Scientific Films of the 1920s - 1930s - continued...

These possibilities were also developed by the National Socialist regime. The so-called "instructional film movement" that had emerged in Germany during the 1920s was institutionalized by the Nazis with the creation of the Reich Office for Teaching Film in 1934. Meanwhile, key figures from that movement also branched out into making so-called "enlightenment films." One pioneer in this field was the neurologist and eugenicist Curt Thomalla, who eventually became medical advisor within Goebbels' Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Thomalla oversaw the regime's campaign of medical propaganda, under the auspices of which the implications of research such as Janker's x-ray film-aided studies of normal and pathological breathing found their way into a variety of eugenically-themed popular-scientific films.

A leading role in both the instructional film and the enlightenment film movements was played by members of the psy sciences - neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists. Already in 1919, Thomalla called specifically for the creation of a neurological-psychiatric film archive as part of UFA's cultural-film department (Kulturfilmabteilung) that he had assumed direction of during the war. Neurologists embraced the medium early on as a means of analyzing the motor disturbances, epileptic convulsions, and hysteric fits of patients. During the war leading doctors had been particularly interested in filming war neurotics and soldiers suffering from brain injuries.

An interesting dimension of such films was the depiction of hypnosis in several of them. The neurologist Max Nonne, for instance, made a film demonstrating the use of hypnosis to treat soldiers suffering from war neurosis. Nonne thereby partially rescued hypnosis from the aura of disrepute surrounding it. Yet many scientists remained skeptical about the authenticity of hypnotic states. This was heightened by the emergence after the war of a genre of feature films (notably "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari") that exploited the oft-lamented theatrical aspects of hypnosis. Thomalla addressed this issue in an article in 1923 in which, responding to the release of Fritz Lang's "Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler," he wrote about the need to rehabilitate, through filmic means, the image of the doctor and of clinical hypnosis in the public eye. In 1924 he followed up on this by co-producing a popular-scientific film on hypnosis for UFA. In doing so he was engaging with a larger cultural debate, concerning the nature of film spectatorship and its possibilities as well as its dangers, that had been prompted by film's transformation into a mass medium. Claims for the scientific and educational value of motion pictures were continually shadowed by anxiety concerning the effects and influence of the filmic medium itself, which - in its popular form - Hugo Münsterberg and others likened to a kind of hypnosis.