Christopher, I liked the various points you made regarding "The Discovery of Vienna at the North Pole," especially the way you examined the content of the piece with regards to expected audience reaction and reception. Based upon this notion of contextual reception and re-contextualized analysis, I would like to move the conversation to March of Time's 1941 segment "Peace, by Adolf Hitler." Using the audiotape we heard in class as a sample to represent popular sentiment (for at least a small New York population), I would like to briefly look at the various images that created, what I believe were, the filmmaker's desired reactions from the crowd, and what that meant to the newsreel genre and an employed use of cinematic and political understanding at that time.
Throughout the newsreel and accompanying audio track, as we were fortunate enough to be able to listen to in class, the viewer was presented with a variety of nationalistic images or personae, be they domestic or foreign, that described America's ever increasing involvement in World War II, with certain images eliciting an auditory reaction from the Radio City Music Hall crowd. We, as contemporary analyzers, are now led to understand that these images must have been associated with preexisting and underlying messages for two reasons. Firstly, few of the politicians or public speakers are introduced to the audience by either explanatory text or through narrative voice over, indicating that this was not the audience's first exposure to the political ideologies these figureheads or images represent. Secondly, upon viewing certain public speakers, Charles Lindbergh for instance, the audience did not wait to hear his message before expressing their approval or anger towards what he was actually saying. The sight of Lindbergh's face alone, placed within the context of a newsreel examining American involvement in World War II, is enough to trigger the condemning boo's or retroactive applause.
To me, this use of the association between image and political emotion marks one of the larger developments of nonfiction film, specifically with an eye towards the relationship between the travelogue and the newsreel. "Peace, by Adolf Hitler" shows the advancement of the moving image from its initial use of surprising and intriguing audiences, to a tapping into of political zeitgeists and the harnessing of the moving image's connotative powers to spread a political point of view. March of Time, along with the other media sources of the era, could have even been responsible for the pre-conditioning of American audiences to like or dis-like certain politicians that we hear on the audio track playing with "Peace." As a newsreel producer in the early 1940s, March of Time knew that juxtaposing the applauded images throughout the newsreel, including American and Great British flags and military personnel among other examples, with the seemingly unbiased portrayal of isolationist supporters, would still create a biased opinion within the audience. Once the crowd has lauded the images that represent wartime involvement, any other images that represent isolationism work in opposition to previously accepted ideals of providing industrial aid to England in the face of a lying and violent Nazi Germany. These contrarian images come off feeling un-American and even slightly cowardly when slanted against the sight of brave English soldiers and the industrious American worker. Since Lindbergh had become known for his strong isolationist opinion, his presence within the diegesis of the film connotes the section of America that believed that this was not the United State's war to fight, and as such was boo'ed and seen negatively in the light of the other pro-involvment politicians present in the newsreel. This newsreel does not need to directly project a negative presentation of isolationists, but does so creatively as to lead the audience to draw that as their own conclusion.
When comparing "Peace, by Adolf Hitler," to "The Discovery of Vienna at the North Pole" we see two different pieces of short nonfiction work designed with audience reception and psychology in mind. While "Discovery" was made with the benign expectation that audiences would find some pleasure in objectifying the Inuit as they explore his contrived daily regimen and travels to Austria in hopes of attending the World Fair exhibit, "Peace," I believe, plays off of the public opinion of previously established political ideals and their representative politicians, to further prepare the audience for the increased American participation in World War II. Within a modern analysis of the shifting 1940s American political sphere, we can now understand "Peace, by Adolf Hitler" as another installment of the psychological conditioning of the American people to publicly support the war efforts and simultaneously censure any sentiment that encouraged isolationism.
-Roger Mancusi