It is well known that cinema, practically since its inception, has been subject to appropriation by states to serve as political propaganda. Cinema, this art originally from fairgrounds, quickly became experimental and is, in a way, the most democratic art there is. Not because it is an art that perpetually seeks to question established power, but rather because it is a form that, by its very essence, tends to touch the essence of popular consciousness and move it, instead of initiating movement from the top down, from intellectual or cultural elites to the masses. The democratic nature of cinema should not be understood here as the characteristic of a given political system, but truly as a proximity to the working classes, by virtue of its accessibility and commercialization. Unlike literature or music, cinema does not depend on initiation into a specific language, written or musical, to be understood. For centuries, the working classes had little access to literature due to the low literacy rates in our societies. Visual language, the power of images, is understood at first glance without the need for any training. This is especially true since cinema consists not of painted or drawn images in its origins, but of photographic images, which truly function as a capture of reality. By putting several photographic images together, the magic of cinema is born, perfectly illustrated by the Kuleshov effect. Thus, by first projecting the face of a neutral, emotionless man, then an image of a plate of food or a dead child, the viewer alternately understands that the man is hungry or feels sadness, all without explanatory text or dialogue. Editing as the source of the most visceral and instinctive emotions is one of the unique aspects of this art form. Cinema is therefore democratic in its verisimilitude and its linguistic proximity to all strata of society.
Another element that, in our view, makes this art democratic is precisely its industrial nature. Cinema, unlike all the art forms that preceded it, is a child of the Industrial Revolution. It is impossible to conceive of the cinematic form without separating it from the machine that gave birth to it, the cinematograph, which allows the recording and reproduction of twenty-four images per second with the only limit being the amount of film available. Not only was cinema born with a machine, not only did cinema aim to automate the photographic process to mass-produce and set images in motion, but one of the first films ever made was the “Exit of the Lumière Factory Workers in Lyon”, which precisely depicts the exit of workers from the factory and their reactions upon seeing a camera. The interest in this short film, besides its pioneering and innovative nature, lies in the subjectivization of the masses initiated by the film. The workers are one, they mass exit the factory, they merge with each other, and they all constitute a cinematic subject that the camera attempts to fully capture through the force of the general plan. Gradually, people with more striking faces or who react differently to the camera, with a smile or a prolonged curious glance, will remain in the viewer’s imagination, but they will be indistinguishable from the mass of workers, forever subjectivized and immortalized by the Lumière Brothers. Cinema is an art that not only inscribes itself, through the subjects it films, in a context where the working masses are becoming increasingly important, but also more easily reaches these working masses through the dynamics of the market in which it operates. The first cinemas were fairground stands that traveled from neighborhood to neighborhood and village to village, and in Anglo-Saxon countries, they were known as “nickelodeons” because they only cost a “nickel,” a price accessible to all. Cinema is an art that the free market itself moves from the bottom up, from popular success to the admiration of specialized critics. All this has obvious limitations in terms of film production with little risk or artistic bias to please a certain audience, but we will not dwell on that here.
Once democracy and the massification of cinema were established, various political movements have tried to appropriate it as a party instrument to convey a certain ideology, but especially, once in power, as part of the state apparatus and propaganda. The most well-known examples are obviously the Nazis and the Soviets. The Nazi propaganda documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl, which depicted the mass of militants at the Nuremberg Congress or glorified the Aryan athlete for the Berlin Olympics, have remained in history as perfect illustrations of high-quality propaganda cinema. More caricatured are the films directly ordered by Goebbels, such as “Jud Süß,” a true fictional anti-Semitic propaganda with relatively low cinematic interest. These films either attempt to shape the popular masses by intervening in the release market to convey certain ideas to the widest audience or to stage the masses to give a sense of grandeur, of spectacle to the new movements. This phenomenon also existed in the Soviet Union, with the films of the great Sergei Eisenstein, where not only the mass is staged and subjectivized, but it becomes the object of a choppy, highly interspersed montage with a frantic rhythm, aiming to individualize each actor in the story being told for a moment, a momentary actor of history with the working class as the main character. Whether during the massacres of the “Battleship Potemkin” or during the taking of the Winter Palace in “October,” the montage makes the mass palpable by giving it an infinity of faces that will merge with the general shots of this acting mass, even more spectacular because of the rhythmic editing.
