I.

Introduction

Propaganda Cinema, organized manipulation of public opinion to influence attitudes in favour of political regimes and against others through film. Propagandists recognize that passive, perhaps naive, audiences, bonded together in the darkness of the cinema, can be led along a chosen line of argument by being shown only that which they want them to see. A film, in which the key elements have been selected, edited, and accentuated with music or authoritative commentary, encourages audiences to believe in the authenticity of what they are seeing. Such manipulation has been a component of cinema since the Russian Revolution in 1917, when Vladimir Ilich Lenin proclaimed that the “art of the film is for us the most important of all the arts”. For film propaganda to be successful, governments that exploit it need to control all the nation’s media. Hence, it has been most effectively used by authoritarian political systems and when countries are at war. Films that are intended to persuade, however, are not necessarily classed as propaganda.

Governments have recognized the value of film propaganda since World War I, when it was discovered that newsreel material, presented from one point of view, influenced audiences in neutral countries. Since then, governments, especially in times of war, have made extensive use of film—at home to maintain morale or to encourage support for official policies, and abroad to stimulate sympathy and understanding. During World War I, the French made use of newsreel footage to compile La Bataille de Verdun (The Battle of Verdun, 1916) and the British made Britain Prepared (1915) to display its military strength for, primarily, the American market, but there were few official films until the Soviet Union identified film as its most valuable educational tool and propaganda cinema can be said to have begun.

II.

The Soviet Union

The Soviets, as others had done, initially made use of compilation newsreel footage. Cinephotographers, such as Eduard Tisse, who was later to work with Sergey Eisenstein, travelled across the nation on agitprop (political agitation and propaganda) trains, gathering newsreel footage, which was edited in Moscow by Dziga Vertov and others. Brilliantly convincing newsreels such as Kino Nedelya (1917) and Kino Pravda (1922) were then shown nationwide. Early converts to the power of cinema—Vertov, Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Esfir Shub, for example—all worked on both documentaries and features. Their work supported the Russian Revolution and its values. In one of the most dynamic periods of artistic creation, Soviet film-makers recreated the processes of film-making from first principles. Editing, composition, and film rhythm were completely rethought, resulting in a series of masterpieces that were universally recognized as exemplars of film technique. Eisenstein’s Stachka (Strike) and Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship Potemkin), both 1925, for example, avoid the individual heroes of bourgeois cinema; three years later, his Oktyabra (October) celebrated the triumph of the Communist revolution. From Pudovkin came Mat (1926; Mother) and Konets Sankt-Peterburga (1927; The End of St Petersburg), the latter using a combination of professional and non-professional actors. Zvenigora (1928) and Arsenal (1929), directed by Aleksandr Dovzhenko, are two boldly expressive films of the period. At the end of the decade, Polish-born film-maker Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s Kinoapparatom (1929; Man with a Movie Camera), a modernist exploration of cinema, was released. These films were studied in all major countries, and were seen as models for propaganda cinema by such diverse groups as the British documentarists and the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany.

III.

Nazi Germany

German cinema was already producing strongly nationalistic films when the Nazis took power in 1933, but it took on a more strident tone under the direction of the Minister for Propaganda, Josef Goebbels. Fictionalized biographies of Nazi heroes such as SA-Mann Brand (1933, directed by Franz Zeitz), Horst Wessel (1933, directed by Frank Wenzler), and Hitlerjunge Quex (1935, directed by Robert Stemmle) were unsuccessful and, although there is no absolute consistency, Geobbels subsequently limited direct propaganda to the newsreels. “Blut und Boden” (blood and earth) was his favoured style for the feature film, and while fewer than 20 per cent were direct propaganda, all German films of the period were compatible with Nazi ideology. In 1934, Leni Riefenstahl, at Hitler’s request, directed the feature-length documentary Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), a brilliantly staged production of a Nazi rally in Nuremberg. It alternates powerful emotional and quiet romantic images, to build up an intense rhythm that offers a seductive combination of intimacy and spectacle. This was followed by OIympiad (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938), a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, remarkable for its use of camera movement and editing techniques previously associated with feature films. Anti-Semitism was promoted within feature films: Jüd Süss (1940, directed by Veit Harlan) and Die Rothschilds (1940, directed by Erich Waschneck) were made immediately after the outbreak of World War II and appear to be setting the stage for the monstrosities to come. With Der Ewige Jude (1940; The Eternal Jew), directed by Franz Hippler, documentary took on a new dimension. The film’s lies and fictitious statistics show Jews as the cause of all the evils in society, and it compares them to vermin. To the educated eye, it is transparently manipulative, but it is, nevertheless, fiercely powerful, intended less to persuade than to raise the fury of existing anti-Semites towards Jews; its primary function seems to have been to be shown to workers in concentration camps. Sowjet Paradies (1941; Soviet Paradise), directed by Friedrich Albat, shows life in Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, using similar techniques. These, although among the most notorious of Nazi racist films, are only examples. Many others were chillingly terrifying: Feuertaufel (1940; Baptism of Fire) displaces responsibility for the war from Germany to Britain, who by promising to protect Poland, encouraged the latter to defend itself against the overwhelming power of the Third Reich. Retribution is pledged in the film’s final promise of “bombs, bombs on England!”.

