the medium for “its power to attract and hold attention, stimulate thinking and discussion and to leave lasting impressions.”32 Although a number of scholars have commented on the value movies had in this occupation period, the “original documentaries,” including those described here, were particularly indicative of what the Army expected the cinema to accomplish – to show people in occupied countries how they could transform their civil society by adopting American democratic traditions.
While other scholars have noted that presenting the “small town” as the face of American democracy was a strategic choice designed to benefit the US government in the post‐war period, the films discussed in this essay suggest the challenges a small town faces when it is asked to perform as an emblem of democracy in action.33 While it is unclear how involved the CAD was in the selection of the communities that were to be filmed for their productions, the people in the towns themselves were aware of the important roles they were to play in promoting American democracy, and, presumably, small‐town values, overseas. For this reason, these community‐based films are best understood not as documentaries that just happened to be produced in a particular place, but also local films, of interest to audiences because they could see people and places they recognized on screen. Unlike other local films, however, these films also had global reach, making them a rare instance in which political questions that were presented as of merely local interest were seen as indications of how small communities and nations around the world would engage with the United States and its allies.
Although these films had a relatively short (but very wide) run in occupied countries, the prints that were given to these communities for their own use endured as moving image documents of their past. In almost all cases, these films continue to be screened, debated, and written about by local historians. Some films, such as The Cummington Story, ask communities to reflect on their own responsibilities to welcome immigrants, support democratic solutions to critical problems, or build resilient institutions.34 At the same time, the fact that these films were produced for use in a fairly limited context and, until recently, were very difficult to see, means that they are much less well‐known than the government films produced in the 1930s or during World War II.35 But they are worth revisiting, not just as a forgotten set of films produced for a particular purpose, but also as one of many instances in which the US government used documentary as both a propaganda tool and as a way to articulate, analyze, and critique its own belief system.
References
1 Cull, N.J. (2008). The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989. New York: Cambridge University Press.
2 Fay, J. (2008). Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
3 Goldstein, C.S. (2009). Capturing the German Eye: American Visual Propaganda in Occupied Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
4 Immerwah, D. (2015). Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
5 Kahana, J. (2008). Intelligence Work. New York: Columbia University Press.
6 Kitamura, H. (2010). Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
7 Lerner, N. (2005). Aaron Copland, Norman Rockwell, and the “Four Freedoms’”: The Office of War Information’s Vision and Sound in The Cummington Story (1945). In: Aaron Copland and His World (eds. C.J. Oja and J. Tick), 351–378. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
8 Lovejoy, A. (2018). “A Treacherous Tightrope”: The Office of War Information, PWD/SHAEF, and Film Distribution in Liberated Europe. In: Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex (eds. H. Wasson and L. Grieveson), 305–320. Berkeley: University of California Press.
9 MacCann, R.D. (1973). The People’s Films: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures. New York: Hastings House.
10 MacDonald, S. (1997–1998). The City as the Country: The New York City Symphony from Rudy Burckhardt to Spike Lee. Film Quarterly 51 (2): 2–20.
11 McCarthy, A. (2010). The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America. New York: New York University Press.
12 Sackley, N. (2011). The Village as Cold War Site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction. Journal of Global History. 6 (3): 481–504.
13 Scott, I. (2006). From Toscanini to Tennessee: Robert Riskin, the OWI and the Construction of American Propaganda in World War II. Journal of American Studies 40 (2): 347–366.
14 Smulyan, S. (2007). Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid‐Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
15 Wagnleitner, R. (1994). Coca‐Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after World War II (Trans. D.M. Wolf). Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Notes
1 1 As Nicholas J. Cull observes in his history of the USIA, many government agencies identified their work as being part of the United States Information Service, the name first used to describe a White House office tasked with promoting the New Deal and later adapted by Robert Sherwood, of the Foreign Information Service, for use in overseas propaganda campaigns during World War II. In 1946, several foreign propaganda offices were consolidated within the State Department, creating the Office of International Informational and Cultural Affairs, but, to avoid confusion, the State department continued using the name USIS. The United States Information Agency was established in 1953, but the government continued to use USIS in its overseas campaigns. See Cull (2008: 14). While overseas propaganda campaigns were largely controlled by offices in the State Department after the end of World War II, the US Army retained control over film propaganda efforts in occupied countries. See “U.S. Film Makers Planning Pictures To Teach World,” Motion Picture Herald, 8 July 1946, 15.
2 2 See Immerwah (2015).
3 3 For more on Riskin’s operation, see Scott (2006). In Richard Dyer MacCann’s history of government filmmaking, he notes that Robert Sherwood, Director of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information, hired Riskin, best known as the screenwriter for several Frank Capra films, in part to counter the “glamorizing” of American life as seen in Hollywood films. See MacCann (1973: 140).
4 4 “A Picture of America,” The Logan (Ohio) Daily News, 5 April 1946, 4.
5 5 See MacCann (1973: 137–151).
6 6 “A Picture of America,” The Logan (Ohio) Daily News, 5 April 1946, 4.
7 7 “OWI To Make
