Kameradschaft, 1931

The film was a landmark in cinéma verité stylization, but that’s not what’s interesting about it. What’s interesting about it was that it was that it was just another case of the arts being used as a platform to promote socialism, and a phonied-up “internationalism” of promoting German-French friendship like so many dopey, government funded foundation exercises today.

It’s time to celebrate eighty years of that sort of awkward propagandizing, so rah-rah, and all that. It’s just as wooden then as it is today.

As it is with Socialism, the film has the vague stench of Communist era “brother-nation to brother-nation friendship parades” which amounted to a compulsory attendance for school children, troops, and factory workers. Drag out the German-Mongolian comradeship banners again Fritz!”