We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE FILM SINCE THEN
express so well in film with their mastery over the mechanics of trick-photography and model-work. We record, for their importance, Obratsov's Land of Toys (1940), and Alexander Rou's The Magic Fish (1938) and The Little Humpbacked Horse (1941), charming and fanciful pieces of film-magic.
Hitler's sudden blow in June, 1941, temporarily disrupted Soviet film-making. Before 1939 one anti-Nazi film, Adolf Minkin's and Herbert Rappaport's much-admired Professor Mamlock ( 1938) had expressed the official Communist view of the German regime with considerable insight and compassion.1 But the Pact had put an end to such expressions, and it was with suddenness indeed that the studios were confronted with the necessity to make actual war films. The technical crudity of films for the first two years of the war was explained by the fact that the studios had been hastily transferred to Central Asia, with much resultant loss of technical facilities, just as the flat, black-and-white villain and hero character of the films themselves resulted from the experiences which the Russian people themselves were undergoing at the time. With large numbers of them under the Nazi heel, there was no room in their her *ts for anything but hate of the ' Hitlerites ', and no demand for anything on the screen except portrayals of Nazis as devils incarnate and their Russian guerrilla and soldier opponents as knights in shining armour. If the Nazi portraits were absurd, the Russian heroisms were real enough, and both were entirely acceptable to their embattled audiences if hardly for export purposes. Probably none of these violent reactions to invasion (Donskoi's Rainbow 1944, from the prize novel by Wanda Wassilevska, was at once the most typical and the most elaborate) will be remembered. But the war evoked from Russia films which will not only be remembered but will also be closely studied by historians many generations from now. The vast Russian campaign
1 Rappapoi t was Pabst's assistant on Kameradschaft (1931).
578