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PROPAGANDA AND MOBIUZATION OF CONSENT

Facing::The iconic figurę of the early cinema, Charlie Chaplin conquered all in his 1918featurefilm Shoulcler Arms.

A London-born comic trained in the late Victorian musie hall traditlon, Chaplin spentthe war In the United States, and vividly led the cinematic charge against the Germans in the last year of the war.

Morę unusual was the effect Chaplin s photograph had on shell-shocked soldiers. A physician serving with the US army said that an autographed photo of Chaplin did wonders for the men in his care. ‘Please write your name on tlie photos’, Dr Lewis Coleman Hall wi'ote to Chaplin, ‘the idea being that nearly eveiyone has seen you in pictures. I will show your picture to a poor fellow and it may arrest his mind for a second. He may say “Do you laiow Charlie?” and then begins the first ray of hope tliat the boys mind can be saved/

Some of his films were exphcitly propagandistic. He used film to promote Liberty Bonds, and followed this up with public appeals. On 8 April 1918, his appearance with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks on Wall Street in New York drew an estimated 30,000 people. After clowning with Fairbanks (and standing on his shoulders), he told the crowds that This veiy minutę the Gennans occupy a position of advantage, and we have to get the dollars. It ought to go over so that we can drive that old devil, the Kaiser, out of France/ In Washington, he repeated the same pitch: The Germans are at your door! We’ve got to stop them! And we will stop tliem if you buy Libeity Bonds! Remember, each bond you buy vsdll save a soldiers life—a mothers son!— will bring diis war to an early yictory!’ He then promptly fell off die platfonn and (in his words) ‘grabbed Marie Dressler and fell with her on top of my handsome young friend', who happened to be the then assistant secretary of die navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt. He met President Wilson, and, for his British audiences, he appeared with tlie British musie hall star Harry Lauder, whose son had been killed in 1916.

But his major achievement on the screen was to produce tlie war film to end all war films, Shoulcler Anns. It premiered 011 20 October 1918, and received instant acclaim. Drawing 011 a tour of US army training camps, tlie story lampoons tlie rigours of boot camp. After a hopeless spell of drill, exliausted, Chaphn falls asleep and wakes up on the western front. He cap-tures a German unit by single-handedly surrounding diem, masters die arts of camouflage by tuming into a tree, and manages to capture the kaiser him-self (played by liis brodier Sydney).

Chaphn was in a class of his own during the war: the comic genius of his time. Film worked on many different registers during the conflict. Many fdms distributed during the war had nodiing to do widi die conflict, sticldng to escapist tliemes. But others retumed to the war, and used film to spread explicit morał messages in the hope of stiffening pubhc morale. When we look at tiiese films, we see some of the ways in which, in many countries at war, consent was fortified and die inevitable anxiety of military conflict soft-ened by the gentle and reassuring images of cinematic comedy.

Many Gennans, too, believed that tbeir cause was just, and that their civi-hzation was based on values higher and nobler than the decadence of France or die crass commerciahsm of Britain and die United States. In Germany, too, film was diere to spread the message. There were over 2,000 cinemas in Germany in 1913, with over 200 in Berlin alone. This national total was only

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