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160 II. AREAS AND ELEMENTS
dark, and let sink in, with their senses ready to absorb them, the images as they happen to follow each other on the screen.*
Excursion: Propaganda and film
The moviegoer is much in the position of a hypnotized person. Spellbound by the luminous rectangle before his eyes— which resembles the glittering object in the hand of a hypnotist— he cannot help succumbing to the suggestions that invade the blank of his mind.12 Film is an incomparable instrument of propaganda.13 Hence Lenin's dictum: 'The cinema is for us the most important instrument of all the arts."14
Grierson, who considered documentary film a godsend for propaganda messages, once said that "in documentary you do not shoot with your head only but also with your stomach muscles."15 And when asked whether in his opinion the illiterate peasants in India might profit by films popularizing reforms, Pudovkin used surprisingly similar terms: "The film is the greatest teacher because it teaches not only through the brain but through the whole body."16
For an idea to be sold it must captivate not only the intellect but the senses as well. Any idea carries a host of implications, and many of them— especially the latent ones, relatively remote from the idea itself— are likely to provoke reactions in deep psychological layers comprising behavior habits, psychosomatic preferences, and what not. The prospective believer may reject an idea intellectually and yet accept it emotionally under the pressure of unconscious drives (which he usually rationalizes in an effort to pay tribute to reason). Or the reverse may happen: he repudiates an idea because his emotional resistance to it proves stronger than the attraction it exerts on his intellect. To be effective, propaganda must supplement its reasoning power with insinuations and incentives apt to influence the "stomach muscles" rather than the "head."
Films do precisely this— provided of course they are not just illustrated sales talk but, as both Grierson and Pudovkin imply, genuine films, with the emphasis on pictorial communications. Since film images lower the spectator's critical faculties, it is always possible to select and arrange them in such a way that they adjust his senses to the idea advertised. They need not refer directly to it; on the contrary, the more they proceed by
* David Low, the famous English caricaturist, once told Mr. Paul Rotha — who kindly passed this on to me — that he has the habit of going to a moviehouse and just enjoys letting the movement from the images flow over him. lie never knows what film he sees but gets tremendous relaxation from his work by such immersion in the screen.