World War II



FILM INDUSTRIES AND CULTURESOF THE AXIS NATIONS

The Nazis took control of the German government in 1933. After their defeat in World War I and years of economic depression, Germans were vulnerable to Hitler's rhetoric of nationalism and racial purity, which blamed Communists and Jews for Germany's social and economic problems. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, was keenly interested in cinema. He over-saw the nationalization of the film industry, achieved over the next decade by acquiring controlling interests of German companies; in 1942 these holdings, as well as those of the Austrian and Czechoslovakian national industries, were consolidated in the Nazi-owned and -directed film company Ufa.

From 1933 onward, Goebbels took a personal interest in film production and previewed every film released. He consolidated governmental control further in 1936 by limiting film imports and banning all film criticism. Film criticism was replaced by Filmbeobachtung (film observation), wherein writers merely described content without comment on the quality. In addition, Goebbels endeavored to remove all Jews from the industry, as well as others with lives or beliefs unacceptable to Nazi ideology. Both Jews and non-Jews fled the German film industry in the 1930s.

Among those who sought refuge in Hollywood were directors Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Douglas Sirk and actor Conrad Veidt. Their influence on Hollywood film was as varied as their individual talents. But collectively, their impact was most notable in the translation of German expressionist

John Wayne in Back to Bataan (Edward Dmytryk, 1945).
aesthetics to the American screen, particularly in those adult thrillers that postwar French film critics would dub films noirs for their characteristically dark worldview and shadowy urban milieu. Billy Wilder directed one of the first noirs, Double Indemnity (1944), whose charismatic criminal couple, snappy dialogue, and stark visual style were highly influential.

Despite Goebbels's fascination with and control over film as a tool of indoctrination, most Nazi-produced films were anodyne entertainment. They were so free of overt political bias, in fact, that captured German films were screened in the postwar Soviet Union as trophies of victory, despite the sharp repression of most aspects of public culture during the final years of Stalin's leadership. But while screens were largely filled with the same comedies and musicals popular before the war, Germany also produced propaganda films for domestic and international distribution. In the early 1930s a number of fiction films focused on the opposition of Nazis and Communists, characterizing it as a generational struggle in order to appeal to younger audiences. In Hitlerjunge Quex ( Hitler Youth Quex , 1933), for example, a boy joins the Hitler youth despite the objections of his drunken Communist father; when his unsavory family life is replaced by the wholesome discipline of the Nazis, he gains a new identity and a new focus for his loyalty.

German also produced propagandist documentaries. Leni Riefenstahl directed the most famous of these, Triumph des Willens ( Triumph of the Will , 1935) and Olympia ( The Olympiad , 1936). Made to commemorate the Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg in 1934, Triumph of the Will was a major production, with sixteen camera crews and sets designed to highlight Nazi power. It celebrated Nazi iconography and rituals in sequences marked by geometric precision and grandeur, its modernist aesthetic used to imagine the Nazi state as a beautiful and powerful mechanism for war. Widely distributed in Europe, Triumph of the Will was never shown in the United States, although a copy was held at the Museum of Modern Art. Americans first saw excerpts of Riefenstahl's film as sequences intercut into Frank Capra's documentary series, Why We Fight (1942–1944). Documenting the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936, Riefenstahl's Olympia was meant to demonstrate both Germany's cooperation with—and its superiority over—competing nations. However, stellar performances by non-Aryans, such as the African American runner Jesse Owens, qualified its ability to validate Nazi ideology.

Shortly before Hitler announced publicly what he termed the "final solution" to Germany's "Jewish problem" in 1941, Germany distributed some explicitly anti-Semitic films. One of the most popular was the historical epic, Jud SĂĽĂź ( Jew SĂĽess , 1940). Its titular villain is a Jewish businessman who corrupts and destroys all who know him; in its climax he rapes the film's heroine and tortures both her father and lover. After the war, its director, Veit Harlan, would be the only Nazi filmmaker charged and tried for war crimes. He was not convicted, despite substantial evidence that the film was used to undermine popular opposition to the Holocaust. Made with the same purpose but with less box office success, Der Ewige Jew ( The Eternal Jew , 1940) was a pseudo-documentary account of Jewish corruption and conspiracy throughout history. Alongside films that portrayed Germany's enemies as worthy of complete annihilation were those that promoted nationalism and militarism: blut und boden (blood and soil) dramas. The most lavish of these was the historical reconstruction, Kolberg (1945). Also directed by Harlan, it was an epic account of Prussian resistance to the French during the Napoleonic Wars; Goebbels was especially interested in the project and diverted Nazi troops from battle to work as extras in the film. It was released in 1945, but Allied bombing of Berlin prevented its being widely seen by German audiences.

