Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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Nostalgic propaganda: well-meaning adverts for a victorious America

Projections of America (Peter Miller) A short documentary about a series of short films to promote America abroad made as part of the war effort by Robert Riskin and reflecting a Jewish leftish outlook. Riskin is chiefly known for his 1937 Best Screenplay Oscar for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Narrated by John Lithgow. Written by Peter Miller and edited by Amy Linton.

Robert Riskin was a screenwriter associated with the feel-good classics of Frank Capra, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, It Happened One Night, You Can't Take It With You. There were eight films done together. This was a fusion, because Riskin was liberal-left and Capra was a conservative Republican; and after they tried forming a joint production company, they soon had a falling out. Riskin's most individual effort, though according to Peter Miller's documentary Projections of America he was more the organizer than the writer, was supervising a series of short US (black and white) propaganda films called "Projections of America" developed and shown during Riskin's two and a half years as director of the Office of War Information or OWI's European branch, described in historical articles as "a secret film unit." A notable "Projection" featured Toscanini conducting Verdi, and the most popular of them was "Autobiography of a Jeep." German boys loved watching the exploits of the tough, feisty car developed by US auto companies to use in the war effort. Miller's documentary presents numerous clips from "Projections" films, but says they have hitherto been filed away and forgotten. Some historians and film writers who appear as talking heads here think the Riskin-supervised "Projections" are invaluable cultural documents showing "how we wanted to be understood" during WWII and right after. No harm certainly in showing that Americans are not all gangsters and cowboys or matinee idols and blonde babes, one of the first aims of the "Projections."

We hear from German and French survivors of the war who remember seeing the films when they were young at the war's end. The Germans, notably Jews who had been in hiding, a youth who spent the war working in a movie house, and another non-Jewish youth who had been avoiding the war in a small town, describe being excited to see anything American, indeed anything not Nazi. One was awed by skyscrapers; others noted the greater freedom of America, and its variety. The movie house boy removed a huge portrait of Hitler from the lobby and replaced it with one of Willy Bergel, a German film and theater star of the time. Not an ideal choice, as it turns out, considering that Bergel had acted in a number of pro-Nazi films and was blacklisted for a while after the war, though not permanently.

But not everybody was eager to be Americanized, however well meant the effort. The French speakers note that their fellow countrymen were not so enthusiastic about being subjected to American propaganda, and that after the war they considered the American presence, after all, an occupation. France is the western European nation that has done most to fight from being swamped by the cultural invasion of US movies.

For a while in Germany the "Projections" films were shown at war's end for fee in half-ruined cinemas with no heating. People dressed warmly and waited in line to see them. From what we see and hear the "Projections" voiceover narrator's tone is invariably the high-minded drone to be heard later in Fifties Encyclopedia Britannica films, stentorian, humorless, and in this case, full of idealistic fervor. Did Riskin write their scripts after all? At any rate they seem to have come from like-minded colleagues whose thinking reflected liberal-left dreams of how America "ought" to be. Notably audiences seem to have retained the apolitical elements, the jeep, skyscrapers, Toscanini. Toscanini had been chosen especially for his eventual passionate rejection of Mussolini and Fascism to come to America. But it was hearing Verdi that mattered to the young German Jewish girl.

Actually, Miller's documentary never goes into any deep analysis of the individual "Projections" shorts. What is shown seems naive, blithe, well-meaning and innocent -- pretty harmless as propaganda: could yesterday's propaganda ever convince, when it comes in the form a shiny old fashioned black and white film? These shorts, as we glimpse them, seem drenched in nostalgia today, full of the energy and pride of America and Americans at the end of the War. But having experienced the simplistic pedantry of Fifties instructional films firsthand, I find it hard to see the "Projections" as charming and quaint. Their eagerness to convert everyone to an "American way of life," however clothed in folksiness, has a totalitarian subtext. They are tiresomely simplistic. Propaganda is dumb. It's one-sided and monolithic.

Unfortunately Riski's career was ended by a debilitating stroke in 1950. He never recovered, and died in 1955. Clearly his contribution to America's wartime propaganda effort was immense. But one may balk at the claim by talking heads in this film that the "Projections of America" films were "enormously important" simply because they were translated into many languages and very widely shown, or that they represent an important part of "our" history or that they reflect anything about "us." At least none of that can be quantified, and isn't really illustrated in any detail by Miller's documentary. In effect this feels like yet another propaganda film, a propaganda film for propaganda films. Maybe now "we" are all seen as cowboys and gangsters again, or matinee idols and Hollywood babes, but updated ones not as classic as the old black and white ones. (It would have been nice if Miller had pointed to other times more recently when Hollywood has engaged in US government propaganda efforts.)

It's interesting to read a review of Peter Miller's documentary by Anne Dessuant, a critic for French weekly Télérama apropos of a French TV presentation. Riskin, she says, was firmly convinced that cinema could change the world. She notes how a film about the daily life of a Swedish community is narrated by "a very didactic Ingrid Bergman" and says these films were part of "an immense ideological offensive." The great irony of this story, Dessuant pointedly concludes, is that most of the men who worked on these idealistic films depicting their dream of a better America wound up being interrogated before the House Un-American Activities Committee -- and blacklisted in Hollywood.

Projections of America, 52 mins., premiered on German TV 23 September 2014, and has been shown in Canada. It was screened for this review as art of the 2015 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

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