The perverse and particular genius of the Third Reich relates to the Nazi government's ambitiously organized bureaucratic culture and one of its ministry's ability to successfully marry the politics of indoctrination with the practices of commodification. The creation and advertisement of ultimate commodities included products ranging from the innocuous Volkswagen to the Nazi's specious anti-Semitic ideology with its neatly packaged policy of genocide.
Joseph Goebbels, "Reich Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda," was one of the men responsible for instituting and defining the ministry's propaganda apparatus. Goebbels desired the more neutral word "culture" in the ministry's title; however, Hitler, never a subtle man, insisted upon the word "propaganda." One of the Nazi legacies was the complete naturalization of propagandistic manipulation, a legacy with which we citizens of the late twentieth century must come to terms.
At his first press conference (March 15, 1933) Goebbels elaborated on the Nazi's propaganda doctrine:
". . .I view the first task of the new Ministry as being to establish coordination between the Government and the whole people. If this government is determined never and under no circumstances to give way, then it has no need of the lifeless power of the bayonet, and in the long run will not be content with 52 percent behind it and with terrorizing the remaining 48 percent, but will see its most immediate task as being to win over that remaining 48 percent. Propaganda is not and end in itself, but a means to an end. If the means achieves the end then the means is good... The most important task of this Ministry must be the following: first, all propaganda ventures and all institutions of public information belonging to the Reich and the states must be centralized in one hand. Furthermore, it must be our task to instill into these propaganda facilities a modern feeling and bring them up to date. We must allow no technology to run ahead of the Reich but rather the Reich must keep pace with technology. Only the latest thing is good enough. We are living in an age when policies must have mass support ... the leaders of today must be modern princes of the people, they must be able to understand the people but need not follow them slavishly. It is their duty to tell the masses what they want and put it to the masses in such a way that they understand it too." (italics added).
Centralization involved the complete control of radio, press, theater, and film industries. By end of March, 1933, it was announced that all "alien elements" would be excluded "from the organization and programming of the radio." "Not only the whole Jews but also the half Jews" would have to "disappear." On May 16, 1933, Goebbels spoke on the Reich Ministry of Propaganda's artistic revolution: "What we are aiming for is more than a revolt. Our historic mission is to transform the very spirit itself to the extent that people and things are brought into a new relationship with one another!"
The Editor's Law, modeled after Italian fascist press legislation, was put into place in October, 1933. The Reich seized total control of all printed matter and dissemination of news and pictures; "all reproductions...destined for dissemination, which are produced by means of a mass reproduction process." Only Aryan Germans could legally be editors.
The "Aryan Clause" (1933) legally prohibited Jews from having any involvement with the film industry, as Jews were determined racial and "ideological undesirables." The Ministry Chambers were established on September 22, 1933, to control and regulate Literature, Radio, Theatre, Music, and Creative Arts. "The arts are for the National Socialist State a public exercise: they are not only aesthetic but also moral in nature and the public interest demands not only police supervision but also guidance." (Theatre Law of May 15, 1934)
The Nazis legally, violently, and militarily suppressive campaign was co-mingled with a campaign of seduction. All elements of German culture-high and popular, folk and modern-were employed in the attempt to lure the audience into identification with Nazi ideology. In Goebbels terms, there was "no need of the lifeless power of the bayonet" when one could use the fascinating, vivid, and alluring power of images.
German cinema was one of the early international powerhouses. The silent era produced classics like Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), F.W. Murnau's' Faust (1926), Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), G.W. Pabst's anti-war miners film Kameradschaft (Comradeship; 1931), and with the Talkies came Von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930), Pabst's Westfront, and Lang's M (1931), which was banned by Joseph Goebbels who, more likely than not suggested one critic, discerned M's use of sound and image too "impressively" rendered the reality of "life under a terror regime."
The German cinema classics directly influenced the Hollywood and international film industries, including use of innovative sets, lighting, and spatial manipulations, specialized editing techniques, tracking shots, highly dramatic close-ups, and the heightened use of sound. These innovations were immediately adopted by Hollywood film directors. In the Nazi ministry of propaganda these techniques became central in what Siegfried Kracauer, in his From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Cinema, describes as the medium's "sumptuous orchestration" of Nazi ideology. The close-up, for example, was used to celebrate and display the allegedly superior physiognomy of the Aryan type and to parody and display as monstrous and deformed the features of undesirable racial and ethnic types.
