Hollywood, Hitler, and Looking Twice at the Cultural Roots of Propaganda
From Hollywood to Hitler: Rethinking the Cultural Politics of Propaganda
by Maximilian C. Forte - ZeroAnthropology
January 6, 2020
What is propaganda? What does cinema reveal about the Third Reich and its people? What are German films about during the Third Reich? What do they reveal? And what are they hiding? What does cinema know that we don’t? What is it that Germans dreamed about? What does German cinema tell that we have forgotten? How much of this cinema lives on in films after 1945, or in today’s films? Does German cinema still dream the old dreams, but in different form? What does cinema know, that we don’t?
These are the questions that are posed in the documentary film, Hitler’s Hollywood: German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda, 1933–1945, a film by Rüdiger Suchsland, produced by Martina Haubrich, and narrated by the actor, Udo Kier. This is yet another major work produced by Europe’s Arte. The film runs for a total of 105 minutes—a heavy film, loaded with references to numerous German films, actors, directors, and dominated by a non-stop lecture under the guise of narration.