Hollywood and World War II

Paper by Silverio F. da Silva. Viewed on DVD.

Someone said a long time ago that “A picture is worth a thousand words,” so what about a documentary film? How can a documentary create such a feeling to help us accept its voice, its concept of truth, and turn us into an allied supporting the position the documentary is presenting?

The documentaries of the 1930s tended to have more of a political focus. John Grierson primary concern was with education and instruction. He focused on informing people of what was hap-pening so they could be more aware and get more involved. Grierson was able to persuade the The British government to do films in 1930 like the Soviet government had done, to develop a sense of national identity with its own political agenda. The model of government sponsorship for documentary film spread to other countries, including the United States. Bill Nichols in his book, “Introduction to Documentary” explains, “These were films design to enter into the arena of social policy and to orient and predispose public opinion to preferred solutions. From slum clearance in Housing Problems to combat in Prelude to War, the first of the seven-part Why We Fight series, these films strove to orient the viewer toward a particular perspective on the world that called for national consensus on the values and beliefs advanced by the film” (221-222). In order to develop a sense on national identity, after Pearl Harbor, the War Department asked Hol-lywood directors to make short documentaries that could be presented in theaters before the fea-tured films to show Americans what was at stake, give them a glimpse of what our soldiers were going through and stir up patriotic feelings.

In the early 1940s, the United States government commissioned some of the best Holly-wood filmmakers to create propaganda in support of the war effort to educate soldiers about the war, build moral and to create similarities and differences among countries. Hollywood was re-sponsible for filming countless training movies for the Army and the war-production industry. The movies helped in familiarizing soldiers with foreign terrain, identifying aircrafts, and simu-lating aerial combat. An important factor ensuring America’s victory over the Axis Powers in World War II was the overwhelming support of the Home Front, and contributing much to creat-ing and maintaining that Home Front support were Hollywood films. Assistance came from all areas of Hollywood, as directors, actors, and workers joined together with the general public to strive for the common goal of victory, and more than just knowing about the historical events, Hollywood show us the mood of the nation and what it was like to have the lives of loved ones at risk. The historical significance of Hollywood in World War II is that it boosted American con-fidence while giving moral and financial support to the cause. Hollywood was a force in unify-ing Americans to strive for triumph and in doing so, it produce some of its most memorable works.

During the war, Walt Disney also made films for every branch of the U.S. government, producing training films, documentaries, and animated cartoons that assisted the war effort. The Disney animators worked closely with Hollywood film director Frank Capra in creating animat-ed maps to appear in the series Why We Fight (1942–1945) films. Capra’s Why We Fight, was a series of seven films to convince people to abandon their former isolationist beliefs. Many of these movies were used in newsreel production and shown prior to the featured presentation in the theaters. The films were informative, entertaining and appealing to society. Prelude to War (1941), was the first film of the series Why We Fight and used a multitude of archival footage, found footage, reenactments, graphs, animation, voice-over, etc. It functions as propaganda on an emotional, ethical, and demonstrative level. In another film, the images in John Ford’s The Battle of Midway (1942), provide a sense of immediacy through the use of 16mm camera with sound, and color film stock. This would influence ‘reality’ in documentaries of the 1960s when 16mm cameras with synchronous sound become widely available. Films like The Battle of Mid-way and Prelude to War are important films, and both Ford and Capra were major film directors winning multiple Academy Awards. Both films were well constructed and edited, and they pre-sent their case with clarity and power. Besides the use of maps and historical images to provide visible evidence, along with an emotional narration, the films were presented in a similar way to the New Deal documentaries like The River, where history is used in order to convince the audi-ence of the film’s position.

John Huston’s film Let There Be Light (1946), provides a different view of World War II and US soldiers compared to Prelude to War and The Battle of Midway. Huston wanted to show the effects of combat on American GIs. The documentary shows the war’s psychological effect on the young men who fought in it. Huston’s wish was to let America better understand the frag-ile emotional state of many returning vets. Despite its interest in seeing the story told, the army actually suppressed the film just prior to its release. The Pentagon claimed the film violated the privacy of the vets appearing in it, but the non-obtrusive camera unfolding the soldiers’s pains, psychological troubles, and emotions, didn’t support the government propaganda building moral among soldiers, on the contrary, they fear that it would damage troop morale. In another Hus-ton’s film, The Battle of San Pietro (1945), an infantry unit’s struggle to clear the Germans out of San Pietro, a small town northwest of Naples, and the surrounding countryside. The combat scenes were very powerful as it was the civilian misery but it was largely re-created. Besides some of the footage of the tanks approaching the town and being fired on, little else was filmed during the actual battle, including many of the photos of the “dead” and POWs. Huston was able to show us that “War is Hell” through his distinctive arrangement of sound and images. In his book Nichols writes “… John Huston could say, in written English, War is Hell or The ordinary soldier pays with his life for what generals decide” (100). Huston is supporting his evidence us-ing viewer-centered arguments through his arrangement of sound, image and official accounts of the struggle, interviews with soldiers who had fought in it, and he used maps and a pointer to keep the American tactics and the chronology straight.