Joseph Goebbels was a passionate fan of film and a shrewd appreciator of its aesthetic and political manipulative potential. A fan of Sergei Eisenstein's Potemkin, he hoped to model the Reich's revolutionary cinema after Eisenstein's film. Goebbels also attempted to recruit Fritz Lang as a filmmaker for the Reich; however, sensing the dangerous nature of the Reich's political regime, Lang left Germany shortly after Goebbels' invitation was issued.
It was Goebbels who enthusiastically assisted Leni Riefenstahl in the making of Triumph of the Will (1935). The seemingly endless fanfare with which the film begins announces it as a more than ordinary cinematic event. No expense was spared in the production of the film; Riefenstahl was supplied with a production staff of 120 and had thirty cameras at her disposal. The scope of the production became part and parcel of the film's magical message-a celebration of efficiency, order, enterprise, and massive organization. Aesthetically speaking, too, no visual, narrative, musical or iconographic economy was left untapped.
In Triumph of the Will, Nazi propagandists used folk and regional expressive cultures; manipulated rhythmic and musical types ranging from Wagner to beer hall songs; utilized sculpture, architecture, and all the visual and performing arts; re-imagined Christian and Classical mythos such as ascension and resurrection myths (the Phoenix rising from the ashes; Hitler's miraculous recovery, his flight from the celestial realm to earthly one); employed the affective-emotive use of visual theatrics light-dark (for example, the repeated shots of the Fuhrer's magically illuminated hand), fire and smoke, panoramic landscapes, and ornamentalized bodies. The film is a dizzying, intoxicating spectacle.
Kracauer suggested that the Nazi propagandists' use of every available technique was designed to manipulate emotion by means of directly appealing to the viewer's subconscious mind and central nervous system. The Nazis also successfully appealed to the German audience's collective national conscious. Kracauer, like Frankfurt School critic Theodor Adorno, was heavily influenced by Freudian psychology. Rather than theorizing the "fixed national character" of a nation, he was interested in "the unseen dynamics of human relations" that were "more or less characteristic of the inner life of the nation from which the films emerged" (emphasis added). Nazi propagandists were able to tap into what he termed the "collective disposition" of the nation at a crucial stage of its development. Under the rubric of a culture's "disposition" or national tendencies would be its collective fears and anxieties, "the effects of natural surroundings, historic experiences, economic and social conditions."
Kracauer understood the German audience's willingness to consume Nazi ideology in historical and material terms as a desire for glamour and order shaped by the post-war and post-Weimar periods. Adorno, on the other hand, considered the Germans' consumption of packaged ideology as the devastating end result of industrialization, modern capitalism, and commodity culture. Adorno wrote in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception that standardized cultural products-film, popular music, popular culture in general-debilitated and "damaged" the audience by turning them into passive consumers who willingly and unquestioningly digested whatever "ruthlessly unified, uniform and interchangeable" products, ideas, ideologies, myths were directed towards them.
The Culture Industry itself, Adorno believed, was a "total, iron" system, an industry with an essentially fascistic nature and agenda, namely the domination of individual will and autonomy and the disciplining of desire. Because he believed products of the Culture Industry masqueraded modern industrial society's violent nature, he considered the audience's consumption of those products a masochistic exercise. Adorno cryptically stated, "Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment." And for Adorno, pleasure meant thinking about nothing; pleasure "is flight; not, as is stated flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance."
Kracauer and Adorno's examinations of popular culture, audience reception, and collective psychology can be analyzed and critiqued in all sorts of ways, and this has been done by cultural studies scholars, popular culture theorists, feminist film scholars, and various post-structuralist thinkers. My interest is in examining the ways in which the Adorno's and Kracauer's works maintain their critical and historical currency. Both writers ask similar questions, only in a different ways. How do we process and interpret visual and other forms of representation? How does representation cognitively, ideologically, ethically, psychologically, politically and historically effect "us"-the audience?
