The Effectiveness of Australian Film Propaganda for the War Effort 1914-1918
Among studies along a similar line, the first chapter of Nicholas Reeve’s book The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? traces the history of Government-sponsored film propaganda in Britain during World War One, and draws several conclusions about the effectiveness of cinematic propaganda. He notes that “there is a clear relationship between the chronology of changing audience attitudes towards the official films and the chronology of changing wartime public opinion.” Furthermore, he states that “film propaganda was the servant, not the master of the audience it sought to control”, concluding that “the power of film propaganda does seem to have been more mythical than real.”[1] Reeves bases his argument exclusively on a study of the official war films, virtually all actuality films, produced under the authority of the British government.
Australian cinema, the first eighty years
Chronological coverage of the making of a film industry which only achieved international recognition in the 1980s.
Film Propaganda and its Audience: The Example of Britain's Official Films during the First World War
its policies by mounting a large and systematic campaign of official propaganda. Within days of the declaration of war, Asquith asked Charles Masterman (a member of the cabinet and chairman of the National Health Insurance Commission) to initiate such a campaign, and Masterman set up his largely secret organization at Wellington House - the London headquarters of the Insurance Commission. To begin with Masterman and his colleagues were exclusively concerned with neutral and allied opinion abroad, but by 1917 domestic enthusiasm for the war had begun to wane, and they turned their attention to public opinion at home as well. Indeed, in the last two years of the war, they also sought to influence public opinion in enemy countries as well. As the scale of official propaganda increased, the government twice took the