1POPULAR CINEMA

material, must we conclude that, to cite Eric Rentschler, “Nazi cinema
exploited the limitations of human imagination, seeking to obliterate firstperson
consciousness and to replace it with a universal third person”? 1 Or
should we agree with Linda Schulte-Sasse that it was “this identification
with someone else’s authority, and this oscillation between narcissistic experience
of self and communal experience that [lent] the subject effect of
classical cinema its affinities with that of fascism”? 2
Rather than assuming a perfect fit between ideal spectators and actual
audiences, I propose to organize the following remarks around the almost
obsessive preoccupation with audiences in industry questionnaires, trade
publications, and scholarly treatises from the Third Reich. Questions like
“What do audiences want?” and “How can we accommodate their tastes and
preferences?” express the interests of any film studio trying to sell a product.
Yet questions like “How can we influence their attitudes and beliefs?”
articulate concerns more typically associated with a state-controlled cinema.
As I hope to show, the numerous sociological studies on audience
composition, attendance patterns, and exhibition practices and the thenprevalent
theories on spectatorship and more elusive categories such as social
mentality or national character place these questions in the necessary
historical context. Despite, or perhaps because of, their obvious methodological
shortcomings, these publications shed new light on the dynamics of
seduction and coercion, through which moviegoers in the Third Reich were
enlisted as active and passive participants in the transformation of cinema
into an illusory public sphere. 3
The methodological problems that haunt most audience studies, from
the heavy reliance on empirical methods and statistical models to the implicit
assumptions about the (gendered) nature of film spectatorship and the
rituals of cultural consumption, seem almost insurmountable when it comes
to the cinema of the Third Reich. 4 On the one hand, there are the analyses
developed by a purged film industry, a conformist academic community,
and the Propaganda Ministry itself. On the other hand, there are the film
historical studies that, since the earliest articles on film and propaganda,
have failed to address the elusiveness of cinema as a social experience and
public event. Here a fundamental shift in focus can only be achieved
through a closer look at the divergent and often conflicting forces that
made, or were supposed to make, the audience an extension of the national
community. Such a shift requires us not only to historicize spectatorship
70 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich