Bending Time and Space for Pan-Americanism: Shots of the “Western Hemisphere” in Wartime Cinema

Abstract

Analysing World War II films, from Allied propaganda to Good Neighbor Policy productions, this work probes the visual construction of the idea of the Western Hemisphere and Latin America’s place in it. It finds how war propaganda carried messages beyond the explicit anti-Axis one. In the films discussed here, the resources of novel aerial photography, cartography, and time-travel plots achieved the contradictory effect of showing the entire continent as one, while North and South were in contrast. During the war, Good Neighbor Policy productions promoting a continental alliance used many of the same visual elements as war propaganda to shore up morale ahead of battles. A focus on Brazil offers a counterpoint to US-based pan-Americanism, considering its nationalist discourse in the Estado Novo. Wartime cinema created a New World where the US was the future of “Western” civilisation as a continuum of Europe, while Latin America was visualised as existing in the past, resulting in a deeply ambivalent Western Hemisphere.

Keywords:

• pan-Americanism
• film history
• propaganda
• World War II
• Brazil

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University for the financial support. I thank Tom Conley (Harvard) whose insight and encouragement inspired this work, as well as Adriano Duarte and Alexandre Valim (Federal University of Santa Catarina) who kindly supported my research on Good Neighbor Policy films in its early days.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In the Oxford Dictionary, “west” is “in the direction of that part of the horizon where the sun sets; towards the cardinal point which is 90 degrees clockwise from the south point”.

2 Since Edward Said (1978), the West has been understood as a highly unstable construction based on antagonisms. These changed over time: Capitalist versus Soviet bloc; fictions of democracy versus terror. After the Cold War, scholarship examined the concept of the “West” in different fields, but mostly in terms of East-to-West rather than how “Western” ideology plays out in North-South relations. See Bavaj (2011), and Browning and Lehti’s (2010) comprehensive review.

3 In the Pan-American Yearbook (1945), several advertisements encourage travel and proximity between North and South America. A striking whole-page ad for Pan-American Grace Airways shows a map of the Americas and an airplane, with the logo “Making good neighbors even closer neighbors”. Two novelties brought by aviation worked for pan-American ideology: the uniting view from above, and the increase of velocity and consequent decrease in duration of travel.

4 As Tenorio-Trillo notes, the adjective “Latin” in Latin America “has stored a basic array of racial, historical and cultural beliefs”. The concept was “capable of incarnating itself as the geographical and cultural assumption of post-World War II theories of modernization”. The term, taken for granted, served “less the supposition of a place, a culture, and a people, and more the need of the other America for a mirror” (Tenorio-Trillo 2017, 2).

5 Who gets to be “Western” is debated. For Samuel Huntington (1996), Latin America was not (while Australia was, showing how little it has to do with objective geography). Hobsbawm (2012) goes beyond geographic lines: “westernized elites”, “non-western”, “western world”, “western ideology”. Gobat (2013) says: “‘Latin America’ was hardly ‘anti-Western’, as Samuel Huntington and others would like us to think. On the contrary, the idea of Latin America not only stemmed from a European concept but emerged in defence of an ideal that Huntington associates with the ‘West’: democracy. Early proponents of ‘Latin America’ perhaps (…) used such ideas not to attack the liberal values associated with the ‘West’, but to counter the stubborn belief of North Atlantic (‘Western’) powers that other societies were incapable of becoming fully ‘civilized’ on their own. Hence did these Latin Americans so adamantly denounce U.S. expansion undertaken in the name of democracy promotion” (1375).

6 In defining themselves, nations and nationalisms constructed elaborate forms of legitimisation in history, from language to religion, often through contradictory procedures (Hobsbawm 2012). Furthermore, Anderson (1991) has shown how national unities are “imagined”.

7 Virilio (2000) has shown how the camera evolved at the same pace as the machine-gun and the airplane.

8 See Lieutenant Cardwell’s (1991, 49) report.

9 See Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Sheffield (1949).

10 To Hargrave (1940), propaganda, “the mightiest weapon of all”, was what motivated the finger that pulled the trigger. The term later acquired a more negative reputation. Germany used it overtly, while the US and UK acted under subtler offices using the term “information” (Valim 2019). In Brett Gary’s definition, propaganda meant “the organized manipulation of key cultural symbols and images (and biases) to persuade a mass audience to take a position, or move to action, or remain inactive on a controversial matter” (1999, 8).

11 In 1845, journalist John L. O’Sullivan wrote in the Democratic Review that “our manifest destiny, was attributed by Divine Providence so we should cover the continent in free development of our race which multiplies by millions every year”. In 1813, Thomas Jefferson suggested that “America” (US) has “a hemisphere of its own” (Whitaker 1954, 323). In 1900, Senator Albert J. Beveridge said “the divine mission of America” was to “lead in the regeneration of the world” (Loveman 2010, 181).

