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Old news
Foreign languages and literatures' Brett Bowles' look at World War
II newsreels nets him a National Endowment for the Humanities stipend.
- When Brett Bowles was working on his Ph.D. dissertation on the cultural
history of Marcel Pagnol’s cinema, he noticed that the French filmmaker
just dropped off the map at the beginning of World War II.
"It was unclear what happened to him during the war," said Bowles,
an assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures.
Prior to the outbreak of the war, Pagnol was a top French movie director
and producer who made some of the most popular fiction films of the 1930s.
But with the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, his career was threatened.
Bowles did a little investigating and found out that Pagnol’s studios
in Marseille, the cultural capital of the unoccupied zone governed by the
Vichy French government were used in the production of propaganda newsreels.
"When the war started, Pagnol had put all of his resources into making
a new movie," Bowles said. "But in order to finish it he had to
get permission to distribute it from the Vichy government, and ultimately
the Germans or he would have gone bankrupt."
So Pagnol made a deal to turn over his studio and personnel for the making
of newsreels. Bowles' discovery has led him to a whole new, previously unexplored
area of French cultural history.
And it has also led to a $5,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
Summer Stipend for his research project, "Filmed News, Politics and
Public Opinion in France, 1940-44."
He is one of two Iowa State and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences professors
to receive the NEH summer stipend. David Hunter, Monsignor James A. Supple
Chair of Catholic Studies and professor of religious studies, received a
similar grant for his research project, "Ambrosiaster, Commentary on
the Pauline Epistles: A Translation."
Summer stipend grants provide individuals with an opportunity to pursue
research in the humanities that contributes to scholarly knowledge or to
the public's understanding of the humanities.
Bowles says that during World War II, newsreels and short documentaries
were a pervasive part of everyday life in France and even rivaled the influence
of newspapers and radio.
In his study and in an eventual book, Bowles is looking at newsreels filmed
in Vichy, France, which was an unoccupied portion of France from 1940-42,
and those filmed in northern France, which was occupied and administered
by the Germans.
"By comparing competing French and German newsreel series produced
during the war, my project highlights the layers of compromise and conflict
that in previous scholarship have remained hidden below the surface of state
collaboration between the Vichy French government and the Nazis," Bowles
said. "Rediscovering these newsreels also allows us to reevaluate the
relative effectiveness of French and German filmed propaganda in shaping
public opinion on a variety of social and political topics, as well as to
understand better the psychology of collaboration and resistance."
Newsreels produced in the German-controlled area of France were what Bowles
terms "exclusionary" propaganda, with references to Jews, Free
Masons and Communists as being enemies of the "new Europe" that
Germany hoped to establish.
By contrast, the newsreels from Vichy, France rarely made references to
these groups and were consistently "integrationist" in tone, focusig
on the "rebuilding of the French nation" and the "revitalization
of French youth."
Bowles has already published two substantial articles and delivered several
conference papers on the politics and content of wartime newsreels.
He will continue that research in Paris this summer, thanks to his NEH Summer
Stipend.
Around LAS
April 28 to May 11, 2003
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