Literature and Propaganda by Foulkes A. P.;

Author:Foulkes, A. P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1461022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

8

Fiction and reality

Steve Neale has recently attempted to specify the theoretical bases of propaganda in relation to the cinema. His main aim is to differentiate films into which a specific ideology has been inscribed in a non-propagandist manner from films made within the context of a ‘specific, politically motivated, ideological intervention by the Nazi state’ (Neale 1977, p. 9). His two poles of investigation are the populist films made in Hollywood during the 1930s and two anti-semitic films released in Germany in 1940, Jud Süß and Der ewige Jude. Neale distances himself from ‘liberal humanist’ definitions of propaganda, in which all ideologies are ideological except one’s own, and develops a method which moves analytically between the structural features of the films and describable aspects of audience reception. Within the classificatory framework produced by this method, the Hollywood populist films are neither structured as propaganda, nor was there any possibility of Hollywood’s films ‘functioning as propaganda, at least within the United States itself (Neale 1977, p. 39). On the other hand, the documentary Der ewige Jude is held to be propagandist, mainly because it signifies discourses and practices in such a way ‘as to mark them as existing outside and beyond it [i.e., the film]. It is this position that I would maintain as the fundamental mark of a propagandist text’ (Neale 1977, p. 31). Jud Süß, because of its classical realist mode of address, cannot be regarded as propagandist in a structural sense (Neale 1977, p. 25), but it is considered to have served a ‘propagandist function’ deriving from the nature of its historical reception. The film was widely used, by Himmler and others, as a means of forestalling and nullifying any possible sympathy for the victims of Nazi ‘resettlement’. The film is none the less a ‘classical fictional text’ (Neale 1977, p. 29), and as such it cannot be formally viewed as propaganda.

Neale’s contribution is a useful and important attempt to establish a conceptual space for propaganda within the metacritical framework presupposed by much recent British criticism concerned with ideology in literature and art. Outside this framework his specification becomes somewhat less convincing, both because of the narrow scope of his definition of propaganda and on account of the way he theorizes fictivity as opposed to documentariness. The narrowness of definition is of course to some extent a question of terminology. Der ewige Jude, the only film considered by Neale to possess the ‘fundamental mark of a propagandist text’, would be classified within the terms I have proposed as a variant form of a much more broadly defined phenomenon, namely as vertical, political, agitation propaganda specifically designed by the Nazis as a means of subverting and rearranging the structure of beliefs and moral principles commonly regarded as ‘conscience’. Populist films such as Ruggles of Red Gap and Mr Deeds Goes to Washington would similarly be defined as examples of integration propaganda reaffirming collective beliefs in the classlessness of American society, national regeneration from the grass roots led by Abraham Lincoln figures and so on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.