WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Propaganda

(Transcript)
Originally broadcast December 04, 2006

	Milos Stehlik

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Row upon row of immaculately uniformed Nazi party members march onto the field, flags unfurled, accompanied by stirring music. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. A brilliantly-executed film, exquisite propaganda.

We’ve seen these images, and we understand their context. They are easy to classify. So is the idolatry of dictators in films: Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Stalin. Several doubles played Stalin on the screen, most notably Mikhail Gelovani who portrayed him almost a dozen times. Communist musicals: farm girls singing on top of tractors about exceeding the goals for the harvest. All these cinematic images make it easy to understand how others get brainwashed by propaganda: Nazis, communists, terrorists—the bad guys. Are we so immune?

Godard said truth is 24 times a second. It sounds great, but it’s not true. Almost all film is propaganda.

In a film like Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece, Potemkin, the propaganda seems obvious to us today: the sailors forced to eat spoiled meat crawling with maggots, the Czarist soldiers marching down the Odessa steps, firing into the fleeing crowds out for a stroll on a Sunday afternoon. Great filmmaking, but we do know which side Eisenstein is on.

The propaganda in films today is less about shaping our politics and more about controlling our attitudes. Foremost is a cruel myth: the myth of the hero. British filmmaker Ken Loach says “If the cinema is any kind of force for social change, then it’s a force for the bad, because most films are about one guy with a gun solving a problem. The ideology of cinema, of mainstream films, is a very right-wing ideology.”

The main tenet of that ideology is to create, keep and keep growing the appetite of a global universe of consumers. One obvious aspect of this is product placement: do we really know that the real reason why Daniel Craig as James Bond is always reaching for his Sony Vaio laptop is because Sony paid a product placement fee to the producers?

A more insidious aspect is to keep viewers pre-occupied with their own perceived needs, hedonism achieved through shopping. Acquisition—whether it’s a dress, a car, beauty through plastic surgery or cosmetics, a boyfriend or a baby—is the main propaganda message of mainstream movies today.

Even serious issues like war are filtered through the mirror of our consumer attitudes: the first Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of in Iraq were shown as something resembling a video game—American planes dropping bombs on buildings far below, the possible loss of human life—now termed “collateral damage”—becoming a distant, abstract concept. The images were intentionally de-personalized, the idea of blood and death removed.

The British journalist Robert Fisk who has spent much of his life covering volatile trouble-spots around the world said in an interview that each journalist always has a choice from whose perspective to write. Fisk tried to tell the story through the eyes of the victim rather than the conqueror. The fact that these choices even exist—that we should know the stance that the filmmaker or reporter is taking—is today obscured by a false and illusory idea of balance and fairness.
Propaganda also exists in what we don’t see—here is the value of censorship, inverted to propagate the official line unopposed, to cover dirty tricks, to allow falsehoods to go unchallenged. A movie like the recent Iraq in Fragments gave us a rare glimpse of what it’s like on the ground in Iraq among the Shiite fundamentalists. It also underscores the failure of journalism in general and television journalism in particular to produce anything resembling an accurate or realistic representation of the situation in Iraq. The journalists, first embedded with the occupying troops, now embedded in hotels which they can’t leave for reasons of personal safety, can tell us almost nothing because they are isolated from the very reality they are there to cover.

The consumerist ethic spun by today’s media propaganda is not too different from the Communist musicals. In these, the village maiden gained a new window on happiness when she joined the Communist Party. For us, the solution is just as easy. Unhappy? Can’t sleep? Stomach ache? Distress from dealing with daily reality? Just pop a pill. Today’s happiness comes in a bottle.

Nazi propaganda master Josef Goebbels said that propaganda ceases to be effective once we become aware of it. So alongside propaganda newsreels, Nazi film production included perfectly mundane “entertainment” films like G.W. Pabst’s film of Paracelsus, or Heart of a Queen, the story of Mary Queen of Scots, and perhaps the largest vehicle of them all, Hans Albers in the fantastic adventures of Baron Munchausen. We, too, have our escapes in a proliferation of choices in the mostly idiotic drivel of 500 TV channels.

As Bob Herbert wrote in The New York Times in response to the hype about the volume of shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving, “Americans are shopping while Iraq burns.”

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

“Worldview” film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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