Cinema has always faced the simple question of whether it is aligned with propaganda. The answer, however, is enormously complicated. To accept the idea would mean, among other things, accepting that thrillers canvass on behalf of murder, classical melodrama promotes weeping women and musicals publicise exuberant outbreaks of choreographed gestural articulations.
However, that is not generally considered the case for any of them. One might argue that the assignments of each of these well-wrought genres go beyond the sensorium of spectatorial responses natural to them. In fact, there are now insightful studies about why Hollywood flooded its global footprint with musicals during WW-II; why hard-boiled detectives soothed the distressed American nerve in the Depression-era, or why science-fiction cinema flourished in the age of the Cold War space-race. Similar concerns have attended the works of Sergei Eisenstein or Dziga Vertov in the Soviet Union, and more explicitly that of Leni Riefenstahl in Nazi Germany.
One of this year’s Oscars favourites, All Quiet on the Western Front, is part of a long line of films which have pleaded for an end to war-induced violence, cruelty and conflict. Should we then call them propagandists for peace? Or is propaganda something that is just wicked and political, and hence needs to manufacture consent through cinema?
