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This interdisciplinary paper examines important similarities and differences in the way that Maoist China and Nazi Germany used political propaganda in their national feature-film industries. The first of part of this paper examines the film industry in the People's Republic of China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. The Chinese communist regime used the power of film to perpetuate communist themes and to educate the masses about the heroic nature of the Chinese revolutionaries and Marxism. Mao believed through popular film the Chinese Communist Party could educate, entertain, and indoctrinate the Chinese population and could ferret out capitalist and bourgeois elements which he believed were infiltrating Chinese society. The second case study examines how Kolberg (1945), the very last feature film released in Nazi Germany, communicates key elements of Nazi ideology: the Leadership Principle, the celebration of Blood and Soil, and the call for total war, especially as expressed by Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in his 1943 "Total War Address."Kolberg demonstrates both the power of Nazi political propaganda and its limitations as a political tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay about how the film "Scorpio Rising," directed by Kenneth Anger, inaugurated innovative representations of same-sex desire through its cinematic juxtaposition of mass-mediated images is presented. The author argues that underground filmmakers, identified as male homosexuals, created films for and about male homosexuality. He claims that the best way to appreciate queer representation in the film is to review the condition of homosexual visibility in popular culture during its initial release.