Film As A Propaganda Tool
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 Hoffman, 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.
Read more about this topic: Propaganda Film
Famous quotes containing the words film as, film, propaganda and/or tool:
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
—Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918)
“The obvious parallels between Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz have frequently been noted: in both there is the orphan hero who is raised on a farm by an aunt and uncle and yearns to escape to adventure. Obi-wan Kenobi resembles the Wizard; the loyal, plucky little robot R2D2 is Toto; C3PO is the Tin Man; and Chewbacca is the Cowardly Lion. Darth Vader replaces the Wicked Witch: this is a patriarchy rather than a matriarchy.”
—Andrew Gordon, U.S. educator, critic. “The Inescapable Family in American Science Fiction and Fantasy Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (Summer 1992)
“As soon as by one’s own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is admitted, the cause for doubting one’s own right is laid.”
—Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)
“One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)