Film Professionals in Nazi-Occupied Europe

This book analyses the film industries and cinema cultures of Nazi-occupied countries (1939-1945) from the point of view of individuals: local “captains of industry”, cinema managers, those working for film studios and officials authorized to navigate film policy. The book considers these people from a historical perspective, taking into account their career before the occupation and, where relevant, pays attention to their post-war lives. The perspectives of these historical agents” contributes to an understanding of how top-down orders and haphazard signals from the occupying administration were moulded, adjusted and distorted in the process of their translation and implementation. This edited collection offers a more dynamic and less deterministic approach to research on the international expansion of Third-Reich cinema in World War Two; an approach that strives to balance the role of individual agency with the structural determinants. The case studies presented in this book cover the territories of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and the Soviet Union.

Pavel Skopal is Associate Professor and department head at the Department of Film Studies and Audio-visual Culture, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.  His recent books include The Cinema of the North Triangle (2014) and Cinema in Service of the State (2015, co-edited with Lars Karl). Skopal has published in international journals including Film History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Convergence. 

Roel Vande Winkel is Associate Professor in Film & TV Studies at KU Leuven and at LUCA School of Arts, Belgium. He is associate editor of Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and his recent books include Researching Newsreels. Local, National and Transnational Case Studies (2018, with Ciara Chambers and Mats Jönsson), Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship around the World (2013, with Daniel Biltereyst) and Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema (2011 revised, with David Welch).