"On the evening of August 8, 1939, Hitler's Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels led a fleet of gondolas down the Canal Grande. He'd been invited to attend the opening of the seventh Venice Film Festival, which began in a lugubrious atmosphere. The specter of a new world conflict was haunting Europe; critics dispatching from the Lido wrote of an "empty" Venice, "long-faced people," "little dancing" and "lots of play to chase away negative thoughts.""
"But Hollywood stars like Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks still graced the Lido, parties echoed from the Excelsior Hotel, a choir sang for Goebbels and 21 new features celebrated their world premiere in the newly built Palazzo del Cinema. "We have witnessed the triumph of sound, we are witnessing the triumph of color," Biennale President Giuseppe Volpi said in his opening speech, before vowing that the festival would "concentrate and remain concentrated on art and only art.""
"Such a head-in-the-sand approach has long since metastasized into Venice's preferred response to the outside world. It's telling that, in the weeks leading up to the 1939 edition, it wasn't the war that worried the Biennale top-brass but what magazine Cine-Giornale called "The Jewish-Masonic Attempt to Organize a Film Festival Plagiarizing the One at Venice" - a few hundred miles west, Le Festival de Cannes kicked off that same year."
On August 8, 1939, Joseph Goebbels arrived at the Venice Film Festival amid a lugubrious atmosphere and fears of a looming world conflict. Critics described an "empty" Venice, "long-faced people," minimal dancing and theatrical diversions. The Biennale operated as a political summit inviting national delegations to submit films; sixteen nations participated while the United States boycotted after Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia had won the previous year. Hollywood stars and lavish parties contrasted with political tensions, as twenty-one new features premiered in the Palazzo del Cinema. Biennale President Giuseppe Volpi celebrated technical cinema achievements while pledging to focus the festival solely on art.
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]