As Filmmakers, the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression are sacred rights that creators hold self evident. It’s in the purview of artists to speak truth to power, to challenge lies, hypocrisy, cruelty, and prejudice. The Camera provides such power.
Film, like theater, is a persuasive tool, perhaps the most efficacious form of expression to reach for an audience’s collective consciousness as well as their hearts. Film can inspire, motivate, stir sympathy, and educate. Yet it can also produce the opposite, to lie, frighten, propagandize, and create a false aggrandizement of nefarious leaders and their various intentions.
With extreme low angles to insinuate power coupled with full frame crowd shots filling theater screens, documentarian Leni Riefenstahl shot three films glorifying Nazi Germany. Her iconic imagery of totalitarian menace affected audiences in the 1930s with feelings of dread. Hyping an “Army of Supermen” ready to take over the world, Riefenstahl's iconography engrained itself upon a global audience exhausted by WWI. In her hands, filmed propaganda became a weapon.
Hollywood responded to Nazi propaganda with films by Chaplin, Capra, Hitchcock, Ford and others. By exposing the Nazi agenda and diminishing its claims of superiority and strength, narrative dramas and comedies bolstered the Allied war effort. When FDR pressed Hollywood to express American values, Hollywood responded with, “Why We Fight,” a series of documentaries inspiring faith, courage, and an acute rationale for war by the allied nations and the price of failure if they lost.
80 years after the end of WWII, with an authoritarian resurgence in American politics and around the world, filmmakers may soon be approached to shoot PSAs or docs selling politically charged themes or directives. These projects are not mere films, they are tools of persausion and enablement. They are not art but propaganda.
In the streaming digital 24/7 modern age of filmmaking, the Camera is more powerful, more present, and more invasive than ever before. In social media’s barrage of fury and instant sound bites the best looking videos get noticed. High production values command the screen. They convey a sense of authority and authenticity through a crafted Hollywood aesthetic.
It takes artistry to create these films but artists must choose which messages they intend to deliver. With cinematic skill, cameras, lenses, editorial choices, scripts, and crew, filmmakers can wield great power. The Camera as Power Tool needs to be taken into consideration. Remember to handle with care.
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