Early sociological propaganda films reveal how this strategy was gradually uncovered and then consciously applied, with devastating results. Film scholar Guide Convents traces propaganda to the South African Boer War films (1905-06) and the films of conversion campaigns conducted in India by the Church Missionary Society (1907). [28] These films predate the first recognised documentary, Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), and Classical Hollywood conventions, which were codified by the Motion Picture Producer & Distributor's Association production code, a document classed by Jacques Ellul as "sociological propaganda." [29] Eric Schaeffer observed that the production code classified certain pictures as "unwholesome entertainment" (B-movies) and "unwholesome education" (exploitation cinema). The former category encompassed propaganda in 1940s film noir (capturing post-World War II anomie) and 1950s science fiction films (Cold War fears about The Bomb), whilst the latter included films such as The Birth of a Baby (1937). [30] The propaganda documentary style that was chronicled by Guido Convents reached its peak during the Eisenhower administration, as corporations created new hierarchies of meanings to control their expanding overseas operations. [31]

Melodrama emerged as a new narrative form alongside propaganda. D.N. Rodowick noted that melodrama encompassed "Warner's social melodramas, Capra's "populist" melodramas, the domestic or family melodrama." [32] The emergence of both melodrama and propaganda in late 1920s Weimar Germany and the 1930s American Depression was significant, for propaganda "created a substantial mass of people who were relatively informed through the mass media, yet were socially and economically disenfranchised." [33] Social climate, thus, created an atmosphere of strange receptivity, which in turn increased the possibility of incitement. The reciprocal link between melodrama film, propaganda, and righteous indignation has been noted - and used - by many political leaders. [34]

Post-revisionist political science scholars now interpret Casablanca (1942) as an example of melodrama hiding 'interventionist' propaganda. Because "identification advances ideology," [35] the film is deeply political because of its production mythology. "Casablanca succeeds as good entertainment and effective propaganda because of its unique combination of identification, ideology, and dialectic . . . the film was rushed into release just after the Allies invaded North Africa . . . the first victory over the Nazis since the beginning of the war." [36]

Media analyst Douglas Rushkoff described the moment of incitement in Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 documentary film Triumph of the Will. A mourning Adolf Hitler is staring, during a ceremony honouring soldiers, at a giant stone swastika. "An attack against a symbol is more spectacular than one against human beings. It is universal." 37 Larry Gross argued that the film was propagandistic because it was "made mainly in order to bind the leaderless SA to the Party after the Rohm putsch and the 'night of long knives'." [38] He observed that Riefenstahl's cinematography emphasised the "dehumanising, quasi-military, strictly hierarchical, and patterned representation of crowds." [39]

In both Triumph of the Will and Olympia (1938), Gross observed "an abiding tendency to abstract the human figure and body from its historical and social inscription." [40] Therefore, the Nazis believed that "reality is the event which happens in order to be filmed." [41] Riefenstahl's films demonstrate Ellul's claim that propaganda "incites an enormous demonstration by the masses and thus becomes a fact." [42] They also illustrate that propaganda films rely upon cognitive "illusions" that are hard-wired: "As with the eye, our mental "modules" remain impervious to the corrections offered by logic, arithmetic, and rational judgment." [43] They manipulate the function of parables, "that refer us to the realm of spiritual reality and latent moral meanings," [44] to predetermined interpretations. But the Nazis weren't alone in manipulating these techniques.

The Other Pearl Harbor Film

Big Jim McLain (1952) used many overt propaganda techniques: 'us' versus 'them' bi-polar thinking; appeals to justice and patriotic nationalism; sympathetic identification through film noir narrative voice-over with House on Un-American Activities investigators Jim McLain (John Wayne) and Mal Baxter (James Arness); the presence of heterosexual 'trophy wife' Nancy Vallon (Nancy Olson); and drawing attention to the 'foreign' outsider Sturak (Alan Napier). When Baxter is betrayed and murdered, this not only triggered melodramatic indignation, but made McLain's vigilante battle against the villains righteous, casting the die for Dirty Harry (1971), Death Wish (1975), and Red Dawn (1984). In propaganda films, "leading characters represent more than just themselves." [45] Propagandist filmmakers will kill-off or sacrifice a character to emotionally jolt the audience into awareness, then acceptance, of abstract ideas. [46]

The Pearl Harbor sequence of Big Jim McLain (1952) reminds the viewer that "propaganda does not rely solely on spoken rhetoric: it employs its own visual equated with 'particular solemnity' . . . which preserves the genre's rhetorical character." [47] Lingering shots of the aircraft carrier hulk and the American flag highlight John Wayne's self-conscious grafting of national mythology onto sociopolitical issues. [48] Wayne recognised that such mythologies "expressed the deep inclinations of society." [49]

The Pearl Harbor memorial sequence works because for viewers at the time, the scene "is addressed to feelings and passions - it is irrational." [50] The sequence uses non-diegetic techniques (music, framing), reminding us that "propaganda does not rely solely on spoken rhetoric: it employs its own visual equated with 'particular solemnity' . . . which preserves the genre's rhetorical character." [51] This sequence warns of what may happen if HUAC is not supported by the populace, creating a conceptual framework that, like the Gulf War media coverage, was difficult to dissent from.

The contemporary viewer, because of the passage of time, can note obvious facets of propaganda in the surface text: [52] the sequence orchestrates emotions, [53] and the characters represent abstract ideas of capitalist and communist ideologies. [54] They recognise, through the techniques of film noir narration and explicit identification with the House of Un-American Activities that Big Jim McLain has a sub-text of "positive incitement." [55] Wayne's opening narrative is crucial for the film, because "propaganda assumes a certain adversarial position - vis-a-vis the people it sets out to convince. It simultaneously suggests that people are reasonable enough to follow the "correct" view but unreasonable enough to have allowed falsehoods to sway them temporarily." [56] One reason why Big Jim McLain is so obvious to contemporary audiences is that its political sub-text was moulded by the historical period of its initial release. Wayne's advocacy of HUAC supported Ellul's contention that propaganda "codifies social, political, and moral standards." [57] The opening HUAC narration plus the Pearl Harbour sequence exemplified Ellul's 'integration' propaganda, which "aims at stabilizing the social body, at unifying and reinforcing it." [58]