A short history of British propaganda... in 10 films

“All art is propaganda”, wrote George Orwell, “but not all propaganda is art.” Something similar can be said of film. Film has continually shaped new forms of propaganda, while evolving practices of propaganda have changed film. 

The history of the British propaganda film is a history of how the nation has grappled with some of the biggest questions of the modern world. What is democracy? What is the state? What (even) is Britain?

In wartime, film played an invaluable role in creating a collective understanding of a complex global conflict, as well as stitching together a new political and social compact.

In the mid-century, ‘propaganda for democracy’ tended to celebrate the ideas, attitudes and values of the baby boomers. More recently, propagandists have turned their attention to using digital media to manage the social fallout from the War on Terror.

While at the start of the 20th century propaganda was viewed somewhat positively, the expansion of the education system, set against the rise of totalitarianism, necessitated a change of approach.

It’s even been argued that propaganda is an inevitable feature of living in a society ordered around technological imperatives. Shaped by successive conflicts, the long process of decolonisation and the growth of a consumer society, propaganda films have variously attempted to energise, placate and civilise the populace.

In the contemporary world the propaganda film is everywhere, and citizens are encouraged to spot the misinformation, malinformation and disinformation created by ‘bad’ propaganda. The only answer to propaganda has turned out to be the production of even more propaganda. The propaganda film is not an art that is going away. 


Director: Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey 



While the financial crisis of the inter-war period saw the propaganda machinery of central government eviscerated, reformers in municipal government took up the flame.


Using film stock left over from – for example – X-ray screenings for tuberculosis, activist local governments began to use film to raise awareness of their initiatives. At the same time, industrial patrons began using film to curry favour with municipal government. These inter-war initiatives proved important in incubating a mode of socially committed filmmaking that was able to mint persuasive new iconographies of modern Britain. 


By bringing together social reformers with British Steel Association, the cement industry and the British Commercial Gas Association, Housing Problems is a striking example of how a new political consensus was filmed into existence.  

Director: Gordon Hales


Set up by a public health official in response to a plague in Nigeria, the Colonial Film Unit (1939 to 1955) specialised in instructional films. But alongside pedagogical films made in a ‘Mr Wise versus Mr Foolish’ format that addressed subjects like how to improve agricultural yields, repair car engines or promote basic principles of hygiene, the CFU also made films about ‘ordinary life’ in Britain. By stressing that the average Briton worked hard, took public transport, and cooked and cleaned for themselves, popular films like Mr English were made to correct the “erroneous impression” that life in Britain was feather-bedded. Mr English at Home sought to promote values such as self-discipline and excite imaginative sympathy with life in provincial England.

Director: Humphrey Jennings 



The greatest works of Humphrey Jennings, who has been described as “the only real poet of British cinema”, were made while he was employed by the state. This story documentary, which follows the valiant efforts of volunteer firemen in the East End during the Blitz, celebrates the esprit de corps and sacrifice of wartime with sensitivity and respect, while also directing its emotional and political energy towards the emerging post-war compact. In addition to anticipating the future ‘humanitarian’ direction of war propaganda, Fires Were Started is a reminder that propaganda is (and propagandists are) often completely sincere. While the evangelism might have waned, the iconography of Jennings’ work remains extremely influential, notably seeping into the staging of the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. 


Director: Roy Boulting 


During the early stages of the war, international newsreels depended on footage from Nazi Germany. Army and RAF Film Units were created to redress the balance.
Documenting Field Marshal Montgomery’s struggle against Rommel in North Africa, Desert Victory became an instant classic on its release, with Churchill rushing copies to Roosevelt and Stalin. The impact of films like Desert Victory, which played an important role in anchoring shared understandings of a complex global conflict, continues to be felt to this day. It’s not a coincidence that the mythology of the war – when the state intervened into the national imagination on an unprecedented scale – has become the dominant moral frame for assessing the contemporary world.


