Propaganda

The word "propaganda" derives from the Congratio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), an organization established by Pope Gregory XV in 1622. Its original missionary denotation has been incorporated into modern dictionaries, where it is defined as the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person. However, this rather neutral meaning has taken on, in common parlance, a more negative connotation, namely the assumption that disinformation, not information, is at its core.

Propagandistic messages have been a mainstay of films throughout the history of the medium. Mise-en-scène, editing, dialogue, voice-over narration, and music are some of the techniques that impart specific meaning. In short, the aesthetics of the cinema have long been used as powerful tools both to convey and to disguise overt and covert polemical proclamations.

EARLY FILM HISTORY AND PROPAGANDA

Among the earliest filmmakers to incorporate conscious or unconscious propagandistic messages were the Lumière brothers. In their short film Démolition d'un mur (Demolition of a Wall, 1896), for example, we see the seeds of later, more carefully constructed propaganda. The "boss" in this little film is given narrative and spatial privilege over the workers. Had a socialist made this film, she or he might have emphasized the workers' labor by choosing a camera angle that favored them and their physical efforts rather than their employer's perspective. The boss might have been satirized or portrayed as a tyrant and the workers' endeavors ennobled or depicted as exploited. Other Lumière films depicted dignitaries, parades, the military, fire departments, and the bonhomie of French bourgeois life; throughout, the viewpoint is clearly that of the self-satisfied industrialist filmmakers, who were comfortable with their class privilege and national identity. By contrast, their contemporary, Georges Méliès (1861–1938), often used fictionalized situations, special effects, and lighting to rigorously deconstruct the bourgeois universe erected in the films of the Lumière brothers and their vision of an orderly universe, which has come to dominate mainstream cinema.

The movie pioneer D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) has often been accused—and rightfully so—of manufacturing propaganda, especially of an antiblack nature, in his Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation (1915). The Birth of a Nation begins with a provocative prologue which explains that the seeds of national discord were sown by the introduction of African slaves into the colonies. Subsequently, the "negroes" (as the film spells it)—most of whom were played by whites in blackface—are portrayed as either savage brutes or fools. Most infamously, Gus leers with animalistic delight at young Flora Cameron and then chases her to her death. Gus is "tried" and lynched by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), his body then dragged through the streets and deposited at a black meeting place. At the film's climax, marauding blacks, intent on rape and murder, surround and attack a cabin that contains "innocent" white people from both the North and South. The message is clear: all whites, from whatever region, should unite against the menace of the freed slaves. The "heroic" Ku Klux Klan comes to the rescue, scattering the black mob and saving the whites. This "rescue" is in sharp contrast to the historical reality of the KKK, whose mission was less to defend the interests of innocent whites than to intimidate and commit violence against innocent blacks.

Griffith's portrayals of African Americans as slow-witted, lazy, or comical are just as stereotyped and prejudicial. During the Reconstruction scenes in The Birth of a Nation, Griffith shows black legislators dressed in clownish clothes and eating and drinking alcohol on the floor of the US House of Representatives. While some of the film's images are supposedly based on photographs of the period, these images of African Americans in The Birth of a Nation convey a clear rhetoric: blacks are irresponsible, unmotivated, and unruly—not capable of holding elective office or even casting a vote.

The Birth of a Nation instantly produced controversy. The NAACP demanded Griffith cut two scenes that depicted white women being molested by rampaging blacks and an epilogue that suggested blacks should be shipped back to Africa. The director grudgingly made these excisions, but many national leaders argued that the film should still be banned. Riots ensued when Birth opened in Boston, Atlanta, and Chicago, and it was banned in at least eight states. Nonetheless, the movie was the most successful of its time—and retained the honor for decades to come. Its nineteenth-century constructions of racial stereotypes were used as recruitment tools for the Ku Klux Klan, and from 1915 to 1940 the Klan's membership grew substantially. It is rare for individual films to have such social impact, but in the case of The Birth of a Nation, the social consequences were apparent.

