Banality in Vision: Cinema and Mass Dictatorship

Abstract

When Veit Harlan’s Der Herrscher (The Ruler) (1937) and Hans Steinhoff’s Ohm Krüger (Uncle Krüger) (1941), the two notorious Nazi films that had been prohibited after the Second World War, were shown restrictively in Seoul in 2008, under the strict guidance of the German government, many Korean film historians expressed their impressions with one voice that the films looked considerably similar to some South Korean films from the 1960s and the 1970s. They did not fail to mention that the points of similarity were, in fact, banal and exoteric while they had eagerly looked forward to watching something lurid and staggering made by the notorious propaganda machine. Though such perceptions were not based on scholarly analysis, they allow one to presume that there had been certain characteristics shared between the German cinema in the Third Reich and the South Korean cinema during the Park Chung-Hee regime. The “banality” of the two Nazi films is reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s renowned concept (1963). However, apart from merely demonizing the Nazi cinema as “evil,” it also raises the question of what the cinematic representations share in common as a tool of domination.