In Defense of Culture: The Vienna Urania and the Cultural Film

Abstract

In the interwar period, the Vienna Urania, one of the leading institutions of adult education in Austria, developed a model of cultural education through cinematic entertainment that built on pre-World War I ideas of the cinema reform movement about the bourgeoisification of film culture. At the center of this model was a screening practice that surrounded the cinematic text with a whole series of paratexts, whose primary goal was not enlightenment but the purification of the audience's emotional life.

Keywords

• cultural film
• cinema reform movement
• film culture