During World War II, propaganda films abounded on the American side, with Hollywood’s biggest stars portraying the average American fighting in Europe or the Pacific in various war films. It is necessary here to recall the series of films supervised by Frank Capra, which were direct war propaganda called “Why We Fight,” where various war images shot by some of Hollywood’s most eminent directors were accompanied by a voice-over explaining to the American people the reasons for the fight. It is interesting to note here that the narration often manifests itself in a collective way, with the “We” as the most common form of expression. John Ford’s short film “Battle of Midway” is particularly interesting in this democratic logic of cinema, especially in its instrumentalization as propaganda cinema, insofar as the typically Fordian character here is the anonymous soldier, who appears only for a few seconds, the typical American who fights during the Battle of Midway and who, when the sun sets, plays the accordion with his comrades, in an acknowledged nostalgia for their home. This scene is typically Fordian but the characters are constructed only as the anonymous face of a clearly identified social group, the soldiers of Midway. It is more curious that one of the soldiers seen in the short film is James Roosevelt, the son of President Roosevelt, and this is never mentioned in the film.
After World War II, cinematic propaganda within the bloc led by the United States became more subtle than simply justifying the war. It was about exporting a way of life, telling archetypal stories of a certain way of understanding the world. Thus, outside the United States, Italian cinema took the reins in Europe as the continent’s great cinema. It is especially interesting to see that within a flourishing industry in a country rebuilding after fascism and with most of the great directors making social or even communist films, such as “Bicycle Thieves” or “Umberto D,” both examples of the Italian neorealism movement, the Undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council and future Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti had the idea of creating a Catholic neorealism in 1949. It was precisely because of the immense success, from bottom to top, of the neorealist films by left-wing authors that the government decided to exercise a certain form of subtle propaganda, using this success as an instrument of its discourse. Thus, were born two great films, “Stromboli” and “The Flowers of St. Francis” by Roberto Rossellini. The latter is a perfect example of how neorealist form, simple, streamlined, apparently unpretentious, can perfectly embrace a discourse to a certain official extent, the Catholic and particularly Franciscan discourse. Here, Saint Francis of Assisi and his companions are played by real monks, amateur actors, in the pure style of the workers portrayed by De Sica in “Bicycle Thieves.” The identification that the public could have with these amateur actors, who in a way embodied their daily lives, is here used in the service of a certain philosophy advocated by the Christian Democracy in Italy.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, propaganda cinema followed the course of history and, within commercial cinema, became unipolar. The view of the United States as the world police, which had already begun with Reagan-era cinema, with heroes much more brutal than those of the 1960s and 1970s, culminated in the 1990s with increasingly expensive films featuring the individual hero figure, solving problems alone, or later, the superhero. From a production standpoint, blockbusters have never been so abundant, and commercial films, for the most part, have never been so expensive. In the logic of the market, the most important aspect of a film is no longer the overall profit it will create but the profit the film generates in the first weekend. Thus, films such as Bryan Singer’s “Superman Returns” were considered failures by their producers despite their total profitability because the initial impact of the film was not as expected. The industrial side of cinema has adapted to a certain form of post-Reagan neoliberalism, where the market must not only be profitable but must also constantly reinvent itself by creating more and more, regardless of the quality of what is offered. Production no longer seeks to make many cheaper films to reach certain strata of subjectivized masses but seeks to create the greatest impact within a market. Unipolar world cinema is no longer represented by a struggle of visions but by a clash of titans between very expensive films that seek not necessarily to shape minds but rather to mark them as quickly as possible, certainly by the absence of a real ideological struggle.
