Propaganda

EARLY FILM HISTORY AND PROPAGANDA

Among the earliest filmmakers to incorporate conscious or unconscious propagandistic messages were the Lumière brothers. In their short film Démolition d'un mur ( Demolition of a Wall , 1896), for example, we see the seeds of later, more carefully constructed propaganda. The "boss" in this little film is given narrative and spatial privilege over the workers. Had a socialist made this film, she or he might have emphasized the workers' labor by choosing a camera angle that favored them and their physical efforts rather than their employer's perspective. The boss might have been satirized or portrayed as a tyrant and the workers' endeavors ennobled or depicted as exploited. Other Lumière films depicted dignitaries, parades, the military, fire departments, and the bonhomie of French bourgeois life; throughout, the viewpoint is clearly that of the self-satisfied industrialist filmmakers, who were comfortable with their class privilege and national identity. By contrast, their contemporary, Georges Méliès (1861–1938), often used fictionalized situations, special effects, and lighting to rigorously deconstruct the bourgeois universe erected in the films of the Lumière brothers and their vision of an orderly universe, which has come to dominate mainstream cinema.

The movie pioneer D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) has often been accused—and rightfully so—of manufacturing propaganda, especially of an antiblack nature, in his Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation (1915). The Birth of a Nation begins with a provocative prologue which explains that the seeds of national discord were sown by the introduction of African slaves into the colonies. Subsequently, the "negroes" (as the film spells it)—most of whom were played by whites in blackface—are portrayed as either savage brutes or fools. Most infamously, Gus leers with animalistic delight at young Flora Cameron and then chases her to her death. Gus is "tried" and lynched by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), his body then dragged through the streets and deposited at a black meeting place. At the film's climax, marauding blacks, intent on rape and murder, surround and attack a cabin that contains "innocent" white people from both the North and South. The message is clear: all whites, from whatever region, should unite against the menace of the freed slaves. The "heroic" Ku Klux Klan comes to the rescue, scattering the black mob and saving the whites. This "rescue" is in sharp contrast to the historical reality of the KKK, whose mission was less to defend the interests of innocent whites than to intimidate and commit violence against innocent blacks.

Griffith's portrayals of African Americans as slow-witted, lazy, or comical are just as stereotyped and prejudicial. During the Reconstruction scenes in The Birth of a Nation , Griffith shows black legislators dressed in clownish clothes and eating and drinking alcohol on the floor of the US House of Representatives. While some of the film's images are supposedly based on photographs of the period, these images of African Americans in The Birth of a Nation convey a clear rhetoric: blacks are irresponsible, unmotivated, and unruly—not capable of holding elective office or even casting a vote.

The Birth of a Nation instantly produced controversy. The NAACP demanded Griffith cut two scenes that depicted white women being molested by rampaging blacks and an epilogue that suggested blacks should be shipped back to Africa. The director grudgingly made these excisions, but many national leaders argued that the film should still be banned. Riots ensued when Birth opened in Boston, Atlanta, and Chicago, and it was banned in at least eight states. Nonetheless, the movie was the most successful of its time—and retained the honor for decades to come. Its nineteenth-century constructions of racial stereotypes were used as recruitment tools for the Ku Klux Klan, and from 1915 to 1940 the Klan's membership grew substantially. It is rare for individual films to have such social impact, but in the case of The Birth of a Nation , the social consequences were apparent.

Immediately after the release of The Birth of a Nation , Griffith made Intolerance (1916)—another epic, but with pro-tolerance, pro-labor, and antiwar themes. The film's epilogue contains its most blatant message: world peace will eventually arise out of hate and intolerance. But such sermonizing did not fare well with the public and Intolerance failed at the box office and was banned in several countries. Some of Griffith's earlier films, however, seem to conflict directly with the proslavery message in The Birth of a Nation . A Corner in Wheat (1909), for example, has implications that verge on being socialist. Griffith juxtaposes a breadline scene with a lavish party in the mansion of the Wheat King, who engineered a rise in the price of bread by shrewd stock market deals. This simple contrast cut between the elegance of the rich and the immobility and despairing looks of the poor establishes a potent class analysis. When the Wheat King meets his ironic fate in a grain pit, where he is drowned in the "torrent of golden grain" that made him wealthy, Griffith again cuts to the breadline to compare the stockbroker's excess with the scarcity of the poor. In the end, the downtrodden farmer survives, though further impoverished, while the moneyed get their just desserts.