Immediately after the release of The Birth of a Nation, Griffith made Intolerance (1916)—another epic, but with pro-tolerance, pro-labor, and antiwar themes. The film's epilogue contains its most blatant message: world peace will eventually arise out of hate and intolerance. But such sermonizing did not fare well with the public and Intolerance failed at the box office and was banned in several countries. Some of Griffith's earlier films, however, seem to conflict directly with the proslavery message in The Birth of a Nation. A Corner in Wheat (1909), for example, has implications that verge on being socialist. Griffith juxtaposes a breadline scene with a lavish party in the mansion of the Wheat King, who engineered a rise in the price of bread by shrewd stock market deals. This simple contrast cut between the elegance of the rich and the immobility and despairing looks of the poor establishes a potent class analysis. When the Wheat King meets his ironic fate in a grain pit, where he is drowned in the "torrent of golden grain" that made him wealthy, Griffith again cuts to the breadline to compare the stockbroker's excess with the scarcity of the poor. In the end, the downtrodden farmer survives, though further impoverished, while the moneyed get their just desserts.

PROPAGANDA AND NATION

In other countries, especially the Soviet Union, leaders began to recognize the power of film to influence social and political attitudes. Film production was nationalized in Russia in 1917, after the Bolshevik Revolution. "Of all the arts," Vladimir Lenin said, "for us, the cinema is the most important." Documentary and fictional silent films were therefore produced to abet the Leninist cause. Notable examples include Sergei Eisenstein's (1898–1948) Stachka (Strike, 1925), Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), and Oktyabr (Ten Days that Shook the World and October, 1927); V. I. Pudovkin's (1893–1953) Mat (Mother, 1926) and Konets Sankt-Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg, 1927); and Dziga Vertov's (1896–1954) Kino-pravda (CinemaTruth, 1925) and Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929).

Because of the inherent domination of visual images and the illiteracy of a good deal of the Russian peasantry, the silent cinema was an ideal tool for presenting ideas and information about the fall of the czar and the rise of the industrial and agricultural proletariat. The fact that film was a mass medium, reproducible and widely distributable, added to its propagandistic appeal. As in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, the hero of these films was often not a lone individual but a social class.

Based on an actual event during the unsuccessful revolution of 1905, Potemkin uses the historical circumstances of a mutiny aboard a ship to make a larger statement about Leninist insurrection. The most famous montage in cinema history—the Odessa Steps sequence—punctuates the film with hundreds of quickly edited shots that plunge the viewer into the midst of a czarist massacre. Although the actual massacre in 1905 occurred on level ground, Eisenstein saw the dramatic (and propagandistic) value of taking artistic liberties. By using the steep steps, Eisenstein was able to sensationalize the helpless entrapment of the fleeing masses as they rushed from the faceless minions of the czar and their rifles. In addition, an establishing shot from above the steps suggests that the fleeing people are visually trapped between the militiamen and the cathedral at the bottom of the steps, making the Marxist point that the Church and State are the enemies of the proletariat. The culmination of the sequence—the "rising" of a statue of a lion (accomplished by editing together images of three separate statues)—was likewise the product of creative license; the three statues were located near Yalta, far from Odessa. Nonetheless, those three quick shots, followed by a cannonade by the Potemkin against the Odessa Opera House, headquarters of the generals, metaphorically mark the masses' outrage at the czar's cruelty.

Later in his career, under the thumb of Josef Stalin and Commissar Boris V. Shumiatski's Socialist Realist policy, Eisenstein was not allowed to make films from 1929 to 1938. Eventually, though, he made three films that used czars as the heroes: Aleksandr Nevskiy (Alexander Nevsky, 1938) and Ivan Groznyy (Ivan the Terrible, parts I (1945) and II (1946, not released until 1958). Whereas Lenin had said that cinema was the most important art, Stalin wrote that "the cinema is the greatest medium of mass agitation. The task is to take it into our hands." Encouraged to produce epics that extolled the "leader of the Russian people," Eisenstein went back in history to glorify the czars, obvious avatars of Stalin himself.

