Why We Fall for Propaganda Films So Easily

Why is the human brain — the same organ that’s capable of sending missions to space and inventing flower pots that can call us out for being bad plant parents — so impressionable that it can make us believe the dumbest shit possible? Why do we, given our ability to think, behave like five-year-olds when someone tells us unfounded things about racial and religious minorities, women or same-sex couples? The simple answer is propaganda. 

Propaganda is biased or misleading information provided with the sole intention of furthering a specific agenda to typically influence or polarise public opinion. This is often done to encourage violence and hate speech that in turn promotes a distrust of democratic processes and undermines a democracy. To be discerning about the information we consume, we need to understand the tools of propaganda, be aware of personal biases, and learn how we tend to process information. 

“[The] human mind has a way of simplifying complex ideas into not-so-complex compartments. This is where black-and-white thinking comes in,” Devika Kapoor, a Mumbai-based counselling psychologist told VICE. “We want to fit ideas into boxes. It’s easier to pin the blame on somebody else and to believe that there exists “pure good” and “pure evil,” because it [reduces] cognitive load on our mind. Propaganda takes into account these tendencies.”

In an early scene from the recently released film in India, The Kerala Story, the protagonist Shalini Unnikrishnan (played by actor Adah Sharma) takes an autorickshaw to get to her college. The camera shows the Islamic phrase “Allahu Akbar” (Allah/ God is the greatest) inscribed on the auto. This is one of several visual cues that helps set the stage for certain ideas to take root as the film progresses. 

The use of cues to signify “anti-national” ideas is fundamental to the premise of the fictional drama: how “love jihad” is used as a means to recruit women from different faiths into the Islamist militant group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). Love jihad is an Islamophobic conspiracy theory that falsely claims that Muslim men seek to entrap Hindu women to convert them to Islam. So, barely a few minutes into the film, we see graffiti with “Free Kashmir” slogans, drawings of Osama bin Laden, and, notably, the emblem of ISIS – cues that help establish the nursing college that Shalini has enrolled in as a place that is home to ideas and beliefs associated with Islamic terrorism.

The use of film as a medium to spread propaganda is far from new. In the spring of 1935, German film director Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will was released in a major cinema in Berlin, Germany, and was immediately well received. The documentary-style film follows Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler’s arrival in the city of Nuremberg in 1934 for a political rally and culminates with a grand parade, four days later, in which the German dictator makes the closing speech. 

The controversial film continues to be a study for Riefenstahl’s visual style and creative choices (it has a 7.2 rating on IMDB and an 84 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes), including the ways in which she capitalises on the event’s scale to magnify the sense of Hitler’s power and reach. Nazi propaganda is said to have played a key role in the genocide of six million European Jews in German-occupied Europe between the years of 1941 and 1945, known as The Holocaust. It is believed that the films of Riefenstahl, as well as the 1940 Der Ewide Jude (The Eternal Jew), largely contributed in helping spread ideas that were integral to the Nazi Message, including the superiority of German military power and Jews and communists as enemies of the German people. 

In India, The Tashkent Files (2019), The Kashmir Files (2022) and, most recently, The Kerala Story (2023) are alleged by critics to be propaganda films said to be using Riefenstahl’s techniques — like heroising the main subject of the film and altering the audience’s sense of history — to push the leading party’s political agenda. 

But why does propaganda spread so easily? “Propaganda breeds on historical disharmonies and generational traumas. They capitalise on these traumas by poking where it already hurts,” said Kapoor. 

According to Kapoor, propaganda filmmakers start their narrative from a point that already resonates with the audience’s core beliefs. “It doesn’t have to actually do the work of laying a foundation. It picks on something that already exists. It just needs to amplify whatever is in people’s minds, which they think is unfortunate,” she added.

Cognitive bias, a systematic thought process, has a large role to play in the way in which we process information. Cognitive bias refers to the tendency of the human brain to filter information via personal experience and preferences as a coping mechanism that allows for large amounts of information to be quickly processed. Propaganda thrives on simplification and emotional appeal rather than logic. In many instances, propagandists will deliberately utilise misleading information, partial truths, or even outright lies to bolster their claims and to influence people.

Confirmation bias is another contributing factor that allows for the spread of propaganda. Kapoor explains that confirmation bias is the tendency to seek evidence that aligns with our existing beliefs and ignore information that might contradict our narrative. “So, if I have a belief like, say, blue is a colour for boys, and if I see boys wearing blue, I will be like, yeah, this is a colour that is more masculine and only men should be wearing that colour. So you will seek whatever validates your belief,” said Kapoor. 

Another weapon in the arsenal of propaganda filmmakers is the “illusory truth effect.” If we hear something repeated many times around us, it encourages us to believe in it as the truth. The repetition of lies across different platforms has been shown to increase their legitimacy in the eyes of the audience. 

Then there is a tool known as framing, in which the narrative is controlled by presenting it in a particular context or frame to encourage certain readings and to discourage others. An example of linguistic framing is to use the term “encounter operation” to justify the killing by the police of a “terrorist.” Now, the person might or might not be a terrorist and might or might not have been armed, but if they are framed as a “terrorist” and are in an “encounter” with the police – someone assigned with the duty to “protect” us – we immediately think of the killing as justified, even moral. 

Education, too, doesn’t insulate us from this. “Access to education does not necessarily guarantee that a person will be analytical because education also really forces you to compartmentalise information,” said Kapoor. “In fact, more educated people are far more rigid in their beliefs because they feel they have studied so much that what they know is the single truth that exists.”

But why do filmmakers choose to make propaganda films? As per Soumik Sen, director of the 2014 film Gulaab Gang and the creator of webseries Jubilee (2023), it is a sign of decline of nuanced thinking among today’s filmmakers. 

“Only a very good filmmaker nowadays has the ability to show the nuance the cinema requires. Sensationalism is easy,”  he said. He feels cinema has always had a certain degree of propaganda and ingrained politics. “Cinema has never been devoid of politics. The only question is how do you promulgate and put forward your ideas,” Sen told VICE in a telephonic interview. 

Another reason for the surge in propaganda films is the decreased attention span of the audience, according to Sen. “Now everything is available in 15 seconds on our smartphones. The attention span of the audience is getting lower and lower everyday. The room and security to propagate a certain artistic idea is fading away. If you want to get noticed and make your presence felt in the drawing room of the Indian audience, you will have to make it loud,” said Sen. 

Sen believes many mainstream Hollywood and Bollywood films, including most James Bond films, and Amitabh Bachchan-starrers like Agneepath, Shahenshah, and Kaala Patthar can be labelled propaganda cinema, and to some extent, films that promote fascism. “One man being a saviour of many people… if you look at it… is the blueprint of fascism. That way, most western films and many films starring John Wayne or Amitabh Bachchan, where they play the saviour of the people, are a form of propaganda,” said Sen. “Most American war movies are propaganda too. We haven’t seen a single film on the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese point of view, have we?”

A very popular example of a propaganda film is the famous Rambo series starring Sylvester Stallone. “In fact, Rambo 3, where the protagonist fights along with the Taliban against the Russians is a purely propaganda film,” said Sen.

Propaganda films have also been made to bring about and influence social change. A case in point is Not One Less (1999), directed by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou. “This film was actually commissioned by the Chinese government to stop rural to urban migration, a major problem at that time,” Sen added. 

As per a report, white supremacist propaganda reached a five-year high in 2022. In India, Hindutva propaganda against Muslims has also been documented to have risen since the advent of the Narendra Modi-led BJP, the ruling party, in 2014. Due to its subjective character, measuring the scope and influence of propaganda in films can be difficult. What constitutes propaganda in a movie may be seen differently by many scholars and specialists, depending on the time as well as on an individual’s own politics.

National-award winning film critic Sohini Chattopadhyay is of the view that cinema, and to some extent cricket, have been used as mediums of propaganda in India ever since the times of the British Raj. “Even the first feature film Raja Harishchandra portrays a value-driven idea of Indian civilisation, which was very mythologically rooted and yet was important in the national movement,” Chattopadhyay told VICE in a telephonic interview. 

Another era she talked about was when the films adopted Nehruvian ideas of secularism, social justice and democratic governance in post-partition India, helmed by directors like Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy. “A case in point was Sujata, a 1960 film about a romance between a Brahmin man and an untouchable woman. There was a sequence in which Sujata, the female protagonist, had to give blood to save her mother-in-law. It was a very open motif of how caste is something that the new India needed to leave behind,” said Chattopadhyay. “Later there were films like Amar Akbar Anthony and the angry young man films of Amitabh Bachchan in the 1980s, all of which had political messages relevant to their times.”

Of the recent Indian films like The Kerala Story, Chattopadhyay believes that they give up art for what she refers as “WhatsApp forward wish fulfillment”. “These films have no modicum of art, but they focus on clever storytelling which manipulates [their] audience. In fact, there is not even one character whom one can identify with and there is an overemphasis on verbalisation and overstatements," said Chattopadhyay. “It's like the characters are actually saying WhatsApp forwards as dialogues, sort of like a realisation of fantasies of those who believe in these things already.”

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