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Films are effective propaganda tools because they establish visual icons of historical reality and consciousness, define public attitudes of the time they're depicting or that at which they were filmed, mobilize people for a common cause, or bring attention to an unknown cause. Political and historical films represent, influence, and create historical consciousness and are able to distort events making it a persuasive and possibly untrustworthy medium.

Film is a medium that has been able to be easily distributed among the masses to mold public opinion

Tools used in film propaganda

Rhetoric

Making the viewer sympathize with the characters that align with the agenda or message the filmmaker portray is a common tool used in propaganda film. Propaganda films exhibit this by having reoccurring themes good vs. evil. The viewer is meant to feel sympathy towards the "good side" while loathing in the "evil side". Prominent Nazi film maker Joesph Goebbels used this tactic to invoke deep emotions into the audience. Goebbels stressed that while making films full of nationalistic symbols can energize a population, nothing will work better to mobilize a population towards the Nazi cause like "intensifying life".

The Kuleshov Effect
After the 1917 October Revolution the newly formed Bolshevik government and its leader Vladimir Lenin placed an emphasis on the need for film as a propaganda tool. Lenin viewed propaganda merely as a way to educated the masses as opposed to a way to evoke emotion and rally the masses towards a political cause. Film became the preferred medium of propaganda in the newly formed Russian Soviet Republic due to a large portion of the peasant population being illiterate.

The Kuleshov Effect was first used in 1919 in the film The Exposure of the Relics of Sergius of Radonezh by juxtaposing images of the exhumed coffin and body of Sergius of Radonezh, a prominent Russian saint, and the reaction from the watching audience. The images of the crowd are made up of mostly female faces whose expressions can be interpreted ambiguously. The idea behind juxtaposing these images was to subvert the audiences assumption that the crowd would show emotions of being sad or upset. Instead the crowd could be interpreted to be expressing emotions of boredom, fear, dismay, and a myriad amount of other emotions. There is nothing to prove to the audience that the images of the audience and the exhumed body were capture in the same moment or place (it is now believed the images of the crowd were filmed outdoors while the images showing the skeletal remains were captured indoors). This is what blurs the line of truth making the Klueshov Effect an effective tool of propaganda.

Demagoguery