IV.

The Spanish Civil War

In contrast to the films from the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the films made during the Spanish Civil War were more positive and were often used for fund-raising purposes abroad. Although there were both Italian and German feature films supporting the Nationalist cause, most important propaganda films supported the Republicans. The Dutch director Joris Ivens’ documentary The Spanish Earth (1937) was made at the instigation of a group of American writers that included Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker; Ernest Hemingway, who travelled with Ivens, read the commentary. It was filmed in the most difficult of circumstances, during bombing raids on the civilian population, and was immediately recognized as a passionate plea for humanity. Ivor Montagu, a British producer and Republican sympathizer, was responsible for three films: The Defence of Madrid (1936), Behind the Spanish Lines (1938), and Spanish ABC (1938), although Thorold Dickinson, who shared the credits on two of them, described them as being less like documentaries and more like “news reports ... snapshots in every sense of the word”. Spanish ABC, however, is certainly propaganda, although less for a regime than for education. “All the misfortunes of Spain”, Dickinson quotes from a Fascist newspaper, “come from the folly of teaching men to read.”

V.

Britain and the United States

British films, more than those of the United States, made considerable advances during World War II. American feature directors, such as John Ford, William Wyler, Frank Capra, and John Huston, made films such as The Battle of the Midway (1942) and Memphis Belle (1944), which used newsreel techniques. Capra’s contribution to the series Why We Fight (1942-1945), which carefully articulated the background to the war, was widely admired as a fresh departure in the utilization of newsreel material. British propaganda was developed through the Crown Film Unit, itself a development of the GPO Film Unit, founded by John Grierson. An early propaganda film, personally financed by Alexander Korda, the documentary-drama The Lion Has Wings (1939, directed by Michael Powell, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Adrian Brunel) was completed within weeks of the declaration of war, but was laughingly unpersuasive. Control of British film production fell to the Ministry of Information with the result that, not only did the quality of British propaganda improve but also that of films generally. The government left the financing of feature films to a broadly sympathetic film industry and few films had problems with officialdom. The most distinguished propaganda films of the war were designed to create a myth of Britishness, of a nation stoically braving out the Blitz and rationing. Films such as Humphrey Jennings’s Listen to Britain (1941) and Fires Were Started (1943) are among the finest films produced during the war—propaganda without rhetoric. The few celebratory films, Tunisian Victory (1943) and Burma Victory (1945), for example, both directed by the Army Kinematograph Unit, typically avoided the virulent propaganda of those of Nazi Germany.

VI.

Propaganda in Other Countries

Japan, immediately before and during World War II, Communist China, and Cuba after the revolution of 1959 similarly made use of films, alongside other methods of social control, to manage public opinion. Japan combined feature film with documentary techniques for such films as Kato Hyabusa Sentolai (The Falcon Fighters of General Kato, 1944); Cuba released some anti-American issues of Noticiero ICAIC, the weekly film magazine, in countries in which it might find sympathetic audiences; and the Chinese government has retained a tight control over its national image. As in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, widely disseminated newsreels in such countries demonize the enemy while praising the heroic efforts of their own workers, but they are rarely seen abroad. Feature films, however, which may be propaganda in a tightly controlled domestic market, may seem little more than heroic romances in a different political climate. The Cuban film Historias de la Revolución (1960; Stories of the Revolution), directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, for example, was widely admired abroad, but not for the same reasons as it was at home. In China, the government resolutely cut films that have been shown complete abroad. Bawang Bi Ji (1993; Farewell My Concubine), directed by Chen Kaige, which was filmed in Beijing, albeit with finance from Hong Kong, took the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but was cut for content on its mainland release. Ironically, Miramax, its distributor in the West, then cut it more heavily for commercial reasons.

VII.

The Cold War

During the Cold War, the United States, in particular, produced a number of extreme anti-Communist films, focusing the blame for both the Korean and Vietnam wars on Soviet policy. The anti-American sentiment, in France in particular, during the Vietnam campaign encouraged a fresh wave of film protest, notably from film-makers such as Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, Ivens, and Agnès Varda, who jointly made Loin de Vietnam (1967; Far from Vietnam), but their films, like many documentaries, need to be distinguished from those of propagandists. Many films, for example, those from Poland by Jarosław Brzozowski, are critical of failures within the system but not of the system itself. In this respect, they are close to the British documentary films of the 1940s and are intended less to manipulate public opinion than to express a point of view within a wider debate.