While Eisenstein was barred from filmmaking, Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) was coming into prominence in Germany. Her landmark propaganda film, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935), still provokes controversy. Commissioned by Chancellor Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), Triumph of the Will was meant to be the official documentation of the Nazi Party Congress of 1934. Yet the film also promulgated fascism and the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) as the bases for renewed German nationalism and patriotism. Swastikas, eagles, statuary, Sieg Heil gestures, and children predominate as national metonymies.

Although Triumph of the Will was made about the party congress, it does not articulate any specific political policy or ideology. Hitler repeatedly stressed that one could not sway the masses with arguments, logic, or knowledge, only with feelings and beliefs. True to form, the film's "star" has a "cult of personality"—a mystical aura associated with nature, religion, and a "folkish" family-based patriotism. Its heroic leader is connected with the sky, earth, and animals; pagan and Christian religious connotations abound (i.e., cathedrals draped with swastika banners); and flags, parades, torchlight rituals, and military-national symbols dominate the mise-en-scène. Indeed, all the signifying mechanisms of the cinema—camera angles, lighting, editing, set design, and music—were marshaled to appeal to a malleable mass audience.

Triumph of the Will emphasizes optimistic, upbeat, and patriotic themes that reinforce the need for a renewed sense of unity and national identity after a period of economic and political instability. Hitler saw the film as an effective glorification of Nazism, a view reiterated years later by critic Susan Sontag, who wrote that it achieved nothing less than transforming history into theater. Propaganda such as Triumph of the Will mingles historical realities and cultural expression so as to have a tangible material and historical effect on society and social consciousness.

Of course, propaganda has been used in films to promote not only right-wing but left-wing causes. The Spanish Civil War, for example, became the battleground not only of loyalist and fascist ground troops but also of cinematic forces. Joris Ivens's (1898–1989) The Spanish Earth (1937) and Leo Hurwitz's (1909–1991) Heart of Spain (1937) are two notable examples that center on the conflict. In 1935 the Communist International had decreed that no longer was socialism versus capitalism to be the dialectic, but rather, democracy versus fascism. So in an attempt to lead the struggle against the fascist dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco (1892–1975), and to combat his propaganda, Ivens and Hurwitz made impassioned documentary films for the Popular Front cause of the loyalists. Ivens made no secret that his goal was not to portray unvarnished truth, but rather to enhance reality through the techniques of cinema in order to sway people into action.

In fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) authorized the building of Cinecittà—a major film production studio—in 1936. The sign above the gate read, "Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon." LUCE (1926–1943) was a state-owned agency, founded by the fascists to produce "educational" and propaganda material for the Italian populace. LUCE made 2,972 weekly newsreels during its existence, most of which focused on Il Duce, military successes, and social progress in Italy under the fascist regime. In addition, the fictional films produced under fascism were highly successful adaptations of Italian novels and "white telephone" films about the bourgeoisie. Protected through strict import quotas, this cultura popolare reflected the cultural mythology of the fascist regime.

To counter Nazi and fascist propaganda and to inspire reluctant, isolationist American troops to fight the Axis powers, the US War Department commissioned the Hollywood director Frank Capra to produce a series of seven films called Why We Fight (1942–1945). One of the cinematic strategies of the series was that the enemies' own words and footage would be used against them; hence, much of the Why We Fight films are compilations of news footage. The themes (Good vs. Evil, Democracy vs. Totalitarianism) and characters (the Leader, Children, the People) were presented, through effective cinematic techniques, to elicit audience identification and involvement as in fiction movies.

The Nazis Strike (1943), for instance, utilized cross-cutting and "creative geography" to create propagandistic meaning. In one scene, dive-bombing German planes are intercut with fleeing civilians and cowering children to suggest that the bombers are menacing the victims

LENI RIEFENSTAHL
b. Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl, Berlin, Germany, 22 August 1902, d. 8 September 2003

Leni Riefenstahl gained international fame in the 1930s as the official filmmaker of the Third Reich. She studied dance in her youth and appeared as an actress in German "mountain films" under the tutelage of Arnold Fanck. While performing in these movies, she learned the art of filmmaking and soon became the director of her own mountain film, Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932), in which she also starred.