12 Whitaker quotes Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

13 First Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Saturday 4 March 1933.

14 The peoples living south of the Rio Grande were of varied ethnicities. Nonetheless, “‘Latin’ America, all of a sudden, became a new ‘racial’ category defined not by blood or skin colour but by marginal status”, beyond Kant’s four races, and, in geopolitical issues, Latin America is conceived of as “part of the West and yet peripheral to it” (Mignolo 2005, 73).

15 See Quijano and Wallerstein’s concept of Americanity (1992).

16 In this paper, the words “America” and “American” refer to the continent and its inhabitants, unless when used to define the United States according to a source or discourse, in which case the word is emphasised with quotation marks.

17 Although President Vargas was a nationalist, often anti-US, after Pearl Harbor he supported Roosevelt in the name of continental alignment, as seen in his statement of 1941 (Garcia 2008).

18 Brazilian “exceptionalism” has been noted by Tenorio-Trillo (2017). Thanks to the monarchist rather than republican history of its independence and its language difference, it has often considered itself outside of any “Latin American” unit, although it was often included in it in the US imaginary.

19 “Records of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Referring to Activities in the State of Santa Catarina”, NARA, 1942.

20 On World War II cinema, Disney, the Good Neighbor Policy and ideology, see, for example, Moura (1991), Smoodin (1993), Tota (2009), Motta (2022), Sadlier (2012), Peres Melgosa (2012) and Valim (2019).

21 See Schroder (2013).

22 Allied and Axis aesthetic exchange is present not only in film, but in print, as Hille (2013) has shown in her study on propaganda posters from the two Germanies – “Different messages, similar strategies” (120).

23 These angles became enmeshed in civilian photography as well. Early-century struggles to attach cameras onto airplanes in mid-war mid-air presenting total visions from above increasingly contributed to how states, artists and audiences perceived the world. In the years following the war, the problem of the view from above would be raised by both US and Soviet films (Jameson 1992).

24 Following the Great War, this angle was questioned with sophistication. In Wings (1927), the disconnection between attacker and attacked brought about by the aerial battlefield reaches the point where the main character shoots down his friend, in a dramatic moment of blindness – the pilot has a broad visual scope, but there are important details he does not see.

25 The Why We Fight series had seven instalments: Prelude to War (1942); The Nazis Strike (1943); Divide and Conquer (1943); The Battle of Britain (1943); The Battle of Russia (1943); The Battle of China (1944); and War Comes to America (1944). Capra was already a successful Hollywood director. After he enlisted for military service, he was given the mission by General Marshall to make a series of “documented, factual information films – the first in our history – that will explain to our boys in the Army why we are fighting, and the principles for which we are fighting” (Capra 1971, 327).

26 Experiments on Mass Communication (Hovland et al. 1949) used data collected by the Research Branch, Information and Education Division, War Department.

27 Some officers found Why We Fight to be so objective that it was redundantly newsreel-like, while the OWI argued it was too biased. It was only released after internal dispute (Dick 1985).

28 “The application of these principles”, he says, interestingly suggesting that the war was still going on, “may someday provide the margin necessary to bring victory to the arms of our democracy” (Gavin 1949).

29 Brian Loveman noted how “the discourse of American policymakers conflated American national interests and the defence of ‘Western Civilization’” (2010, 253).

30 This type of duality implicit in Orientalism is well described by Mignolo: “Western people have disciplines and Eastern people have cultures to be studied by Western disciplines” (2005, 36).

31 The case of Europe and Africa alone shows how uniting nearby land masses as one identity, as was done in pan-Americanism, is not a self-evident procedure, as these are close together and not identified as a common group. Said’s “imaginative cartography” comes to mind, as does the notion of visualising the “other” before actually seeing them.

32 This seventh-century map consisted of a circle representing the ocean, containing three slices of land: Asia, Europe and Africa, resulting in a shape resembling a letter “T” inside an “O”.

33 As Benedict Anderson stated, “the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history. An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellow Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” (1991, 26).

34 Columbus’s infamous “achievement” of discovery has been strongly questioned since the end of the twentieth century. The shift in perspective it provided concerning America as a whole was much later attributed to North America’s own beginning. See Wynter (1995).

35 The same year that this film was produced, Whitaker wrote: “The European origin of the whole ‘New World’ idea is obvious the moment one breaks the idea down into its two component parts, which are the newness of America and the congruity of its several parts” (Whitaker 1954, 323).

36 When Simón Bolívar chose the name “Gran Colombia” to name his America, it was as though to maintain Columbus’s finding as one (Pratt 1992). This did not happen in practice, of course, and the continent was divided with strong contrasts, even when the discourse of hemispheric unity was what justified (unequal) alliances. Questioning Columbus as a unifying common memory of a continent, Trouillot (1995) notices that the collective identity of Native Americans, from Arizona to the Amazon, defied the quincentennial, while Euro-Americans claim Columbus as an ancestor.

