The Sunday Intertitle: B&W?
The gigantic Animated Soviet Propaganda box set is really worth a look, if you have the means. Amazing design sense and a variety of styles, plus a variety of didactic approaches. While some of the anti-western satire is easy to dismiss, knowing what we do about life in the USSR, a few of the films hit home hard. The 1933 short BLACK AND WHITE deals with race in America, and its salvoes basically hit the mark: all achieved without words and pretty much without intertitles, save for the above animated question mark which morphs into an imprisoning knot, and the inscription “Lenin,” offered up at the end as a kind of panacea to the problems we’ve just seen. Paul Robeson must have liked this.
Particularly chilling is the white boss’s drive into town along a SPARTACUS-type highway of hanged black men, while a lynched figurine jiggles against his back windscreen. And the film’s rhetorical connection of the state’s electric chair to the lynch mob’s noose, as well as the not-too-subtle connection drawn between the overseer with the whip and the priest with the cross, seem, you know, basically TRUE to me.
Available from Amazon:
Animated Soviet Propaganda: From the October Revolution to Perestroika (4 DVD Set)
May 23, 2010 at 2:59 pm
The highway of hanged men is remindful of the last shot of Ken Russell’s The Devils
May 23, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Absolutely. Strange Fruit, indeed.
May 23, 2010 at 5:47 pm
The Lenin intertitle was also a potent one, because of his own early incarceration, as well as his siblings, and was a cornerstone of his “mythology”, especially nine years after his death.
May 23, 2010 at 9:13 pm
When we moved to Australia in 1964,I started 1st grade there..sat at a little double desk next to this girl for a bit..She never spoke,but one time said..”I don’t like americans”..I asked WHY?…she goes..cuz they still tie people to trees and whip them and hang them..”..I’m like WHA?…I had no idea what she was talking about..Wasn’t until many years later while looking at fotos of riots in the south in the early 60s,that I realized that this was the kind of thing the girl must have seen and was talking about…That was a totally isolated thing tho…Australians aren’t unfriendly..and neither was she..just a kid with ideas going thru her head..
I knew nothing about the injustice of blacks in america growing up mostly overseas..untill I moved back in ’70 ..and faced the harsh backlash..
May 23, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Of course the Russians could afford to be superior since they didn’t have a comparable social situation. And the Australians had carried out a near-genocide against their indigenous people and were probably still doing forced adoptions and trying to eliminate their ethnic embarrassment.
The Brits could feel superior until increased immigration in the 50s suddenly exposed out own prejudices. Today a xenophobia, stoked by the tabloid press, is again sweeping the country…
May 23, 2010 at 11:03 pm
I learned soon after how aussies felt about “bloody abos”…
May 23, 2010 at 11:05 pm
In some ways, I think animation is the perfect vehicle for propaganda, and indeed its been used alot ,especially in WWII.
One could argue that in animation there is no objective camera, rather the POV is internalized in the animation cels. This hermeticism is ripe for honing ideolgical tools.
Sort of recently, The Incredibles was fraught with a lot of Neo – Con ideological tics. Among them being a French villian with a strong resemblance to John Kerry. This was around the time of the 2004 elections.
May 23, 2010 at 11:21 pm
I hadn’t really picked up on The Incredibles’ politics, though there did seem to be something strange going on in it. That Brad Bird is clearly talented, and clearly kind of obsessed by how talented he is. His Iron Giant seemed fairly liberal though.
I don’t really believe in the existence of an objective camera, but it’s true that the more control the filmmaker has, the more able they are to present their own view (or their sponsor’s).
May 23, 2010 at 11:30 pm
As a caricaturist, I sure don’t see any resemblance between Kerry & Bomb Voyage (“Bomb Perignon” was the wittier original character name, before the Lawyers red-pencilled it) in Incredibles. Having known Brad Bird since 1976, I think the notion that there was any neo-con bias in his film is waaaaayyyyy off the mark .
May 24, 2010 at 12:07 am
Yes, the objective camera theory is flawed, but perhaps there’s still a point there. I still think there is structural component to animation that lends itself to propaganda differently than straight filmaking
Of course there wasn’t going to be a direct caricature of a presidential candidate, but the film was in lock step, in this instance, with the anti French sentiment that was going on at that time. That together with the character’s long face, big chin, and hairstyle, and Kerry’s “Frenchness” being touted in the media added up to the film showing some sort of political “leaning”, regardless of what the directors personal politics are.
May 24, 2010 at 12:13 am
The rightist appreciation I noticed for The Incredibles wasn’t from a neo-con perspective but rather from the Ayn Randian 14-year-old-brain-in-a-40-year-old-body libertarian quarter. The Incredibles were a family of John Galts, innately superior beings forced into a crouch of normality, just like, you know, ME, Mr. Half-Bright. (It usually is a Mr.) I wasn’t inclined to blame Brad Bird for that, though, if only because The Iron Giant makes me all weepy.
May 24, 2010 at 1:12 am
There were a lot of big chins in that picture, and sometime a joke is only a joke. Sure, that character is a villain and a fool, and so any resemblance to Kerry is lost on me as I don’t find Kerry to be either one.
The democratization of the arts is quite another matter, and perhaps the idea that all artists are not created equal is bound to be an unpopular one.
I rather think that Brad is aware of his talent, but not necessarily obsessed by it. I think he just takes it for granted, and gets on with his work—which, from my perspective, is making very good movies.
May 24, 2010 at 1:13 am
Alice Rosenbaum is the scourge of all serious thought.