i. Why Movies Matter

The following presentation focuses on answering several important questions: How did silent filmmakers put their politics on the screen without using words? How did filmmakers present ideas about class, class conflict, unions, radicals, capitalists, strikes, and mass movements to the general public? What do politics and ideology look like when they are transferred to the screen? How can audiences learn to interpret the ideological messages contained in those images and, in so doing, learn how to apply the same skills to interpreting the ideological messages that are often woven into contemporary media images?

Before trying to answer these questions, we need to step back a moment and ask Why should we care about movies or their politics? Do the images we see on the screen--be it a movie screen or television screen--really matter?

The brief answer is YES! No one movie is likely to change a viewer's mind about the world. But seeing the same images and messages over and over again in hundreds of films dealing with similar problems could change the way in which people understood daily events--especially events about which they have little first-hand knowledge. Indeed, movies mattered most for people who knew the least: people who had little daily contact with for unions, radicals, strikes, or mass movements were most likely to be influenced by what they saw on the screen--especially if they were exposed to the same kinds of images over and over again.

Visual images can often be far more powerful than words. Back in late 1800s, when New York City's infamous Boss Tweed was asked why he had offered cartoonist Thomas Nast $500,000 to stop drawing caricatures of him and his cronies (fig. 1), Tweed replied: "I don't care so much what the papers write about me--my constituents can't read; but they can understand pictures."

The same is true today. Movies and mass media most impact us in the areas we know the least about. Who is Saddam Hussein? Is he really another Hitler? Who is Boris Yelstin? Bill Clinton? How many of us really know?

For all our skepticism about the mass media, most of us rely on film, television, radio, and newspapers for our knowledge of the world. But can we believe what we see or hear? Seeing should not always be equated with believing. During the Gulf War, millions of people saw American Patriot missiles destroying Iraqi Scud missiles with enormous success. Only later did we learn that many Patriots missed their target. But those images were never shown on television. "Truth" and "reality" can be shaped by what we do not see as well as what we do see.

During the first three decades of the twentieth century, many Americans gained their understanding of the meaning of class and class conflict by watching movies. Movies were far more politically engaged and ideologically diverse during the silent era than at any other time in the movie industry's history. Directors and writers did not shy away from the most controversial issues of the day, but confronted them head on. While some filmmakers simply hoped to entertain audiences, others tried to change a nation.

Silent films are not some quaint antiquities. Rather, they played a crucial role in shaping--not just reflecting--current attitudes toward class, labor unions, radicalism, strikes, and mass movements in general. The images of strikes, labor leaders, and workers seen in the 1910s and 1920s, were repeated in films of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s such as F.I.S.T. (1978), Blue Collar (1978), and Hoffa (1992).

Before we look at these movies and the techniques producers used to convey ideological messages, let us step back a moment and look at the early years of the movies.