Post War 1945-1959
1940 to May 7, 1945
Japan, Italy, and Germany enter military and economic alliance.
Under German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, in European countries, film production consisted of government sponsored
propaganda docs and newsreels, while fictional films consisted of escapist fare, or sentimental domestic front movies. However, the latter were also
cut back due to the shortage of materials which were devoted to the war effort.
POST WAR 1945 -1959
In 1945, much of Europe lay in ruins—including most production facilities. Thirty-five million people were dead, over half of them civilians…. All European countries were massively in debt…yet three great national cinemas endured amidst this rubble and despair–those of Great Britain, Italy, and Japan.
***US foreign aid paved the way for American movies’ reentry into European markets. … Hollywood’s strategy was to make each country’s domestic industry strong enough to support the large-scale distribution and exhibition of American films. Penetration was quick. By 1953, in most countries, American films occupied at least half of the film screens. Since then Europe has been Hollywood’s major source of foreign revenue.
Many Europeans argued that with American economic and political domination had come a cultural imperialism—that advertising, fashion, and mass media had made Europe into a colony of the United States.
In the postwar era, there was a complex–often tense– interplay between nationalism, European unity, allegiance to America, and resistance to it.
However the American MPAA argued that Hollywood films were excellent propaganda against Communist and Fascist tendencies. This argument carried the most weight in Germany.
Most important question—did the major postwar influx of American films into foreign countries hurt or help the resurgence of their native film production? One argument was that viewing the superior craftsmanship of American films inspired new levels of competence in a country’s burgeoning domestic cinema. Too…the tax on American ticket revenues often imposed in European countries helped to finance native cinema.
The opposing argument is the influx of expensive, high quality American films made it impossible for foreign filmmakers to compete in even their domestic markets.
As a result, the new European films didn’t try to compete with American entertainment films…instead they portrayed the search for meaningful, life-giving values in a world in which absolute values had crumbled. They continued the pre-War tradition of structuring themselves around a theme or psychological problem more than around a story–not so much linear narratives, as experiments in cinematic narration, often concerned w. political and philosophical issues, as well as investigative comparisons of human conduct, emotional states, and conflicts between the social whole and the personal unit.
With these thematic concerns also came a new style—Modernism–which rejected reality and preferred a nonrepresentational portrayal of the world which was also manifest in painting, atonal music, absurd drama, and the stream-of-consciousness novel. Tenets included the self-conscious questioning of all social and moral values, the duty to “make it new,” the study of perception, the determination to work creatively with fragmentation (from Cubism to montage), and the self-conscious manipulations of the conventions of the art itself. (Mast, 318-9).