PROPAGANDA IN FILMS… (Eclipsing to the workplace)

PROPAGANDA IN FILMS… (Eclipsing to the workplace)

Bruce Bisbey…please follow us at: https://dumbdogproductionsllc.blogspot.com

A propaganda film is a film that involves some form of propaganda. Propaganda films may be packaged in numerous ways, but are most often documentary-style productions or fictional screenplays, that are produced to convince the viewer of a specific political point or influence the opinions or behavior of the viewer, often by providing subjective content that may be deliberately misleading.

It is common to hear people say that films are simply a form of escapist entertainment, a harmless product designed to make money. As a Hollywood studio-era executive might have said to an aspiring politico screenwriter, ‘if you want to send a message, use Western Union.’ Yet, the dark sealed off world of the cinema and the world outside – a cut and thrust political world – have always bled into one another.

If one compares the directness and intensity of the effect that the various means of propaganda have on the great masses, film and TV are without question the most powerful. The written and spoken word depend entirely on the content or on the emotional appeal of the speaker, but film uses images, film and photography that for almost a decade have been accompanied by sound. We know that the impact of a message is greater if it is less abstract, more visual. The human physic identifies with what they see and visualize. That makes it clear why film and TV, with its series of continually moving images, must have particular persuasive force.

Propaganda is the ability "to produce and spread fertile messages that, once sown, will germinate in large human cultures.” 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”. First developed by the Lumiere 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. As Nancy Snow stated in her book, Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech and Opinion Control Since 9-11, propaganda "begins where critical thinking ends."

Film is a unique medium in that it 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. Film’s ability to create the illusion of life and reality, opening up new, unknown perspectives on the world, is why films, especially those of unknown cultures or places, are taken to be accurate depictions 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.” To paraphrase Hilmar Hoffmann, this means that in film, only what the camera ‘sees’ exists, and the viewer, lacking alternative perspectives, conventionally takes the image for reality.

Films are effective propaganda tools because they establish visual icons of historical reality and consciousness, define public attitudes of the time they’re depicting or that at which they were filmed, mobilize people for a common cause, or bring attention to an unknown cause. Political and historical films represent, influence, and create historical consciousness and are able to distort events making it a persuasive and possibly untrustworthy medium.

Bernays, a nephew of Freud, who wrote the book Propaganda early in the 20th century, later coined the terms "group mind" and "engineering consent", important concepts in practical propaganda work. He wrote:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.”

At the turn of the 20th century, films emerged as the new cultural agents, depicting events and showing foreign images to mass audiences in European and American cities. Politics and film began to intertwine with the reconstruction of the Boer War for a film audience and recordings of war in the Balkans. The new medium proved very useful for political and military interests when it came to reaching a broad segment of the population and creating consent or encouraging rejection of the real or imagined enemy. They also provided a forceful voice for independent critics of contemporary events.

The earliest known propaganda film was a series of short silent films made during the Spanish–American War in 1898 created by Vitagraph Studios.

At an epic 120 minute running time, the 1912 Romanian Independența României is the first fictional film in the world with a deliberate propagandistic message. Filmed with a budget that would not be reached by a Romanian movie until 1970 (Michael the Brave, supported by the Romanian communist regime also for propagandistic purposes), the movie was meant to shift the perception of the Romanian public towards an acceptance of Romanian involvement into an expected Balkan conflict (the First Balkan War).

Another of the early fictional films to be used for propaganda was The Birth of a Nation (1915).

19TH CENTURY

Propaganda as generally understood, is a modern phenomenon that emerged from the creation of literate and politically active societies informed by a mass media, where governments increasingly saw the necessity for swaying public opinion in favor of its policies. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era Propaganda was among the first of the Modern Period. A notable example was perhaps during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, where Indian sepoys rebelled against the British East India Company's rule in India. Incidents of rape committed by Indian rebels against English women or girls were exaggerated to great effect by the British media to justify continued British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent. At the time, British newspapers had printed various accounts about English women and girls being raped by the Indian rebels. It was later found that some of these accounts were false stories created to perpetuate the common stereotypes of the native people of India as savages who need to be civilized by British colonialists, a mission sometimes known as "The White Man's Burden". One such account published by The Times, regarding an incident where 48 English girls as young as 10–14 were supposedly raped by the Indian rebels in Delhi, was criticized as a false propaganda story by Karl Marx, who pointed out that the story was reported by a clergyman in Bangalore, far from the events of the rebellion.

Gabriel Tarde's Laws of Imitation (1890) and Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1897) were two of the first codifications of propaganda techniques, which influenced many writers afterward, including Sigmund Freud. Hitler's Mein Kampf is heavily influenced by Le Bon's theories.

ECLIPSING INTO THE WORKPLACE

The ease of data collection emerging from the IT revolution has been suggested to have created a novel form of workplace propaganda. A lack of control on the acquired data's use has led to the widespread implementation of workplace propaganda created much more locally by managers in small and large companies, hospitals, colleges and Universities etc. The author highlights the transition of propagandist coming from large, often national producers to small scale production. The same article also notes a departure from the traditional methodology of propagandists i.e., the use of emotionally provocative imagery to distort facts. Data driven propaganda is suggested to use 'distorted data' to overrule emotion. For example, by providing rationales for ideologically driven pay cuts etc.

Sources, References & Credits: Google, Wikipedia, Wikihow, Pinterest, IMDB, Linked In, Indie Wire, Cinema Blend, Variety, Creative Skill Set, No Film School, Cinema Blend, Frank Stern, Screening Politics: Cinema and Intervention, Reddit, Business Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, Investopedia, Study, English Oxford Dictionaries, Hollywood Branded, James Combs, Film Propaganda and American Politics, Business Weekly, Valve, Rain Dance, Elliot Grove, Film Maker Magazine, The European, Film Reference, Cracked,

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