There is often a conflict of interest between explicitly message-based “propaganda” films and dynamic, imaginative cinema. Movies made with the chief aim of educating or rousing an audience will understandably emphasise content at the expense of form. When the priority is to feed ideas to viewers (rather than create a nuanced work that is open to interpretation), a script can easily become clunky and over-expository and the camerawork might be no more than functional — there isn’t much sense using techniques that might distract or be lost on viewers.
Working on such films can be drudgery for those with creative aspirations. Writer-director Kundan Shah once told me about being commissioned by the Films Division to make a documentary titled Visions of the Blind, meant to show what blind people could achieve if given the opportunities. Noble though the cause was, it wasn’t an artistically fulfilling assignment for someone who had studied at the Films and Television Institute of India and dreamt of following in the footsteps of leading avant-garde moviemakers. “It was a staid film,” Shah said, his eyes glazing over, “but I needed the work.”
This is not to say that good cinema and propaganda have to be mutually exclusive — in this column last year, I wrote about Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Third Reich-commissioned documentary Triumph of the Will, which used powerful and distinctive visual grammar to portray Hitler as a nation-rescuing deity.
However, I find it particularly interesting when directors with real cinematic style are reined in by the need to be solemn and didactic, and you can sense that tension in the work itself. One example is the British duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who made a series of wonderful films in the 1940s. Their best work was assured and daring, often segueing effortlessly from the real world to a fantasy landscape: consider A Matter of Life and Death (about an airman who stands trial in Heaven) or the ballet film The Red Shoes (with a stunning, highly stylised 15-minute dance performance at its centre) or Black Narcissus (about a group of nuns in a beautifully recreated Himalayan setting).
During World War II, Powell also worked on more straightforward, morale-boosting films, including a poignant five-minute short titled An Airman’s Letter to His Mother. Among the best of his full-length features in this category is 49th Parallel, about a small band of Nazis coming ashore in Canada and being confronted with more courage than they had expected to find. It’s an honourable, solidly crafted movie with big-name actors such as Laurence Olivier and Leslie Howard (working at half-salary for the wartime cause). But as a contemporary viewer, distanced from the urgency of those dark days and the realness of the German threat, one is aware of how it tries to hammer home its points. In one extended scene, where the Nazi leader makes a speech extolling his ideology and is then answered by a speech by an anti-fascist, the film becomes deferentially inert, the camera staying trained on the faces of the two men as if they were talking directly to us.
And yet, this movie, which could have been an assembly-line production in other hands, has moments of subtle beauty, verve and such a feel for characterisation that it gives us a conscientious German (remember, this was 1941) and portrays even the bad Nazis as resourceful and dedicated to their cause. It represents one of those happy moments where a top creative talent, working within limitations and to a brief, managed not to completely lose his own identity. You can’t keep a good artist down forever.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