Adolf Hitler admired The Blue Light and commissioned Riefenstahl to film the congress of the Nazi Party at Nuremberg in 1934. The result would be her masterpiece and triumph, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935). Multiple cameras were used to powerful effect to lend full cinematic expressivity to the event, sweeping up the viewer in the spectacle. Riefenstahl insisted that Triumph of the Will was not propaganda, claiming "it is history—pure history." Yet the film relies on a nearly constant display of national symbols and mythic iconography to instill a sense of Teutonic grandeur, and her cinematic techniques convey a propagandist message beneficial to the Nazi cause. Indeed, its monumental style seems to convey the essential appeal of the fascist mentality. From its opening, Triumph creates identification with its "hero" by presenting the visual perspective of Hitler from inside his airplane. This "God's-eye" viewpoint is used as the plane parts the clouds (of postwar confusion? of the Weimar Republic?) over Nuremberg and thereby presents Der Führer as a mythic Messiah.

Olympische Spiele 1936 (Olympia, 1936), an ostensibly objective account of athletic competition at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, utilized cinematic techniques to emphasize the German-Axis contestants. The famous diving sequence—with low-angle, slow-motion shots of gravity-defying divers leaping gracefully into the sky—depicts German, Italian, and Japanese competitors from slightly more imposing angles and with more grandiose music. (Riefenstahl's style could not disguise, however, African American Jesse Owens's four gold medal victories in track events.) Through Riefenstahl's camerawork and editing, the divers at times appear to defy gravity and tumble through the air, their athletic bodies—in seeming freefall—serving as a summary image of Riefenstahl's ideal of physical beauty.

Riefenstahl's last feature was Tiefland (Lowland). The filmmaker was accused of using gypsy concentration camp inmates as extras. Filmed during World War II, Tiefland was not released until 1954. By then, Riefenstahl had spent four years in Allied prison camps, undergone denazification, and been acquitted by a German court. In her later years, Riefenstahl became a still photographer, most notably of the African Nuba tribe. In her nineties, she shot stunning underwater scenes of deep-sea flora and even sharks. Despite these apolitical artistic projects, Riefenstahl is best remembered as a political pariah for her propaganda efforts on behalf of the Third Reich.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932), Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935), Olympische Spiele 1936, (Olympia, 1936), Tiefland (Lowland, 1954)

FURTHER READING

Hinton, David B. The Films of Leni Riefenstahl. 2nd ed. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1991.

Riefenstahl, Leni. The Last of the Nuba. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

——. A Memoir. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Sontag, Susan. "Fascinating Fascism." In Under the Sign of Saturn, 73–105. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980.

Tomasulo, Frank P. "The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema: Triumph of the Will." In Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, 99–118. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

Frank P. Tomasulo

shown. In fact, these events did not occur simultaneously, but footage was cut together in the editing room. Later, we see Nazi soldiers loading howitzers and then the result of their handiwork: civilian areas exploding, a church steeple falling, children fleeing, and dead horses. Such associative editing enhances the portrayal of Germans as evil. Music is also used to accentuate the pro-Allies message; in particular, Chopin's Polonaise accompanies a voice-over narration that states, "Warsaw still resisted [the Nazis]." Later, a funereal passage from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is heard over images of the bodies of dead Poles and their weeping widows. A heroic passage from the same symphony is used over images of Winston Churchill, and an uplifting rendition of "Onward Christian Soldiers" is played as the film ends—thereby equating the Allied effort with a religious crusade.

POSTWAR PROPAGANDA

A classic example of the juxtaposition of neutral visuals with ideological commentary is the little-known documentary Operation Abolition (1960), which uses relatively unbiased television newsreel footage of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings in San Francisco during 1960 combined with a right-wing narration to excoriate witnesses who refused to testify and the protesters who supported them. As one witness denounces the committee's witch-hunting activities and is summarily escorted out of the chamber, the voice-over refers to the man's cowardice for using the Fifth Amendment; similarly, when protesters are propelled down the steep steps of the city hall by fire hoses, the narrator praises the local gendarmes for performing their legal and civic duties. In 1961 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) produced a two-part remake of Operation Abolition titled Operation Correction, which used much of the same newsreel footage but with a different voice-over. In the ACLU version, the narrator commends the witness who refuses to testify for standing up to the belligerent committee and exercising his constitutional rights; likewise, when the police hurl demonstrators down the steps of city hall, the ACLU voice-over refers to the lawmen as "goons" who are breaking up a peaceful, lawful meeting. In this case, contradictory messages were disseminated by two separate groups to two different political constituencies by using the same visual images; no reediting was even necessary.

