8. Triumph of the Will provided propaganda not only for the Nazis but also, when recut, for the Allies. Directed by Leni Riefenstahl, 1935.
In Britain, “people’s war”-themed documentaries lasted longer in theaters than more timely and preachy propaganda. Humphrey Jennings’s 1940 London Can Take It was the first box office success. It featured an American journalist’s reporting, with the underlying motif that Germans cannot “kill the unconquerable spirit and courage of the people of London.” Listen to Britain was another audience success, but it was an exception. Documentaries were also taken on the road, with 16mm projectors for organized screenings.
In the United States, Capra’s series was shown to just about every soldier at home and abroad. Studies showed that the films affected soldiers’ opinions both immediately after viewing and later. With their uncomplicated celebration of the Allies, the films were also popular with British and Russian governments, which ordered them shown in theaters. The series was less successful in U.S. theaters. Theater owners did not want to show the Why We Fight series, in part because of bad experiences with documentaries, and in part because the series reused much material—especially newsreels—that had already been shown in theaters.
Viewers do not surrender easily to propaganda they can identify. Triumph of the Will could be used by so many for counterpropaganda so effectively because its command over the viewer is imperial; it became a visual demonstration of the will to conquer and crush. One of the reasons Listen to Britain has remained so beloved is because it creates the impression among viewers that it is not attempting to control their minds but inviting them in to observe a reality.
Results of a propaganda film can be far different from expected, as the reuse of Riefenstahl’s work has shown. The American Hollywood director John Huston made a wartime film for the American armed forces, The Battle of San Pietro (1945), to inform Americans of the need for the high-casualty fighting in Italy. Because it was so graphic, the government chose not to use his film during the war for fear of alarming the populace, although it reversed its decision after the war’s end. The film, with its unique battle photography, has been used since by antiwar activists, among others, to demonstrate the high human cost of war.
The work of Akira Iwasaki, as recalled by Erik Barnouw, is an ironic tale of propaganda redeployed and suppressed. Having been forced to work as a filmmaker for the Japanese government during World War II, Iwasaki had the equipment and skills to record the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The U.S. occupation government, however, soon confiscated and classified his work. When the work was declassified, Erik Barnouw produced a short, powerfully moving film, Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945. When Iwasaki saw the film, he saw his own footage on the screen for the first time.
Ethics
If documentary pledges to show viewers a good-faith representation of reality, can an honest filmmaker produce propaganda and really call it a documentary? Many broadcast journalists would regard it as career-destroying to take a government contract. Independent filmmakers likewise prize their autonomy from government dictates and censorship. At the same time, many film production companies make their bread and butter producing training and promotional documentaries for governments, although this is generally regarded as unglamorous work.
Filmmakers in the World War II era often believed they had not only a right but an obligation to produce propaganda. John Grierson thought that intellectuals had an obligation to work for a strong and unified but still open society. As he explained at the time, “Simply put, propaganda is education. The ‘manipulation’ in our films combines aesthetics with ideas of democratic reform. We are medicine men hired to mastermind. We are giving every individual a living conception of the community which he has the privilege to serve.” Compromise was both a harsh reality and a privilege. “The first rule of filmmaking is don’t pistol-whip the hand that holds the wallet,” he once said about the absence of class conflicts in his government projects.
Frank Capra saw no contradiction in working for the U.S. Army, although he was often exasperated by the difficulties and frustrated by conflicting demands from military authorities. Capra proudly put his talents in the service of fighting fascism as did other leading Hollywood talents, some of whom had left-wing political beliefs and who saw fascism as the primary threat to a more socially just future. After the war, film producer and writer Stuart Schulberg produced a series of documentaries promoting the Marshall Plan for European consumption.
On the other hand and on the losing side, Leni Riefenstahl, who spent four years in a de-Nazification program after World War II, found that her association with Hitler tainted her for the rest of her life. She tried to argue that she was simply making art, not propaganda, but that she was forced to make propaganda. Until she died at the age of 101 in 2003, she insisted that she had never been a Nazi, that she had little option but to work for Hitler, and that she merely produced the most beautiful work she could under the circumstances.
Legacy
Propaganda, also known as disinformation, public diplomacy, and strategic communication, continues to be an important tool for governments. But stand-alone documentary is no longer an important part of public relations campaigns aimed at the general public. Government propaganda has been the object of attention by documentarians, though, as in the broadcast public affairs documentary The Selling of the Pentagon, Jayne Loader and Kevin and Pierce Rafferty’s The Atomic Café (1982), which is a sardonic look at government propaganda about the nuclear age, and Robert Stone’s Radio Bikini (1987) about the extraordinary U.S. government public relations campaign around the first H-bomb explosion.
Government propaganda organizations started in wartime have blossomed in peacetime. The National Film Board of Canada began as a wartime endeavor. Japanese government support for World War II propaganda films greatly expanded the capacity of the industry, and readied it for postwar, privately capitalized production.
One generation’s propaganda is another’s treasure trove. Deep archives of newsreels, documentary, training, and other actuality footage became a resource for later compilation films and TV series. For example, the American network TV series Victory at Sea (1952-53) drew heavily on navy filming. World War II-themed documentaries on cable channels have depended on public domain, government footage from World War II. Private businesses have flourished by cataloguing and indexing U.S. government materials. The Prelinger Archives also makes government films available in a free, downloadable digital form off the Internet.
Although documentary films are no longer primary vehicles for government propaganda, governments continue to invest in film and video for a very different purpose: surveillance. This ubiquitous practice can become fodder for documentarians as well. In Eastern Europe, after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, government archives became raw material for documentary films reexamining history. In the Polish filmmaker Piotr Morawski’s The Secret Tapes (2002), secret police filmmakers recalled their jobs, voicing over footage from an accidentally abandoned carton of film. The film’s sly humor comes from the filmmakers’ evident nostalgia for their former jobs. Peruvian intelligence minister Vladimiro Montesinos’s records of his illegal bribes were ultimately shown on television and resulted in Sonia Goldenberg’s acidic documentary Eye Spy (2002).
Propaganda documentaries put a spotlight on the problems of representing reality built into the documentary genre. They use the same techniques as documentaries made for any other purpose. Like other documentaries, they are designed to show the viewer something the viewer can believe is true; the realities they show fit into an ideological context that gives the films meaning. They are not necessarily made in bad faith. Indeed, often the makers are patriots who see themselves contributing to the public good with their skills. They might even be truthful, or at least show a reality that the filmmaker believes to be true.
Propaganda documentaries differ from other documentaries in their backers, who are agents of
the state—the social institution that sets and enforces the rules of society, ultimately through force. Those backers control the message. Those differences ramify the significance of propaganda documentaries, since the portrayal of reality is backed by such enormous power. These documentaries dramatically demonstrate that no documentary is a transparent window onto reality, and that all meaning-making is motivated. They also remind us of the importance of examining the conditions of production of any cultural expression.
Advocacy
Documentaries produced for political causes, by advocates and activists, raise similar issues as government propaganda documentaries, but they operate in a different context.
What distinguishes an advocacy film like one in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Freedom Files or in the Sierra Club Chronicles (both at aclu.tv) from propaganda like Frank Capra’s wartime work? Both of them are created by producers for organizations in order to promote the agenda of the organization. The big difference is in the nature of the sponsoring organizations. The state wields a unique power and authority over its citizens; its persuasion is often a tool in its repressive apparatus.
By contrast, in an open society civil society organizations’ promotion of their own perspectives (with a few exceptions such as treason and obscenity) is regarded as contributing to a vital public sphere. The greater the activity of a wide range of civil society organizations in expressing their perspectives and appealing to a public to engage with them, the healthier a society is seen to be. American law in particular is anchored in the First Amendment, which endorses the idea that, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it, the remedy for bad speech is more speech.
What distinguishes an advocacy film like Celsius 41.11, produced by the American conservative advocacy group Citizens United, from a passionately argued independent film like Fahrenheit 9/11, to which it responds? The answer: Both its affiliation with an organization and its focus on supporting the organization’s work with instrumental action by viewers. You may agree or disagree with Michael Moore, but he is one person, albeit a celebrity. Moore’s arguments inspire conversation and may lead some viewers to express their disagreement with foreign policy (and others to rail at Michael Moore and liberals). They are direct interventions in public conversation. By contrast, advocacy films are tools of an organization’s mobilization for action on specific issues or causes.
Advocates and activists have often chosen documentary because it is a relatively low-budget way to counter the status quo as expressed in mainstream media. They have grappled with questions of subject and form in their search for the most effective way to reach viewers. Advocacy films are usually highly focused and designed to motivate viewers to a particular action. Like government propaganda films, they may be made in good faith by people who profoundly agree with an organization’s agenda. They, like propaganda films, deserve attention from anyone who wants to understand the techniques of persuasion—and nothing persuades like reality.
“Committed”
In the tumultuous 1930s, when the Great Depression thoroughly shook the faith of many in the future of capitalism, many left-wing political groups and many of the film clubs populated by fashionably left-wing young people saw documentary film as a tool to challenge the status quo. They wanted to make “committed” films—supportive of social and even revolutionary change.
In continental Europe, the UK, Japan, and the United States, enthusiastic young people debated the latest work of Vertov, Eisenstein, Flaherty, and the Grierson teams in cinema clubs around the globe. Inspired by Vertov’s Kino-Eye newsreel work, they made newsreels that countered the popular and often right-wing newsreels shown in theaters. In the United States, the Film and Photo League created a widely seen series of worker-oriented newsreels featuring strikes and demonstrations. These were simple records of events, photographed with a sympathetic eye for workers. Filmmakers showed the newsreels to each other, to recruits, and to political groups and rallies.
