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History of propaganda. Propaganda is a form of communication that aims to shape people's beliefs, actions and behaviours. It is generally not impartial, and is hence viewed as a means of persuasion. It is often biased, misleading, or even false to promote a specific agenda or perspective.
- Overview
- The experimental and animated film
In presenting a background, an environment, and characters who behave in a certain way, every motion picture may be said to be propaganda. The term is usually restricted, however, to pictures made deliberately to influence opinion or to argue a point. During the 20th century, the most powerful and most consistent use of the cinema for propaganda was seen in the Soviet Union. After the 1917 revolution, Soviet films exploded on the screen with fervent conviction. Gradually, however, the pictures became lifeless, and in the 1930s and ’40s, during the Stalin regime, great directors such as Eisenstein and Aleksandr Dovzhenko worked under severe restraints. Nazi Germany produced its own brand of propaganda in the 1930s, the most striking being Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (1936; Triumph of the Will), a terrifying spectacle of a huge Nazi rally that had in effect been staged for the film made about it.
Few filmmakers would admit to making propaganda, although, in effect, many so-called educational films and all advertising or promotional shorts, whether featuring consumer products, vacation sites, or religious groups, may be seen as examples of propaganda. This form of film bears a stigma because of its undisguised aim: to influence ideas and change behaviour. Cinematic artistry serves merely as a tool in propaganda. Dudley Andrew Robert Sklar
While the motion picture developed rapidly as a medium predominantly based on recording actual events and creating narrative fictional stories, from its early decades there were artists and filmmakers interested in exploring the new technology’s potential outside or beyond the mainstream modes. Although extremely varied in form and subject matter, their endeavours have been grouped together under the terms experimental film or avant-garde film, as well as under the broader rubrics of alternative cinema or art cinema.
Experimental filmmaking took form in the 1920s primarily in France, with significant contributions from elsewhere in Europe and also in the United States, where the photographer Paul Strand and the photographer-painter Charles Sheeler made one of the first such works, Manhatta (1921), a meditation on images of New York skyscrapers.
In France, artists associated with the post-World War I avant-garde movements Dada and Surrealism, among them Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, René Clair, and Man Ray, also made abstract, nonnarrative, and animated films. It was also possible in French film culture of that era for experimental works to be made and exhibited commercially, by such filmmakers as Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, Germaine Dulac, and Abel Gance, who went on to make the three-screen epic Napoléon (1927). The most famous avant-garde film of the era was Un Chien andalou (1929; An Andalusian Dog), a Surrealist work made in Paris by the Spaniards Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.
A number of experimental films were made in the United States during the 1920s and ’30s, but the movement gained important new impetus with the emergence of Maya Deren, a former dancer who made her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), with Alexander Hammid. Deren’s films and writings influenced the development of post-World War II American avant-garde filmmaking with an emphasis on inner psychology, dream states, and exploration of the self. Stan Brakhage was another key figure of this movement, often called New American Cinema, the films of which could be made inexpensively through the wider availability of 16-mm and 8-mm cameras and film stock. The New American Cinema expanded during the 1960s to reflect the cultural transformations of the era, more explicitly taking on such themes as feminism, gay and Lesbian sexuality, and multicultural ethnicity. It reached its peak in the decade 1965–75, when the Pop artist Andy Warhol, among others, made experimental films that were exhibited commercially in theatres. In the 1970s one wing of the movement focused on the formal and structural aspects of film, while political concerns led others to shift more toward a hybrid style combining narrative fiction and documentary elements.
Animation has always played a significant role in experimental filmmaking. In the past, the process involved filming a series of still drawings or objects so that, when projected, an illusion of movement was created. With the development of computer technology, many animated films have been made from computer-generated images (CGI, also known simply as computer animation). Through the popularity of animated cartoons, the techniques of animation have typically played a larger part in commercial cinema than other aspects of avant-garde filmmaking.
Animation in fact developed in early cinema in a commercial context through the works of such animators as Émile Cohl in France, Winsor McCay in the United States, and Wladyslaw Aleksandrowicz Starewicz in Russia, the latter animating insect figures in narrative fiction tales. In Germany after World War I the artists Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling utilized the animation tables at the big UFA studio to make several of the first abstract animation films. While animation continued to interest experimental filmmakers over the following decades, the animated cartoon short became a fixture of exhibition programming, and cartoon characters Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Popeye the Sailor, Woody Woodpecker, and many more became legendary figures in popular culture. In the 1930s the Hollywood animation studios began to produce feature-length films, with Walt Disney leading the way with such classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
May 11, 2020 · Timeline. From WW II to War on Terror: How the U.S. military influenced these 21 Hollywood movies and TV shows. Why Hollywood turned broken men into heroes after the Vietnam War. The U.S. Office...
Aug 27, 2024 · Propaganda is the more or less systematic effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions by means of symbols (words, gestures, banners, monuments, music, clothing, insignia, hairstyles, designs on coins and postage stamps, and so forth).
- Bruce Lannes Smith
- Propaganda is the dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion. Deliberateness and a re...
- People have employed the principles of propaganda—manipulating the dissemination of information and using symbols in an attempt to influence public...
- Propaganda can be used in several areas, such as commercial advertising, public relations, political campaigns, diplomatic negotiations, legal argu...
- Joseph Goebbels was the minister of propaganda for the German Third Reich under Adolf Hitler.
A propaganda film is a film that involves some form of propaganda. Propaganda films spread and promote certain ideas that are usually religious, political, or cultural in nature. A propaganda film is made with the intent that the viewer will adopt the position promoted by the propagator and eventually take action towards making those ideas ...
Jul 18, 2017 · 11 min read. Russian villains have been terrorizing Americans onscreen with regularity since World War II; the KGB officers, ex-KGB officers, gangsters and scientists are all deeply familiar stereotypes in the Hollywood canon.
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Oct 18, 2018 · Propaganda is about creating an illusion and manipulating the truth, and in this regard film is fundamentally the same. Film is a series of flat images giving the illusion of depth, movement, and – most importantly – life.
