With the rise of popular cinema, governments started producing propaganda, providing skewed information, racism and simple rumors and lies to gain popular support for something controversial, such as war and nuclear missile proliferation.
Information is controlled: specific framing of images, quick editing, not too much time to take things in, as narration tells you what is "happening" and what to think. All under bombastic, emotional orchestra music.
The US government also used an educational style, trying to provide a science vibe to propaganda.
Over time, the propaganda style slipped into television, keeping up with new media formats. Television news is far from explicit propaganda - its not made by the government, its not (on most channels) promoting war, it raises important social and political issues... But the format is severely limiting. Time constraints, quick editing, big music - there is even a narrator - who has now been crafted into a full personality, dressed well, speaking with authority, making everything you need to know simple and direct. There is a level of entertainment and shock and awe that news channels feel they have to give audiences, rather than simple facts. Newscasts thrive on unpredictability...every day at 6am, noon, 5 and 10.
There are good newscasters, good information, real information getting across - even truly emotional moments where the "script" is thrown out:
and news outlets that report on other news outlets:
(the full story here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110217/ts_yblog_thecutline/fox-airs-misleading-footage-before-ron-paul-interview)
As an audience, we not only have to get the news, but process it and take each source into consideration. There is a curation that has to happen, finding various viewpoints, reports and news formats to learn about a story. With any information presented as news and reality, we have to do more work if we want to trust the information.
A recent poll explored the impact of news outlets over the last 20 years, correlated with our own personal connection with news and politics, and how we think it affects us:
http://people-press.org/report/319/public-knowledge-of-current-affairs-little-changed-by-news-and-information-revolutions
take the quiz and see updates here:
http://pewresearch.org/politicalquiz/
The two films screened exist on the other spectrum of propaganda, made by filmmakers who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, fueled by the tail end of the Cold War.
In Buffalo Common, filmmaker Bill Brown goes to North Dakota to try and find the nuclear missiles that haunted the previous six decades. Instead of propaganda's soap opera and powerful explosions, Bill finds beautiful landscapes, mundane reality and real people. The shots are framed wide and are long takes. His narration is personal, down-to-earth, and raises more questions about what the Cold War accomplished than finds answers. Propaganda comes from high above the common man and speaks down. Bill is in the chair next to us. (www.heybillbrown.com)
In O'er the Land, filmmaker Deborah Stratman explores the contemporary world of war reenactments, gun culture, and the notions of freedom.
Stratman shows the world in a formal way - long takes, wide shots, no narration, some soundtrack but mostly real sound, broken in the middle by the incredible true story of William Rankin, who ejected from his fighter plane and got stuck in the air in the middle of a thunderstorm. The disconnected parts of the film come from various interviews, which we can hear over images that are evocative of the subject (Rankin, border patrol agents, RVs, gun shows) but we never see the speaker.
O'er the Land is concerned with property as a notion of freedom. Is what property (land, nature, possession) we own (and therefore have to defend) what defines being free, as opposed to a freedom of the mind, to think and speak freely? Which is what the film does, presents evidence for discussion rather than telling you what to think about the content. Although the people and events seen are unusual to daily life, they are still presented as real people, their specific reality captured.
Do we need to conquer man and nature, or achieve a balance with it? How does this affect our national and personal identity?
www.pythagorasfilm.com
