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
almost entirely confined to the documentary medium, in which the Goebbels ministry from the first took the greatest interest. The reasons for this policy decision and its ultimate consequences are brilliantly sketched in Kracauer's pamphlets Propaganda and the Nazi War Film and The Conquest of Europe on the Screen} Everyone interested in propagandist methods and effects should read these keen analyses : they display not only what can be accomplished by means of a unified plan rigidly adhered to, but also lay bare the extent to which the characteristics of particular media resist the intentions of the master propagandist. This brief survey can do no more than refer to Kracauer's conclusions : that Goebbels was under powerful compulsion to annex all life to the Nazi system; no sphere of intellectual emotion or physical activity but must be swallowed up in the swastika world, for to leave out any would permit the free play of individual judgement in the by-passed area. Hence the urge to employ authentic documentary material which would testify to the ' reality ' of the particular film, but which could be manipulated by the editor into an image of reality suited to immediate propagandist needs. When documentary or newsreel shots resisted such manipulation, or were not available, the Nazi film-makers ' staged ' reality for their cameras in a manner never before attempted. The apotheosis of their efforts was the celebrated Triumph of The Will (1937) in which a Nazi convention, purportedly held for its own sake, was ' actually staged for the camera like some colossal Hollywood production* (Iris Barry). 'The deep feeling of uneasiness ', says Kracauer, ' which Triumph of The Will arouses in unbiased minds originates in the fact that before our eyes palpable life becomes an apparition . . . .This film represents an inextricable mixture of a show simulating German reality and of a German reality manoeuvred into a show/2 The triumph here was due to the fact that the
1 Both published by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, New York. The first of the pamphlets is also appended to From Caligari to Hitler.
2 Op cit., page 303.
590