Multimodal Analysis Reflection: This was an interesting first dive into analyzing the rhetoric of a film rather than a piece of writing. I think I learned a lot about how different aspects of a medium can combine into sending a very specific message.

America after WWII was a country desperately trying to sort out its identity as a modern superpower in an evolving world. After the fall of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States rose as the two superpowers of the Modern World–two superpowers that were diametrically opposed in their ideologies.

America’s identity could no longer be a singular idea, or simply be the United States–a country by itself whose identity was cultivated by what was happening within its borders. It had to be a nation whose identity existed as a set of ideologies that were born out of opposition to Communism. The threat of Japan and Nazi Germany had faded and the geopolitical threat of Communism and the Soviet Union were, rather than traditional threats of territory and tyranny, positioned as an ideological battle, and stopping it was propagated as a moral imperative (Kirby 411). 

The overarching narrative of ideological turmoil was of course underpinned by material aggression and weaponry. The arms race, on the part of both the United States and the Soviet Union, did not translate cleanly into the moral superiority of democratic Capitalism for American propaganda, so the Cold War era was sold as a war of ideologies rather than bombs, “American officials fused the material and the immaterial into a discourse justifying American predominance in international affairs. Through radio shows, film, and publications, U.S. policymakers propagated a carefully constructed narrative of progress, freedom, and happiness” (Belmonte 7).

This idea of constructing a narrative to reinforce a national identity brings us to the natural conclusion of state-sponsored propaganda. State-sponsored films injected into the American milieu were like fast-acting agents created to do two things simultaneously: justify America’s place as a global superpower, and denigrate the Soviet Union’s place as a global superpower. The thesis of Corenet Film’s piece on Communism is relatively straightforward: America and Capitalism breed democracy, and the Soviet Union and Communism, mainly the teachings of Karl Marx, breed tyranny and a lack of individual fulfillment. 

In America’s eyes, the existence of the Soviet Union as it stood was, in itself, a threat to America’s place as a global superpower, and film’s like Coronet’s were a way of reaching the American people to get them on the side of their country, and on the side of their country’s justifying ideology. The film is mostly narration played over film clips juxtaposing American Capitalist democracy and Soviet Union Communism, while making moral assertions that undermine Communism and revere Capitalism. 

We can consider the time frame of 0:32 to 1:30 the introduction of the Rhetorical Situation, or the problem the film is hoping to solve. Here several things happen and several implications are made all one after the other. Firstly, the position of Russia as a “a grave threat to our nation, to our freedom, to the peace of the world” is inserted as simply a given. It is axiomatic and does not need to be proven; it is simply a fact of the matter at hand. The film immediately then goes on to give an example of a quality that emerges from the Soviet Union being a tyrannical threat: portraits or memorabilia of Communist leaders. At first this seems insignificant–just a regular talking point about the preoccupation of the state. But one could say this represents something much more central to the message being delivered. What immediately comes off as meaningful in this is the emphasis on “Communist leaders” rather than “Soviet” or “Russian leaders”. This word choice reveals what the film is about in a broader sense: it is not simply attempting to discredit the Soviet Government, but rather the Communist ideology as a whole. 

After the broad scopes it set in that criticism, the film immediately contracts and appeals to personal rhetoric by asserting that “here in Russia, we can see the reason why we are spending billions of dollars in defense production. Why your family is paying the highest taxes in our history”. By juxtaposing so decisively the critique of Communist ideology as a whole with the emotional argument that the economic hardships you and your family faces are directly a result of the Soviet Union, it paints a picture meant to resonate with the American people. The Communist ideology is all of our enemies.

All of these assertions and narrations are made over top of shots of grandiose buildings and military troops marching down the street and industrial assembly lines, meant to distill a sense of conformity in how you perceive Soviet society. Unlike in America, there is no room for individual identity. 

These messages are delivered through multiple different rhetorical techniques. The film segment chosen mainly relies on generalizing the oppositional state (the Soviet Union) to an entity comparable to a machine; to the propagandist, the state in the Soviet Union is a machine that requires the citizens be made into cogs. It also relies on a lack of music over the top of militaristic imagery–rows of tanks rolling down the street, fleets of planes flying through the air, and troops marching through cities. Finally it relies on a third aspect that ties the entire message together–pathos. The Communist ideology is causing personal distress in the lives of the American people. The film attempts to make the threat personal and emotional.

The film opens with the claim that Russia is a grave threat to “our nation, our freedom, and the peace of the world” (0:32). The choice to open up the discussion of the film with such a broad moral generalization seems a very deliberate one. Neither Coronet films nor the United States are interested in an honest assessment of the Soviet Union’s place in the geopolitical sphere because honesty and nuance are the enemies of propaganda. This statement is working in confluence with a low static hum in the background–no music, just ambience to create a more stern and serious atmosphere–and shots of crowded cities with grand architecture. The film generalizes the Soviet Union and its citizens as fundamentally misguided and antagonistic, with the narrator telling the audience that Russia is the reason for countries building up their armed defenses over film clips of heavily militaristic imagery. This narration combined with this imagery tells the audience very clearly the message of this portion. The Soviet Union and the Communist ideology it is based upon are not only misaligned with the United States, but with the modern world as a whole, which is more preoccupied with peace than aggression.

At the time frame 1:05 in the film, the propagandist moves away from the broader geopolitical implications of the Soviet Union’s aggression and instead brings the message of the film much closer to home. The rhetoric at this point changes very starkly to that concerning American citizens directly. The narrator claims “Here in Russia, we see why […] your family is paying the highest taxes in our history”. This is, of course, coupled with images of factory workers assembling military equipment. It seems like no coincidence that as soon as the rhetoric switches to that of family life and that which concerns citizens directly, the imaging of the film is no longer wide streets and military planes, but rather regular people in factories. This appeal to emotion works much more effectively this way, as it implies that this is the effect of Communism on regular working class people. The implication being it forces people onto industrialized factory lines for the purpose of the state.

The effectiveness of this film and the many others like it that were released during this time period is hard to understate. The American psyche was dichotomized between The U.S. and the Soviet Union; good vs. evil. Capitalism in these films was successfully marketed as the unequivocal moral and free option, where Communism was unquestionably wrong and tyrannical. In the context of the Cold War, this film accomplished what it set out to do, which was to exacerbate the already existing line in the sand between America and Russia. Looking back on it almost three decades after the end of the Cold War, films like this were a major contributing factor to the climate surrounding the cultures during that time period. Much of the antagonism of the Cold War was driven by propaganda, such as this film, which increased tensions and affected the way American citizens viewed the conflict.

 

 

Works Cited

Belmonte, Laura A. Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 

Kirby, Dianne. “Divinely Sanctioned: The Anglo-American Cold War Alliance and the      Defence of Western Civilization and Christianity, 1945–48.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 35, no. 3, July 2000, pp. 385–412, doi:10.1177/002200940003500304.