page_title: Politico-media complex
section_title: Propaganda
hierarchical_section_title: Politico-media complex / Film / Propaganda
context_page_description: The politico-media complex is a name given to the close knit, systematized, symbiotic-like network of relationships between a state's political and ruling classes and its media industry. It may also encompass other interest groups, such as law, corporations and multinationals. The term PMC is often used as a pejorative, to refer to the collusion between governments, individual politicians, and the media industry, in their attempt to manipulate rather than to inform the general public.
  The idea that the media has profound impacts on the polity of the nation state, democratic or otherwise, is not a new one and hardly controversial. Election campaigns spend significant sums in the media and oppressive regimes nearly always seek to control the media as it is a very powerful means of persuasion. Prior to Chomsky's propaganda model, George Orwell noted: "All the papers that matter live off their advertisements and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over the news."
context_section_description: Propaganda is a way that politics can be represented and manipulated in film. Leif Furhammar and Folke Isaksson credit Russian producers Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin with the birth of propaganda aesthetics, for which the underlying assumption was that by manipulating cinematic images representing reality, they could manipulate spectators' concepts of reality. Documentaries can be an even more effective form of propaganda than other genre films because the form of representation claims to mirror reality, making obfuscation of manipulating  an audience easier.
  British newsreels such as The Battle of the Somme of World War I were propaganda because they only showed the war from their own perspective, though it can be argued as being more honest and objective than more recent war documentaries (for they were edited without adjustments for dramatic or epic effect). Their photographers remained on their front lines which presented at least some truth. According to Furhammar and Isaksson, it was Russian filmmakers who were the "masters of montage" and discovered film's power to create the convincing illusion with cutting, rhythmic editing, and a didactic approach.
  When sound became possible, documentaries have been said to become more politically powerful with the use of speakers' voices and music. In Nazi Germany, newsreels were just as important as feature films, while in Fascist Italy propaganda was mostly limited to documentaries. A comparison of the first three installments of the American series Why We Fight and the Nazi documentary Sieg im Westen (Victory in the West) demonstrates how convincing even two opposing interpretations of the same events can be. The first covers years in a couple of hours but its density disguises any omission of truth while the latter manages to depict war with real images but without blood or death. The same is found in documentaries about the Spanish Civil War.
  Falsification of political matter in documentaries can be created by lifting shots of events other than the one being dealt with and including them in the film so that they appear to be a part of the "reality" it claims to represent. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, for example, did this with Operation Abolition in 1960 and Nazi newsreels depicted scenes of the Allies' defeat at Dieppe as real scenes from the Normandy invasion just a few days afterward to convince the audience of the Reich's success. The Audience's political affiliations can also be manipulated by actually staging the ostensibly real events as the 1944 Nazi picture The Führer Gives the Jews a Town did.
  World War II propaganda persisted 30 years after Dachau and Auschwitz such as in the thinly disguised fascist Italian film The Night Porter (1974). The film sought to legitimize the Nazis' genocide while glorifying sadism, brutality, and machismo. What amazes Henry Giroux, as he explains in "Breaking into the Movies," is that such blatant ideological messages were ignored by critics and the general public, and that society may be incapable of testing the present against the past has implications for post-industrial oppression in the West and the strategies for resisting it. Despite the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Paulo Freire, the majority of Americans do not recognize how important class hegemony, or cultural domination, is in nations where populations are kept obedient to governments through ideological means. He argues that "[w]e are not only victims in the political and material sense, but are also tied emotionally and intellectually to the prevailing ruling-class norms and values."
  Though feature forms of propaganda lack documentaries' ostensible authenticity they can retain political power because directors' resources are less limited and they can create the reality of the film. They further compensate for lack of credibility with intensity.
caption: A scene from "Divide and Conquer", the third installment of Why We Fight, 1943.
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