1POPULAR CINEMA

film journalists and scholars over the following years argued about the social
and psychological function of individual genres, debated the creative
contribution of actors and directors, and contemplated the future of film as
an art form. Celebrating the screenwriter as an auteur-like figure, some
proposed to strengthen film’s ties to literature and theater, and by extension,
to middle-class culture. Others insisted on the importance of ensemble acting
as a valid alternative to the star phenomenon and what they dismissed
as its superficial cult of physical beauty. Searching for new ways of making
the cinema more relevant to everyday concerns, most writers agreed that
the continuous preference for literary sources only perpetuated the petit
bourgeois tastes of the past and deprived audiences of the more relevant
contemporary subject matter presented so convincingly in the Hollywood
films. 10 However, there was little agreement on the best solutions to these
problems. A few contributors declared that a new filmic realism could be
developed only through the rejection of urban culture and the rediscovery
of rural culture. 11 Film directors, they insisted, should stop idealizing foreign
countries and alien cultures and choose German characters and locations
even for high-society dramas. 12 Equally limited in their thematic obsessions
were the habitual calls for more films about average professions,
typical workplaces, and the new ethos of labor. 13
In the same way that the cinema of the Third Reich incorporated many
features of Weimar cinema, the more ambitious theoretical contributions
often reconnected to the highly politicized debates that had accompanied
the rise of film from the very beginning. Many propagandists took advantage
of the developments in mass psychology since the Wilhelmine period
and, based on their reading of LeBon and Ortega y Gasset, offered more radical
proposals on mass manipulation. The insights gained from the political
uses of film during World War I proved particularly useful to the Propaganda
Ministry in planning the media campaigns in World War II. Even the
reform movements from the 1910s and 1920s, which had enlisted the cinema
in the project of public education and social reform, inspired several
publications on cinema as a group experience and social ritual. The “depravities”
of Weimar cinema were evoked in polemical treatises that introduced
race and nation as key ingredients of a truly popular and, by extension,
truly national cinema. Yet some of the arguments exhibited surprising
similarities with the highly politicized debates from the early 1930s about
the class character of mainstream film production. This selective adaptation
of established traditions, including from the Weimar years, allowed film
176 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich