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appalachiablue

(41,052 posts)
3. Recommend reading the full article about the distribution of the film
Tue Jun 12, 2018, 01:34 AM
Jun 2018

in Germany, Holland and France, also the film's producer and writer of the 1922 book on which the film was based.
The rediscovered "City Without Jews" Austrian film is an ominous and striking visual portrait of horrible times to come, although the actual film's ending is positive. A great number of popular movies were produced in the Silent Movie Era (1894-1927) and seen in the US, Europe and elsewhere--"Metropolis," "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "Ben Hur," classic dramas and Biblical stories, westerns and comedies by artists like Charlie Chaplin.

In Europe prior to the 1924 Austrian film, there was rising anti semitism, harassment, and violence against Jews occurring in areas in the late 19th c., into the early 20th c. and inter-war period. Attacks and pogroms were extreme in Czarist Russia and eastern Europe.
For centuries, Jews and Jewish communities experienced sporadic persecution and expulsion at least since returning Crusaders attacked Jews in Germany; the death of Aaron and the Jews of York in 12th-13th c. Norman England; the 15th c. Spanish Inquisition; and turmoil in the 1600s during the Protestant Reformation.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/yorks/city-of-york/pp47-49: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_of_Lincoln

The subject matter of harsh anti Semitism in the Austrian film echoes another early use of motion picture mass media technology to promote racism and white supremacy, "The Birth of a Nation," (1915) the D.W. Griffith production based on Thomas Dixon's novel "The Clansman." Griffith's groundbreaking epic movie was widely viewed and used as a recruiting tool by the KKK whose membership increased in the 1920s during a time of labor issues, strikes, anarchism and the Red Scare in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_film



"Sallie Gardner at a Gallop," c. 1878 considered to be the first "proto-movie."

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