Moving towards Truths

Later in the period, more realistic views of the countryside began to emerge, with concern to protect open spaces and see farming as an endangered industry, not a pleasing spectacle. Writers reflected these changes with less idealistic views. Francis Brett Young’s Portrait of a Village did this, but its illustrations by Joan Hassall continued the romanticised approach. William Beach Thomas is forward-looking in The English Countryside, with more contemporary photographs and even the discussion of national parks. Yet even here there is a yearning for the older village and its traditions. The chapter ends with a discussion of the vocabulary of country writing, with villages that ‘nestle’ in hills, and vistas that are ‘charming’, ‘graceful’, all seen from a sentimental distance. Propaganda films of 1939 return to similar imagery: all contrast sharply with the directness of writing about the ruined villages of Belgium and France.

An Archive of Development

This article argues that a fantasy of Indian road infrastructure was archived in official documentary films. It analyzes two 1960s road construction projects through three corresponding Films Division of India documentaries, which represented India's northern borders. These show how the playfulness of film, the unruliness of infrastructure, and the precariousness of the border and its imaginary have meant that even propaganda films with set narratives erupted with an aesthetics of pleasure and violence. Replete with such dramatic signifiers, the films offer a psychic archive of the developmental state. The projective capacity of architectural knowledge enables this article to speculate on this archive of fantasy and thus interrogate infrastructure, modernization, and development, not as normative categories, but as aesthetic techniques. These produced for the Indian state a spatial narrative of fraught borders contiguous with metropoles, a condition that created a new tyranny of proximity.

From Ecohumor to Ecohumanism: Iegor Gran’s O.N.G! and L’Ecologie en bas de chez moi

Iegor Gran’s two humorous novels poke fun at the self-righteousness, opportunism, anti-humanism, catastrophism, and humorlessness of some environmentalists. More an ecoheretic than an ecosceptic, Gran provides a Rabelaisian and Voltairean critique of environmentalists who take themselves too seriously. O.N.G! recounts a ridiculous war between two NGOs forced to share office space. Despite their lofty ideals, everyday life proves too difficult to manage, and their relationship degenerates into a bloody war over such trifles as parking and bulletin board space. L’Écologie en bas de chez moi is above all a critique of Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s 2009 environmental film Home, which Gran denounces as paternalistic and opportunistic, comparing it unfavorably to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a documentary about Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg Rally. Both are propaganda films featuring aerial photography and stirring music, but Gran finds Riefenstahl much more creative.

Third Worldism and the Panama Canal

This chapter investigates how, between 1970 and 1977, Panama’s military regime participated in the second generation of the historical movement, Third Worldism. To insert itself into the movement, Panama emphasized that, without access to the Panama Canal, the isthmus would remain undeveloped and subservient to Washington. Third Worldism attracted a large worldwide audience. To examine Panama’s use of the movement, this chapter first analyzes the regime’s reliance on Third-World commonalities to foster international solidarity for new treaties. Secondly, the study shows how the general encouraged the blending of Third Worldism at the local level in propaganda films and theatrical productions. Lastly, the chapter evaluates the 1977 plebiscite for Panamanians to vote for the treaties as a method to legitimize the regime’s existence to isthmians and the global community.

La France à l’heure anglaise

During the Second World War, Germany often imposed its own time zone onto those countries it occupied. Chapter 5 looks at the case of France, and examines responses to a perceived temporal misalignment with Britain which occurred with its capitulation to Germany in June 1940. Surveying a series of wartime propaganda films, including those by the GPO Film Unit, the chapter demonstrates how war time was expressed through pastoral tropes, and through notions of Allied temporal guardianship. It turns to the activist writer Storm Jameson, whose novel Cloudless May (1943) conveys a kind of ‘international regionalism’ to cultivate British support for France. Through affective, embodied landscapes, she reinforces what she sees as modernism’s strengths, and revises what she sees as its weaknesses, for a geopolitical agenda.

Gendering the Japanese Empire: Ri Kōran as ‘Transnational’ Star?

This paper aims to assess how Ri Kōran came to represent the gender dichotomies of the Japanese Empire. Looking at two propaganda films, Suzhou Nights (1941) and Sayon’s Bell (1943), I will work out how the roles she played are indicative of the gender roles in the Japanese Empire, taking into account her transnational star persona.

Perwersje archiwum

Perversions of the archive In the article, the author discusses the problematic status of an archival document,taking into account the concepts of perverse historiography and the methodological indicators of the apartheid archive. Documents stored in IPN (Institute of National Remembrance) have been used to show the challenges faced by the people investigating the documents stored there and attempting to unify the material found in the archive. The analysis of Autor Solaris, a 2016 biographical documentary film about Stanisław Lem, is preceded by reflections on the involvement of the archive researchers in politics and their reproductions of clichés and stereotypes about the past, which the author sees as directly leading to blurring and erasing of the victims’ testimonies. In doing so, the author uses critical analyses of the pornographic aspects of the presentation of mass murder victims. Relating to a concept proposed by one of the critics indicating that using archival sources in modern art leads to a mass amnesia, the author points to the dangers of using Nazi propaganda films in contemporary documentary film.