viz. - Political Propaganda

Picturing Poetry in the Classroom

ebfrye — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:08:40 +0000

Image Credit: "Don't Touch My Flag," Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Greetings, all. In my last post for this semester, I'd like to continue on the poetry track down which I've been more or less rambling. Lately, I've noticed the growing frequency with which both poets and larger institutions are using visual media to bring poetry to broader (usually younger) audiences and to augment the form of the reading experience. I've also thought about how some of these techniques can be added to my own pedagogical practices.

In that frame of mind, I've put together a short piece using iMovie and images from the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs collection to accompany my reading of Donald Revell's poem "Election Year." The clip models an exercise I'd like to use in the classroom in the future.

I'm interpreting the poem as indicating the speaker's willingness to be outside of all of the "Americanisms" an election year might evoke. However, the title emphasizes the weight of a nationalistic, mass culture that is difficult to escape. Consequently, because the poem's title arouses and insists on what the rest of the poem deliberately eschews, the poem is about what it is not about, if that makes sense. To emphasize such a contradiction, I've chosen a series of images that are highly saturated with associations of patriotism, protest, and significant events in U.S. history. Included in the clip are a photograph of Lincoln's funeral, a shot of listeners at a Civil Rights-era protest, an image of a group meeting in an Arizona labor camp, and a photograph of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk.

In a literature class, students could produce similar videos using images from the databases that we have listed on our "images" section of the blog. Students could be instructed to take multiple approaches, using images to interpret a poem, to historicize it, or a mixture of both. The exercise might be modified to allow students to use images of their own making in interpeting a poem. The latter approach could be particularly fruitful for a creative writing workshop in which students could produce docu-poems similar to these. Students would be asked to give a presentation and/or produce a short essay with a bibliography to accompany their pieces.

Significantly, as much as the exercise focuses on images, it also requires students to read the piece aloud, which is a practice that should be emphasized in any teaching of poetry.

Rock the Vote

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:02:39 +0000

Obama supporters have been called fanatical and naive but something that we've also noticed is that they are also rather musical. MK noted the Will.I.Am video and McCain parody here and Tim posted the somewhat...let's say cheesy...response from Clinton supporters here. Starting with the "Obama girl"'s song (who, it turned out later, didn't vote), and helped along by the accessibility of web publishing, Obama's participatory rhetoric seems to elicit a creative response that belies an identification (perhaps over-identification) with the candidate.

Here in Texas we've got two new videos hitting the tubes. The first attempt to argue against the widely held conception that Clinton is the candidate for Latino (and in this case Mexican American) voters:

The corrido emphasizes Obama's humble roots, flashes pictures of him in crowds of people, and argues "his fight is our fight."

The second, recently composed by Austin singer Kat Edmonson:

The video asks the question "What would you do if you were president?" and flashes to different people holding their answers in the form of cardboard signs. What intrigues me about the Will.I.Am video and these two latest incarnations is the various ways that they argue an identification with Obama, in the "we" "our" and (notably missing) "I" that signifies a corporate or cooperative identity.
It makes me think of the larger ideas of collaborative composition that inhere to ideas of New Media and Web 2.0 and I think it is interesting to consider how this "new idea" for politics that people attach to Obama might be a larger "new idea" of culture.

Case in Point...

timturner — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:18:47 +0000

See this earlier discussion of iconographic photography on the campaign trail.

First spotted at Wonkette

Here's the full picture:

Yes we can/no we can't

mkhaupt — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:57:22 +0000

By now, you've probably seen the moving and (I assume) influential video by the Black-Eyed Peas' Will.i.am "Yes We Can" video in support of Barack Obama, which sets Obama's New Hampshire primary speech to a stripped-down tune, the words voiced by a coterie of A- and B-list celebrities:

While some might argue that seeing/hearing Scarlett Johannson sing Obama's words might dilute their power, the video certainly helped determine where my vote, once belonging to John Edwards, would go. I had not previously heard Obama's speech, and hearing his indirect (yet rhetorically powerful) reference to Martin Luther King, Jr., sung by John Legend certainly caught my attention.

Equally interesting is the "spoof" video (one among many, I am sure), which adopts many of the same techniques, casting "real" people in the celebrities' roles and portraying their dismay at John McCain's pro-war rhetoric. The producers, "Election 08," claim that "earnest people reacting to a candidate is the future of music video":

Hoping to use al-Qaeda's propaganda against them?

LaurenMitchell — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 07:43:12 +0000

This article from the BBC Middle East shows that the U.S. military and Iraqi government hope that some visual evidence will help them to win “hearts and minds” in their efforts to rid Iraq of al-Qaeda.