Director: Michael Waldman



The highest grossing title of 1953 was the film of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation – the first and only time that the most popular film of the year at the UK box office has been a documentary. On the back of the film’s success, Christian Fry, who wrote the commentary, moved to Hollywood where he worked on epics including Ben-Hur (1959). A Queen Is Crowned represented a new media phenomenon – millions watched the coronation on television and then went to see it again at the cinema – as well as the start of a new relationship between the monarchy and popular media. British films about the monarchy – The Madness of King George (1994), The Queen (2006), The King’s Speech (2010) to name a recent few – have subsequently proved a reliable route to global favour.


Directors: John Halas and Joy Batchelor



George Orwell’s writing, especially his novels Animal Farm and 1984, have proved potent source material for propagandists. Covertly funded by the CIA, Halas and Batchelor’s adaptation was the first British animation feature. Operating at the level of parable, the film made for effective propaganda as it was both unfalsifiable and avoided ‘Red under the Bed’ hysteria.

Orwell’s work would also be promoted by the Information Research Department (IRD), a secret anti-communist propaganda organisation run by Labour MP Christopher Mayhew.
But the ambiguities of Orwell’s writing have proved a double-edged sword, and his work has been continually appropriated by activists across the political span including, most recently, American populists, health campaigners and Wikileaks.

Director: Don Levy 


The official film of the UK pavilion at Montreal 67, Don Levy’s Opus was an attempt to show how Britain was meeting “the challenge of change”. Instead of spoken commentary, Opus blended footage of Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Brook and Mary Quant with snippets of Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett and the electronic music pioneer Tristram Cary. 


While not as experimental as his other works, Levy’s attempt to amplify the “psychic distortions” of modern life reflected a shifting approach to the propaganda film. In anticipation of the multiscreen future, once dominant ‘rational’ realist approaches were increasingly replaced by the ‘hidden persuasion’ of sensory distortion and audio-visual associations. 


• Opus is available to view in the BFI Mediatheque

Production Company: Central Office of Information  


Of necessity, Western propaganda during the cultural Cold War had to distinguish itself from totalitarian models. While the propaganda films of the inter-war years were exercises in avant-garde virtuosity, propaganda for democracy took a televisual turn. During the mid-century the British government made thousands of telezines – including This Week in Britain (1959 to 1980), British Sporting Personalities (1959 to 1962) and London Line (1964 to 1978) – aimed at overseas audiences. Series like Pacemakers (1969 to 1971) from the Central Office of Information (COI) celebrated how a new generation of professionals were ‘shaking up’ established professions. These programmes promoted the values of an emerging post-war elite, finding a sympathy between the promotion of counter-cultural values such as scepticism, individuality and self-realisation, and a deeper programme of anti-communism.

Director: Richard Taylor

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the COI commissioned Halas and Batchelor to produce a range of animations explaining government policy. Charley, an ‘everyman’, explored New Towns, energy supply and the necessity of import substitution. But by the 1970s the COI’s Charley had become a budget animated cat – cut out of cardboard and coloured with felt pens – who existed to warn children about strangers, matches and water safety. During the early 1990s, the cash-strapped COI opened their archives, enabling dance band The Prodigy to sample the film and grant Charley an afterlife as a countercultural icon. An example, par excellence, of propaganda’s boomerang effect.

Director: Sam Mendes



Richard Moore, the head of MI6, has described James Bond as “an important force multiplier”. According to one estimate, 20% of the planet has seen at least one Bond film. Skyfall was the first Bond to gross more than one billion dollars.
Not only does the Foreign Office use the films to promote Britain abroad, but Bond also serves an important symbolic purpose. While British hard power has declined, Bond films support the idea that the nation retains its greatness through secrets, intelligence and derring-do.
Domestically, Bond’s image also helps conceal the extent to which the growth of the intelligence services in the contemporary world represents a new development: an initiative of the War on Terror as much as a legacy of the Cold War.

The Story of British Propaganda Film by Scott Anthony is out now from Bloomsbury Publishing.