Entertaining the Third Reich

‘Heavy Hands and Light Touches’: Approaches to the Study of Cinematic Culture in the Third Reich

“…By superimposing Frederick's eyes over privileged icons of romantic anti-capitalism, nation and Volk, the sequence amalgamates Mother and Father, nurturance and discipline, the bodily and the abstract, icon and verbal text. 70 Schulte-Sasse's analysis compliments Welch's identification of the symbol as the focus of the scene. Here, by combining these interpretations, the student is able to see both the potential propaganda function and how it is achieved, with attention to the symbolic detail provided by a visual reading of the film.…”

“…24 In her attempt to restructure the discursive terrain, Schulte-Sasse argued that 'Nazi films, regardless of genre, need to be studied in themselves and anchored in the context of their culture's moral and aesthetic values'. 25 She argued that scholars needed to address 'its internal contradictions as well as its continuities'. To this end, Schulte-Sasse challenged the concept of a 'coherent and predictable ideological edifice we call "Nazi ideology" '.…”

“…She used ideological critique -that is, the theoretical criticism and examination of the processes and function of ideology -as a starting point for the study of films produced in the Third Reich, 'sorting out configurations, establishing unities among film texts as well as references between texts and various subtexts'. 26 This intriguing research methodology produced some fascinating analytical visions of Nazi cinema, cutting deep into the heart of National Socialist culture and its use of the image, whilst also fitting with recent historiographical developments in the field tracing patterns of consensus, collaboration and resistance. One does, at times, wish to locate these observations within an empirical study of historical sources beyond a reading of the film itself.…”

Authenticity as a Political Act: Straub-Huillet's Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach and the Post-War Bach Revival

“…78 Eighteenth-century personages were particularly prone to this Romanticized cinematic treatment because of that century's association with the rise of German nationalism, military power, and Enlightenment thought: several biopics focused on the life and works of such canonic figures as Frederick the Great, Schiller and Mozart. 79 In such "Genius films," as Linda Schulte-Sasse observes, "the Genius, whether artist, scientist, or doctor, is a 'rebel' constrained by a world that fails to understand him and attempts to subjugate him to 'rules,' which are inimical to his 'nature. '"…”

'There is no place like home': Diasporic identifications and Taiwan cinema of the 1960s and 1970s

“…Accepting the theoretical premise advanced by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe that society 'does not exist', Schulte-Sasse then invokes Slavoj Zizek's notion of ideology as 'social fantasy' that 'allows a society to mask the impossibility of the ideals by which [it] identifies [itself]'. 56 National Socialism, with its social fantasy of the 'Jew' who is so essential to Nazism's understanding of itself, clearly epitomises this structure, which operates through the twinmechanisms of displacement and condensation. Social fantasy, therefore, helps to explain the workings of idealisation and fetishisation that are the defining features of the Heimatfilm.…”