When attempting to identify a film as propaganda, we often resort to the same set of historical antecedents. There’s Eisenstein and Vertov fronting for the communist contingent. There’s Riefenstahl repping the fascists. Over here’s Capra standing up for Why We Fight. All of it is rather comfortably contextualized in an extreme era that necessitated an extreme methodology that, when it’s been evoked during the 70 years since, implies crass hysteria—which is also how it’s applied to North Korea, effectively a holdout from that earlier era, making it all the more hysterical and crass for enduring in this supposedly more enlightened era.

Thus a perfectly descriptive, non-qualitative word damns and is damned by dint of its historical associations. Officially, propaganda casts a wide net, encompassing, per Webster’s, “ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause,” whereas in popular discourse it’s become a blunt, zero-sum pejorative for art with an agenda. Which leaves us without a valuable tool for identifying what certain films are doing and why, and forces some of the savvier modern propagandistic practitioners into a defensive crouch.

Tags: Documentary, Storytelling