In the Second World War, the Germans had their Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, commonly known as the Propagandaministerium, while the British had a Ministry of Information. They were both engaged in a range of activities to put the best possible gloss on all stories relating to their own country’s war efforts and to demean their opponents. Both recognised that documentary film was one of the most effective forms of propaganda.
The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, not only commissioned propaganda newsreels and Nazi epics, but kept up the production of comedies and romances that attracted the German masses to the cinema in the first place. He also introduced mobile cinemas to
Figure 9.1
Leni Riefenstahl runs up the flag for the Nazis in Triumph of the Will (1934)
ensure the rural poor were not excluded from the message, and resisted a move to ban all foreign films, though kept a tight control on those that were allowed. The undoubted propaganda triumph of the pre-war phase was Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the Sixth Nationalist Socialist Party Rally held in Nuremberg in September 1934. An admirer of Hitler, who in turn admired her earlier fictional films, Riefenstahl had already made a short film (Sieg des Glaubens/Victory of Faith) in 1933, the year that Hitler had come to power. But the elegiac epic Triumph des Willens/Triumph of the Will was to become the most famous propaganda film epic of all time. Its symphonic structure and use of music and iconography are extraordinary. One American critic writes about its ‘masterful blend of the four basic elements of cinema – light, darkness, sound and silence – but it is not just an achievement in cinematic form, for it has other essential elements – thematic, psychological, mythological, narrative and visual interest – and it is in the working of these elements that Riefenstahl transcends the limitations of the documentary film and the propaganda film genres’.15 Riefenstahl went on to do an equally impressive job filming the propaganda triumph that was the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Her two-part documentary, the first great sports film – Olympia:
Fest Der Völker/Olympia: Festival of the People and Olympia: Fest Der Schoenheit/
Olympia: Festival of Beauty (1938) – extends the fascist aesthetic, underpinning the self-styled 1,000-year Reich’s claim to historic supremacy by mixing from classical statues to modern athletes.
The balletic qualities Riefenstahl brings to her filmmaking may be ascribed to her first career, as a dancer, which may have also helped her evade prosecution after the War, eventually de-Nazified and classified as a ‘fellow traveller’, not a war criminal. She found it virtually impossible to get financed as a director thereafter and turned to still photography, but the enduring argument about whether she was culpable or merely naive is central to all filmmaking in the service of a system or idea. How far the filmmaker goes to placate their government or financier reflects either how fortunately synchronous they are in their objectives or how malleable they are, more often the latter. Of course, if the filmmaker or production house can convince themselves they are right, on the side of the angels, then the sense of compromise involved in bending the truth is supplanted by the higher goal. Some of Britain’s wartime filmmakers, such as Humphrey Jennings, saw themselves as socialists, surrealists and poets – but in no way compromised by their nationalist fervour. Jennings was no jingoist, but found his range in war, as Williams writes:
World War II’s extraordinary conditions restored Jennings’s professional fortunes and inspired his visual lyricism. Because of newly available Ministry of Information funding, to boost civilian morale and to promote Britain’s cause to undecided neutrals, Jennings found a focus for his disparate talents and influences as the GPO was reformed as the Crown Film Unit. Jennings’s output is regarded as among the best records of this
‘people’s War’ in any national cinema. His films are driven by creative tension between affection for traditions and a symbolist’s eye for the telling details of a people under the stress of modern war. Initially, Jennings’s Home Front documentaries were unashamedly and (given the crisis of the time) justifiably propagandist.16
The indomitability of the plucky Brit under the bombardment of the Luftwaffe during the Blitz was the subject of films such as Britain Can Take It (1940), Listen to Britain (1942)
and Fires Were Started (1943), and transformed Jennings’s involvement with the Mass Observation movement into a more insightful construction of the popular experience in extremis. He was unashamed about the propagandist elements of what he was doing, because he believed in the justice of the cause, but it did not discourage him from extending the licence he was granted when the opportunity arose.
