Marika Rökk s Bilingual Legs: German Movies, Un-German Behaviour, and Meaning of Cinema-Going
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In the case of the history of cinema reception in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the myth of a passive resistance of cinemagoers to the German film production often persists. In fact, the attendance was strikingly rising during the era, despite strangling of the indigenous production by the Nazis. And the memories of roughly 90 dedicated cinemagoers we have interviewed about the Nazi era indicate that aside from the Czech movies, the most popular cinema entertainment was represented by the German colour spectacles, melodramas, comedies, and musicals (Münchhausen, Damals, Die Frau meiner Träume, etc.). My research on the reception in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany after the war implies that the German audiences denied the imposed Soviet movies as “primitive” in contrast to the German tradition of “well made movies”. Establishing such opposition served the audiences for a confirmation of the fundamentally shaken national identity under the occupation. However, such register was not universally available for the Czech audiences because of the high production values of most of the German movies. The Czechs used a satirizing denial in relation to newsreels and to the most ideological films – but the audiences were not resistant to the entertainment genre production. Nevertheless, we can recognise some strategies how the Czech cinemagoers coped with the “Germaness” of the movies and how they rewrote the national indications of the cinema experience – the stars of non-German origin were of the most popular (Zarah Leander, or, unbeatably, Marika Rökk), and the Wien-film production was highly appreciated; significantly, even the German stars and movies are sometimes “misremembered” by the narrators as Austrian one. With taking the general distribution system and the local exhibition practices into account, the paper intends to understand the preferences of the audiences and their attitudes towards the German production. |
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