The most well-known propaganda film about the HUAC era is Point of Order (1964) by Émile de Antonio (1920–1989), which used kinescopes of the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 to show the gradual self-destruction of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957) and his red-baiting cause. Although the film begins with an intrusive voice-over—"Everything you are about to see actually happened"—there is no overt authorial voice, music, or cinematic commentary thereafter. However, despite the appearance of neutrality, Point of Order represents a distillation of thirty-six days of testimony into an hour-and-a-half movie. The rhetoric lies in the film's editing, which left a month of footage on the cutting room floor and used footage that both plays up the most dramatic moments of intensity (in particular, Joseph Welch's famous challenge to McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?") and demeans HUAC. While the film uses objective newsreels, they are edited like a legal brief to make an argument: McCarthy was a dangerous fraud and hypocrite, and the HUAC investigations damaged the republic.

As with much propaganda, on first viewing, Alain Resnais's (b. 1922) Nuit et Bruillard (Night and Fog, 1955) may seem to be a highly emotional yet factual film, in this case about the Holocaust. After all, its heart is obviously in the right place. Nonetheless, based on a strict definition of propaganda, Nuit et Bruillard is a propaganda film, for it is only because of the juxtaposition of horrific and peaceful images, poetic narration, and mournful music that viewers develop an empathetic stance. In particular, Resnais edits stark black and white newsreel footage from the 1940s of the Nazi concentration camps, especially of hundreds of emaciated corpses being bulldozed into a mass grave, in conjunction with rich color footage of the camps a decade later—peaceful and serene in their quietude. The director also uses black and white footage of the 1945 Nuremberg trials in which one German leader after another denies responsibility for the genocide and cuts to color footage of the calm green meadows of 1955; on the soundtrack the narrator asks, "Then who is responsible?" while heartbreaking music crescendos. Although the film generally remains distanced from its horrific contents, the finale brings home the propaganda point: that humanity needs to be humanized.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Cubans have been well aware of the power of film propaganda. The Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos (ICAIC) took over film production three months after the over-throw of dictator Fulgenico Batista in 1959. Although technically not a state agency, ICAIC emphasized documentary and fictional filmmaking that valorized the ideology and accomplishments of Fidel Castro's regime. Santiago Á lvarez (1919–1998) used Soviet montage style in his documentaries Hanoi, Martes 13 (1967), LBJ (1968), and 79 primaveras (79 Springs 1969). The latter film, for example, a tribute to the life of Ho Chi Minh, opens with an intellectual montage that juxtaposes time-lapse photography of flowers opening with slow-motion footage of US bomb strikes against Vietnam. Later, scenes of American military atrocities are conjoined with newsreel footage of US peace demonstrations, suggesting that the American people are not to blame for the Vietnam War, but its political leaders. In the final scene, Á lvarez uses juxtaposed torn/burned pieces of celluloid, bits of paper, and quickly cut individual frames of film to create an animated montage of attractions further enhanced by music and poems written by Ho Chi Minh and Jose Marti.

Another Cuban, Tomás Guitiérrez Alea (1928–1996), started out by making pro-revolutionary shorts, such as Esta tierra nuestra (This Is Our Land, 1959), for the rebel army's film unit. Later, in fictional feature films such as La Muerte de un burócrata (Death of a Bureaucrat, 1966) and Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968), Alea critiqued the intellectuals of the Batista bourgeoisie. Still later, Alea made Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, 1994) whose sympathetic portrayal of Cuba's homosexual community earned it international recognition—yet limited distribution in his homeland. In Lucía (1968), Humberto Solás traced the history of Cuban women through his story of three women named Lucía, living in three different eras. A different cinematic style was used in each episode, although overall the Cuban cinema hews closely to Castro's famous dictum about the arts: "Inside the revolution, all is permitted; outside the revolution, nothing is allowed."

