Cinema in Eastern Europe

Abstract

The cinema world of 1938-39 was a very small world. There were really only six centers of production which were known-France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. In most of the countries of the world even those six centers were reduced to four. There were very few sound Soviet films being shown outside the Soviet Union in the period 1934 till the beginning of the war; for political reasons, nobody wanted to show them. There were very few German films being shown for different political reasons. And so the average spectator in the United States, Poland, Hungary, Great Britain, or France would see mostly American films and sometimes French or Italian films. We knew that there were far-away centers of film production in Japan and India but they were totally unknown. Japanese films were shown to people of Japanese origin but not to the general public. That was the situation in 1939.