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The techniques of modern official propaganda were established during the First World War. Film became a part of the propaganda drive undertaken in Britain, France, the United States and Germany, but it was a young medium whose expert practitioners were still aiming to discover certain ways of attracting and holding audiences, and this uncertainty fed into the use of film for official purposes during the war.
Official propaganda during the First World War fell into three categories, being directed at enemy, home or neutral audiences. Film could play little or no part in any campaign directed at enemy audiences, owing to the inevitable restrictions of cinema distribution - no German cinema was going to book a film promoting the Allies' point of view. Film was therefore best directed towards home or neutral audiences, but in Britain (as opposed to Germany) there was little official understanding at the outset of the war of the potential of film as a medium by which an official point of view might be projected. It was largely through pressure exerted by the film trade that official filming was eventually sanctioned and then brought under absolute governmental control. The desire to influence neutral audiences, most particularly the United States, became the object of greatest interest to British propagandists, and it was in this arena that film was first made use of.
America was the key target for a number of reasons. Newly emergent as a world power, it was the largest non-combatant Western nation, and its forces and support would be invaluable to the Allies, should it abandon its stance of strict neutrality declared by President Woodrow Wilson at the outbreak of war. That position of neutrality was viewed by many in Britain as showing indecisiveness, even cowardice; America owed loyalty to its parent nation, it was felt, and had to be persuaded of the Tightness of the Allied cause. Most importantly, American business interests, in particular the anglophile J.P. Morgan Jr., were providing the loans necessary for the British government to buy its military supplies, and it was hoped that British propaganda in America would keep the needs and sacrifices of the Allies in the minds of American finance, and likewise counteract the influence of German propaganda in the United...