In his book Five Came Back: A Story Of Hollywood And The Second World War, Mark Harris show us the relationship between the military and Hollywood, and the five directors who made movies for the War Department: John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler and Frank Capra.
‘In the months following Pearl Harbor, the war would reshape Hollywood from the top down, just as it reshaped the rest of America: Fully one third of the studios’ male work force—more than seven thousand men—would eventually either enlist or be drafted. But few would enter the war as these directors did, with the sense that in middle age, they suddenly found themselves with a new world to conquer, an assignment that would test their abilities to help win the hearts and minds of the American public under the hardest imaginable circumstances’ (Harris).
Except for Capra, all of them saw action, but they weren’t fighting, they were filming combat. Capra stayed in the US to help organize Hollywood’s war effort and the army’s propaganda. Capra’s use of Nazi propaganda in his Why We Fight film series was born out of necessity be-cause there was almost no budget for these movies. The Treasury Department had seized a lot of foreign propaganda movies and one of them was a print of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will (1935), a pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler propaganda. “The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never again escape from it,” wrote Joseph Goebbels in his diary. Following the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, Adolph Hitler established a Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propa-ganda with Goebbels as its head. Goebbels promoted the Nazi message through art, music, thea-ter, films, books, radio, and the press, and censored all opposition. Capra’s idea was to take some of these movies which incredibly were shown in German communities in New York, in local movie theaters to pro-German audience, and turned them against their makers by showing just how dangerous these people and their ideas were. Frank Tomasulo in, Documenting the Docu-mentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video writes, “Propaganda films such as Triumph Of The Will not only promote the mythic rebirth of their nations, they also celebrate the rebirth of myth itself. There is only one role for the individual or collective spectator of these spectacles; as acceptor of the foreordained meanings of their cultural myths” (115).

Triumph Of The Will was commissioned by Chancellor Adolf Hitler and was meant to be the official documentation of the Nazi Party Congress of 1934. The film utilized thirty film cameras and 120 technicians, actress and movie director named Leni Riefenstahl who produced an extraordinary film record of the festivities, featuring many unique camera angles and dramatic lighting effects. The film begins with a prologue, the only commentary in the film and opens with shots of the clouds above the city, and then moves through the clouds to float above the as-sembling masses below, with the intention of portraying beauty and majesty of the scene. The cruciform shadow of Hitler’s plane is visible as it passes over the tiny figures marching below, accompanied by an orchestral arrangement of the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the anthem of the nazi Par-ty. Upon arriving at the Nuremberg airport, Hitler and other Nazi leaders emerge from his plane to thunderous applause and a cheering crowd. A clever camera angle used by Riefenstahl in her film makes Hitler appear larger than life on the movie screen. One of the most enduring propa-ganda images of the Third Reich – the omnipotent Führer (with Himmler and Lutze) in front of 160,000 Germans arraigned in perfect geometrical formation. Hitler’s personal architect, de-signed the set in Nuremberg and did most of the coordination for the event. Pits were dug in front of the speakers’ platform so Riefenstahl could get the camera angles she wanted, and tracks were laid so that her cameramen could get traveling shots of the crowd. When rough cuts weren’t up to par, major party leaders and high-ranking public officials reenacted their speeches in a stu-dio for her Riefenstahl’s film next shows a lengthy sequence featuring the grand finale parade, and concludes with Hitler’s speech at the closing ceremony in which he labels the Rally “a most impressive display of political power.” Hitler goes on to declare the Nazi Party “will be un-changeable in its doctrine, hard as steel in its organization, supple and adaptable in its tactics. In its entity, however, it will be like a religious order…” The Rally was planned not only as a spec-tacular mass meeting, but as a spectacular propaganda film.

There’s a desire that propaganda can be understood by the viewer, although, the ability for audiences to determine between propaganda and the truth can be difficult to recognize. Rich-ard Taylor in his work entitled Film Propaganda, defines this visual influence as, “Film was the first universal mass medium in that it could simultaneously influence viewers as individuals and members of a crowd, which led to it quickly becoming a tool for governments and non-state or-ganizations to project a desired ideological message.” Such a message is heard in Prelude to War as Capra states in the beginning of the film, Prelude to War has its goals in giving factual information as to the causes, the events leading up to America’s entry into the war, and the prin-ciples for which they were fighting. Hollywood was a force in unifying Americans to strive for victory and its historical significance in World War II is captured in one of its most memorable moments in Prelude to War, when the narrator asks the fundamental question: “Why are we fighting?’ Is it because of Pearl Harbor? Or is it because of Britain? France? China? Czechoslo-vakia? Norway? Poland? Holland? Greece? Belgium? Albania? Yugoslavia? Or Russia?” Rein-forced by footages of the bombing of each country, we are convinced that there are more than enough reasons to fight.

Works Cited

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Kindle Edition ed. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press, 2001. Print.
Grant, Barry K, and Jeannette Sloniowski. Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Print.
Harris, Mark. Five Came Back: A Story Of Hollywood And The Second World War. New York. Penguin Press HC, 2014. Print