Propaganda with a touch of art: 49th Parallel

There is often a natural 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, there were many constraints and it wasn’t an artistically exciting assignment for someone who had studied at the FTII and dreamt of following in the footsteps of leadingavant-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 – film history has many examples to the contrary. Consider Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Third Reich-commissioned documentary Triumph of the Will (about which I wrote here), which used powerful and distinctive visual grammar to portray Hitler as a nation-rescuing deity.


However, I find it particularly interesting when directors with a real sense of 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 (jointly known as the Archers), who made a series of magnificent films in the 1940s. Their best work was assured and daring, often segueing effortlessly from the real world to a fantasy landscape: take 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 becoming increasingly paranoid 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 (fresh from his first Hollywood successes in Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, and cast here in one of his most atypical movie roles as a garrulous French-Canadian trapper) and Leslie Howard (who himself directed a couple of WWII propaganda films such as The Gentle Sex), 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 verve and moments of subtle beauty; it takes an episodic narrative structure (the dwindling group of Nazis travel across the country, encountering different sets of individuals) and forges from it an adventure tale and a travelogue while also sharply observing the many different responses to wartime; and it has a feel for characterisation, giving us a conscientious German (remember, this was 1941!) and portraying 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 on a commissioned project, managed not to completely lose his own identity. The Archers would certainly make better films in the next few years (included subtler message-oriented works), but no one can accuse 49th Parallel of being “just” a dry piece of propaganda.

[From my Business Standard film column]