A01=Laura Heins
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Author_Laura Heins
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=APF
Category=ATF
Category=GTB
Category=GTM
censorship
Classical Hollywood
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
domestic melodramas
domesticity
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
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family
fascism
film genre
gender roles
home front films
Ital
Language_English
maternal melodramas
National Socialism
Nazi cinema
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
propaganda
PS=Active
romance films
sexuality in film
softlaunch
spectator response
working women
Product details
- ISBN 9780252079351
- Weight: 513g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 Sep 2013
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Cultural productions in the Third Reich often served explicit propaganda functions of legitimating racism and glorifying war and militarism. Likewise, the proliferation of domestic and romance films in Nazi Germany also represented an ideological stance. Rather than reinforcing traditional gender role divisions and the status quo of the nuclear family, these films were much more permissive about desire and sexuality than previously assumed. Focusing on German romance films, domestic melodramas, and home front films from 1933 to 1945, Nazi Film Melodrama shows how melodramatic elements in Nazi cinema functioned as part of a project to move affect, body, and desire beyond the confines of bourgeois culture and participate in a curious modernization of sexuality engineered to advance the imperialist goals of the Third Reich. Offering a comparative analysis of Nazi productions with classical Hollywood films of the same era, Laura Heins argues that German fascist melodramas differed from their American counterparts in their negative views of domesticity and in their use of a more explicit antibourgeois rhetoric. Nazi melodramas, film writing, and popular media appealed to viewers by promoting liberation from conventional sexual morality and familial structures, presenting the Nazi state and the individual as dynamic and revolutionary. Some spectators objected to the eroticization and modernization of the public sphere under Nazism, however, pitting Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda against more conservative film audiences in a war over the very status of domesticity and the shape of the family. Drawing on extensive archival research, this perceptive study highlights the seemingly contradictory aspects of gender representation and sexual morality in Nazi-era cinema.
Laura Heins is an assistant professor of media studies and Germanic languages and literatures at the University of Virginia.
