German Films in Latin America and the Second World War: A Comparative Study on Argentina and Ecuador

Abstract

German cinema had an important presence in Latin American countries until the beginning of WW2 and collaborated with the diffusion of the Nazi political, economic and cultural project. The cultural diplomacy of the national-socialist state played a significant role in promoting cultural transfers from Nazi Germany to Latin America, disseminating the attractive and popular cinema of the Universum Film-Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) film company. Although the German film industry had developed more slowly than the American one, it achieved a peak in growth and splendour during the period of WW1. Thus, in 1917 the UFA was established to compensate for the decrease in films imported to Germany (Kreimeier 1999; Witte 2016). This initially private initiative later integrated all the pre-existing production companies. The UFA expanded its operations to one hundred and forty branches, agencies and cinema theatres across the world and became a global player (Fuhrman 2021). We still have little knowledge about the players and institutions involved, the kind of films exported and how the circulation of German cinema was affected by the war. In this chapter, we propose a first comparative look at the distribution of Nazi films in Latin America during the war and years preceding it. We address the cases of Argentina and Ecuador, focusing on the dissemination of German films considered to be Nazi propaganda. An American blockade introduced in 1942 restricted the activity of German film companies in Latin America, so there were hardly any new releases until approximately the 1950s. In the first section, we describe the theoretical and methodological framework of this chapter, based on the background of the New Cinema History and the insights of a comparative approach. In the second section, we contextualise the situation of Latin American cinema during the 1930s, the position of German films in the region and we address the exhibition of Nazi films specifically in Argentina and Ecuador. In the third section, we propose a comparative analysis of the situation in each country and formulate some further questions for future research.