Documentary • 2012 • 56 minutes

THE STRATEGY OF TRUTH: DOCUMENTARY GOES TO WAR (1933-1945) The Strategy of Truth explores the role of film as propaganda during World War II, and the different forms it took in the US, the UK, and Germany. It also raises the central question of whether a film can be both documentary - reflecting the truth - and propaganda. As the first major war was about to unfold on celluloid, documentarians around the globe were enlisted into the causes of their nations - causes that were not always easy to sell. How would you convince Germans, for example, that 'the Jewish problem' requires a 'Final Solution'? Or bring class-bound Britons together as equal partners to endure and combat an unprecedented Blitz? And what would galvanize isolationist Americans - and Black soldiers faced with Jim Crow laws - to defend a patch of land thousands of miles from home? In Germany, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will not only promoted the Nazi ideals but was also posed to become a landmark of propaganda filmmaking (although Riefenstahl said that by definition it could not be propaganda, because it was a documentary). It was meant to stir an internal audience - Germans who were ambivalent about Hitler. Other Nazi propaganda took viewers right into battle, providing a terrifying image of German military power. In the UK, the government first turned to newsreel directors to create propaganda, sidelining left-leaning anti-fascist filmmakers. One early result, 1939's The Lion Has Wings, was so laughable that it was reportedly screened as a comedy in Berlin. Eventually, the Crown Film Unit did call in established documentarians such as Harry Watt, Pat Jackson, and Humphrey Jennings. Their films cast the working person as hero, creatong a sense of collective heroism and shared purpose. In London Can...