1POPULAR CINEMA

come—its own past played a key role in postwar cinema’s self-understanding
as a popular cinema. The star provided the physical body through which
the cinema’s past and future could be comprehended through the revisions
performed on its “heavenly bodies.” Of course, it should be remembered
that all exorcisms leave behind wounds that never heal; and it may be that
the difficulty in reclaiming a popular tradition for German cinema has
much to do with these strategies of expulsion and incorporation. The exorcism
described on the preceding pages made possible the transition from
history into mythmaking that, especially since the 1980s, has further reduced
the legacies of the cinema’s past to highly codified images, gestures,
and scenarios. No matter how one views this process of postmodern appropriation,
one fact seems indisputable: With the stars from the 1930s and
early 1940s either retired or deceased, with the films about the Nazi period
an established part of world cinema, and with the cinema of the Third
Reich the subject of renewed scholarly attention and popular interest, the
transformation of film history into new myths and old clichés can finally be
retraced to the beginning, in the 1950s, of a difficult process of coming to
terms with the cinema’s past. This process of secondary revision may finally
allow us today to understand better the popular cinema of the Third Reich
and assess its historical and theoretical relevance both for the cinema of
postwar reconstruction and, even more important, for the global media culture
of today.
230 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich