Apropaganda film is afilm that involves some form ofpropaganda. Propaganda films spread and promote certain ideas that are usually religious, political, or cultural in nature. A propaganda film is made with the intent that the viewer will adopt the position promoted by the propagator and eventually take action towards making those ideas widely accepted.[1] Propaganda films are popular mediums of propaganda due to their ability to easily reach a large audience in a short amount of time. They are also able to come in a variety of film types such asdocumentary, non-fiction, andnewsreel, making it even easier to provide subjective content that may be deliberately misleading.[1][2]
Propaganda is the ability "to produce and spread fertile messages that, once sown, will germinate in large human cultures".[3] However, in the 20th century, a "new" propaganda emerged, which revolved around political organizations and their need to communicate messages that would "sway relevant groups of people in order to accommodate their agendas".[4] First developed by theLumiere brothers in 1896, film provided a unique means of accessing large audiences at once. Film was the first universal mass medium in that it could simultaneously influence viewers as individuals and members of a crowd, which led to it quickly becoming a tool for governments and non-state organizations to project a desired ideological message.[5] AsNancy Snow stated in her book,Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech and Opinion Control Since 9-11, propaganda "begins wherecritical thinking ends."[6]
Film is a unique medium that reproduces images, movement, and sound in a lifelike manner as it fuses meaning with evolvement as time passes in the story depicted. Unlike many other art forms, film produces a sense of immediacy.[7] Film's ability to create the illusion of life and reality, allows for it be used as a medium to present alternative ideas or realities making it easy for the viewer to perceive this as an accurate depiction of life.
Some film academics have noted film's great illusory abilities.Dziga Vertov claimed in his 1924 manifesto, "The Birth of Kino-Eye" that "the cinema-eye is cinema-truth".[8] To paraphraseHilmar Hoffmann, this means that in film, only what the camera 'sees' exists, and the viewer, lacking alternative perspectives, conventionally takes the image for reality.
Making the viewer sympathize with the characters that align with the agenda or message the filmmaker portray is a common rhetorical tool used in propaganda film. Propaganda films exhibit this by having reoccurring themes good vs. evil. The viewer is meant to feel sympathy towards the "good side" while loathing in the "evil side". Prominent Nazi film makerJoseph Goebbels used this tactic to invoke deep emotions into the audience. Goebbels stressed that while making films full of nationalistic symbols can energize a population, nothing will work better to mobilize a population towards the Nazi cause like "intensifying life".[9]
After the1917 October Revolution the newly formedBolshevik government and its leaderVladimir Lenin placed an emphasis on the need for film as a propaganda tool. Lenin viewed propaganda merely as a way to educate the masses as opposed to a way to evoke emotion and rally the masses towards a political cause.[10] Film became the preferred medium of propaganda in the newly formedRussian Soviet Republic due to a large portion of the peasant population being illiterate.[11]TheKuleshov Effect was first used in 1919 in the filmThe Exposure of the Relics ofSergius of Radonezh by juxtaposing images of the exhumed coffin and body of Sergius of Radonezh, a prominent Russian saint, and the reaction from the watching audience. The images of the crowd are made up of mostly female faces, whose expressions can be interpreted ambiguously. The idea behind juxtaposing these images was to subvert the audience's assumption that the crowd would show emotions of being sad or upset. Instead the crowd could be interpreted to be expressing emotions of boredom, fear, dismay, and a myriad amount of other emotions.[12] There is nothing to prove to the audience that the images of the audience and the exhumed body were captured in the same moment or place (it is now believed the images of the crowd were filmed outdoors while the images showing the skeletal remains were captured indoors). This is what blurs the line of truth making the Kuleshov Effect an effective tool of propaganda.[12]
Republican political commentator and filmmakerDinesh D'Souza is notoriously known of promotingconspiracy theories againstDemocratic Party for his films. He uses his own films as a propaganda tool to manipulate younger audiences, most notablyGeneration Z, to influence their allegedcorruption.[13][14][15]
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