Modernity, World Wars and Dictatorships | 109La Presa di Roma was released in 1905. Denmark and Sweden gained fame
for their melodramatic and erotic films, while France was celebrated for its
experimental and fantastical works. George Méliès in particular utilised film
to play with the audience’s perception, and dealt with science fiction, as shown
for example by A Trip to the Moon (for global comparison, see Nowell-Smith
1996). Early German films are hard to characterise. Loyalty and duty, inno-
cence and rescue, as well as transformation, for instance, have been considered
typical motifs (Haucke 2005: 21–38).
The establishment of film also professionalised state control. Initially it was
conducted like theatre censorship without separate censorship laws. During
screenings, the local police would check film contents and viewer reactions.
Censorship was thus subjective and depended on regional differences. A film
that was prohibited in one place might be permitted in a neighbouring town.
Audiences also had the power to effect film bans through their behaviour.
Loud and vehement protests at the pictures, for instance, could entail a ban,
for disturbance of the public peace (Loiperdinger 2003: 73). In many coun-
tries, such local censorship was more stringently coordinated after 1910, cor-
responding to a change in film distribution, which was no longer marked by
sales but rather by film rentals. After 1911, Prussia began to standardise age
limits, censorship regulations and film editing. Two years on, Italy followed
suit by establishing a national censorship body (Hibberd 2008: 30). Though
administered by the film industry, even Great Britain and the United States
introduced pre-censorship during this time. After several U.S. states adopted
state censorship, however, the Supreme Court demonstrated its support in
1915: due to the commercial nature and precarious effects of film, it did not
regard the medium as part of the legally protected freedom of press. Moral
rather than political concerns primarily led to censorial control in anglophone
countries (Maltby, in Nowell-Smith 1996: 235). Regardless, the practice of
censoring impacted both contents and self-censorship.
The Media and the First World War
The First World War shook up the previously established media culture. Con-
versely, the significance of the mass media market at the war’s outbreak was
widely discussed in contemporary research. More recent work based on doc-
umentary material confutes the assumption that the media fomented war.
The English press, for example, was not consistently antagonistic towards
Germany before 1914. Liberal papers in particular deliberately refrained from
criticism in order to promote de-escalation. Even Wilhelm II was seldom lam-
pooned before the outbreak of the war (Reinermann 2001: 414; Schramm
2007: 498f.). By the same token, although the leading German newspapers