E44: The Political Aesthetics of Cold War Propaganda (w/ Dr. Bret Vukoder)

On today’s show, Alex and Ben speak with Dr. Bret Vukoder about his recently defended dissertation, an investigation into the United States Information Agency’s (USIA) filmic and televisual propaganda output during the Cold War. Due to a domestic production ban, the massive archive of over 20,000 films has been relatively unknown in media scholarship, until now.

To investigate this rich but little known archive, we begin our conversation discussing a sub-genre of USIA propaganda, which Bret refers to as “thesis films” - in short, films that are explicitly about the USIA’s film-making and information-dissemination processes. We turn our attention to clips from some of these original films to examine how they use a meta-textual attention to “process” as a propaganda strategy for showcasing the “transparency” and “ethics” of the U.S.’s foreign information apparatus. In talking through these examples and others that Bret has analyzed, we critically interrogate the ways that aesthetic and stylistic elements impact the USIA’s political messages being communicated to foreign audiences. Finally, we apply some of Bret’s heuristic tools to examine an example of interventionist foreign policy propaganda from New York Times - Joanna Hausmann’s “Venezuela’s Crisis: What My Fellow Liberals Don’t Understand.”

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Resources from / about the Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth

Information on the MEP’s USIA Pilot Study

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. International Publishers.

Gharabaghi, H. (2018) “American mice grow big”: The Syracuse audiovisual mission in Iran and the rise of documentary diplomacy. Dissertation for New York University, Department of Cinema Studies.

Kim, H. S. (2019). Who Views Whom through Whose Lenses?: The Gazes in USIS Film Propaganda in South Korea. In The Cold War and Asian Cinemas (pp. 284-304). Routledge.

Luce, H. (1941, 17 Feb.). The American century. Life Magazine. (Digital version available at: https://news.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/luce.pdf) 

Hausman, J. (2019). “What my fellow liberals don’t get about Venezuela.” The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/vKVakhcm5ko

Williams, M. & Vukoder, B. (forthcoming). The great war at scale: New opportunities for provenance in World War I collections at the National Archives (NARA). In Provenance and Early Cinema: Preservation, Circulation, and Repurposing (P. Cherchi Usai, J. Bernardi, T. Williams, & J. Yumibe, eds.). Indiana University Press.

Williams, M. & Vukoder, B. (2020). Local insights, global networked scholarship: The Media Ecology Project USIA pilot. In Nuevas aproximaciones al cine documental. Un estado de la cuestión contemporáneo (J. Campo, T. Crowder-Taraborrelli, C. Garavelli, P. Piedras, & K. Wilson, eds.). Prometeo Press.

*Watch this space!* Forthcoming special issue in the Journal of E-Media Studies, co-edited by Dr. Vukoder and Dr. Hadi Gharabaghi:

https://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/xmlpage/4/issue