The World War II era might be considered the “golden age” of propaganda films. While silent films (such as the 1915 US film Birth of a Nation and the 1925 Russian film Battleship Potemkin) could be effective in advancing reactionary or revolutionary agendas, sound-on-film could be more effectively used to play on emotions and deceive audiences.
An excellent podcast, Service on Celluloid, is available from the National WWII Museum.
Overview of Propaganda films, especially Triumph of the Will, from One Hundred Years of Cinema
NAZi propaganda
The Nazis of 1930s Germany pioneered propaganda films with an intensity unmatched in history. A complete list of these films is here on Wikipedia.
Perhaps the most important is Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, made to glorify the Nazi Party in 1935 and celebrate Germany’s return to power after its defeat in World War I. Using long tracking shots, triumphal music and masterful montage, the film depicted the 1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremburg. Given theNazi control of all German media at the time, Triumph of the Will was more or less the only image German people had of the Nazi party, and helped Hitler to consolidate power in the years beforeWorld War II.
Riefenstahl later claimed that she had no choice in making the film, and that she had no knowledge of Nazi concentration camps. She also claimed that artists should not be held responsible for the political problems their art causes. She spent several years in detention after the war but was never convicted of war crimes. Even so, there are many who do not like her.
“Leni Riefenstahl is a monster,” the New Republic said in reviewing a documentary about her life. We can admire her work, the magazine said, in the same way that we admire Soviet masterworks of film “for their art despite the heavy irony of their now blood-drenched enthusiasm.”
Even more monstrous was the 1940 Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, a violently anti-Semitic pseudo-documentary that provoked racial hatred in Germany with its comparisons of Jews to rats and other vermin. The film was directed by Fritz Hippler and produced by Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.. Hippler was a proponent of film as propaganda:
“If one compares the directness and intensity of the effect that the various means of propaganda have on the great masses, film is without question the most powerful” (Hippler, 1937). But months before his death in 2002, he said: “If it were possible to annul everything (about the film) I would. Terrible things happened and I had many sleepless nights because of this.”
Hippler served two years in jail after his trial at Nuremberg in 1946 for contributing to crimes against humanity. By depicting Jewish people as sub-human, Hippler made the genocide of the Holocaust possible. Similar dehumanization paved the way for genocide in Serbia and Rwanda in the 1990s.
Allied films and counter-propaganda
Counter propaganda involved both comedy and serious documentary work in the US and Britain during the time around World War II. A nearly full list is found here on Wikipedia.
British intelligence used film editing techniques to make the Nazis seem small and ridiculous, for example, in “General Adolph Takes Over.” It uses an old Vaudeville musical number, the Lambeth Walk, to good effect. Although it may seem mild today, the film gave Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels a screaming fit. There were also surprise showings in theaters in occupied countries.
Several anti-Nazi films made in America stand out. A 1940 film by the Three Stooges was one of the first to lampoon the Nazis.
In 1940, Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Great Dictator” used biting sarcasm and hilarious slapstick to attack the cruelty of the Nazi regime. At one point, dictator Adenoid Hinkle of Tomania carelessly tosses a balloon globe into the air, only to have it pop at the end.
Hinkle gives a speech in fractured German. Hilarious.
But later in the film, Hinkle’s look-alike, a Jewish barber, is mistaken as the dictator and gives a radio speech that reverses fascist ideology. “We are coming out of the darkness into the light,” Chaplin’s character says at the end of the film. “We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality.”
Chaplin’s moral courage in satirizing Hitler and defending Jewish people should not be underestimated. Few people in 1940 would
have predicted the end of Nazi rule only five years later. Asked around that time whether (as the Nazis claimed) he was Jewish himself, Chaplin said, “I do not have that honor.”
US counter-propaganda
Prelude to War was the first film of famed Hollywood film director Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series. It was originally intended to explain the war to the troops, but after President Roosevelt saw it, the film was released to the public and shown in theaters across the country in 1942. The propaganda techniques were rather obvious, but that was seen as one of the film’s virtues — that it was taking a direct approach. Disney collaborated on the animations.
Other serious war films in the US include “Winning Your Wings” starring Jimmy Stewart, who left Hollywood for the front lines in 1942, and “Training Women for War Production,” narrated by Elenor Roosevelt.
Among the most prominent war-themed films at the time was Mrs. Miniver (Trailer here) (1942), Casablanca (1942), and Lifeboat (1944).