After Germany surrendered it was occupied by the Four Powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France. They confiscated film holdings and decentralized the industry. Likewise, thanks to extensive lobbying on the part of the Motion Picture Association of America, the Occupation Statute of 1949 that created the Federal Republic of Germany also specified that no import quotas would protect its cinema from foreign—Hollywood—competition. Although there is some debate over just how much of the West German market Hollywood controlled after the war, it is clear that Hollywood took the opportunity to continue those distribution strategies declared illegal within the United States by the US Supreme Court's Paramount Decree of 1948, making West Germany a significant source of revenue. West German production was itself healthy but somewhat lackluster until the 1960s, when a new generation of young filmmakers rejected the generic entertainments of the past and called for a new German auteurist cinema.

Unlike the German film industry, Italian cinema during World War II remained for the most part privately funded. But Mussolini, like Hitler and Goebbels, recognized the significance of cinema to his political aims. His government provided support for production, and he kept close watch on all films produced. The majority of these, as in Germany, were pure entertainment: romances, melodramas, and comedies. The values of fascism were communicated primarily in historical epics, such as 1860 ( Gesuzza the Garibaldian Wife , 1934) and Scipione l'Africano ( Scipio the African , 1937), which provided opportunity to celebrate Italy's national pride and military prowess; overtly political films, however, were rare. Two exceptions were films made in honor of the Fascist Party's tenth anniversary: Camicia Nera (The black shirt , 1933), which dramatized the rise of fascism, and Vecchia Guardia ( The Old Guard , 1934), which recounts a violent confrontation between fascists and socialists in 1922.

For the most part, mainstream Italian production favored screen fantasies with glamorous settings and situations, including romantic comedies and so-called "white phone" melodramas. The La Canzone dell'amore (The song of love, 1930) is characteristic of those films that set contemporary stories of emotional upheaval, love, and loss in brightly lit modernist interiors. Critics writing in journals such as Bianco e nero ( White and Black ) called for more realistic films to be made; in the early 1940s the aesthetic direction of Italian cinema began to shift. For example, Roberto Rossellini's documentary-influenced La Nave Bianca ( The White Ship , 1942) anticipated neorealist cinema in its use of a hospital ship as its setting and medical corps staff and on-duty naval officers as actors. Likewise, Luchino Visconti's adaptation of James M. Cain's novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), titled Ossessione (1943), utilized regional settings and dialogue for its story of ill-fated love.

In addition to such aesthetic innovations, developments in Italy's film industry during the war would contribute to its postwar status in international film culture. The Venice Film Festival, which was inaugurated under Mussolini's leadership in 1932, became annual in 1935, was discontinued in 1942, and then revived in 1948 (it was interrupted by student protests in 1968; and, between 1969 and 1979, editions were non-competitive), would become a model for festivals begun in Cannes and Edinburgh in 1946 as well as those established during the 1950s in Berlin, Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco, London, Moscow, and Barcelona. These festivals showcased postwar European cinema and were vital to the development of an international art cinema. Also important to Italy's postwar role in international film culture was the development of Cinecittà. Located in the southern part of Rome and designed to house all aspects of filmmaking, it was officially opened by Mussolini in April 1937. During the war it was the hub of Italian production. After the war, when Hollywood sought means to profit abroad despite protective legislation that froze a percentage of its assets, Italy's "Hollywood on the Tiber" became a key site for international co–productions and runaway productions.

On the Pacific front, World War II was shaped by Japan's imperialist ambitions. First signaled by Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1932 and confirmed by its invasion of China in 1937, those ambitions widened following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to include the entire Pacific as well as Southeast Asia.

