Audient Authentic: Why We Fight: Prelude to War

This is the fourth in my 2020 monthly series watching "classic" documentaries I have never seen.

When I watched Eugene Jarecki's 2005 documentary Why We Fight, I knew its name was a conscious reference to a series of documentaries dating back to World War II. I never had occasion to seek them out, though, until this series.

Why We Fight: Prelude to War is the first of seven such movies available on Kanopy. If it being the first weren't reason enough to select it as the next in this chronological series that has already made it through the 1920s and 1930s, then it being directed by Frank Capra certainly would have been. (It also won an Oscar for best documentary.)

I still haven't gotten up to the true feature length I'm seeking -- this is only 52 minutes long -- but I suspect I'll be there by the 1950s next month. At which point I will likely slow down and see a lot more movies from 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Propaganda films come in all shapes and forms. We tend to think of them as negative, such as those made for the Third Reich by Leni Reifenstahl, but they can serve a positive function as well, and that's the case with this (and, I assume, the other six in the series, which I might watch if it weren't such a drain on my Kanopy credits, and if I didn't get a sense of what all of them are probably doing from this one). The U.S. had already made the decision to enter World War II, and these government-sponsored films wanted to retroactively make the case for it, as well as convince an American populace with non-interventionalist tendencies.

Noting Capra's involvement, I had assumed that the government had just gone to Hollywood and conscripted the most successful director at the time. In fact, Capra seems to have been a far more willing participant, as he took up the mantle of specifically answering the function of Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which probably would have made a good selection for this series had I not already seen it. (Actually, I may have only seen select scenes from it, so it could have also been a good candidate for last year's Audient Audit.) According to Wikipedia, Capra was "daunted, yet impressed and challenged" by Reifentstahl's work.

As it turns out, Capra actually directed most of the films in the series, so I could have selected any of them if that had been my primary interest. It made sense to go chronologically, though, and this one -- released near the beginning of American involvement in the war -- gives the background for how the Axis dictators came into power. It intersperses actual footage and newspaper headlines with recreations of events where cameras could not have been present, but just as quick snippets of footage to provide context to the narration, nothing requiring any acting or potentially fictitious interpretations of events. We see/hear about political rivals assassinated and armies amassed. We see Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese generals firing up brainwashed crowds.

As a cinephile, I was, of course, looking to see if I could detect "the Capra touch" -- something that would remind me of the director of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, two of the hits Capra had already made at that time. Of course the film shares an earnestness and seriousness of political purpose with the former, and one could argue, the latter as well. And indeed, the underdog current to Capra's previous work helps with the thrust of these films, as America is characterized as an underdog under the oppressive heel of these European and Asian tyrants.

I suppose it wasn't likely that I'd find the kind of "escapist humanism" -- is that a good way to describe it? -- that I attribute to Capra's work on the whole. That's fundamentally inconsistent with this type of project. Though it does have Capra's plucky spirit, it does not necessarily seem like something Capra himself was uniquely qualified to bring to the film/these films. It's such a different type of project from Capra's feel-good Hollywood films that I don't feel like I really would detect hallmarks of the same director, and yet another director probably would have made them a lot less hopeful and more cynical, or simply never gravitated to the project in the first place.

As for the actual content of the film, it gives a showcase of some absolutely priceless historical footage -- not necessarily rare, but something that I don't generally see, or am less likely to find accumulated all in one place. Like footage of the bombings of various European cities and Pearl Harbor, the latter being the actual "inciting incident" (to use the screenwriting term) that got American into World War II. The footage of the marching armies of other countries shows quite well the type of determination the Allies were up against. I was also educated on parts of the lead-up to war that I didn't know about, or forgot. (The report I did on World War II in the sixth grade, or whenever it was, has mostly left me.) Also the film lays out the plans for world domination put forth by each of the Axis powers, the routes they planned to use on the map to invade adjacent and far-flung territories and turn them all an insidious color of black, meant to indicate their occupation. Chilling.

There was one particularly shocking image from the film that I'd never seen before, and it was about the idea of other countries breeding young brainwashed soldier from birth. The shot -- which could not have been recreated for fear of violating all sorts of morality standards -- shows a big "pile of babies" who appear to be accumulated together to receive some kind of innoculation or brain-washing agent. You can literally see like 40 babies stuck in the same ten foot by ten foot space, not actually smothering each other, but coming as close as you can, and all crying like the dickens for obvious reasons.

I tried to find an image online but ultimately failed. So I found the spot again in the movie and took this picture. Crazy, right?

I guess I didn't find Prelude to War "groundbreaking" in the form or anything like that, but it is certainly a vitally important historical document and I'm really glad I saw it. I reckon it played a significant role in turning public sentiment toward the war.

On to May and on to the 1950s, unless I find another thing in the 40s that screams out to be watched.