1POPULAR CINEMA

ures, Walter Panofsky distinguished two basic impulses, visual pleasure
(Schaulust) and the will to experience (Erlebniswille), and examined their
contribution to the new scenarios of specularity accordingly. He set out by
calling for a workable compromise between the political relevance of filmic
realism and the audience’s ineradicable need for illusionism and concluded
that “we must accommodate their desire to escape from everyday life . . .
and treat this as a legitimate desire emanating from their natural disposition
[Publikumsempfinden].” 37 Panofsky’s passionate defense of the will to
experience stood in sharp contrast to the pathologizing of such needs in earlier
campaigns against trash and smut. Elevating the cinema to an Erlebnis
allowed the author to treat filmic texts and contexts as extensions of each
other and to subsume the aesthetic entirely under the experiential. The
conceptual move from the individual spectator to the entire audience is essential
to this process. Whereas a notion like Empfinden implies a certain
distance from the work and still differentiates between artistic means and
effects, Erlebnis places the spectator firmly within the libidinal structures
that constitute imaginary communities inside and outside the theater. Not
surprisingly, some critics spoke about the cinema in terms of “empowering
human experiences” 38 that no longer shared anything with traditional aesthetic
categories. The thus-constituted imaginary community of spectators,
they hoped, would be propelled to contribute more actively to the goals of
National Socialism.
The most systematic approach to the psychological dimensions of spectatorship
can be found in Wolfgang Wilhelm’s 1940 dissertation Die Auftriebswirkung
des Films (The Elevating Effect of Film), which is based on
two in-depth questionnaires. 39 In the first, the author asked twenty university
students to describe their reaction to specific story elements and filmic
techniques (e.g., camerawork, editing). The second test group consisted of
twenty-three individuals of various social backgrounds who were asked
about their reasons for going to the movies. Wilhelm evaluated their answers
in relation to the elevating effect that, in his view, distinguished experience
in the cinema from that in the other arts.
In relying on aesthetic and psychological categories, Wilhelm’s study
moves beyond the formulas of mass psychology and avoids empty political
slogans in favor of closer attention to the individual viewing experience.
The elusive connection between the stories on the screen and the individual
spectators, he insists time and again, depends fundamentally on the power
of spectatorship to facilitate active and passive forms of identification and
82 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich