Propaganda Films

Through whatever coincidence, I happened to watch Chaplin's The Great Dictator, Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, and Lubitsch's Ninotchka with Greta Garbo in sequence, shortly after seeing Hitchcock's Notorious. To call these movies "propaganda films" is an exaggeration to an extent, but they do all contain strong political messages, and came out in a time where they served to influence public opinion, qualifying them for the term.

Chaplin and Hitchcock are concerned with Nazis; Chaplin at the beginning the war (1939) and Hitchcock at the end (1946). Chaplin's is perhaps the most straightforward propaganda of the lot, with characters often sermonizing directly to the camera. Notorious, on the other hand, is literally playing off of hatred of the Nazis, but is functionally concerned with the likelihood of the Soviets getting the bomb, switching names presumably for diplomatic purposes. Ninotchka offers an early comic view of the Soviets comparable to Chaplin's Nazis, though with a different style, but again with fairly overt propaganda. The message (one should be a capitalist because we're richer, even if they are more virtuous and rational) is slightly confused, though a fascinating look at capitalist attitudes towards the USSR pre-McCarthy.

Richard Condon's book The Manchurian Candidate, on the other hand, came out in 1959, followed by the film in 1962, in the wake of McCarthyism, and the influence is clear, though deliciously twisted: the protagonist's string-pulling mother makes a name for her Senator husband by falsely accusing others of being Communists, while in fact, she is a Soviet agent. The film serves its purpose as propaganda of presenting the Communists as evil caricatures, but simultaneously condemns the McCarthyism of the right. The result is a surprisingly centrist movie, though centrist in the sense that the center is right, not that everyone is right.

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Comparing these films with a monument of propaganda film such as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will makes their political role more clear. While Triumph is a documentary – about the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg – but even so, the film's political message is oddly translucent, even though the Nazi rallies it filmed were anything but subtle. Instead, Riefenstahl presents the rallies as she sees them: as a momentous occurrence in German politics, shot in style through her talented lens. What makes Triumph a propaganda film is not its intentions, but its substance.

The four other movies, then, are more properly propaganda films than Triumph of the Will in that their creators also created the messages contained in them. If they are thus propaganda films, why, then do they hold such a different position in the history of film than Triumph, which is widely viewed as technically brilliant but morally reprehensible? Their content is less offensive to Americans, though their targets would find it quite as disagreeable as non-Fascists find Triumph. Indeed, this is really their only redemption: that we agree with them.

The obvious question, then, are what are our current propaganda films? First inclination is to look at war films, because this has long been the purpose of propaganda: to garner support for a war. However, in the wake of Coppola's Apocalypse Now and other Vietnam movies, war movies have largely transformed into protest movies, which are only propaganda if taken to be against their own country. They are not for an opposition, but rather for a reformed country. Today, this takes the form of movies like The Green Zone, which condemns the W administrations manufacturing of WMD evidence and general approach in Iraq. A more curious recent case is The Hurt Locker, which is not largely a protest film, but rather a study of war and a group of characters in it, in almost a documentary-like atmosphere. It is not a propaganda film, but something quite different.

So where are the propaganda films? They are now a division of politically critical film that presents one side as particularly justified, and demonizes the other. The most obvious one in recent history is Avatar, which makes no effort to hide its political agenda in anticipation of the fact that most people will agree with it. It is not the first, though; the pre-Nolan Batman films come to mind, presenting the crime waves sweeping America as something purely evil rather than an undesirable effect of poor governing.

No, propaganda films are not gone, nor will they be in the future. The good news is that they are still fascinating studies. The other – let's not quite call it bad – news is that they still shape how the public thinks. In some ways, this is good: because Hollywood must create films to appeal to a wide audience, it helps unify the American people in the center; their more critical peers help people think critically about their own beliefs; and they can be a force for the justice of the moment, moving the world forward. Gay issues, green issues, wars, vegetarianism and more are all within the moral purview of Hollywood, making the entertainment industry a moral authority at least as great as governments or religions. And because their only demand is that they must satisfy the peoples they serve – and therefore make money – without the limitations of the bureaucracy of governments, or the inflexible traditions of religions, I honestly think that Hollywood is a fairly good moral arbiter.