They're coming to take me away, ha ha?

One Comment

• Partisan says:

  June 10, 2010 at 2:59 pm

  One inter­est­ing thing about German cinema under Hitler is the con­trast between post-war German cinema and post­war Italian and Japanese cinema. Few would deny that the lat­ter two were much more impress­ive, while it took a quarter of a cen­tury for German cinema to get sus­tained inter­na­tion­al atten­tion. Intertesting also is that while Italian cinema under Mussolini was not very remark­able and the lead­ing post­war fig­ures played a rel­at­ively minor role in it, both Ozu and Mizoguchi (to choose the most obvi­ous names) made major films while their coun­try was becom­ing a truly vile dic­tat­or­ship. I remem­ber read­ing an essay by John Dower on Japanese war­time films, which were appar­ently bet­ter and less simple minded than one might think, but which are largely unknown since the American occu­pa­tion con­fis­cated many of the films.