Looted Films: Integrating Cinema into Provenance Research

If we consider cinema as cultural heritage, film remains a blind spot in provenance research. Its crucial role under the Nazi regime is well known, yet the large-scale seizure of studios, distribution networks, cinematographic equipment, and thousands of reels across occupied Europe remains understudied. The Propaganda-Abteilung, under Goebbels, played a key role in this expropriation, centralizing films within the Reichsfilmarchiv in Berlin. The archive was later seized by the Soviet Army in 1945, and the films were partly redistributed across Eastern European film archives and cinematheques. Presumed destroyed and regarded as minor works because of their reproducible nature, looted films have consequently been excluded from restitution debates. Through several case studies, we will examine the mechanisms and protagonists of this spoliation and reflect on what the restitution of a film might entail, thereby calling for a repositioning of provenance research within an interdisciplinary, cross-archival, and international approach.