At war with propaganda
"They called them 'Prince of War' cages [and] made the Hitler salute when they left. They couldn't help it - it'd been bred into them. Propaganda had been part of their lives, their whole lives, when you're sixteen, you know?" Hallie Sloan, a veteran Canadian nurse of the Second World War recalls some Hitler Youth POWs. "They were kids. It was tragic!"
By the Second World War, photographic technologies' ongoing evolution radically altered war photography's development as a sophisticated propaganda tool on all sides. "Action shots" replaced the portraits that dominated American Civil War photography, the first war to be substantially photographed. Joe Rosenthal's timeless image of six American marines raising the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima became one of the most reproduced of all time.
Close to both Goebbels and Hitler, the controversial (and brilliant) filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl received carte blanche to create what is widely acknowledged as the greatest example of filmic propaganda ever made--The Triumph of the Will. Shot around the sixth Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg in 1934, Riefenstahl's film exudes what today we recognise as obvious propaganda techniques—dramatic lighting and music, low angles, using lenses and camera movements exaggerating relationships between people and their environment.
Riefenstahl continues to claim ignorance of Nazi war crimes despite having used concentration camp inmates as extras in another film and remaining close to the Nazi elite well into the 1940s.
A favoured device of Vietnam War TV coverage—reporters doing stand-ups with "war" in the background—takes a back seat today. During the Gulf War, the ultimate image came direct from missiles dropped on Iraq. Recording the moments before annihilation in extreme close-up, these images possess the significant PR advantage of blipping out just before impact—obliterating the images of bombed people at the same time as killing them. The "surgical strike" creates sanitised imagery, devoid of blood, guts, agony, and most significantly, all wars' ultimate object—death.
By comparison, the Gulf War's grand exception, the incubator story, mushrooms out like a detonating atom bomb. Hired by the Kuwaiti government to sell the war to the US public, the US PR giant Hill & Knowlton launched a multi-million dollar campaign cooking up a story about Iraqi soldiers unplugging incubators in Kuwait City hospitals. The crux was "documentary" video footage of the unplugging. We were all convinced. The contrast between this imagery and Riefenstahl's Triumph couldn't be starker. The side-affect of our belief in gritty realism makes us vulnerable to new kinds of manipulation.
Ironically, the Pentagon's child, the Internet has become the place to find "frontline" information. Sloan recalls wartime articles, newsreels and radio reports, wondering, "How much of that was propaganda...?" The Net offers a truth or a series of truths to sift through—first person accounts and images of war, sometimes unfolding, sometimes, only when its all over—free of government and media monopolies' manipulations... for now.
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 1999
By the Second World War, photographic technologies' ongoing evolution radically altered war photography's development as a sophisticated propaganda tool on all sides. "Action shots" replaced the portraits that dominated American Civil War photography, the first war to be substantially photographed. Joe Rosenthal's timeless image of six American marines raising the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima became one of the most reproduced of all time.
Close to both Goebbels and Hitler, the controversial (and brilliant) filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl received carte blanche to create what is widely acknowledged as the greatest example of filmic propaganda ever made--The Triumph of the Will. Shot around the sixth Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg in 1934, Riefenstahl's film exudes what today we recognise as obvious propaganda techniques—dramatic lighting and music, low angles, using lenses and camera movements exaggerating relationships between people and their environment.
Riefenstahl continues to claim ignorance of Nazi war crimes despite having used concentration camp inmates as extras in another film and remaining close to the Nazi elite well into the 1940s.
A favoured device of Vietnam War TV coverage—reporters doing stand-ups with "war" in the background—takes a back seat today. During the Gulf War, the ultimate image came direct from missiles dropped on Iraq. Recording the moments before annihilation in extreme close-up, these images possess the significant PR advantage of blipping out just before impact—obliterating the images of bombed people at the same time as killing them. The "surgical strike" creates sanitised imagery, devoid of blood, guts, agony, and most significantly, all wars' ultimate object—death.
By comparison, the Gulf War's grand exception, the incubator story, mushrooms out like a detonating atom bomb. Hired by the Kuwaiti government to sell the war to the US public, the US PR giant Hill & Knowlton launched a multi-million dollar campaign cooking up a story about Iraqi soldiers unplugging incubators in Kuwait City hospitals. The crux was "documentary" video footage of the unplugging. We were all convinced. The contrast between this imagery and Riefenstahl's Triumph couldn't be starker. The side-affect of our belief in gritty realism makes us vulnerable to new kinds of manipulation.
Ironically, the Pentagon's child, the Internet has become the place to find "frontline" information. Sloan recalls wartime articles, newsreels and radio reports, wondering, "How much of that was propaganda...?" The Net offers a truth or a series of truths to sift through—first person accounts and images of war, sometimes unfolding, sometimes, only when its all over—free of government and media monopolies' manipulations... for now.
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 1999
