1.) Introduction

Media can mobilize emotions in order to subordinate them to the political goals of state power. Nowhere is this statement more unquestionable and self-evident than in the representation of war by audiovisual media. It is widely assumed that war and propaganda films can move individuals to change their political convictions, to neglect their material interests, even to give up their basic impulses at self-preservation. But how does it work? 

How do media experiences convey affective attitudes that shape individual patterns of perception and judgment? In fact, history knows a host of instances - from the First World War to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan - that attest to the propagandistic persuasive power of audiovisual images. But as much as we may know about the intentions and effects of media politics, we know very little about the way media access the patterns of affectivity and meaning-making of individual beings. 

Like almost no other genre the Hollywood War Film is marked, in the general understanding, by its explicit intention to mobilize the emotions of spectators in the service of ideology and a ‘greater good‘. Jeanine Basinger, in her thorough study of the stereotypical narrative situations of the genre, summarizes that war films convey particular evaluative attitudes to the historical events of war. She adds:

The tools of the cinema are employed to manipulate viewers into various emotional, cultural, and intellectual attitudes, and to help achieve all the other goals. (Basinger 2003: 57)

My questions are focused above all on these ‘tools of manipulation’. However, we consider the term manipulation to be insufficient. Indeed, it is not a matter of manipulating the emotions and attitudes that every individual spectator brings forth as his or her biological and intelligible essence. Rather, it is a question of cultural practices in which a feeling of belonging to a community is created and formed in the first place. We assume that feelings of community cannot be observed and understood outside these cultural practices that are defined through the goal of bringing forth and mobilizing precisely such a feeling. 

The Hollywood war film genre is a striking example of such a cultural practice. It aims to produce and modulate an affective relationship to the political community and its history. It seeks to mobilize a feeling of belonging to a political community shared by many individuals. That is, it seeks to mobilize a sense of community or a sense of commonality. 

But how can we understand this idea of a 'sense of community' more concretely, and related to the media production of war? This sense of community is not to be found on a level of represented facts or emotions; it is not a matter of contents. Rather, it structures the emotional evaluative attitudes and stances toward the moral-political issues and historical information communicated by the films.

We situate our use of the term within the theoretical discourse of the terms community, sense of community and sensus communis in political philosophy, and especially within the strand that relates (a theory of) the political to categories of aesthetic experience. Alongside Jacques Rancière‘s concept of a “Politics of Aesthetics” (2004) and other well-known considerations within these debates (e.g. Cavell 2004), two positions form the bottom line for our understanding, namely those of Richard Rorty and Hannah Arendt. We now want to refer to them very briefly.  

Richard Rorty (1998) attempts to conceive the sense of community as a dynamic element of a society in an open historical process, which must always configure itself anew as a community. In pluralistic, democratic societies, the sense of community cannot rely on genealogically derived formations of community. It is rather based upon agreements in emotional and moral judgment that cannot be justified apart from the fact that they constitute commonly shared values. The sense of community has to be produced as the affective agreement to commonly shared values in concrete cultural practices. 

In an earlier, very different context, Hannah Arendt developed a theory of the political that explicitly connects the sense of community with the mode of aesthetic experience. In her reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment (Arendt 1992), a spontaneous “feeling of belonging to the world” can be grasped in the aesthetic judgment of taste, an "extra sense [...] that inserts us into a community” (ibid.: 70; see also Arendt 1958 and Arendt 1963). If I experience something as beautiful, then I put my feeling in relation to others who experience the world of appearances in the same way. And if I judge an action as bad, then this judgment is based on the significant feeling of sharing my sensation with all those who belong, as I do, to the human community. 

From this perspective, the sense of community is closely associated with the modes of aesthetic experience. This association denominates the level of connection between a sense of community and the specific individual‘s embodied feelings of selfhood. And it is this interweaving of the subjective reality of a concrete sensation of the self with a feeling for the political community that designates the junction at which Hollywood cinema is connected to the political-historical events of war. The central question here is how historical experiences and the cultural phantasms of war are joined with the spectators’ affective sensations in the aesthetic pleasure of genre cinema. Hence, war films do not only provide a historical specification of the depicted events but, more importantly, of their spectators as well. They address a highly contingent and shifting sense of community.

Riefenstahl’s film has a clear division.

An epilogue shows a group of young men stripped to the waist at their morning wash. We see laughing faces, youthful bodies, the joy of morning.

Following this we see the soldiers’ deployment, marching into a stadium; they march past the audience and the tribune of generals. The soldiers fall into the strict order of the Führer’s review. This is followed by a speech by Hitler to the newly recruited soldiers. In ornamental tirades, he continually varies the same metaphor. The young men can and should trade in their debased physical existences for their participation in a body that is equally abstract and heroic–the newly established corpus of the German man, the armed forces of the fathers. What then follows are the steps of just this transition, staged as the fusion of human material with technological material.

^{Clip 2: DAY OF FREEDOM: OUR ARMED FORCES [TAG DER FREIHEIT: UNSERE WEHRMACHT] (Leni Riefenstahl G 1935), 00:06:38–00:12:49, censored film version).}

Once again we see soldiers – faceless beneath their helmets – marching past the grandstand. This proves to be the opening of a maneuver: infantrymen throwing themselves onto the ground and shooting. Then, in a more or less strict escalation by the rules of a child‘s outdoing play, we see soldiers on motorcycles, in cars with cannons attached, then light track vehicles, armored cars, and finally tanks. The attentive gaze into the heavens by the Nazi elite announces the final stage: the air force (Luftwaffe).

Capra develops the montage of materials from newsreels, documentaries, and the opponent’s propaganda into a deconstructive process that could be compared with the strategies of the found-footage film. Some of the episodes can be considered to be cinematographic analyses of the fascist rituals of community building. In the following, we will concentrate on the first episode of the WHY WE FIGHT series, PRELUDE TO WAR. The film opens with the question: “Why are we on the march? What put us in the uniform?” 

^{Clip 3: WHY WE FIGHT: PRELUDE TO WAR (Frank Capra, US 1942), 00:01:29–00:03:58.}

First and foremost, these questions directly address the troops: the soldiers in the training camps and on their way in ships and planes that will take them to the most remote parts of the globe. Even if they seem to have a purely rhetorical function, an answer can only be given and fully understood as the film has run its course to completion. At first the questions are associated with the image of marching American soldiers, bright uniforms, music, casual marching, and individual faces.

Then, in a sharply polemical tone, the film scans over possible answers. The theater of war around the world is called up. The recognizable images from newsreels trace out a mental movement for the audience, which is pursued and structured by the off-screen voice: "Is it because of Pearl Harbor…?! Because of Poland, China, Russia? Any way you look at it, it involves the whole world."

The montage thus formulates a stream of associations in which weapons technology – images of cannons, tanks, airplanes – is time and again placed in relation to images of destruction: detonating buildings and exploding landscapes, burning ships, scattering masses of people. Reinforced in the thundering of the noise of battle, the staging of the powers of weapons technology is related to its opposite: to images of wounded human bodies, killed and injured children, horrified, desperate women, oppressed men – rows of corpses.

The staccato of the raging accusations is carried by a montage of found footage, which is condensed into an affect-laden formula of pathos – a well composed expressive movement image. Its principles of composition can be summarized according to four aspects.

Comparable to a musical composition, the perceptual process of the spectators is organized as a structured sequence of dynamically contrasting sensations. Every aspect, every single moment of the spectators' perceptual experience is a transitory phase within this expressive movement, as it unfolds in time. And this continually unfolding expressive movement is, at each moment of its unfolding, connected and interwoven with the recognition of iconic images, of motifs, the realization of the speech‘s semantic meaning, the grasping of audiovisual formulas.

Hence, what emerges is the precious commodity that every propaganda film seeks to create: the impression that one can see, feel, and understand the world spoken of here in one and the same stroke; what emerges is evidence for the senses. The evidence that the world of which I am being told is visible there on the screen, and that everything that is visible there can be unlocked and evaluated directly as an affective experience. It is this aesthetic evidence that gives the off-screen voice its power. In view of this process, Capra’s film does not in fact differ from that of Leni Riefenstahl. But what is added into the cinematographic image here is precisely that perspective that is cut out in Riefenstahl‘s film: The physical vulnerability of individual bodies forms the opposite pole to the destructive power of weapons technology.

These two poles are depicted in Riefenstahl‘s film in a unidirectional process of a force that is continously enhanced. But here it becomes the experience of a clash of two very different, very mismatched forces. It is just this principle of the montage of different perspectives that also determines the entire construction of the film. Attempting over and again to find an answer to the film’s opening question, “What put us in the uniform?”, Capra‘s film introduces different cinematic modes of staging from sequence to sequence.

A few iconographic shots recall the founding acts and fathers of America: paintings, memorials, architecture that represent its democratic institutions. Even in its most impressive appearances, the powers of the state are not an end but a means to uphold the freedom of the political realm. The following sequences show this idea to be diametrically opposed to the enemy‘s idea of the state.

In line with this logic, the opening sequence takes up a good ten minutes, which are almost exclusively concerned with the ‘world of slaves', with Italy, Germany, and Japan. The parallel montage of the appearances of the Duce, the Tenno, and the Führer shows us the masses themselves as a faceless body, responding to the ruler’s theatrical speeches with the same ritual of submission. The triumph of the will of the leaders is completed in the celebration of an ecstatic experience of community. The sequences that follow spell out how this experience of community destroys the fundamental values of freedom.

Then the film once again turns to its own social life, turns once again to America. And again, what is negotiated here is the categorical difference between politics on the one side and the terror of the totalitarian state on the other side. At every stage the American ideal of community is opposed to the fascist one. In place of the freedom of religion we see the glorification of the leader; in place of political difference of opinion we see the beauty of staging state power; in place of politics we see terror; and in place of the ordinary life we see the militarization of social life.

4.) Conclusion

The fact that the American way of life is idealized will not have been overlooked, even in wartime. But this is not the question. The question is what ideal of community is offered here in contrast to the fascist one – and which means are used to achieve this. Capra here makes use of a genre that he was the undisputed master of at the time. He proclaims America’s way of life in the sentimental pathos of a family melodrama. 

He opposes the values of the everyday lives of ordinary people and their personal pursuit of happiness to the heroic pathos of war society. This sentimental pathos marks the fundamental difference between Prelude to War and Day of Freedom. This difference forms the basis for Capra’s strategy of decomposing the opponent’s propaganda.

In fact, Capra’s cinematographic analyses precisely seem to capture the idea of community that the pathos of Riefenstahl’s films is based on. In continually new variations, they show how state power is founded on the ritual negation of the individual. They show the formation of the masses into an ornamental representation of the power of their leader. They show the obliteration of the ordinary individual in favor of the military community. Finally they show the war itself as the mode of fascist community building. 

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah: Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Chicago 1992.

Arendt, Hannah: On Revolution, New York 1963.

Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition, Chicago 1958. 

Basinger, Jeanine: The World War II Combat Film. Anatomy of a Genre, Middletown 2003.

Cavell, Stanley: Cities of Words. Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Cambridge 2004.

Rancière, Jacques: The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible, London / New York 2004.

Rorty, Richard: Achieving Our Country. Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Cambridge 1998.

Filmography

DAY OF FREEDOM: OUR ARMED FORCES [TAG DER FREIHEIT: UNSERE WEHRMACHT]. Leni Riefenstahl, G 1935.

WHY WE FIGHT: PRELUDE TO WAR. Frank Capra, US 1942.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/mae.2016.42