The Shaping of Popular Consent: A Comparative Study of the Sovie ...

On 16 November, 1940, White House aid Ralph Block wrote to a colleague about the Hollywood for Roosevelt Committee⁴⁶, a voluntary organisation of cultural producers who used all their knowledge of movie-making to campaign for the re-election of FDR. “The Hollywood Committee”, wrote Block, “was composed chiefly of amateurs. But they do not lack political sense.”⁴⁷ In other words, Block, a seasoned political campaigner, recognised that a career in cultural production had given these filmmakers an understanding of political issues and an expert ability to communicate them (not to mention a desire to do so). Ian Scott has underlined the point. “…Politics has always played”, he wrote, “and Hollywood came along to enhance a game of spectacle and idealisation. Hollywood reflects and encourages the kind of mythmaking that American politics itself has constantly engaged in.”⁴⁸ Even if all films are not political, Scott continues, “they are all ideological”.⁴⁹

So far as the visual arts are concerned, I have approached them as a vitally important sub-section of the larger epistemological field of culture. The epistemological value of culture lies in its ability to provide a bridge, or at least a potential convergence, between two divergent approaches to the study of history. Ronald Suny, a leading historian of the Soviet Union, explained lucidly what we may call, in a historiographical sense, this cultural convergence. “The problem for us in the future”, he wrote,