Concern with the film industry's ability to package ideologies and mythologies and the medium's ability to use spectacle, sound, and music to make any message palatable remains as urgent as ever for a variety of reasons. One reason relates directly to the productive processes of our nation's film industry. The Nazi propagandists' effective measurement and manipulation of national anxieties are currently standard practice for the U.S. film industry. The test marketing of films, polling of preview audience's responses to the film, and adjustment or readjustment of narratives and endings to satisfy the audience's desires are, to a certain extent, a refinement and strange transformation of what Goebbels's considered the duty to "tell the masses what they want and put it to the masses in such a way that they understand it too." Now the industry finds out what the audience wants, taps into its desires, anxieties and concerns, and feeds it directly back to them.
One of the most notorious examples of this test marketing strategy occurred with Adrian Lyne's film, Fatal Attraction. When Glenn Close's sexually aggressive, androgynously named career woman Alex lived to tell, the test audience requested a more satisfying ending, which was provided by Ann Archer's (the "good wife's") ritual slaughter of the "bad woman." Many critics applauded the film as a modern day morality tale on AIDS, fidelity, and family values. This marketing strategy suggests that giving "us" what "we" want is a practice with potentially dangerous implications.
Another reason relates to the partial similarity of the Nazi era's national anxieties with the anxieties of our own era. Current debates over citizenship and civil rights; anti-immigration and anti-foreigner campaigns; the resurgence of fashionable theories of essential racial, ethnic, and sexual differences; debates over the legitimate or permissible range of artistic expression; concerns related to economic decline, as well as the decline in morals and family values, are not identical to the historical moment of the 1930s and 1940s, but many of the parallels are impossible to overlook.
Representation is also so cross-pollinated that it is sometimes difficult to establish generic categories: infotainment, infomercials, you-are-there cop shows, news and tabloid use of dramatic re-enactments, musically driven narratives, and election campaigns ("Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow") suggest that consumer practices require a critical scrutiny that is not necessarily associated with entertainment media and its enjoyment.
A final reason relates to the fact that spectacle itself is naturalized in today's media-saturated culture. The most innovative computer technologies are immediately used in product commercials and music videos, and they rapidly become part of the audience's accumulated repository of images. Spectacle is naturalized and, in some instances, is celebrated as the perfection of the commodity. Spectacle is the essence of the narrative, the event itself, as is the case with Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, a "sumptuous orchestration" but an orchestration of what? Both Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag have suggested that the fascistic visual impulse is characterized by the "aestheticization of politics," as opposed to progressive art's "politicization of aesthetics." Stone's work powerfully debunks the assumption that authoritative discourses are unidirectional, ideologically speaking. We must remember that authoritative and oppressive discourses can emerge from both the right and the left, and that even a supposedly progressive director can produce fallacious films.
A brief reading of Australian Director Geoffrey Wright's recent film, Romper Stomper (1993), demonstrates the need for a re-education of critical and visual perception. The film, concerned with contemporary fascism, tells the story of two adolescent Nazis and their relationship with each other, a rootless rich girl, and a tribe of similarly alienated and angry youths. Generically-speaking, Wright's film fits into the action-adventure category. Its excessive and glamorously choreographed violence were central to the marketing of the film; for example, a number of advertisements made reference to Romper Stomper's visceral punch and nonstop, "bone-crunching action."
The opening shot of
In the midst of the violence, set to throbbing Oi (fascist punk) music, the director freeze-frames Hando's (Russell Crowe) and Davey's (Daniel Pollock) faces and splashes the characters', not the actors', names across the screen at the same moment the frame is stilled. In the course of the film, only the Nazis' hateful faces are highlighted; the Vietnamese remain nameless, faceless victims or, later in the film, are presented as a "teeming hoard," an indistinguishable mass. In one scene, Hando studies a map on the wall and points out to Gabe, the rich girl, all the areas that used to be white. While doing so he ominously tells Gabe that, "There's going to be more;" the swarm that began with the boat people is only the beginning.
