By Hajrah Mumtaz

“Film, and now videotape, has enormous propaganda value. Nothing is as it seems. Film is very deceptive. One must ask who is paying for it. Why are they putting in money? What is their purpose?” So commented by veteran UK filmmaker Professor Alan Segal during a recent lecture in Karachi, as he explained that the appearance of talkie films in the 1920s Britain “became a potent weapon; the government and politicians saw the propaganda value in these films … they were not going to leave documentaries just as entertainment. They became a tool of political control.”

It is true that documentaries – a term which covers a whole range of visual expressions connected by the self-avowed attempt to “document reality” – have been used for political purposes and propaganda ever since the genre was hit upon. The fact is that, as with any form of expression where reality is presented through an interpreter (such as documentary film and television, narrative prose or journalism) there is nothing such as the wholly and fully objective. Each piece of information has been filtered through the inclinations and consciousness of the interpreter, and can – in the worst cases – be intentionally twisted to suit other purposes. One of the first films that are considered a ‘documentary’ as we understand the term today, for example, was the 1914 “In the land of the head-hunters”, which displays both primitivism and exoticism in presenting a staged story as an objective reality. Purporting to reflect the customs and traditions of the Native North American Kwakwaka’wakw people, it actually portrays practices that dated either from long before the first contact these people had with European-descent people, or were entirely fictional. If we were to view it today as documentary, we would be entirely misled as to the Kwakwaka’wakw realities of the early 20th century. Were we to view it as a piece of fiction, or as a fictionalised tale, however, we would have a built-in scepticism vis-à-vis the authenticity of the practices it portrays.

In other words, by merely claiming to merit the title ‘documentary’, a piece of film or video that is essentially fictionalised can take on greater pretensions of reality, and can therefore be all the more powerful as a tool of propaganda.

So it is that one of the most notorious – and most successful – propaganda films was the 1935 German film, “Triumph of the Will.” Created by Leni Riefenstahl, it chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremburg and presents excerpts from speeches by various Nazi leaders, including portions of speeches by Adolf Hitler, interspersed with footage of massed party members. The film was commissioned by Hitler, whose name appears in the opening titles and who acted as the unofficial executive producer. (Remember that this is before the start of WWII.) The over-riding theme is Germany’s re-emergence as a great power, with Hitler as the true leader paving the path towards glory.

What made the film so successful was its ‘realism’, with Riefenstahl using techniques such as a moving camera, telephoto lenses deployed to create distorted perspectives, aerial photography and what is now considered a path-breaking approach to music and cinematography. It has received acclaim as not only amongst the greatest propaganda films ever, but also amongst the greatest films in history, winning awards in Germany, the US, France, and other countries.

What the filmmaker Riefenstahl had to say about it on the subject of being a propaganda film adequately explains the blurred distinction between such films and documentaries:“If you see this film again today you ascertain that it doesn’t contain a single reconstructed scene. Everything in it is true,” she said in 1964. “And it contains no tendentious commentary at all. It is history. A pure historical film… it is film-vérité. It reflects the truth that was then in 1934, history. It is therefore a documentary. Not a propaganda film. I know very well what propaganda is. That consists of recreating events in order to illustrate a thesis, or, in the face of certain events, to let one thing go in order to accentuate another. I found myself, me, at the heart of an event which was the reality of a certain time and a certain place. My film is composed of what stemmed from that.”

True, perhaps. But what the film did of course leave out were the many references in Hitler’s speeches about the need for purity of the German race, of its superiority, of the use of force being justified when the greater good is at stake.

The problem, of course, is that any filmmaker, writer or journalist must, when trying to present a reality, present certain coherent links and perforce leave others out. Reality is very big after all. It cannot be boiled down to a feature-length film, a 30,000-word book or a 1,200 word news-report.

The point to absorb is that when watching or reading anything that attempts to present the real, the audience must be fully aware that what they are absorbing is merely one of the realities, not all of them. Consider Pakistan today: there is the reality of the poor man who struggles for his daily wage; that of the disillusioned youth who joins the Taliban; that of the college student who worries about buying the latest in phone technology; that of the businessman who makes money off hoarding sugar or CNG; that of the hari who’s got no conception of ‘urban metropolis’…. The list can go on and on. All these realities are intertwined and inter-dependent, but to attempt to present them all in a single documentary, for example, would be a project of fantastic proportions.

Reality can be altered in a documentary to present propaganda; documentary techniques can be employed in a fictional film to create an aura of realism. The latter, in fact, is one of the factors that made Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film “The Battle of Algiers” so immensely powerful. Portraying the resistance against French colonial rule during the Algerian war from 1954 to 62, the film employs a grainy newsreel technique to great effect, using various methods to give it the feel of a documentary. So convincing was the end-result that, when screened in the US, reels carried the disclaimer that “not one foot” of newsreel had actually been used.

We, as audiences, ought to be aware of these matters lest we become unknowing, unthinking absorbers of propaganda and one-sided ‘documentary evidences’. The camera can invent anything, and can leave anything out. Knowing audiences would always corroborate information thus gleaned through other sources.

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Source: Dawn
Date:2/7/2010