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"'Yanks Held by Nazis See Newest U.S. Pix': Film Exhibition in German POW Camps During World War II."  2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference.  Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.  Submitted.

On 20 Oct. 1943, General Secretary of the War Prisoners' Aid of the Young Men's Christian Associations Tracy Strong contacted Executive Vice-Chairman of the War Activities Committee of the Motion Picture Industry Frances Harmon.  The Canadian Government was about to send films as part of a British-German exchange to provide screenings for "prisoners of war and interned enemy civilians."  Would the motion picture industry War Activities Committee similarly provide 200 films for exhibition in Nazi POW camps that could both "depict some of the best of the film industry in America and which would have a fair chance of passing both the American and German censors?"  What roster of films could possibly meet such divergent dictates?  Was the prisoner of war a "perverse spectator," not in a "willful turning away," as Janet Staiger observes, but by "an inability to do otherwise?"  This paper explores what happens to film spectatorship when film exhibition occurs in extreme circumstances.