NYT interview with Michael Haneke

From an article entitled "Minister of Fear" September 23, 2007

“At the beginning of the 20th century... when film began in Europe, storytelling of the kind still popular in Hollywood was every bit as popular here. Then the Nazis came, and the intellectuals — a great number of whom were Jewish — were either murdered or managed to escape to America and elsewhere. There were no intellectuals anymore — most of them were dead. Those who escaped to America were able to continue the storytelling approach to film — really a 19th-century tradition — with a clear conscience, since it hadn’t been tainted by fascism. But in the German-speaking world, and in most of the rest of Europe, that type of straightforward storytelling, which the Nazis had made such good use of, came to be viewed with distrust. The danger hidden in storytelling became clear — how easy it was to manipulate the crowd. As a result, film, and especially literature, began to examine itself. Storytelling, with all the tricks and ruses it requires, became gradually suspect. This was not the case in Hollywood.” At this point, Haneke asked politely whether I was following him, and I told him that I was. “I’m glad,” he said, apparently with genuine relief. “For Americans, this can sometimes be hard to accept.”

An entire continent forced into intellectualism by the persecution and death of its intellectuals? It's an interesting idea -- as though he suggests that American storytelling is prelapsarian, that we are still somehow happily ensconced in the 19th century, or the boulevard theater, that for American storytelling, the Nazi propaganda film never happened, and so does not need to be avoided.