'Selling Democracy' Premieres at Brattle

The blossoming of a new European cinema in the decades following the Second World War marked the beginning of a distinct cultural epoch on the continent. The 50s and 60s brought a generation of cinematic geniuses like Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and Federico Fellini to light, along with a diverse set of styles whose ambition and vision are still tremendously influential. But the future of filmmaking in Europe was not so bright, nor its future so clear, in the last days of the war. By 1945, the national film industries that hadn’t been hijacked for propaganda purposes had been destroyed, and with the continent on the precipice of an economic abyss, nothing seemed more unlikely than a European film renaissance. George C. Marshall and the plan that would bear his name would change all that, however inadvertently.

From March 12 to March 19, the Brattle Theatre is showing a series of films funded by and promoting the Marshall Plan in Western Europe in a program called “Selling Democracy, Films of the Marshall Plan: 1948-1953.” The event, organized by curator Sandra P. Schulberg and funded by the Goethe-Institut (a German non-profit cultural institute), features 25 short films constructed around the Marshall Plan’s deployment in Europe. The films range widely in genre and rhetorical strategy, from simple narratives about how the Plan’s programs could improve daily life, to more broadly pedantic lectures on the nascent, but nevertheless looming threat of totalitarianism from the East.

“They’re entertaining and witty, and they offer really interesting examples of effective public communication,” Schulberg says. “Examples that can both inspire and educate their audiences at the same time.” Schulberg first became interested in these films when she learned that her father, the late NBC producer Stuart Schulberg, had worked with the European filmmakers who produced the shorts. What she saw in these films was the seed of social change that was not without a modern-day resonance: “The films offer a blueprint for how America, in partnership with so-called ‘aid recipients,’ once approached the same problems we face in Iraq. These films offer a very concrete example of how we managed recovery hand-in-hand with European partners.”

Despite the obvious bureaucratic strings, many of these films are rather charming. “The Story of Koula,” targeted at audiences from rural Greek farmlands, tells the story of a farm boy’s dream: to own a donkey. His poor family is only able to fulfill the boy’s desire by signing up for aid from the Marshall Plan. Koula, a mule shipped in from the American South, bristles with European stereotypes about Americans; he’s young, wild, and virtually untamable, but with a little affection from the boy and help from a local donkey, he becomes an invaluable asset to the farm. “I read [“The Story of Koula”] as the quintessential metaphor for what made the Marshall Plan work so well,” Schulberg says. “You have this powerful mule that doesn’t really function until it’s yolked to a little donkey that knows the route.” For modern audiences, it may smack of the sentimental, but for a generation whose national will had all but dissolved, this cinema of hope was more than welcome. “There was constant negotiation and improvising on a basic framework that made [the Plan] very alive and very pragmatic,” Schulberg says.

“It’s cool that we get to see them projected in the way that the people experienced at the time,” says Ned R. Hinkle, the Creative Director of the Brattle. These short films were usually shown preceding features in European movie theaters.

“The idea behind the films—that they should not be done by Americans but by European directors—was psychologically extremely important,” says Detlef M. Gericke-Schoenhagen, the new director of Boston’s Goethe-Institut. Gericke-Schoenhagen was formerly Head of the Film Department at the Goethe-Institut’s headquarters in Munich, where he supervised a collection of over 4,000 films. He believes that the mission behind these films has important implications for contemporary international community building and cooperation: “When I was abroad, I got so many ideas from Africa, from Afghanistan, and the Near East, to create film programs that help deal with the problems in those regions.”

The Marshall Plan films had the collective effect of a quiet reawakening of the European will to create cinema. “When a road-show comes to town to screen a film program, whether its propaganda or not, its going to reestablish an interest in movies that may have been lost during the war—that was quelled either by being at war or occupied by another country,” Hinkle says. “These films are about reconstruction; they’re about winning hearts and minds.”

—Staff writer Ryan J. Meehan can be reached at rmeehan@fas.harvard.edu.