Movies
As a common form of entertainment for many Americans, motion pictures portrayed a positive image of relocation to non-Japanese movie-goers. Produced by the United States War Relocation Authority, such movies as A Challenge to Democracy (1944) and Japanese Relocation (1943), depicted the internment camps in a positive light and showed the Japanese people as happy and content, benefiting from their new life in the internment camps. To accomplish this, these government-issued propaganda films touched on common positive themes, such as:
- ensuring the safety of internee property
- providing Japanese-Americans with greater opportunities, such as education, employment, internal government, and religion
- cooperation of the internees with the local authorities and federal government
- language comparing the relocated people to early American frontiersmen
Such motion pictures were made with film from actual Japanese-American internment camps with a narrator informing the audience of what they were witnessing. As the UCLA Film and Television Archive writes:
film reminds us how easily unpleasant truths can be rationalized into banality and individual liberties can be swept away. (UCLA, 2007)
Read more about this topic: Propaganda For Japanese-American Internment
Famous quotes containing the word movies:
“One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless.... They have put into practise the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“Every now and then, when you’re on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It’s a sound you can’t get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve hit them where they live.”
—Shelley Winters (b. 1922)
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)