After raiding an al-Qaeda hideout north of Baghdad, coalition forces found videos of young boys brandishing guns and grenades. The videos show about 20 boys running around with machine guns, staging mock kidnappings, and in one scene putting a pistol to the head of their “hostage.” The videos are apparently part of al-Qaeda propaganda aimed at attracting new recruits. But American and Iraqi officials hope that the “images might persuade Iraqis to turn against the Islamic militants.” It’s interesting that we’re hoping these images will turn Iraqi’s off to such activities and al-Qaeda is hoping that they will turn people on to their cause.

Black sheep and propaganda

timturner — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:20:36 +0000

This poster is a political advertisement for the SVP (in English, the "Swiss People's Party"), a far-right political party in Switzerland that has made anti-immigration policies a centerpiece of its campaign in an upcoming election. The posters have been controversial: the tagline reads "to create security," and the image depicts three white sheep booting the black sheep from the swiss flag, presumably symbolic of Swiss territory.

In fact, deportation is an important component of the SVP's proposed immigration polices, including a proposal to "let judges deport foreigners after they serve prison sentences for serious crimes. The measure also calls for the deportation of the entire family if the convicted criminal is a minor. Human rights advocates warn that the initiative is reminiscent of the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft, or kin liability, under which relatives of criminals were held responsible and punished for their crimes" (NYT).

Although comparisons to Nazism are usually taken to end arguments rather than advance them (see reductio ad Hitlerum), in this case the comparison may be apt--and not only because of the SVP's policies. Consider this short film, called "Heaven or Hell," that was also created by the SVP as a political advertisement in its campaign:

The film is a thorough compilation of basic propaganda techniques: flames, black-and-white vs. color, the threat of violence against women (and the underlying assumption that women are helpless in the face of such violence). At the end of the film, the text reads "the choice is clear" ("Die Wahl ist klar"), and the use of klar/clear (imposed over the smiling, shiny Swiss couple) only reinforces the underlying metaphor of opacity/darkness as "pollution" that the poster presents in visual terms.

It'd be nice to think that because of its lack of subtlety, this video could easily be written off, but some of the YouTube comments suggest otherwise: "simple, true, effective"; "Awesome!!! We need a video like this in the U.S.A."; and "It's absurd to see the SVP described as 'extremist' and their message labeled 'propaganda'."

One final example of SVP propaganda:

“A Soviet Poster A Day” delivers propaganda with commentary

John Jones — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 23:10:39 +0000

“A Soviet Poster A Day” serves up images of Soviet propaganda posters with commentary. This site would be a great resource for anyone studying propagandistic images. Here’s an entry on the Five Year Plan:

Let's accomplish the plan of great deeds!
Klutsis G., 1930

Industrialization in Russia took off in 1929. It was based on a 5 year plan, which implied building of more than 1500 of industrial sites: factories, powerstations, mines, refineries. This was an ambitious plan, which was made even more impossible to carry out because of Joseph Stalin’s call out: “Five year plan in four years!” Nevertheless, the industrialization proved to be extremely successful with heavy industry output to increase 3 times in only 4 years. The zero-level unemployment level was reached in 1930. And although the first Five year plan was not implemented fully in time, during the second one Soviet Union surpassed all world countries except the USA in gross industry output. The country was turning from agriculture to industry as the main source of its power and wealth.

This poster was created by Gustav Klutsis - a pioneering photographer and major member of the Constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century. He was one of the apologists of photomontage technique, he managed to bring to an impressive level.

via boingboing

Also via boingboing is this list of satrical, photoshopped propaganda posters from Worth1000. Most are quite funny. (Warning: some of the posters are mildly not suitable for work.)

Representing Abortion

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:28:09 +0000

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision to uphold a ban on "partial birth" abortions, I thought it would be worth mentioning how visual rhetoric is employed in the abortion debate, particularly by pro-life partisans. Anyone who has spent much time on a large university campus has likely seen the images of protest I'm referring to in demonstrations once or twice a year, protests often coordinated by off-campus religious groups. In their most confrontational manifestations, the groups frequently employ large signs depicting very, very graphic images that they claim show aborted fetuses. I don't have enough medical knowledge to evaluate whether or not such images depict the realities of abortion. But certainly such graphic depictions have an impact on passersby. And certainly visual depictions, whether photos or drawings, will influence how people feel about abortion.

I don't wish to post any of the more graphic images pro-life groups have tended to employ, but even in the image above, taken from a Catholic pro-life site, the ostensible medical drawing is certainly designed to have an emotional impact on audiences. I leave it to readers to decide what they think of all this, but would further add that there has been a move in texts such as Sturken and Cartwright's Practices of Looking to acknowledge that even medical imaging is framed and read in a variety of subjective ways.

I am reminded of the scene in Jesus Camp (which I recently screened in my RHE 306 class) where small models of babies in various stages of development were used to talk to young kids about abortion. Instead of looking, say, fish-like, as a fetus does in the early weeks of development, the models looked exactly like newborn babies, just much, much smaller.