Goals of The Nazi Film Policy
Goebbels, who appointed himself "Patron of the German film", assumed, accurately, that a national cinema which was entertaining and put glamour on the government would be a more effective propaganda instrument than a national cinema in which the NSDAP and their policy would have been ubiquitous. The main goal of the Nazi film policy was to promote escapism, which was designed to distract the population and to keep everybody in good spirits; Goebbels indeed blamed defeat in World War I on the failure to sustain the morale of the people. The open propaganda was reserved for documentary films and newsreels. There are very few examples of German feature films from the Third Reich that deal with the NSDAP or with party organizations such as the Sturmabteilung, Hitler Youth or the National Labour Service. The propaganda films that refer directly to Nazi politics amounted to less than a sixth of the whole national film production, which mainly consisted of light entertainment films.
The authorities and NSDAP departments in charge of film policy were the film department of the Ministry of Propaganda, the Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), the Chamber of Film (Reichsfilmkammer), and the film department of the Party Propaganda Department (Reichspropagandaleitung).
A system of "award" was used to encourage self-censorship; awarded for such things as "cultural value" or "value to the people", they remitted part of the heavy taxes on films. Up to a third of the films in the Third Reich received such awards.
Read more about this topic: Nazism And Cinema
Famous quotes containing the words goals, nazi, film and/or policy:
“Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain’t-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on—our lost narcissism lives on—in our ego ideal.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“The obvious parallels between Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz have frequently been noted: in both there is the orphan hero who is raised on a farm by an aunt and uncle and yearns to escape to adventure. Obi-wan Kenobi resembles the Wizard; the loyal, plucky little robot R2D2 is Toto; C3PO is the Tin Man; and Chewbacca is the Cowardly Lion. Darth Vader replaces the Wicked Witch: this is a patriarchy rather than a matriarchy.”
—Andrew Gordon, U.S. educator, critic. “The Inescapable Family in American Science Fiction and Fantasy Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (Summer 1992)
“We are apt to say that a foreign policy is successful only when the country, or at any rate the governing class, is united behind it. In reality, every line of policy is repudiated by a section, often by an influential section, of the country concerned. A foreign minister who waited until everyone agreed with him would have no foreign policy at all.”
—A.J.P. (Alan John Percivale)