These political parties and cinema clubs were incubators for documentarians. The filmmakers who went to work for Pare Lorentz in the Roosevelt Administration began there, and so did Dutch activist filmmaker Joris Ivens. The stridency of the work is exemplified by a short film Ivens made with Belgian cinema club leader Henri Storck, Borinage (1933), portraying the miners as cruelly plunged into poverty as a result of a classic capitalist crisis of overproduction. “We wanted to shout our indignation by using the starkest images possible,” said Storck later. The film, a didactic and angry indictment, used reenactment and condemnatory juxtaposition.
As the Great Depression deepened, in many countries the Communist Party (CP), affiliated with the Soviet Union, gained credibility. The CP had a powerful influence on progressive politics internationally, and on cultural work associated with it, including film. For instance, many of the Film and Photo League filmmakers were CP members, and the organization was informally part of the CP’s “cultural front.”
The connection with the Communist Party was crucial; it created community, it allowed people to pool resources, it provided audiences, and it shaped messages. The Spanish civil war provides one good example. The civil war broke out in 1936 when military officers including Francisco Franco revolted against the left-leaning Popular Front Republican government. Republicans resisted, with USSR-backed CP support. CP leaders brutally suppressed other political factions, including anarchists. By 1939, Franco won with the help of the Nazis. Internationally, some saw the war as an anti-fascist struggle requiring international solidarity, while others, anti-CP, saw it as a national issue in which they should not meddle.
Internationally, filmmakers rallied to make films about the war, in order to raise awareness and funds for the anti-Franco forces. These films glossed over internal factionalism and encouraged international support for the Republicans, as suited the CP. One of the best known is The Spanish Earth (1937). The film was made by an international team—Ivens as director, Helen van Dongen as editor, with script and narration by Ernest Hemingway—for Hollywood backers. It demonstrates an artful approach to political truth telling and incidentally shows the growing aesthetic versatility of Ivens—who went on to become a leading activist filmmaker and mentor for many others, until his death in 1989.
In an approach that evokes the romantic realism of Robert Flaherty, the film brings viewers into the daily life of a village near Madrid. Filmed in the midst of the war, it documents the building of an irrigation canal crucial to crops that would feed embattled Madrid. The film’s focus on the rhythms of daily life invites the viewer into the work and habits of the villagers. Now we see that the war is also part of the villagers’ daily lives; we see them slinging guns, standing guard, surveying the wreckage after a bomb attack. The villagers’ unstinting support for the anti-Franco cause is woven into the values and fabric of everyday life.
Ivens, with the help of Hemingway’s spare narration, managed to sidestep messy political questions about factional conflict. The film communicated human warmth rather than delivering political information; Ivens used the techniques of realism to bring viewers’ feelings to the fore. Although the film had only a modest theatrical run, it raised a substantial amount of money for the anti-Franco Republicans in its screenings, both in theaters and in cinema clubs as well as in private showings.
The Spanish Earth also demonstrated one response to a debate common among activist filmmakers at the time: should one make “militant” films to mobilize one’s own constituency to act, or should one be reaching out to convince broader audiences of a point of view? This second resort would require more artfulness, which The Spanish Earth successfully employed. The New York filmmakers who established the filmmaking group Nykino after a political and aesthetic split with the Film and Photo League also took up the second approach in making another famous advocacy film of the time, Native Land (1942). Using dramatic reenactments, the film drew upon a congressional investigation of civil liberties violations, and strove to inspire a greater
demand for social justice and fair and equal treatment under the law. The film could not compete with Hollywood’s production values, though, and by 1942 its message had been overtaken by wartime patriotism.
The advent of World War II put an end to many experiments in committed filmmaking. In Germany and Japan, governments ruthlessly suppressed cinema clubs. The combination of anti-communist witch-hunting and the self-discrediting of Soviet communism after the 1956 revelations of the horrors of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion of Hungary distanced many intellectuals and artists from CP politics.
“Third cinema”
In the 1960s civil rights and human rights movements, struggles against colonialism, nuclear weapons, and the Cold War arms race all marked a time of political ferment. The technical breakthroughs that enabled cinema verité and the dawning of the video age with the introduction of portable video equipment in 1967 inspired many to again see documentary as a tool within political movements.
Seeing themselves as a cultural vanguard for change, activist filmmakers—often students or ex-students in a university community—formed collectives, or projects where work and benefits were shared equally. In the United States, newsreel collectives dedicated to raising awareness of social injustice among working people emerged in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. In France, in the period that culminated in the 1968 general strike, Jean-Luc Godard and others formed the significantly named but short-lived Dziga Vertov group, which experimented with avant-garde film approaches. Chris Marker and others formed the more militant Iskra, named after Lenin’s underground newspaper and focused more on working issues. In British collectives such as the London FilmMakers Co-op and the London Women’s Film Co-op, members debated what styles were effective and which audiences to target.
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