New Book Examines the Role Propaganda Has Played in the History of British Cinema
“All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art.” The saying from 1984 and Animal Farm author George Orwell features in The Story of British Propaganda Film, a new book in the British Film Institute (BFI)’s British Screen Stories series at Bloomsbury Publishing written by Scott Anthony, the deputy head of research at the U.K. Science Museum Group, which consists of five British museums.
An archival project based on the BFI National Archive, the book shows how central propaganda is to the development of British film and how it has filtered people’s understanding of modern British history. While the term “propaganda film” was traditionally associated with war-time narratives, Anthony emphasized that it didn’t end after World War I and II.
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Instead, it became “a tool for packaging our cultural heritage, promoting tourism and transforming British culture,” a synopsis highlights. His argument: propaganda does not always have to be insincere or untrue. It can also highlight certain aspects of a culture and function as a tool of soft power.
Showing how the emergence of film as a global media phenomenon reshaped practices of propaganda, and new practices of propaganda in turn reshaped the use of film and other forms of moving images, the book dissects classic examples of cinematic propaganda, such as The Battle of the Somme (1916), Listen to Britain (1942) and Animal Farm (1954), before discussing such beloved movie franchises as James Bond, Harry Potter, and Paddington films and TV shows, along with such TV series as The Crown, digital media and more.
In the age of fake news, misinformation and disinformation, Anthony argues that “the response to the ubiquity of the propaganda film has often turned out to be the production of ever more propaganda,” taking us into what he calls “the era of total propaganda.”
The author, who has previously also published the mystery novel Changi, defines three periods or stages of British propaganda film. “The book describes how the propaganda film went from being a stand-alone object — think Triumph of the Will or Battleship Potemkin — to forming part of an expansive media environment,” Anthony tells THR.
That has also meant a change in scope and audience focus. In the history of British propaganda films, the WWII was the period that saw the greatest production of classic and iconic stand-alone propaganda films. “For example, there are lots of films made about the WWII or about The Blitz that say what the war or The Blitz means to the British people,” explains the expert. “But when you study it, many of the most iconic films — like Fires Were Started — were made a year and a half after The Blitz had finished. These films represented a very traumatic event that had happened, and played a role in shaping viewers’ responses to it, not necessarily in a nefarious way, but in a psychological processing sort of way. You can think about it as an attempt to channel people’s energy.” Such stand-alone films were screened in civic spaces, canteens, army venues, trade union halls as well as cinemas.
After the start of the Cold War, in a second phase, “propaganda becomes seen as something that that the other guys do, that only the Soviet Union and totalitarian societies do,” Anthony tells THR. “And yet there’s a realization that they still have to respond to that. So they started the production of films that try really hard not to look like propaganda.”
The ones that the expert focused on most are “ones essentially made for television, which operates in a much more private, closed space, or individualized space. A lot of these films are about individuals who resist conformity or are very skeptical or shake up an established profession. So they are at quite a subtle level,” Anthony explains. “I don’t mean they are insincere, but it’s a sort of propaganda of individualism in a sense. Part of it is the anti-Communist thing of ‘don’t be afraid to say no, don’t be afraid to be skeptical, the individual is the actual driving force of history,’ all this kind of stuff.”
Finally, the third period of propaganda film discussed in the final section of the book focuses on the post-War-on-Terror world. In the digital media age, Anthony notes that traditional definitions of “films” don’t capture the whole breadth and mass of propaganda content anymore. “You still get one-off propaganda films made, but a lot of things get made to be clipped or memed or shared,” the expert highlights. “Actually, as individual objects, a lot of the films are not that interesting, but they are often very, very ubiquitous and will turn up in news media or elsewhere.”
While in the first period of the British propaganda film, the films were rooted in shared experiences, for example of the war, now “digital expands our geographical range,” Anthony argues. “You’ve got lots of people who might be very individualized watching things on their phone rather than communally, but also watching things that they haven’t experienced or don’t know themselves. So there’s this kind of loop thing happening whereby lots of digital media refers to itself or refers to other digital media. So it’s more of a circular thing.”