With Japan's changing role on the world stage came significant changes in its film culture. Its film industry was one of the world's most successful and fully developed, largely consolidated in three vertically integrated companies that collaborated with one another to keep out competitors, including Hollywood. Yet despite the fact that the Japanese industry was unusually successful at competing with Hollywood, Hollywood film and film culture, along with Western fashions, jazz music, and modern dance styles, were important to the urban Japanese of the 1930s. All of this changed, however, when Japan joined the Axis Powers. Taking its cue from the Nazi use of cinema as part of Germany's plan for total war, Japan tightened its control over film content. American music, dancing, and fashions were banned from the screen; nationalist aims were given priority, and a censorship office was created to ensure adherence to new laws governing film content. Film's purpose was no longer simply to entertain, but to accurately represent Japanese national identity, values, and beliefs. In pursuing this goal, censors were alert to any omission or misrepresentation of Japanese culture. For instance, Yasujiro Ozu was the highly successful director of shomingeki , stories of the everyday life of the lower classes. But his script for Ochazuke no aji ( Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice , 1952) was rejected when he failed to include the traditional meal of red rice that wives fed to husbands departing for battle.

Japanese popular cinema of the 1930s included action-packed historical films (the jidai-geki ) as well as a variety of genre films devoted to depicting contemporary life (the gendai-geki ). These continued to be made but were increasingly directed toward the wartime goal of heightening national pride. During the early war years, the jidai-geki became less of an action genre and directed more toward depicting the power and grandeur of abstract values associated with military action, such as honor, duty, and self-sacrifice, as in Abe ichizoku ( The Abe Clan , 1938). In the wartime epic Genroku Chushingura ( The 47 Ronin ), released in two parts in 1941, Kenji Mizoguchi recasts the familiar story in such a way that it focuses entirely on the nobility of sacrifice rather than on violence. The jidai-geki only recovered its fast-paced action orientation when young director Akira Kurosawa made Sugata Sanshiro ( Judo Saga ) in 1943.

An important extension of the contemporary focus of the gendai-geki came in the form of battle and home-front films. Early war films such as Five Scouts ( Gonin no sekkohei , 1939) and Tsuchi to heitai ( Mud and Soldiers , 1939) focused less on violence than on the more routine aspects of battle, less on individual heroism than the work of the collective, with a style reminiscent of newsreel footage. But, significantly, representations of battle changed as Japan's global role changed, and films became more jingoistic after Pearl Harbor. Thus, the post-1941 films Mother of the Sea (1942) and Rikugun ( The Army , 1944) are marked by overt signs of national and militarist pride—displays of armaments as well as literal and figurative flag waving of various kinds. In these terms, the bravura displays of nineteenth-century martial arts in Sugata Sanshiro might be read as not only the result of Kurosawa's auteurist tendencies—of which more would be seen in the decades to follow—but also as a sign of changing attitudes toward combat during the 1940s.

While war films depicted the changing attitude toward militarism, home-front films consistently celebrated small victories of ordinary people who bear their burdens with good cheer and unquenched patriotism, as in Hideko no shasho-san ( Hideko the Bus Conductress , 1941). As in the wartime cinemas of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, home-front films are often a site for female heroism. However, distinct from those home-front films that focus on romance or maternal affection as an adjunct to or even a source of patriotic fervor for women, Japanese home-front films tended to downplay all relationships in favor of that between the individual and the nation. The exceptions were interethnic romance films, such as the hugely popular China Nights ( Shino no yoru , 1940), which used heterosexual desire as a figure of Japan's imperialist ambitions: against the backdrop of war-torn Shanghai, a Chinese girl is rescued from squalor by a handsome Japanese officer and transformed from a headstrong and willful orphan to a dutiful—and typically Japanese—wife.

Following the US bombing of Japan and its consequent surrender in 1945, American forces occupied the devastated country under the command of General Douglas MacArthur and his retinue, known as SCAP—the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. With the goal of remaking Japan in such a way that it would cease to be a threat to Western democracies, SCAP was especially interested in the film industry as a purveyor of cultural identity and as a potential tool for cultural change. In addition to censoring what it considered dangerous topics of militarism and nationalism in prewar and wartime film, SCAP encouraged film content that it considered useful to the cause of democracy, including screenplays supporting women's rights and opposing militarism. Considered a significant aspect of Japan's transformation, the film industry was supported by the United States, although steps were taken to break down its centralized character. A time of rapid change and expansion, the decade of the 1950s is commonly considered one of Japanese cinema's most successful, a time when the domestic industry prospered despite the hundreds of American films that flooded the marketplace. Certainly, it was an era when auteurs such as Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi took their place as part of an international art cinema.



User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: