The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality?

In the years before television, it was widely assumed that the cinema could exercise enormous influence over the mass audience. Governments and revolutionary intellectuals, party politicians and individual filmmakers, all believed that film offered a uniquely effective means of manipulating the ideology of the masses and thus, notwithstanding their very different ideological objectives, films as different as "The Battleship Potemkin", "Triumph of the Will", and "In Which We Serve" were all the product of the same assumptions about the immense power of film as a medium of political propaganda. In this book, the author re-examines these assumptions. Drawing on recent historical scholarship, he explores five different case studies to see whether or not propaganda films reached the audiences at which they were targeted at and, where they did, whether the films made the impact on those audiences that the propagandists had expected.