Propaganda

A propaganda film is a film, either a documentary-style production or a fictional screenplay, that is produced to convince the viewer of a certain political point or influence the opinions or behavior of people, often by providing deliberately misleading, propagandistic content. One of the early fictional films to be used for propaganda was The Birth of a Nation, although it was not produced for the purposes of indoctrination. In 1918, Charlie Chaplin made, at his own expense, The Bond, a comedic propaganda film for World War I. In the years following the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviet government sponsored the Russia film industry with the purpose of making propaganda films. The development of Russian cinema in the 1920s by such filmmaker as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein saw considerable progress in the use of the motion picture as a propaganda tool, yet it also served to develop the art of moviemaking. Eisenstein's films, in particular The Battleship Potemkin, are...