Page "Cinema of Germany" Paragraph 5

Despite the advent of a regular television service in the Federal Republic in 1952, cinema attendances continued to grow through much of the 1950s, reaching a peak of 817. 5 million visits in 1956.

The majority of the films of this period set out to do no more than entertain the audience and had few pretensions to artistry or active engagement with social issues.

The defining genre of the period was arguably the Heimatfilm (" homeland film "), in which morally simplistic tales of love and family were played out in a rural setting, often in the mountains of Bavaria, Austria or Switzerland.

In their day Heimatfilms were of little interest to more scholarly film critics, but in recent years they have been the subject of study in relation to what they say about the culture of West Germany in the years of the Wirtschaftswunder.

Other film genres typical of this period were adaptations of operettas, hospital melodramas, comedies and musicals.

Many films were remakes of earlier Ufa productions shorn of the nationalistic Blut und Boden traits of those Nazi-period films.