#002 Art and War: Propaganda, Resistance and Expression in Conflict
Another late one from Lazy Man. Turn off your reading light and try this instead.
Triumph of Manipulation: How the Nazis Used Film to Promote Propaganda
by Liam Turner
Propaganda, which aims to manipulate our emotions, actions, and beliefs, can be found in various forms of media and art. It often serves to promote harmful ideologies, such as the glorification of authoritarian regimes or the dehumanisation of specific groups. Film has been a particularly powerful tool for spreading propaganda.
What is thought to be the first propaganda ‘film’ personifies the crafty and deceptive nature of political spin. While only 39 seconds long, “Tearing Down the Spanish Flag” gives an insight into the true nature of propaganda. This short clip initially shows the Spanish flag flying proudly in front of the Morro Castle in Cuba, only for it to be pulled down and replaced by the stars and stripes of the American flag, indicating American victory over the Spanish in Cuba. While this may seem like a somewhat inconsequential historical clip, by scratching beneath the surface, one can reveal some themes that have become commonplace in state propaganda for years to come.
Propaganda films portray a carefully curated image to the audience. The only important information the audience receives is what is contained within the borders of the frame. That sounds pretty obvious, but bear with me. Duplicitous shots are designed to give the audience a sense of jubilant and unquestionable victory for a particular ideology, without any context whatsoever. Audiences are not shown the real costs of war but rather exposed to a carefully assembled image of their side winning. By controlling the narrative, propaganda films are able to control the audience’s emotional response and constantly reinforce a state-approved message until the audience believes it.
The lack of context is clear to see in the Tearing Down of the Spanish Flag. The 39-second clip is used to symbolise American victory over Spain, providing the audience with a euphoric sense of triumph over their enemy without any appreciation for the historical context, or bloodshed it took. The so-called director of the 39-second movie, Stuart Blackton, claimed the footage was shot on the battlefield in real time, but it’s quite clear to see this is cap. Years later, it was confirmed that this was actually shot in a New York film studio. Again, while this may seem like an inconsequential lie, it helps to legitimise the American victory over the Spanish in the eyes of the public. The Tearing Down of the Spanish Flag would become the first of many state propaganda films. The influence is crazy.
Hitler and the National Socialist Party in Germany were particularly aware of the power of propaganda, subsequently making it a very high priority in their political strategy. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of it, their chance for state control of media output would come in 1933, when the home of the German parliament, the Reichstag, burned down. Utilising fear-mongering tactics, the Nazis were able to push through a new legal framework that allowed them to pass laws without the approval of either house of parliament. This was known as the Enabling Act, helping Hitler get his fingers into the minds of the German people. With their newly gained control, the Nazi party dropped a bag to buy up the German film industry, gaining creative control of filmmaking and turning it into a state-run enterprise. The infamous Joseph Goebbels was appointed to implement film propaganda production. To put this into modern-day terms, it’s like giving Suella Braverman tax money to make a film about Rwanda as a holiday destination. Rwanda: Where Your Journey Ends (literally).
Perhaps the most well-known Nazi propaganda film is ‘Triumph of the Will’. The film draws unambiguous parallels between the Nazi regime and religion, painting Hitler as godlike and their cause as divine in the eyes of God. The opening scene in the film embodies this idea. Aerial shots of pure white clouds give way to Nazi flags draped over the St. Lorenz Cathedral, and shortly after, Hitler emerges as if descending from heaven. The film is littered with low shots of Hitler towering over the masses, God-like in his unchallenged authority. Soldiers are promised immortality in exchange for sacrificing their lives for the regime. Of course, religion is not the only key theme of the film. The message that is continually hammered home is one of obedience and authority. Loyalty to Hitler is pictured as the key component to military supremacy and, in the end, victory against the enemy. Victory is implied as being inevitable, not only due to their ‘racial superiority graced by God’, but also due to the unity of the German people in their submission to the Fuhrer. The film ends with a line that perfectly encapsulates the aim of the carefully crafted piece of propaganda: “Hitler is Germany; Germany is Hitler.”
At its core, this film is no different from The Tearing Down of the Spanish Flag. Despite writer Leni Riefenstahl insisting the film is based on true events, the story was staged and orchestrated. The writer had bridges and ramps built throughout the city to magnify the effects of the god-like shots of Hitler. The film carefully pulled the ideology from its context, choosing to ignore the racist and hateful policies of the Nazis and the violent behaviour that enabled Hitler to gain control of the country. The Triumph of the Will falls short of being the revolutionary piece of art it aimed to be, yet it remains a testament to the impact of raw emotional appeals.
Propaganda can be a dangerous thing. With its true aims operating in the covert, it’s often difficult not only to identify a piece of state propaganda but also to understand its purpose, highlighting the necessity for objective, independent, and strong media coverage. If you ever find yourself feeling scared or worried about something a political party tells you, ask yourself what information or context has been purposefully omitted, and consider who benefits from the emotional response it provokes in you.
The Art of Resistance: Chile, Palestine, and ‘Museum-in-Exile’
by Tom Mancini
Earlier this year, Lazy Man Newsletter visited Palais De Tokyo, a contemporary art museum on the banks of the Seine.
After pottering around the Louvre and a taste of L'entrecôte, we entered the space with little expectation. It was shelter from the cold that crept as the sun set.
We paid for our tickets and wandered down the stairs to a large exhibition chamber. Hanging from the ceiling opposite were posters decorated in script from every corner of the Earth: Latin, Abjad, Cyrillic. This wasn't your usual white cube.
Unlike the Louvre, this art hadn't been commissioned by some 16th century royal or gifted by one of history's 'Great Men'. There were no effigies, no oil on canvas – it wasn't placed behind glass, wire or string.