Gillo Pontecorvo (b. 1919) is best known for La Battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1965), a classic example of a fictional film with overt propaganda value. Although an opening credit states that none of the images in the film are real, the movie's cinematic techniques (grainy film stock, hand-held camera, frequent zooms, newsreel style, no expressive lighting, no makeup) suggest the film is presenting the reality of the Algerian revolution. The Algerian government funded the film, but it was later used by many insurgent groups, such as like the Black Panther Party in the United States, to teach urban guerrilla tactics; conversely, the film has been studied often at FBI and CIA headquarters to plan counterterrorist operations.

Although primarily meant as a paean to the Front dération Nationale (FLN; National Liberation Front), one scene in The Battle of Algiers illustrates how even propaganda can be fraught with ambiguity. Following French atrocities against Algerians in the Casbah, the FLN leaders set up a series of bomb attacks against French civilians. Three women are outfitted with make-shift bombs and disguised (with Continental clothing and cosmetics) so they can pass through heavily guarded checkpoints into the French Quarter. Once there, the women plant their bombs in a milk bar, a discothèque, and an airport terminal. Although most viewers probably side with the Algerians against the harsh colonial rule of Libe the French, this partisanship is tested when Pontecorvo shows the innocent victims of the explosions: a youngster licking an ice cream cone in the milk bar; teenagers dancing in the club; and an elderly woman sitting in the airport. Indeed, the film segues immediately after the assaults from the upbeat disco music to Bach's Requiem, the film showing the human cost on both sides of the struggle. Such moments suggest that propaganda need not be completely one-sided and insensitive to be effective.

In the United States, several filmmakers produced films, both documentary and fictional, in opposition to the Vietnam War. The pro-war exception was The Green Berets (1968), an epic codirected by and starring John Wayne (1907–1979) that extolled the efforts of the US military against the Communists. Among the notable antiwar documentaries were Émile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig (1968), Barbara Kopple's (b. 1946) Winter Soldier (1972), and Peter Davis's (b. 1937) Academy Award^®–winning Hearts and Minds (1974), which used unstaged interviews with participants (soldiers, civilians, politicians) and newsreel footage of combat and speeches to critique US policy. All three films eschewed "voice-of-God" narration, relying instead on editing and other cinematic techniques to skewer the pro-war Establishment.

In In the Year of the Pig, de Antonio presents an interview with General George S. Patton in which the officer, in a caricature of himself, comments on his unit: "They're a great bunch of killers !" His gleeful tone and facial expression convey his underlying sadism and, by implication, the brutal mindset of the Pentagon and White House. Likewise, Winter Soldier, shot in grainy black and white, is composed of extended interviews with twenty Vietnam veterans who describe the atrocities they witnessed or in which they participated: rape, torture, disembowelment, mutilation, tossing prisoners from helicopters, and stoning a child to death. An occasional color photo of a civilian victim of US mistreatment is presented as evidence of the disturbing eyewitness testimony. The film was shot shortly after the My Lai massacre, making it particularly topical. Neither In the Year of the Pig nor Winter Soldier received wide release, hence their impact is difficult to assess. This pattern is often seen with controversial, one-sided movies: their commercial viability is uncertain and their audience is composed mainly of adherents to their cause.

This was not the case, however, with Hearts and Minds, whose Oscar^® victory exposed it to a wider audience. Davis relies on selective editing of stock footage and candid interviews to support his antiwar stance. For example, an interview with General William Westmoreland (1914–2005), commander of the US forces in Vietnam, is juxtaposed with a military funeral in South Vietnam. Westmoreland wears a comfortable seersucker suit and is positioned in front of a peaceful glade as he says, "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner." This statement is in sharp contrast to the images with which it is juxtaposed: the burial of a slain soldier, whose sister cries disconsolately over the man's photo and whose mother attempts to jump into his open grave. The general's comment on the Asian mindset may be insensitive, but Davis's montage—placing these words right after this heartbreaking scene and just before shots of napalmed Vietnamese children—their burned flesh dangling from their bones, heightens the smugness of the "ugly American."

