American Cinema, FBI and Propaganda: The Image of the Internal Enemy (1941–1942)

Abstract

Introduction. The period 1941–1942 became a time when American art was rapidly rebuilt on “military rails.” Cultural figures in every way reinforced the morale of American soldiers and were engaged in justifying various actions of the government through a more accessible and understandable language of artistic narrative. Methods and materials. The rich material of the archive of the FBI, the army and other US security services allows a better look at how the cinema obeyed the propaganda needs of the warring power. The article is based on the principles of historicism and systematics, as well as the methods of historical comparativistics and imagology (discourse-analysis, analysis of audiovisual representation and some others). Analysis and results. It is quite clear that cinema played a special role in these processes – the most massive and popular type of art, which in the previous two decades became the most common form of leisure for Americans. This article is devoted to the use of cinema to justify the initially extremely unpopular measure of the American government to intern the Japanese in concentration camps in the light of the entry of the United States into World War II.