Scott Anthony
So what does Anthony mean when he speaks of “the era of total propaganda”? “What I talk about in terms of total propaganda does not necessarily mean that everything is a lie,” he explains. “But I mean it in the sense that actually now it is about efforts going into shaping information architecture or the information environment rather than ‘I see this film about the British National Health Service NHS, and I’m inspired to believe in it and use it.’ Instead, it’s more about ‘let’s create this kind of culture which anchors everyone’ and that is all-encompassing in a way.”
At the same time, in this era of total propaganda, driven by the broader availability and affordability of media technology and tools that has opened content creation to more people, “there’s now an attempt to sort and shape who is what and a kind of credentialism and fact-checking: ‘This is the authentic one, not that one’,” Anthony notes.
That also fits in with a key finding of his research. “One thing I found was that propaganda isn’t always lying but can be quite sincere,” he tells THR. “I think of it as much more ubiquitous than I was expecting. But in some ways, the current trend is alarming because it’s moving away from the individual film and more toward shaping an environment.”
In earlier days, government agencies often played bigger roles in propaganda films across the board. For example, the animated film Animal Farm from 1954, directed by John Halas and Joy Batchelor based on the Orwell novella, was funded in part by the CIA, Anthony highlights.
But he also points out that British propaganda films were also often positioning the U.K. as a player different from the U.S. and the rest of Europe. “Part of the story of the rise of America is that WWI destroys old Europe and film becomes the emergent global technology. And many countries around Europe start to intervene in the cinema market, partly because they’re worried. The phrase that you always get is that cinemas are basically U.S. embassies and all our citizens are going to become like American citizens essentially,” Anthony explains. “Governments get involved in Europe because they are terrified that America’s going to dominate this new medium and shape their public. At the same time, a lot of those countries are becoming democratic for the first time.”
In Britain, the focus was on positioning “ourselves in the Anglosphere as slightly up-market,” the expert tells THR. “France can be a bit protectionist because it has the French language, but Britain doesn’t have the option of linguistic protectionism. So, therefore, you have to do something else. You have to try and find a different way to distinguish yourself.”
How do Harry Potter, Paddington and other franchises fit into the topic of Britain using its soft power in film form? After the Cold War, policymakers started questioning the need to fund filmmaking after the end of the world-defining conflict. What happened in Britain with the New Labour government of Tony Blair is the creation of the U.K. Film Council, which is tied to the belief that “we need to sell a global vision of Britain” and attract people to our culture and bring in tourists and smart foreigners and the like, Anthony explains. So promoting Britain, its culture and its creative output became more important.
This is also where 007 fits in for Anthony. “We’re funding films, and the films should support our global brand in the era of globalization,” he says. “As regards James Bond, I had this bit in the book because it strikes me that Britain is not a hard power country anymore. They’re not really a military power, but it still has a big reputation for spying. So people like [famous British computer scientist] Alan Turing and spies and deception are a fascination.”
Anthony’s book also mentions the appeal of the British royal family and such content related to that as The Crown. “The monarchy has had a huge role,” he tells THR. With the post-war focus on democracy and modernization, British film also reflects that. “You also get in Britain a re-modernizing of the monarchy and you actually see this dramatized in film, such as in The King’s Speech. So, the monarchy is a big part of how Britain sells itself overseas. And The Crown has a relationship to the film The Queen with the same writer (Peter Morgan) who kind of ran with that material. It’s essentially an up-market soap opera. It’s very entertaining, and I think it does serve a purpose in selling a vision of Britain abroad.”
Where will that go with King Charles III? “I think what will be interesting is how far it is actually the monarchy and how far it’s Queen Elizabeth II, because she had an incredible imprint,” offers Anthony.
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