As we’d come to learn, the art belonged to a collection called 'museum-in-exile', donated 'to demonstrate support for a movement of national liberation, or a struggle for justice and equality'.
This was posters, newspapers and pamphlets, art 'donated in the name of peoples, not governments'. Arranged in a display entitled 'Past Disquiet', it sought to represent the power of art in resistance, from Chile to South Africa, Nicaragua to Palestine.
There was no structure. You'd read a poster from Vietnam alongside a pamphlet from the Democratic Republic of Congo. While the histories of these nations are different and their stories innumerable, 'Past Disquiet' removed the labels, and mapped a shared resistance from East to West. People fighting a different version of the same enemy.
This isn't art with a capital 'A' – the pretentious stuff you expect to see in Paris. It was clear and defiant; designed to grab your attention, to show solidarity, and lead to change.
When I first made it to the exhibition, I found myself reading about the resistance in Chile. Having read Roberto Bolaño's 'Distant Star' and listened to the usual podcasts, it piqued my interest.
General Augusto Pinochet, who had overthrown elected leader Salvador Allende in 1973, was known for his ruthless persecution of opponents, especially those in the arts and academia. To quote Bolaño, 'but everyone blinks in the end, even writers, especially writers'. Disappearing rivals was totally commonplace, a fact of the junta.
The Rettig and Valech reports of 1991 and 2004 approximate that there were around 30,000 victims of human rights abuses between 1973 and 1990. 40,018 were tortured, 2,279 executed.
In the face of such violence, protestors rallied, with murals erected across the globe condemning Pinochet's regime. The pieces at Palais De Tokyo expressed the collective courage of the exiled, preaching 'viva libertad' wherever they had landed.
By 1988, the Chilean people had begun to mobilise, and by 1990, they had ousted the dictator via non-violent protest and activism. Theirs was a silent war, immortalised by the visuals created against the regime.
The left of the exhibit was dedicated to Palestine. The back wall was covered with posters in solidarity.
It's important to note the dates on these posters. Some from the '50s, the '70s – a harrowing reminder that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine didn’t begin in the 21st century. This has been nearly a century of apartheid, wherein Palestinians have been routinely relocated and bombed in their homes.
In the past 6 months alone over 35,000 Palestinians, including 15,000 children, have been killed.
15 per hour, 6 of whom are children.
It’s a horror art can’t express.
Yet Palestinians continue to document the conflict, sharing with the world the reality of living under occupation.
Amongst the prints and drawings honouring the Palestinian people sat a 24-page book called 'Home' by Zakaria Tamer and illustrated by Mohiedden El-Labbad. I call it a book – it's more like a folded pamphlet, around 10 by 10 centimetres. It was written with the aim to teach children about belonging in the face of displacement.
To recite a couple of pages:
'The Palestinian has no home. The tents and huts he lives in are not his home.
Where is the home of the Palestinian? The home of the Palestinian is in Palestine.
The Palestinian does not live in his home now.'
This was written in 1974.
50 years on, it remains a stark reminder of the displacement of the Palestinian people; the violence they have faced in successive military operations enacted by the Israeli government.
Despite the terrors of its subject, ‘Past Disquiet’ (and the ‘wider museum-in-exile’ collection) highlights the ability to galvanise in the face of struggle, to stand up to the tyrannical and totalitarian.
It’s a belief that we must tap if we’re to see real change.
The First World War and the Transformation of British Art
by Harry Meadows
The First World War is well-trodden territory for most people. We all go through it at school. Young lad shoots a posh bloke and ten million people have to die on the fields of Europe. What’s more interesting than the dick swinging between cousins is the cultural impact of those whose job it became to document the war and their role in shaping public attitudes towards conflict.
When you consider that the First World War was the first ‘total war’, it is probably unsurprising that it led to such drastic changes in the way we engage with conflict. This is a type of warfare that channels all of a society’s resources in to the war effort, giving priority to the war over non-combatant needs and legitimising all civilian infrastructure as military targets. The war effort saturated daily life, meaning public engagement with the conflict was on an unprecedented and unavoidable scale.
Anything seen as surplus to the war effort was pushed to the side and its resources diverted. With the arts suffering as a result, Robert Baden Powell, of boy scout fame, published My Adventures as a Spy in 1915, in which he describes how artists were able to encode military intelligence in to seemingly innocuous imagery. When the arts in Britain needed a kick up the arse, they instead got a kick in the bollocks. That same year, a paranoid government introduced the Defence of The Realm Act (DORA), leading to a spate of arrests for artists who were deemed to be contravening the wording of the bill…
‘No person shall without the permission of the competent naval or military authority make any photograph, sketch, plan, model, or other representation of any naval or military work, or of any dock or harbour, or with intent to assist the enemy, of any other place or thing’.
Like the rest of society, artists had to mobilise. And that they did. In an attempt to demonstrate its use in generating funds for the war effort, The Royal Academy staged The War Relief Exhibition. By the end of the war, British artists had raised around £400,000 – around £19,000,000 in today’s money.
With all this going on in 1915, Scottish artist, Muirhead Bone, had sketched an image of Piccadilly Circus at Night that caught the attention of Queen Mary. Depicting mounted troops beneath raking searchlights in the sky in an apocalyptic scene. Its cinematic style also impressed somebody in government, because the following year he was sent to the Western Front as Britain’s first official war artist.
Trained as an architect, much of his work reflected the architecture and industry of war in bleak sketches. Of his images from the front line, historian Dr. Patricia Andrew said that
‘they’re not the best examples of his work … he's struggling to make some sort of individuality in pictures that are just mud, trees that are shattered, houses that are shattered, the odd chateau that is shattered. It's a bit samey.’