Wright's film interestingly and effectively connects attraction to fascist organizations with sexual and erotic attraction; a powerful illustration of what Susan Sontag called "fascinating fascism." The Nazi myths, the images, icons, and ornaments are part of the attraction; the company of like-minded individuals provides the rest. What makes Romper Stomper a disturbing film is the way in which the film's formal language increasingly invites the viewer into identification with the Nazis it is supposedly studying. The scene during which Davey-who is processually being depicted as the "good" Nazi-goes back to rescue Gabe's coat amidst the revenge-driven Vietnamese attack, firmly establishes him as the film's romantic hero and seals the audience's identification with the character. While some viewers may be hoping Davey gets caught and pummeled, the tension of the scene circulates around the question of whether or not Davey is going to make it. The thrashing sound-track increases this narrative anxiety.
The Oi music that drives the film is sometimes used to provide ironic commentary. In one scene, the rhythmic intensity of the music and bravado of the Oi lyrics ("Jews and blacks and ghetto scum. Mirror, mirror what have we done? Mirror, mirror our day will come, we'll crush the scum!") contradicts the visual action; the Nazis are running for their lives. However, given the role of Oi in contemporary fascist violence in Germany, England, and elsewhere, the ironic playfulness wears thin.
Finally, Romper Stomper never effectively de-glamorizes Nazi violence. The Nazis clash with the Vietnamese-the Asians die anonymously, while the deaths of the Nazis incidental to the film's narrative are captured in mini-cameos. The final shot of the film once again subtlety reiterates its foreign, racial, and ethnic anxieties. After Hando and Davey fight on the beach, a busload of Japanese tourists literally span the horizon. The Japanese, who record the violent scene with cameras and mini-cams, are also positioned as the ultimate voyeurs-outsiders. And lest the viewer forget about the fanatical Nazi, Hando, who at this point is dying on the beach after being stabbed with a cheap imitation of a Nazi Jugen dagger, Wright leaves us with a final point-of-view shot, a vertical view of the horizon taken from the dying Hando's skewed perspective.
Though I've used for illustration two films that specifically represent Nazi culture and iconography, the dangers of visual-narrative romance are central to viewing of any film because film is always involved with seduction. The suggestion that Romper Stomper could appear romantic to any viewer may be difficult to imagine. Here's an example of a professional film critic's response to the film that might suggest otherwise: "It would have been very easy to make this just another crash-and-burn action flick with a political edge, but director Wright wisely chose to imbue these disturbing characters with odd bits off charm and humanity; if not for the wayward drift of their cause, this motley group of super-patriots would be almost heroic by sheer virtue of their unshakable beliefs." The reviewer concludes saying, it is a violent film, "certainly, but it's also a genuinely excellent film, horrifying and touching and beautiful in a bloody sort of way. A bit like real life, really."
Counter to his friend and colleague Adorno's pessimistic assessment of film, Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, suggested that film could productively and critically engage and educate the viewer. Rather than seeing the audience as damaged and passive, Benjamin believed that the filmgoer acquired perceptual and intellectual skills. He pointed out that the actor's inability to adjust her or her performance to the audience in person, permitted "the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor." The camera, technology's mediation of performance, might enable a kind of automatic critical distance. The audience, as witnesses of the film's accomplishments, would gain critical expertise as part of processing the film.
Benjamin also believed that film's expansion of space would lead to an improved spatial awareness and a gradual perceptual expansiveness. He thought that film demanded a kind of active participation that passive contemplation of a painting did not. Benjamin's utopian hopes for the film's transformative social and critical capabilities may or may not maintain their currency; however, I am not willing to forsake the question of agency-in this case, active and intellectual habits of observation. What Kracauer, Adorno, and Benjamin made apparent were the high stakes of interpretation. Each critic's observations of Nazi aesthetics and their aftermath made the impact of that era's instruction absolutely unforgettable.
I do not want to suggest that contemporary culture is structurally and intentionally fascistic. What I hope to suggest is that we need be aware of our ways of seeing; we need to think about what kinds of myths and messages reside in all of our various forms of news and entertainment; and we should stop to consider how and when our fears and desires are co-mingled. I hope this article illuminates our need for a careful and always self-reflexive education of our aesthetic and interpretive sense and sensibility. Perhaps "we," the viewing audience of the late twentieth century, might learn to resist enchantment without entirely abandoning the pleasures of looking. - Dr. Mia Carter