Abstract
Since the advent of film in the 1890s, it has been used for political or propaganda purposes. However, propaganda is a larger phenomenon than film propaganda; it also encompasses the written and spoken word, music, pictures, and as technology advances, propaganda’s reach likewise advances to include YouTube videos and Gifs. Propaganda can involve the moving image in all its complexity. Hence, as a broad social phenomenon, propaganda and the moving image reward philosophical contemplation, and it is important to have a rather broad conception of philosophy when subjecting the moving image to philosophical analysis because much of the scholarship about propaganda and the moving image occurs across several academic disciplines. The task here is to integrate a large body of scholarship in order to give an overview of how thinking about propaganda can enrich our understanding of film and how thinking about film (and the moving image more generally) can deepen our insights into propaganda’s machinations.
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Notes
- 1.
Stuart Ewen PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 102.
- 2.
Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1994), 82.
- 3.
Ewen, PR!, 104.
- 4.
Ewen, PR!, 104.
- 5.
Mark Benbow, “Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and Like Writing History with Lightening,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, vol. 9 No. 4, October 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20799409
- 6.
Robert Jackall, introduction to Propaganda (New York: New York University Press, 1995) 1.
- 7.
Jackall, Propaganda, 1.
- 8.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (New York: Penguin, 1952) 93.
- 9.
William Hummell and Keith Huntress, The Analysis of Propaganda (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Wilson, 1949) 2.
- 10.
Betrand Russell, Free Thought and Official Propaganda (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1953) 126.
- 11.
Alfred Lee, How to Understand Propaganda (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1953) 18.
- 12.
Dean W. Duncan, Landmarks of Early Film (Film Preservation Associates, 1994).
- 13.
Forsyth Hardy, Grierson on Documentary (New York: Praeger, 1971) 246.
- 14.
Hardy, Grierson on Documentary.
- 15.
Hardy, Grierson on Documentary.
- 16.
John P. Hess, “The History of Cutting: The Soviet Theory of Montage,” Filmmaker IQ (2014).
- 17.
Hess, Filmmaker IQ.
- 18.
Hess, Filmmaker IQ.
- 19.
Sergei Eisenstein, trans. Jay Leyda, The Film Sense (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1942).
- 20.
David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1993) 40–41.
- 21.
Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, 41.
- 22.
Harold Lasswell, “Propaganda” in Propaganda ed. By Robert Jackall (New York: New York University Press, 1995) 13.
- 23.
Leonard Doob, Public Opinion and Propaganda, 2nd ed. (Hamden, CT: Archon) 240.
- 24.
Randal Marlin Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (Toronto: Broadview Press 2002) 22.
- 25.
Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1991) 199.
- 26.
Pratkanis and Aronson, Age of Persuasion, 199.
- 27.
Pratkanis and Aronson, Age of Persuasion, 199.
- 28.
Pratkanis and Aronson, Age of Propaganda, 200.
- 29.
Pratkanis and Aronson, Age of Propaganda, 201.
- 30.
Institute for Propaganda Analysis, “How to Detect Propaganda” in Jackall, Propaganda 217–225.
- 31.
Jacques Driencourt, La Propagande Novelle Force Politique (Paris: Libraire Armand Colin, 1950) 18.
- 32.
Driencourt, La Propaganda Novelle Force Politique, 16.
- 33.
Driencourt, La Propaganda Novelle Force Politique, 16.
- 34.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Man’s Attitudes, (New York: Vintage, 1973) 12.
- 35.
Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, xviii.
- 36.
Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 61–84.
- 37.
Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 20.
- 38.
Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 64.
- 39.
Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 64.
- 40.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. By John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993) 112.
- 41.
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 112.
- 42.
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 112.
- 43.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) 15.
- 44.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1990) 47.
- 45.
Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 14.
- 46.
Walter Lippman, The Phantom Public (New York: The Macmillan Company 1927), 47–48.
- 47.
Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1928), 31.
- 48.
Walter Lippman, The Phantom Public, 47–48.
- 49.
Walter Lippman, The Phantom Public, 47–48.
- 50.
The propaganda value of Live Aid is discussed in Luis Velasco Pufleau, “Reflections on Music and Propaganda” Contemporary Aesthetics Vol 12, 2014.
- 51.
Ewen, PR! The Social History of Spin, 3–17.
- 52.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books 1988) 2.
- 53.
Herman and Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: 2.
- 54.
Herman and Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: 2.
- 55.
Herman and Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: 292.
- 56.
Steven D. Classen Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955–1969 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
- 57.
Herman and Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: 22.
- 58.
Sinclair Broadcast Group Website: http://sbgi.net/
- 59.
Broadcast Group Website: http://sbgi.net/
- 60.
Josh Sawsy and Hadas Gold, “Kushner: We Struck Deal with Sinclair for Straighter Coverage,” Politico 12/16/2016.
- 61.
John Oliver, “Sinclair Broadcast Group” Last Week Tonight, HBO 7/2/2017.
- 62.
Dylan Matthew, “Everything You Need to Know About The Fairness Doctrine in One Post,” Washington Post, 8/23/2011.
- 63.
FEC vs. Citizen’s United, http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission/
- 64.
Library of Congress, “UK Campaign Finance Law” U.S. https://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-finance/uk.php
- 65.
Library of Congress, “French Campaign Finance Law” https://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-finance/france.php
- 66.
Garth Jowett and Victorial O’Donnell, “How to Analyze Propaganda” in Propaganda and Persuasion (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012) 269.
- 67.
Jowett and O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 270.
- 68.
Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) 53.
- 69.
Sheryl Tuttle Ross, “Understanding Propaganda: The Epistemic Merit Model and Its Application to Art” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2002, 16–30, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333623, https://doi.org/10.2307/3333623
- 70.
Sheryl Tuttle Ross, “The Propaganda Power of Protest Songs: the Case of Madison’s Solidarity Sing Along,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 11, 2013, http://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=667
- 71.
Sheryl Tuttle Ross, “Art Propaganda: The Many Lives of Picasso’s Guernica,” Biblos, Vol. 11 2013 455–474, https://digitalis-dsp.uc.pt/bitstream/10316.2/35517/1/BIBLOS%20XI_cap20.pdf
- 72.
Tuttle Ross, “Understanding Propaganda” 20 The idea of “Epistemic Defectiveness” was first introduced in Noël Carroll’s “Film, Rhetoric and Ideology” in Theorizing the Moving Image (1997).
- 73.
Tuttle Ross, “Understanding Propaganda” 20.
- 74.
Tuttle Ross, “Understanding Propaganda” 20.
- 75.
Paul Grice, Studies in the Ways of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) 213–215.
- 76.
J.L Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).
- 77.
Barack Obama, Yes, We Can! https://youtu.be/jjXyqcx-mYY
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Ross, S.T. (2019). Propaganda and the Moving Image. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_32
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