Antiwar sentiment was usually disguised in Hollywood films during—and even years after—the Vietnam War so as not to alienate large segments of the audience who may have supported the war effort. In M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970), for example, the action took place during the Korean War but clearly commented on the Vietnam conflict. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) went back even further—to the Mexican Revolution of 1913—to comment on the war. The unprecedented fierceness of the film's opening and closing massacres—achieved through the innovative use of montage and slow-motion death—allegorically depicted the wholesale killing of combatants and civilians, thus exposing the dark side of America's "noble cause" in Southeast Asia.

NEW COMIC PROPAGANDA

More recently, the American Michael Moore (b. 1954) gained both notoriety and acclaim for his "documentary" films, which are unabashedly tendentious—and funny. Although comedy is not usually associated with propaganda, muckraker Moore uses irreverent satire and wry humor in Roger & Me (1989), Bowling for Columbine (2002), and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). Most documentaries have taken liberties with veracity but also hold up objectivity as a goal. Moore, however—using a first-person, polemical, and postmodernist style—often overtly restructures chronology, intercuts events unrelated to a scene's focus, and adds music and narration to make a political point—or get a laugh. He has even admitted that Roger & Me is not a documentary at all.

Roger & Me is an exposé of corporate greed at the highest levels of General Motors (GM), especially as it relates to the economic devastation of the director's hometown of Flint, Michigan. Moore personifies the villain in the elusive figure of Roger Smith, GM's CEO, and takes on the hero's role for himself—appearing onscreen and proffering a voice-over narration throughout the film. Other villains appear as Moore finds that tracking down his prey is increasingly difficult. Miss Michigan, Deputy Sheriff Fred Ross, GM public relations man Tom Kay, Anita Bryant, Pat Boone, the television celebrity Bob Eubanks, corporate (and United Auto Workers [UAW]) flunkies, and rich ladies at a golf club all make insensitive, if not cruel, comments about the auto plant closings, but Moore's editing and voice-over add a more polemical dimension. As the camera tracks past rows of abandoned homes and businesses, the Beach Boys' song "Wouldn't It Be Nice" is played. When UAW union leaders and unemployed workers (including a woman forced to sell rabbits "for pets or meat") are lampooned as well, Moore's progressive point may be lost.

Bowling for Columbine, winner of the Academy Award^® for Best Documentary of 2002, offers a forceful antigun message, focusing on the Columbine high school shootings and other gun death tragedies in the United States. At times, however, Moore is overly aggressive in his pursuit of celebrities. For example, one scene involves Moore's hounding of Dick Clark, who—Moore claims—is culpable in a little girl's death because of the celebrity's financial ties to a fast food chain. Moore's "logic" runs like this: Clark's restaurant pays minimum wage salaries, forcing a young mother to take a second job and leave her son with relatives; the lonely boy finds a handgun in his uncle's home and accidentally uses the weapon to kill a playmate. Moore ambushes Clark as he enters a van and peppers the music impresario with questions about his restaurant's pay scale, trying to directly link low wages with gun violence.

At the end of Bowling for Columbine, Moore goes even further in making questionable connections. Actor Charlton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), grants the filmmaker an interview. The discussion soon moves to the subject of gun violence and the NRA's legislative agenda. Moore poses a seemingly innocent question: "Why does Canada have a lower rate of gun deaths than the United States?" to which Heston opines that racial tensions cause more murders in America. The filmmaker first attempts to turn this comment into a rabidly racist remark and then ambushes the doddering star as he walks away from the camera. Moore adds a voice-over plea for "Mr. Heston" to come back and continue the interview and, further, to apologize for the Columbine shootings. Finally, the director shamelessly lays a photo of a dead child in the star's driveway, as if Heston were somehow personally responsible. Such sanctimony is not uncommon in propaganda films; however, in the past, journalistic objectivity prevented many documentarians from attempting to arouse emotions so blatantly. In the twenty-first century, the pastiche-like "personal" postmodernist documentary knows no such restraint.

