Dr Nishant A.Irudayadason
Professor of Philosophy and Ethics, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune.

Dr Nishant A.Irudayadason

During the Second World War this political use of cinema became one of the fiercest battlefields between the Allies and the Axis powers. Hollywood went into battle even before the US military did, and the German film industry, under Goebbels’ control, produced some of the most famous propaganda films of all time, including those by Leni Riefenstahl, the official filmmaker of the Nazi Party.

To be able to address the genre of “propaganda films”, it is necessary to be able to specify what is called a propaganda film, a question that contains another: what is called propaganda? In the context of this write-up, I will be satisfied with a working definition that takes into account the historical origin of the term and its common understanding of manipulation of public opinion in order to obtain its adherence to a political program. Thus, any use and manipulation of the mass media including the OTT platform like Amazon Prime that aims to propagate an ideological point of view and to somehow influence the people to whom such use is addressed would be propaganda.

As far as the propaganda film is concerned, the canonical examples are, for the most part, documentary. However, in the twenty-first century, it seems to me that fiction is precisely the most effective form of propaganda film, precisely because fictional narratives are less easily graspable by the viewer as propaganda. Since it engenders a “fictional attitude” in the viewer, and arouses its consumption as pure entertainment, the fiction film can avoid coming directly into conflict with the critical faculties of the viewers and offer them a fantasy enjoyment “without reproach and without shame” in the words of Freud.

The use of fiction film to make propaganda is more a matter of form than of substance. It is a question of the point of view offered by the work to its spectators, the arrangement of the pathways into the fantasy structure that underlies the work and the possibilities of pleasure that it provides. The defining feature is univocity, the constitution of a narrative system that allows only one way of involvement and understanding for the narrative and that relates to a broader mythological structure to which it encourages adherence as a condition of enjoyment of the narrative.

The Amazon prime web series Family Man 2 has undoubtedly provoked a lot of reactions and debates in many countries, especially on the portrait of the liberation struggle in Tamil Eelam. Through a disclaimer the producer of the series has found an escape route from conflict, they have a propaganda agenda to defame the Tamils and their cause. The producers of the web series seem to have a political nexus especially when we look at the timing of both Family Man 1 and Family Man 2. The first episode was a notorious ploy to divide the Keralites along the religion before the assembly election with an attempt to create a popular narrative that the Muslims in Kerala has connections to international terrorist organizations and the second episode shaming the liberation movement of Tamils in Eelam is brought out at a time when they have been gradually making progress to get international attention for the genocide that took place more than a decade ago. What is the political agenda of the producers of this web series and that of the Union Government which allowed it even after the letter sent by the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister to ban it?

The fact is that both the film and the reactions it has provoked allow us to question the very notion of propaganda and the function of creative artistic expression in our time. The Family Man “affair” offers us the opportunity to rethink the notion of propaganda so that we can scrutinize it carefully in the contemporary context of mediatization and aestheticization of politics. As political communication and advertising have become major forces in our societies, propaganda tends to makes it way to form popular narratives in the twenty-first century, a danger which obliterates history.