Diseño de una red Wimax

Controlling the mind of the people is one, if not the principal, aim of any government, for from it is derived the power to do anything they may wish. One of the earliest, most sophisticated and most successful users of film for propaganda purposes was the Soviet Union.

From the October 1917 Revolution onwards, Lenin and the politburo recognised the cinema as the most effective means of engaging the vast and disparate people to engage in common goals and thought. The Editor of Kino-nedeyia/Cinema-week was Dziga Vertov, whose newsreels and written manifestos came to embody the transformative potential of film.

He borrowed Marx’s denigration of religion as ‘the opium of the people’ and applied it to what fiction film had become. The series of monthly newsreels he produced he called

Kino-pravda/Cinema Truth (1922–5). He called his approach to filmmaking Kino-Eye and his followers kinoki: their role was to elevate the film form from entertainment to a key element of popular political analysis:

I am cinema-eye – I am mechanical eye. I show you a world such as only I can see . . . Freed from the tyranny of 16–17 images per second, freed from the framework of space and time, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I may record them.

My mission is a new perception of the world. Thus I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.⁶

Revered to this day as a great pioneer, Vertov was too original and troublesome to be an effective long-term propagandist and was not patronised by Stalin but, in part thanks to Vertov, Soviet cinema produced two important genres of propagandist film, the historic and the epic. The first was the revisionist history, which reached an early apogee in the work of Esfir Shub (1894–1959), a former film editor who stumbled across the home movies of Tsar Nicholas II, which became the basis for her epic documentary, Padeniye dinastij Romanovykh/The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). She went on to make a sequel covering the years 1917 to 1927: Velikij put/The Great Road (1927) and then a prequel covering 1896 to 1912: Rossiya Nikolaya II i Lev Tolstoy/The Russia of Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy (1928). In this trilogy, Shub emerges as a sophisticated and effective propagandist. While the still image communicates a specific truth, or lie, film can stimulate an intellectual exchange with its audience. It is widely known that Russia under Stalin exiled or executed former leaders such as Leon Trotsky, and retrospectively and crudely airbrushing them out of historic photographs. Shub’s enormously influential approach to historical compilation filmmaking was in the subtle juxtaposition of image that leads an audience to believe it is drawing its own conclusions. An overt dialectic between the home movies of the Romanovs and the lives of the poor sets up the potential for a range of critical readings of subsequent images. As Burke quotes Shub:

To assemble a documentary film you only have to think clearly. The spectator has to manage not only to see people and events properly, but to memorise them. Let the lovers of cheap montage effects remember that to edit simply and with a clear sense is not at all easy, but very difficult.

(Shub, 1972: 18)⁷ . . . Her legacy remains in that form of political documentary cinema where archive material is used dialectically or against the grain as part of a historical argument or debate.⁸ The other classic legacy was in the even more archetypal Soviet documentary celebrating the great public works that dragged the feudal Russian economy into the modern age. The seminal work here is Victor Turin’s film about the building of a railway linking Siberia and Turkestan, Turksib (1929). Whereas Vertov and his kinoki believed in ‘life caught unawares’, Turin had worked in Hollywood for ten years before the Revolution and had no compunctions about re-enacting or setting up scenes to tell a more compelling story. But he also used extended subtitles which prefigure the use of grandiloquent spoken commentary in service

of the bigger theme. That tone of voice is also clearly discernible in Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s Jim Shvante (marili svanets)/Salt for Svanetia (1930), in which a backward community starved of salt is saved by the Soviet construction of a new road. Stalin felt that Kalatozishvili was too obsessed with the backwardness of Svanetia and too propagandistic in the socialist message and his next film was banned. Although many miles of extraordinary footage of Soviet engineering and enterprise were shot, such as that of enthusiastic Komsomol youth braving a Siberian winter in a canvas city to help build the vast Bratsk hydro-electric dam on the River Angara,⁹the increasingly paranoid Stalin regime crushed Russia’s documentary tradition, even as it gave a language and ambition to world documentary filmmaking.

Propaganda remains a primary use of the powerful medium of film. The justification will usually be of the highest kind – such as preserving security or democracy – but one key means will be through restricting the flow of information and controlling its interpretation. At times of war, a population may well acquiesce to the need for such controls. Britain first understood the power of propaganda in the First World War (1914–18), though only setting up a Ministry of Information in 1917. The same year it took over the newsreel company Topical Budget, to make morale-boosting films on the home front, even though the generals were loathe to let cameras anywhere near the slaughter on the frontline. India was the powerhouse of the British Empire and the supplier of thousands of troops and – as it had already begun to evolve its cultural love affair with film – plans were made to bring heroic images of that contribution into the Indian hinterland, reinforcing support and recruitment. But difficulties between London and the British-run Government of India delayed orders for a fleet of cinema trucks until it was too late and the war was over.

Although the British government had belatedly understood the potential of film propaganda, there was a waning taste for it once peace came. ‘In wartime, propaganda was seen as a necessary evil, but in peace-time it was believed that Government standards should return to normal as soon as possible.’¹⁰It was only later, in the 1930s, as the clamour for Indian independence grew, that a more concerted use of peacetime propaganda grew with the distribution of films, both factual and fictional, that propounded the British line. Alexander Korda’s unashamedly jingoistic ‘Empire films’ were intended to hold that line, but their arrogance probably did more to fan the flames. The 1935 Sanders of the River’s opening dedication – ‘to the handful of white men whose everyday work is an unsung saga of courage and efficiency’ – is all too typical. As Indian film historian Prem Chowdhry writes:

The Indian media condemned the propagation of empire films as British propaganda. In Film India’s opinion ‘the imperialist propaganda was the crudest and most vulgar sort’

in which Indians were depicted as nothing better than ‘sadistic barbarians’ . . . The Hindu took it as ‘vilification of India through screen, which lowers us in the estimation of the world and these films shown in India inflame us’. In their critical attacks, the Indian media highlighted how the screen portrayal of Muslims in Western films was ridiculing Muslim practices. For example, a film like Real Glory¹¹was severely criticised for scenes in which the hides of pigs were flaunted in front of members of an Arab tribe before the Muslims were made to bury their face in them.¹²

Seventy years on, such filmic portrayals of Islam enjoy renewed power to inflame outrage and lethal reaction. Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed and shot to death in Amsterdam in November 2004 following the TV transmission of his film Submission,¹³which

explored violence against women in Islamic society and offended some through its provocative use of Koranic texts superimposed on naked female bodies. In Britain, even the documentary exposure of extreme preachers in mosques excites investigation by a nervous police force.¹⁴Neither of these were propaganda works but they excited the same degree of reaction. Strictly they belong more in the following chapter on Polemic. But they illustrate the fact that the battle for hearts and minds that propagandists engage in is a constant one, with many different fronts and faces. Wartime produces the most extreme need and offers the broadest canvas for controlling media.