1POPULAR CINEMA

to the constituent elements and processes. Greater awareness of the complex
nature of popular cinema and its privileged moments of crisis, controversy,
and compromise also forces us to rethink many of the tacit assumptions
about the sociopsychological function of mass entertainment in the
Third Reich and, more generally, in modern Germany. In particular, the
event-based nature of cinema brings out the most effective forms of negotiation
and the most important areas of contention in the social and cultural
practices that are implicated in, but never reducible to, dominant ideology.
The theoretical implications of approaching popular cinema as a site
of ongoing struggle are far-reaching. In terms of German film history, the
focus on typical genres, tastes, and styles draws attention to the discontinuous
continuities—that is, the prevailing modes of representation and their
changing critical and aesthetic investments—that defined classical genre
cinema from the late 1920s to the 1950s. Moreover, the attention to industry
practices and audience expectations highlights the extensive exchanges,
again with the necessary modifications, between a self-consciously national
(and nationalistic) cinema and the kind of international tendencies and developments
associated with Hollywood. In terms of modern German history,
the emphasis on popular traditions shifts the terms of the debate from
a deterministic relationship between cinema and ideology to the often inconsistent
articulation of that relationship in economic strategies, political
measures, artistic traditions, social movements, and, perhaps most importantly,
popular tastes and mentalities. And in terms of film studies, the
combination of textual and historical analysis moves the study of popular
cinema beyond the binaries of propagandistic vs. escapist, subversive vs.
affirmative, or innovative vs. conformist that continue to influence the debates
on the fascist imaginary in often unproductive ways.
As I want to argue, popular cinema in the Third Reich must be approached
through its inherent contradictions. On the one hand, its most
successful genres and most popular stars confirm the formative influence
of the early Weimar sound period and point to even stronger connections
with the classical Hollywood cinema of the 1930s. On the other hand, the
Gleichschaltung (forced coordination) of the industry in 1933 completed the
institutional alignment with the ideology of National Socialism, primarily
through the new anti-Semitic measures and the creation of a highly politicized
genre, the so-called Staatsauftragsfilm (state-commissioned film). On
the one hand, the identification of popular cinema with escapist entertainment
helped to maintain the institutional divisions between high and low
x Popular Cinema of the Third Reich