The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945 - Klaus Kreimeier - H... Book

Art and entertainment bent to the will of the unspeakable. This excellent history of Ufa studios is appropriately divided into two parts, before and after 1933. Part one is the fun part (though there are warning shadows), about the golden age of German film -- Lang, Pabst, Murnau, Dietrich -- and part two is an astonishing, painful exploration of one of the first systematic campaigns to turn film into a weapon and an instrument of terror. It's worth noting that this book is primarily a political and business history and only incidentally an aesthetic or artistic one, so some of the passages are a little dry. The more one knows about the politics surrounding the eras, and the films themselves as works of art, the more complete the picture is likely to be. The structure -- chapters are thematic as much as they are sequential -- also leads to a little repetition as films are examined in one context and then another, but this is a minor distraction. Full of wonderful detail, most of it unknown to me, the book refused to be laid down.