Introduction: Screening Diseases. Films on Sex Hygiene in Germany and France in the First Half of the 20th Century.

This research received support from the Excellence Initiative of the University of Strasbourg funded by the French government’s Future Investments program. It was conducted with the support of Interreg IV Upper Rhine OS A25 Rhinfilm project, co-financed by the European Union – European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) “Transcending borders with every project” and the ANR project MEDFILM. We are grateful for copy-editing by Jean-Yves Bart. French hygienist André Cavaillon, chief of the Central Service of Pro phylactics at the Ministry of Public Hygiene, was among the viewers when the lights went off at a Paris screening of Il était une fois trois amis (1929 FR), a VD prevention film. The official was astonished that a Boulevard Cinema would promote this educational film against venereal disease in the same way it would promote an American comic or a “yellow film”.1 Cavaillon thought that the best way of finding out how many people attended the film and what their reactions were was to go see it himself. After the screening he wrote: “We saw an enormous crowd was entering and shortly afterwards the projection began in a theatre packed with an audience that followed the film religiously for an hour by the clock.”2 This introductory scene testifies to the unprecedented development of public health education films after the First World War, a development that has become a rich topic of study for historians over the past two decades.3