Fahrenheit 9/11 was the highest-grossing documentary film of all time and also won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2004. Although it is apparently riddled with factual inaccuracies, suggests that events occurred in a different chronological order than they actually did, and takes cheap shots at celebrities and government officials, its satirical passion and rage against the administration of George W. Bush (b. 1946) found an audience willing to suspend logic and its customary demand for truth. Even when the scenes are factually accurate—perhaps a vestigial concept in a postmodernist documentary—Moore still uses ad hominem attacks and chicanery to skewer the regime. For example, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is seen wetting his comb with saliva and slicking back his hair before a TV interview. This unhygienic practice certainly makes him look foolish, but does it say anything substantive about the Iraq War? Furthermore, does Wolfowitz's minor attempt at TV stage management compare with Moore's major manipulation of TV news footage?

Many in sympathy with Moore's antiwar agenda argued he did not have to resort to falsification to critique the president and his post-9/11 policies: the public record and the administration's own words, they said, provided enough fodder to support Moore's points. There is biting humor and irony in showing Bush play golf while the United States prepares for war, but President Bill Clinton also played golf while the nation was at war in Bosnia. Likewise, while Bush's look of stupefaction when informed that the Twin Towers had been attacked on September 11, 2001, suggests he was incompetent, it is an ambiguous image. Although Bush continues to read a book, My Pet Goat, to schoolchildren for seven minutes after he is told the news, the president may have been trying to maintain an air of calm while his staff investigated. But Moore goes for the easy explanation.

Indeed, Moore is rarely interested in subtlety. He takes great pains to prove that: (1) the US presidential election of 2000 was rigged; (2) Bush was in cahoots with the royal house of Saud and even Osama bin Laden—"facts" that have been challenged by the findings of the nonpartisan September 11 commission; (3) the president was a Vietnam-era deserter; and (4) the Iraq War was instigated to please the administration's wealthy backers. Whether Moore proves these allegations beyond a reasonable doubt is not the point; his chief concern was to create a dramatic and engaging film that marshals images and sounds (often his own voice-over commentary) to show that Bush is an incompetent, dishonest war-monger—and to affect Bush's reelection campaign in 2004. Moore wanted the film to "become a part of the national conversation" in the months before the 2004 election, and it did. It was not, however, sufficiently influential in the election-year debate to sway the results, even though the film contains powerful scenes of emotional blackmail, including a grieving mother who lost her soldier son in Iraq weeping in front of the White House, horrific scenes of Iraq war amputees in the Walter Reed Medical Center juxtaposed with the president addressing a fundraiser full of fat-cat contributors, and dead Iraqi youngsters positioned next to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's assurances about "the humanity that goes into our conduct of the war."

While Moore's films may be among the most freely manipulative of documentaries, ultimately, to an extent, all films (whether documentary or fictional) are propagandistic in that they are products of a particular culture at a particular moment in its history. Thus, films cannot help but reflect (and influence) that culture. In short, movies are social acts in that they contribute to depicting a certain vision of society and say something—consciously or unconsciously—about the culture that produces them, which is very close to the definition of propaganda.

SEE ALSO Documentary;Ideology;World War II

FURTHER READING

Chomsky, Noah. Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997.

Clark, Toby. Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: The Political Image in the Act of Mass Culture. New York: Abrams, 1997.

Culbert, David, ed. Film and Propaganda in America: A Documentary History. 4 vols. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990–1991.

Cull, Nicholas John, David Culbert, and David Welsh. Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present. Santa Barbara, CA, and Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2003.

Giesen, Rolf. Nazi Propaganda Films: A History and Filmography. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2003.

Grant, Barry Keith, and Jeannette Sloniowski, eds. Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Updated ed. New York: Pantheon, 2002.

Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Reeves, Nicholas. The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? London and New York: Cassell, 1999.

Sontag, Susan. "Fascinating Fascism." In Under the Sign of Saturn, 73–105. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980.

Taylor, Philip M. Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era. 3rd ed. Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003.

Taylor, Richard. Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 1998.

Welch, David. Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Frank P. Tomasulo