37 Zweig’s (1941 Land of the Future celebrated Brazil’s mixed-race potential as an alternative to the Europe of Nazism. “This problem confronts no country more dangerously than Brazil; and none – and it is to prove this that I am writing this book – has solved it in such a happy and enviable way” (7). John dos Passos later mentioned Brazil’s “amoebalike quality” to absorb different racial elements. “The Brazilians, of all the South American peoples, seem furthest on the way towards producing a civilization of their own” (Dos Passos 1963, 2).

38 The cinema educativo was helped by a government decree that abolished taxes on such films. For the ambiguous relationship between nationalist artists and intellectuals working for the dictatorship’s cultural department, see Bomeny (2001) and Miceli (2001).

39 Supported by the “Cacao Institute” of Bahia, O descobrimento was in production between October 1936 and November 1937, thus at the time of the Estado Novo coup.

40 Gazeta de Notícias, 8 May 1937. Cited from Schvarzman (2003, 188).

41 Santiago (2000) sees power in a precarious position in the big scheme of the continent: Latin America is an in-between place of encounter, and the biggest contribution of Latin America to Western culture is the “systematic destruction of the concepts of unity and purity” (16).

42 This didactic approach can be seen as a reference to the original travel log of the trip, by Pero Vaz de Caminha, who each day recounted the narrative stating date and geographic position (Schvarzman 2003, 154).

43 In its six years of activities, it spent around 140 million US dollars at the time (Tota 2009). The OCIAA produced, screened, and reported on public reactions. They also managed the distribution of textbooks in schools, radio programmes, and supporting authors from both countries to travel between them and report back to their readers.

44 Importantly, the OCIAA was also concerned with preventing other films from being screened that might portray the US badly or reveal ways in which the countries were not aligned – such as, for instance, those involving racial issues. For this, they partnered with Brazil’s Department of Press and Propaganda (DIP), the Estado Novo’s infamous censorship office. See Moura (1991) and Sadlier (2012).

45 For a comprehensive work on Brazil and the Good Neighbor Policy, see Valim (2019). Previously, Tota (2009) has offered a nuanced view of the so-called “Americanization” of Brazil, Garrard-Burnett et al. (2014) have questioned the one-way perspective of imperialist influence from US to South America, and Cándida Smith (2017) has put together cases of inter-American cultural exchange with Latin American agency.

46 Several US authors were sent to Latin America by the State Department to further improve inter-American relations. Government funding of cultural diplomacy programmes included the clandestinely CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (Cohn 2006). Scholarship has found connections between political climate and cultural missions, using artists as peacekeeping soft-power ambassadors (Oakley 2002).

47 In practice, cultural relations were not one-sided, nor were foreign films received passively in Latin America. Intense and rich dialogues took place among artists from North to South and vice versa during the Good Neighbor Policy scheme. The very idea of Brazilian culture being “Americanized” was critiqued as a joke. Brazil-US cultural exchange has been discussed as much more complex. See, for instance, Jason Borge on the conversations between samba and jazz (2016).

48 When Down Argentine Way premiered in Brazil, it was criticised in the magazine O Cruzeiro (1940) for showing samba and tango as interchangeable. Carmen Miranda, who starred in it, did not welcome generalising labels like Latin or South American, and preferred to be called Brazilian instead.

49 “Eu só boto bebop no meu samba/Quando Tio Sam tocar um tamborim/Quando ele pegar/No pandeiro e no zabumba./Quando ele aprender/Que o samba não é rumba./Aí eu vou misturar/Miami com Copacabana./Chiclete eu misturo com banana …” (“Chiclete com Banana”. Gordurinha and Almira Castilho, recorded by Jackson do Pandeiro in 1959).

50 See Marli Rosa (2013).

51 Gracias Amigos (OCIAA 1944) states how “we got our rubber” from the willing Amazon. “What our Latin American neighbour had, we could have”, says the narrator: Cuban manganese, Colombian quinine, Bolivian tin, Chilean nitrates for explosives, Brazilian quartz for walkie-talkies.

52 Although Brazil was under Getulio Vargas’s dictatorship (1930–1945), Brazil at War affirms that Vargas is a “progressive president”, who has “always supported inter-American solidarity”.

53 Progressive Brazilians supported the war against the Axis, as a way out of their own authoritarian regime. See Bandeira (1973).

54 The Natal base is highlighted in the film Gracias Amigos (OCIAA 1944): “Ask our pilots what they think about the rubber in their tires”, says the narrator, showing on a map how the base enabled transport from US to Europe, something “this America” could not have done “without the other Americas”.

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Maria G. Gatti

Maria G. Gatti holds a PhD in history and romance languages and literatures from Harvard University, and Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in history from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil). Her work examines the connections between cultural policy and the policing of culture in twentieth-century inter-American relations, propaganda, and the effects of the Cold War in South America.