"MISSION TO MOSCOW"
277
The producers of the film have no doubt been troubled by the sus–
picions and criticisms voiced before its release. Their publicity betrays
the motivations behind the picture and the uneasy consciousness of false–
hood. The first still published in advance of the film was of Trotsky
negotiating with Ribbentrop, an incident that is not even mentioned
in
the testimony of the Moscow trials (although history provides us
with unquestionable documents of Ribbentrop's meetings with Stalin
and Molotov). In selecting this shot, the producers gave away a central
aim of the film, to fix in this country the belief that opponents of the
government are a fifth column of the enemy, and that the strength of
Russia comes precisely from the extermination of plotters against the
state. But this phony incident was deleted from the film, with all other
shots of Trotsky, presumably because of protests from Jewish groups
which were disturbed by the anti-Semitic conclusions that might be drawn
from such a scene. Afterwards, the advertising avoided all mention of
the purges and the fifth column, and tried instead to establish the exact–
ness of another order of correspondences. Day after day, there appeared
in the press paired photographs of the actors and the people they im–
personated, Huston and Davies, Whipper and Haile Selassie, Malone
and Churchill, as if to convince us that the film was true because of the
resemblance of the faces of the actors to the historic personalities por–
trayed. And as the climax of this displacement of the test of truth from
the actions to the physical appearance of individuals, the publicity on the
day before the opening of the film centered on the most marvellous and
suggestive corrt:spondence of all: Joe S. and Joe D. The two Joes came
up from the ranks the hard way; the mother of the American Joe was an
ordained minister of the gospel, and the Russian Joe studied in a theo–
logical seminary. The meeting of the two Joes in Moscow brought about
the unity of their two nations in the sruggle against fascism. Just as
those who wish to establish the truth of a reported miracle point to the
correctness of the account of the setting and verify all the statements
about the people, the buildings, the roads and the instruments involved in
the miracle, so the directors of the film who wish to establish a cor–
respondence with reality, where none exists, are forced to multiply
examples of correspondences irrelevant to the main question.
In a recent book
Propaganda and
the
Nazi Film,
Siegfried Kracauer,
who is certainly the best connoisseur of the German film, has observed
as the main characteristic of the Nazi pictures their use of elements of
unquestionable veracity, newsreels and maps and statistics, to create a
deceitful pseudo-reality which impresses the audience as a directly ex–
perienced fact. No doubt he was mistaken in assuming that this method
is peculiar to fascism. In
Mission to Moscow
the same devices have
been imported to this country. This technique of falsification seems
to arise naturally from the needs of the modern state, which operates on
two planes and possesses a double set of truths, one the practical knowl–
edge which governs the action in the interest of the ruling groups, the
other the official doctrines and justifications addressed to the mass of
the people who have little voice in the state and are the victims of the
crises and wars that follow. As the gap between the real motives and
the public explanations becomes wider and more apparent, the most
