Was the Third Reich Movie-Made? Interdisciplinarity and the Reframing of “Ideology”

Abstract

FOR DECADES, historians of America and Europe have been attentive to some of the ways in which film history might offer access to general socio-historical questions. In both teaching and research, movies and other popular media have for some time been seen as barometers of changing social norms and values. More recently, they have been analyzed not merely as mirrors of society but as cultural products that themselves have had an active role in representing, but also enforcing or even constituting, visions of society and of history.1 Implicit in this shift is an understanding that the place of film within our discipline is not only an important but a complex one: that the reciprocal relations among creators, financiers, regulators, and spectators of movies cannot be reduced to a simple formula. How can we use film, in research or in teaching, to engage historical questions? What sort of questions can be answered by such analysis, and what methods must be employed to answer them? While the potential interdisciplinary engagement I will be exploring in this essay relates to film studies, and while the example I focus on concerns the National Socialist period in Germany, my concerns here are actually broader. And though I will refer to a variety of fairly recent (and not-so-recent) publications, this is not intended as a review essay or survey of the literature in a given field; rather, my goal is to demonstrate the possibilities that a deeper interdisciplinary engagement with film offers and also to draw attention to a pattern of resistance to such an engagement, in spite of the presumed consensus in favor of interdisciplinarity in principle. I am particularly interested in drawing out the ways in which a richer, if