German pictures

A compilation of scenes and sequences from Nazi “Kulturfilme”, which were to be shown advancing the feature films in German cinemas between 1933 and 1945. Mostly they are documentary style although carefully designed and out-worked on a rather artistical level. Their main task was to gain the ordinary and working people for the Nazi’s sake, and that’s why work and recreation are the centre subjects of these films, all within Nazi ideology indoctrination.This program has been compiled from clips and escerpts of more than thirty “Kulturfilme” (general short subjects) which were made and shown by the Nazis during the Third Reich. 2Kulturfilme2 are something the Nazis laid a stress upon. They liked them, and these films tried to give Germany a look which the fascists would appreciate. The excerpts are mostly from documentary films, and if the concept of a documentary film might be to a certain extent a dubious one, then it is especially true with the “Kulturfilme”.We did not choose films of fascist terror and atrocities, nor did we select films presenting political manifestation, parades and leading personalities of the Third Reich. They seemed to us somewhat over-used and perhaps too well known. And they are not that typical for the Nazi film production. They do not give the feeling for this German kind of complacent self-righteousness, stupid smugness and authoritarian conformism which had their high time in the Third Reich and therefore impregnate the “Kulturfilme” in every detail.2Kulturfilme” had to palliate fascist Germany. The Nazis were in an eminent need for beauty. They believed in films and images and made an excessive use of it to beautify and make up anything they did or did not. In a way the Nazis are the forerunner of our modern audiovisual age trying to (non-) inform and (non-) education people by images.Most of the films deal with work, sports, leisure time and again work. They pretend a certain populism, a close and understanding look on the common man. When putting the program together we often asked ourselves what it is that these films show and still can be perceived, since the films dissemble and disguise everything they are dealing with. The more they seem to show the more they hide. So what is to be perceived by the “Kulturfilme” is mainly the managing of images. The way they were arranged, edited, put to music, commented on, they way they were taken and used. The elaborate pains the fascist moviemakers took producing “Kulturfilme” suggest the idea that it has not been the point in the first hand to influence the public by Nazi ideology but even more to make the world invisible by images taken of the world. The films are alike masks. They show something in order to make something else imperceptible. They affirm in order to deny.