A good film should make us think, touch our hearts, communicate with us, and teach us something new. A good film review should persuade us, entertain us, and inform us. During the time of Nazi Germany, film, propaganda film specifically, was a very popular means of spreading ideas and manipulating millions. The Nazi Party was able to persuade people into truly believing that the Jewish population was as corrupt and as ruthless as the Nazi’s claim. Many famous films arose during this time in history. Some notable titles are Charlie Chaplain’s “The Great Dictator,” which was a comedy in opposition to the Nazis, Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” which was saturated with pro-Nazi footage of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Harlan’s “Jud Süß,” which was set back in history and was used to validate the Nazi Party’s horrendous actions against the Jewish population, and Wilder’s romantic comedy “A Foreign Affair,” which takes you through a story of a German woman and an American soldier and their crazy love story. All of these films, whether produced during the war period or after, effectively communicate ideas and …show more content…
Even though, Salomon was breaking the law before going into the concentration camp, his motivation was not to hurt anyone, he simply wanted to make a living and a have a powerful persona. The Nazis took his seemingly small-scale skill and made it much larger and turned it into something increasingly negative. The Nazis were wrong in using Salomon’s skill and the skills of other Jewish prisoners to bring demise to other nations, which had the possibility to ruin the lives of millions of people. The Nazis were also wrong in the way they treated the Jewish people and in their anti-Semitic values. In the end, the Nazis were never able to complete their plans to flood the British and American economies and never won the war. The Jewish prisoners were finally free and good, in fact, did
Society tends to associate propaganda films with issues such as Nazi Germany and their film messages for their country; however, it is also possible for small independent companies, groups of like-minded people and individuals to use the media of film to incorporate messages for our society (The Independent, 2010). These messages are often in relation to changes that individuals should make in order to improve the standards by which they live their lives and changes to everyday habits that will benefit the individual, the individual’s family, a group of individuals or even a single person (Barnhisel and Turner, 2010).
Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford, 2004.
In the book, the German soldiers went out of their way to make the Jews suffer. Why did the Solidiers do it? To begain the Soldiers didnt start off as this way ,but faced with German rule and wanting to portect themself they abandoned
The Holocaust was a terrible and tragic time for Jewish people. They were constantly treated bad, harassed, and killed. The Nazi’s maintained many concentration camps, the most infamous of which being Auschwitz, where Vladek Spiegelman was sent to during the war. In the graphic novel, Maus, Art Spiegelman tells the tale of his father, Vladek, and his life during the Holocaust. In order to improve his chances of staying alive, Vladek got involved in helping the guards with certain tasks and jobs. By doing so, Vladek was able to raise his reputation among the Nazi officers, which improved his living conditions and saved his life a few times, and he was able to help his fellow prisoners and his wife, Anja.
German cinema was greatly affected during the Nazi movement between 1933 and 1945. Once appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933 Hitler wasted no time and almost immediately began working on his propaganda strategy. Typically “propaganda targets a mass audience and relies on mass media to persuade. Propaganda is aimed at large numbers of people and, as such, relies on mass communication to reach its audience” (Gass, 14). The Nazi party used film propaganda to brainwash the German people, distract them from the harsh reality of the Nazi party, and attempt to intimidate the enemy. Hitler knew propaganda entailed mass persuasion and he knew just how to get his message out there; film. It was through the use of propaganda, largely film that made the Nazi party so powerful as they redefined propaganda.
According to Welch, “The public’s reaction to anti-Semitic films reveals that propaganda had considerable success in persuading the population that a Jewish ‘problem’ existed, but equally that there was a limit to their tolerance of the type of virulently anti-Semitic propaganda to be found in films like Der Ewige Jude and publications like Der Stuermer.” Even after years of Nazi propaganda, even Goebbels wasn’t convinced that “such propaganda had persuaded Germans to condone open violence against
Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler A Psychological History of The German Film. New Jersey, Princeton University Press. 1947
'The film Swing Kids provides many indications as to the reasons that the Youth in Germany both feared and revered the Nazis.'
The Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, is an excellent propaganda film that has many images that are meant to inspire, encourage, and invigorate the German people to be reborn. The film was made in 1934 during the rise of Adolf Hitler as the fuhrer of Nazi Germany. Hitler rose from the rank of a corporal in the German army to an inmate in a German jail. Hitler, once released, used fascist propaganda to promote the Nazi party. The propaganda promised to restore Germany as an economic leader in Europe while improving the lives of the German citizen. This pretense of a better life for German people won Hitler the dictatorship of Germany. Triumph of the Will is a good example of how propaganda entices the masses into
How can someone fully understand a tragedy such as the Holocaust? Many say the event ineffable to anyone who wasn’t there to begin with, but people are still striving to achieve complete or near complete comprehension. In order to do this people have used multiple media like books and recordings but the one that gives “the greatest illusion of authenticity” is movies. The purpose of Holocaust-filmmaking is to help people get a grasp on what it felt like to be in the middle of such a horrific thing as the Holocaust. If this isn’t done, then the true emotions won’t influence the audience who won’t find a way to preserve the history of the Holocaust and memories that took place in those awful times will be lost forever. Many films of the Holocaust
In Defiance, the deviations from the historical record are used to emphasis certain aspects of the movie. In the beginning sequence the audience can see how there is a mesh of video of Hitler imposed with footage that the director made to look older. If a person had never seen the original footage they would not see the subtle mixture of fact and fiction. But this practice raises the question should directors be able to add or subtract from the historical accuracy of a movie, especially one with a subject matter such as the Holocaust. In the case of movies that are based on the real life experiences of individuals the deviation makes the matter more accessible to a large group of people. There are many aspects of someones life are not easily readable when place on the screen. In order for them to be understood some liberty must be given to the director to make them understandable to someone who may not know the culture or the traditions behind the actions. In a scene of Defiance Zus, played by Liev Schreibe...
First of all, to get a proper understanding of the events in my book, I did some research to paint a picture of the holocaust. The reason that the Germans started the holocaust a long time ago was because they believed that the Jewish people were minions of the devil, and that they were bent on destroying the Christian mind. Many Christians in Germany were also mad at them for killing Jesus in the Bible. Throughout the holocaust, Hitler, the leader of Germany at the time, and the Nazis killed about six million Jewish people, more than two-thirds of all of the Jewish people in Europe at the time. They also killed people who were racially inferior, such as people of Jehovah's Witness religion, and even some Germans that had physical and mental handicaps. The concentration camp that appears in this story is Auschwitz, which was three camps in one: a prison camp, and extermination camp, and a slave labor camp. When someone was sent to Auschw...
Totalitarianism in the arts of Nazi-Germany portray. The most famous piece of propaganda in support of Nazi-Germany is The Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl. In the context of Nazi-Germany, Triumph of the Will seems to reflect well its totalitarian upbringings: it concentrates its focus in support for Hitler through bold camera angles and symmetrical images (Fiero 423). Riefenstahl’s use of physical gaps and hierarchical distinction between leader and followers are just two of the aspects of the film that set it apart from other documentaries of the time. Triumph of the Will was monumental in that it was one of the first observational documentaries showing events like parades, mass assemblies, images of Hitler, and speeches that are occurring as if the camera was recording the natural unfolding of the events—unaffected by the presence of a camera or not. There is no spoken commentary, only speeches by Hitler and other Nazi leaders, and this is how it differs from propaganda and documentary film. These techniques are introduced and brought together by Riefenstahl in response to a need specific to her time period: that of creating support political conformity. We may be averted to the subject, we approach Riefenstahl’s documentary with an intrigue for her ability to
Reich, J. and Garofalo, P. (ed.) (2002), Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
In the famous final speech of Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator, released in 1940, it is clear that the speaker put forward an advocacy of democracy and against tyranny. Using Kenneth Burke’s pentad as a means of analyzing this speech allows for better understanding who he places blame on and what he advocates. Moreover, Kenneth Burke’s pentad also aids in understanding the relationships between the five components of the pentad, as well as which one becomes the determinant in every part of the speech, told from the twenty ratios made up with the five components. In this final paper, I would use the model of Burke’s dramatistic pentad to tentatively explore the rhetorical motivation behind Charlie Chaplin’s speech.