However, nowadays, with the increasingly poignant challenge to American hegemony by several geopolitical powers such as Russia, China, and, to a lesser extent for the moment, India, the struggle for the cinematic public, the propaganda struggle, resembles more and more a confrontation between empires rather than a genuinely ideological confrontation, from one political model to another. The way films are made is assumed, blockbusters are now hegemonic, and the concept of a clash of titans between blockbusters is something that the public perfectly understands. However, within this model, films from other powers are increasingly arriving, and different markets are trying to become hegemonic in different parts of the world. The American cinema, which has a huge advantage in terms of resources and the profits their films make, has been trying to penetrate the Chinese market for a few years now. China does not admit all foreign films but, as it is a market of more than a billion people, the American distributor who manages to place a blockbuster there has almost assured success. There is therefore an adaptation to Chinese legislation, with more and more actors of Chinese origin in films or with the softening of certain criticisms open to China so as not to be cut off from the market. This is the case, for example, with the blockbuster “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” which clearly speaks of the oppression of Tibetans but cannot do so at any moment.
On the other hand, emerging powers also try to penetrate foreign markets and gain hegemony there. China has made efforts to make blockbusters in the pure Hollywood style, notably with a very striking example, “The Wandering Earth,” in 2019, which made $700 million on a $50 million budget. In this science fiction film, a certain form of subtle propaganda is implemented in the same model as American blockbusters. In a world where the Earth is adrift due to the danger of a collision with the sun, it is a group of Chinese astronauts who will save the Earth from destruction. The political vision behind this film remains interesting, with a primacy of collective action over individual action, an alliance with a Russian character, and a form of fetishization of technological progress that fits into the new Chinese technological productivism. On the other hand, India, whose Bollywood market has long been the industry that produces the most films per year but had never entered the Western market with high-budget films until now. The paradigmatic film of this breakthrough in the Indian film market is the film “RRR.” After several years of probing the internal market and, in a way, the market of certain non-aligned countries, Bollywood released a film on Netflix that was immensely successful and, in a quite nationalist and spectacular way from the point of view of the scenes filmed, tells the struggle of two Indian revolutionaries against British domination. All this is done with the intention not only of legitimizing India’s struggle but also of making a film as spectacular as possible to attract an audience accustomed to monstrous blockbusters. The success was commercial and therefore, in a way, the propaganda operation succeeded in leaving its mark on people’s minds.
Cinema, due to its strictly democratic nature, inevitably leads to its instrumentalization in the service of propaganda that historically attempted to ideologically shape minds and now seeks to mark them, with a rise in geopolitical tensions between Empires vying for hegemony. In this new logic, due to the increasingly closed production model demanding more and more money, it becomes necessary for the public to re-appropriate both ideologically and commercially the market. This could involve a search for smaller productions that tend to forget the current market optimization dynamics but that transmit a message through pure cinematic language and not just through simple spectacular images.
Marcos Bartolomé Terreros
References
Kouleshov Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwMRtWNEQRo&ab_channel=HistoryClub
“The Exit of the Lumière Factory in Lyon,” Louis Lumière, 1895
“Triumph of the Will,” Leni Riefenstahl, 1935
“Olympia,” Leni Riefenstahl, 1938
“Jew Süss,” Veit Harlan, 1940
“Battleship Potemkin,” Sergei Eisenstein, 1925
“October,” Sergei Eisenstein, 1927
“Why We Fight,” Frank Capra, 1942-1945
“The Battle of Midway,” John Ford, 1942
“Bicycle Thieves,” Vittorio de Sica, 1948
“Umberto D,” Vittorio de Sica, 1952
“Stromboli,” Roberto Rossellini, 1950
“The Flowers of St. Francis,” Roberto Rossellini, 1950
“Superman Returns,” Bryan Singer, 2006
“Avatar: The Last Airbender,” M. Night Shyamalan, 2010
“The Wandering Earth,” Frant Gwo, 2019
“RRR,” S.S. Rajamouli, 2022
Marcos Bartolomé Terreros is a spaniard, born in 2003. He studies the double degree in Spanish and French Law at the Complutense University of Madrid and the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is interested in politics, literature and cinema.