Cinema programs as a source for research on historical film audiences. Berlin 1945–1949

In my paper, I analyse programs from cinemas in all four sectors of occupied Berlin from 1945 to 1949. I focus primarily on ads. Looking at cinema programs allows me to conduct research on local audiences by taking into consideration the social structure of the German population under occupation, the Berliners’ mobility between the sectors and – if possible – the viewers’ habits before, during and after the screenings. The analysis is based on research done at the archives of the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. The programs collected from the SDK are not representative in terms of statistics, though. The SDK owns programs from 44 Berlin cinemas from the years 1945–1949 (unfortunately all incomplete) making up approximately 20 percent of all the cinemas in the city during that period. As a result, I examined about 400 programs.This book was financially supported by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities: project “Cinema: Intercultural Perspective. Western-European Cinema in Poland, Polish Cinema in Western Europe. Mutual Perception of Film Cultures (1918–1939)”; Research on this paper was enabled by a grant from the Polish National Science Centre, number 2012/05/D/HS2/03490. My thanks to Lisa Roth and Regina Hoffmann from the Archive Deutsche Kinemathek for their help and comments as well as to Anna Labentz for editing this paper