Abstract
Before the Second World War, German cinema was an important competitor to the Hollywood industry. With the Nazi regime, film policies tried to expand distribution to foreign markets, both for commercial and ideological purposes, including Latin American countries. In this chapter, we explore the distribution and exhibition of Nazi films from 1936 to 1943, in the main cities of Argentina (Buenos Aires) and Ecuador (Quito and Guayaquil). The number of German feature films released in the central movie theatres between those years was considerable and a number of highly ideological films were exhibited. Based on archival data from journalistic sources and drawing inspiration from recent work on the new history of cinema, we compare the cases of Argentina and Ecuador with the aim of achieving a better understanding of the German cultural policy in Latin America during the Third Reich regime.
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Notes
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- 2.
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation. (n.d.). 49 Suchergebnisse. Retrieved June 11, 2019, from https://www.murnau-stiftung.de/movie_search?genre=22
- 3.
The configuration of the cinema theatres was different in Buenos Aires, on the one side, and in Guayaquil and Quito, on the other. As the next section will discuss, in Ecuador there were no neighbourhood cinemas at that time.
- 4.
According to our own reconstruction of the market through journalistic sources (Anuario Cinematográfico Argentino, Heraldo del Cinematógrafo and La Nación, 1935–1942).
- 5.
The government of General Alberto Enríquez Gallo (1937–1938), Aurelio Mosquera Narváez (1938–1939) and Carlos Alberto Arroyo del Rio (1939–1944).
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Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Organ of the Ecuadorian Government (1938). Official registration, from October 1937 to August 1938, Quito.
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In 1934, the Film Law (Reichslichtspielgesetz) was created, which created distinctive categories for German productions: Institutional (1920); National Education (1924); Political and Artistic Value (1933); Special Political Value (1933); Special Artistic Value (1933); Political Value (1933); Artistic Value (1933); Cultural Value (1933); Valor for Youth (1938); National Value (1939); and Movie of the Nation (1939). Politically valuable films reflected the Party’s goals. This title was awarded not only to documentaries such as The Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, Leni Riefenstahl, 1935) but also to films with a political message, such as the pro-euthanasia production Yo Acuso (Ich klage an, Wolfgang Liebeneiner, 1941). The combination of political and cultural value meant special quality and high credibility. Those of artistic value were understood from a cultural perspective and were awarded only to prestigious films and those reserved for export (Vande Winkel & Welch, 2007, p. 6).
- 8.
As mentioned above, the exhibiting companies were concentrated in the country’s large cities, restricting access to the cinema to rural populations and those further from urban centres.
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Moguillansky, M., Echeverría, Y. (2024). German Films in Latin America and the Second World War: A Comparative Study on Argentina and Ecuador. In: Treveri Gennari, D., Van de Vijver, L., Ercole, P. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_18
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