When the Nazis massacred the Czech village of Lidice in reprisal for the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the self-styled ‘Protector’ of Bohemia, a Czech poet wrote to Jennings suggesting a film. Jennings came up with the idea of re-enacting it in – and with active involvement of the people of – a Welsh coal-mining village, Cwmgiedd. The Ministry of Information was happy to finance this film, though probably not consulted about the choice of a village of pacifists, none of whom had volunteered for service, and where the use of the Welsh language and sense of oppression by the English would be used to stand for the Czech sense of being under the German jackboot. The Silent Village (1943) is not Jennings’s best film but – perhaps because – it was one that got closest to what he was trying to say about people in film, ‘far more important to me than the Fire one’.17He found the honesty, courage and support he got from the coal miners an illuminating contrast to the self-serving elites he was more familiar with. He was particularly dismissive of the fellow travellers he came into conflict with when trying to finish films, having a singularly bruising run-in with producers wanting radical cuts during post-production of Fires Were Started at Pinewood. ‘Of course, one expects that from spineless well-known modern novelists and poets who have somehow got into the propaganda business – who have no technical knowledge and no sense of solidarity or moral courage’, he wrote.18
While Jennings’s work was largely on the Home Front, a lot of the Crown Film Unit’s work was on the field of battle. Roy Boulting’s Desert Victory (1943) was one of the finest war-zone documentaries, winning that year’s Oscar for Best Documentary. Following the Eighth Army’s punishing push across North Africa against the Afrika Korps, from the battle of El Alamein to their final victory at Tripoli, the unit’s losses all too accurately reflected the costs of war. Four cameramen were killed, six more wounded, and seven captured by the Germans. Desert Victory was a great popular and critical success, creating an appetite for feature-length combat documentaries on both sides of the Atlantic:
Desert Victory is incisive, lucid, and complete in its handling of actual, close-range combat footage, some of it captured from the Germans in their retreat. The shots of night-time artillery attack are spectacular. Desert Victory contrasts the immediate strategy of battle with the lives of individual fighting men, from the general in command to the infantry-men in the trench; this technique was also used in such later American films as With the Marines at Tarawa and To the Shores of Iwo Jima. The narration here is much less strident than that of American combat films, and, for the most part, the sound was recorded directly at the scene.19
The Crown Film Unit had been in production for over two years before the United States entered the war in December 1941. While the Unit worked with largely young, in-house talent, the American propaganda machine naturally turned to Hollywood, and established feature film directors such as Frank Capra and John Ford. Ford had over 100 director credits to his name before he shot the first widely distributed US combat documentary of the war. He was on leave from Hollywood as head of the Field Photographic branch of the Office of the
Co-ordinator of Information, and got himself assigned to film the defence of the US Naval Station at the Pacific atoll of Midway.
The Battle of Midway is only 18 minutes long, but packs a powerful punch in its graphic representation of the 3-day battle, capturing the percussive effects of heavy artillery, one of which explosions rendered Ford unconscious and wounded, so earning him a Purple Heart as well as an Oscar for his pains. The battle footage only fills the middle third of the film, the other parts given to characterisation and flag-waving imagery, overlaid with martial music – from Yankee Doodle Dandy to Onward Christian Soldiers – and some arch dialogue from the likes of Henry Fonda, all of which heavily underlines its morale-rallying propagandist purpose.20
Some of the same heavy-handedness marks the seven highly effective propaganda films made by Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak in the Why We Fight series, the first three of which set out to chart the history that had brought America to war: Prelude to War, The Nazis Strike and Divide and Conquer (all 1943). Subsequent instalments were vital in uniting the American people to the destinies of allies of which they had little knowledge.
The Battle of Britain (1943) opens in Calais with the visit of the all-conquering Fuehrer.
The commentary, punctuated by martial music, sets the mood for the epic struggle:
Now Adolf Hitler stood, just as Napoleon had stood more than a hundred years before, and looked across the English Channel at the one fighting obstacle that stood between him and world domination. The chalk cliffs of England stood sheer and white, out of the choppy waters, and beyond: a little island, smaller than the state of Wyoming. Crush that little island and its stubborn people, and the way was open for world conquest.21 Evincing sympathy for the plucky island breed was relatively easy in a nation where many still sentimentalised their British roots. The Battle of China (1944) had a tougher job to do, getting Americans to make a distinction between the orientals who had attacked Pearl Harbour unprovoked, and those with whom the Japanese had previously been at war. The commentary adopts a much more basic tone:
To understand China, three facts must never be forgotten. China is history. [Pause]
China is land. [Pause] China is people. Chinese history goes back for more than 4,000 years. That’s a long time. It was only 168 years ago that Washington crossed the Delaware . . .22
Having set this primary school tone, the film goes on to paint a picture in primary colours between the Chinese and Japanese as the ultimate disparity between civilization and barbarism, good and evil. That simplistic rhetorical device reducing everything to black and white – ‘you’re either with us or against us’ – is not just the inevitable effect of war, but remains a popular but limiting factor in many a documentary film, as well as in political rhetoric and reportage up to this day.
By the time Capra and Litvak got to the two instalments of The Battle of Russia (1944), they had decided to pep up the epic mix, both with uncredited footage from features like Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, to sketch in Russia’s heroic history, and with celebrity endorsements from the leading US military men of the day, which increase in hyperbole until the roll-call ends with MacArthur:
The SCALE AND GRANDEUR of the (Russian) effort mark it as the GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT IN ALL MILITARY HISTORY.
(General Douglas Macarthur, Commander-in-Chief, Southwest Pacific Area)23 These films compress a complex history into a clear narrative, with a comprehensible, if incessant, commentary delivered by Walter Huston. As historical compilation films, they would have stood the test of time, if it were not for their convenient and contrived failure to mention the Soviet Union’s communist system, which feature would not have played well in eliciting sympathy in the States, but which was to dominate American polity from 1945 onwards. So the propaganda goal of 1944 – the Alliance – was reversed in the propaganda role that followed