An American `Precedent'? Propaganda in American Movies: The Case of the Hollywood Jews
1999; Salisbury University; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies
ResumoDespite their small numbers in the United States, have enjoyed an advantage unequaled by any other group in America-a virtual control over their own self-image on the screen. -Patricia Erens, Between Two Worlds: Jewish Images in Film in Kaleidoscopic Lens: ed. R-M. Miller I didn't think that should deal with anything but entertainment. To make films of political significance is a mistake. If it's entertainment, it's all right-but not propaganda. -Adolph Zukor, qtd. in An Empire of Their Own: How the Invented by Neal Gabler The still run Hollywood --Marlon Brando, qtd. in Beaumont Enterprise, 1996 One of the most difficult, yet necessary, tasks in a free society is the identification of social and institutional forms of coercion-whether these forms take the most overt or covert manifestations. difficulty here, of course, is that all such social, ethnic, or institutional powers within a free society naturally wish to exhibit themselves in the most positive and valuable light possible; and thus the question of distorted versus a more benign self-explanation demands the tricky focus upon nuances or trends within a particular display of group aggrandizement. Here, too, even the very attempt at observing and recording exaggerated or false information or imagery-e.g., the propagandistic uses to which Jewish interest may have put their films-will no doubt raise serious questions about the observer's own impartiality or group-bias. Such is the nature of the strenuous and microscopic task at hand. All is not to say that we must avoid a close scrutiny of any dominant group or force within our hypervisualized society: indeed, with Walt Whitman, we should take the stance of the humble seer-poet: is no better than the rest; only he sees it and they do not.... He is not one of the chorus (Whitman 715). Or with Emerson, we know that our task as American Scholars is not to shirk the essence of our genius in America, with tyrannous eye (Poet 238) but to take our current classical cinema or everyday movies and blockbusters before the Hawthorean/Puritanical public eye: Bring the for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day (Self-Reliance 152-53). Indeed. the Emersonian insistence that we forget the past and achieve our own relation to the universe (Nature 21)-that we stop dragging about this corpse of memory (Self-Reliance 152)-may hold the key to our entire contemplation of propaganda in Jewish-produced or directed or acted films (i.e.. the inability of to truly look forward instead of back to their origins in America, their suffering during the Holocaust, and their fears for the state of Israel-their essentially narrative or Herzog-ian orientation to reality). To be sure, too, as we begin our observations of Jewish-American films, we shall find many insisting that the old empire about which Gabler speaks in his volume, An Empire of Their Own: How the Invented Hollywood, no longer exists-that the original powerful group of Jewish producers, distributors, writers, and directors is gone. However, the severe criticism that Marlon Brando recently drew for announcing that Jewish interests still essentially control or films may reveal something of a passion that continues to deny too vehemently, because for every Sam Goldwyn or Louie B. Mayer lost, a Steven Spielberg or Woody Allen is found-for every Marx brother or jazz singer dead, a Michael Douglas or Jerry Lewis or Neil Diamond is born. This is not to say that blacks or gentiles have no considerable influence in movies, but only that Jewish interests remain powerful enough to exercise real control over most film messages and image. As Patricia Erens points out in the epigraph above, Jews have enjoyed an advantage unequaled by any other group in America (114), and as Lester Friedman continues to declare in his The Conversion of the Jews, Unlike films about other minorities, movies about were often shaped by a segment of that minority with the power to decide how the entire group would be presented to society. …
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