 Greetings and welcome to Films of State, Moving Images Made by Governments. I'm Martin Johnson, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And I'm pleased to moderate our fourth panel, Infrastructure of Public Diplomacy. So I will introduce all of our panelists first and then I will play their recorded talks and then after we will have a lengthy discussion with our panelists, you'll be able to ask questions using the Q&A feature of Zoom. So please ask any questions as they come up there and then I will be the moderator after. So first up we have Nick Cole and the Cole is a professor of communication at the University of Southern California. And Cole is one of the leading scholars in the field of public diplomacy and has published many books and articles on the history of the role mass communication played in foreign policy, including most recently, public diplomacy, foundations for global engagement and digital age, which is published by Politi in 2019. Next we have Hongwei Thorn Chen, who is an assistant professor of communication and Asian studies at Tulane University. He's currently working on a book titled Governing the Audiovisual Cinema and Education in Republic and China, 1918 to 1952, which examines how education and tutelage served as the organizing rationalities of instructional film use in China during the early 20th century. Next we'll have Hadi Garbaji, who received his PhD in cinema studies in New York University in 2018. His archival research makes the case for the emergence of documentary diplomacy during the early history of the USIS-Iran relations. His upcoming article on Syracuse Group's Documentary Diplomacy in Iran will be published in the summer issue of the Journal in Cinema Media Studies. And then finally we'll have Brett Fukodor, who is a lecturer at the University of Delaware. In 2020, he received his PhD in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University, where he wrote a dissertation titled Filmic Aesthetics and Technologies of War, Policy, and Truth in the Motion Pictures of the United States Information Agency. And I'm also really happy that we'll be joined by Carol Swain. Carol Swain is an archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration Special Media Division and currently works on digitization and access projects. She's also served as a reference archivist for the NARA's Motion Picture Branch and has been at NARA since 2009. So I will play the video now and look forward to engaging in the Q&A with you after. I'm Nick Cole from the University of Southern California and today I want to talk about the way in which USIA film was part of President Kennedy's initiative in Latin America, The Alliance for Progress. Kennedy, from the beginning of his administration, announced that he was going to do more to help Latin America and launch The Alliance for Progress. It's actually in the inaugural address. The idea was that he would match American aid with aid from regional governments and that they would all commit to promoting self-help to help the citizens to build a better life. USIA contributed the publicity for The Alliance for Progress within the region but in Washington DC, The Alliance had its own press apparatus. USIA at this point was under the directorship of Edward R. Morrow. Morrow was one of the best known TV journalists at the time and it was quite a feather in USIA's cap to suddenly have a nationally known person as the director. The emphasis on Latin America included investment in the region. USIA created what was called a regional service center. This was a facility in Mexico City that could print and create all kinds of public diplomacy materials locally but the films I'm talking about today were made in the United States. There was some production in Mexico for the region but I'm gonna focus on the US work. USIA planned to upgrade the use of film and the person in charge of that effort was the son of Hollywood film director, George Stevens, George S. Stevens Jr. One of the first things that Stevens did to help Kennedy's public diplomacy for and about Latin America was to work on a series of presidential visit films. So really upgrading films of Kennedy's visits to the region so that they had well-known documentary filmmakers like Leo Seltzer or Charles Guggenheim working on them so that they had celebrity narrators, high quality production values, 35 millimeter and these films would include not just stuff of the president's movements meeting and greeting people but they would introduce the country to the world and have elements that were about the history of the country. These soft policy elements as they became to be known, emphasis on the life of ordinary people and elements that looked more like a documentary film than a government promotion, these elements predominated in a couple of projects, high priority projects for USIA. Three films about Columbia made by the filmmaker James Blue, commissioned by George Stevens. These films were Evil Wind Out which is about the way in which a community in Columbia create their own healthcare center, a school for Rincon Santo about a village that builds a schoolhouse, Letter from Columbia about the whole work of the Alliance in general. All three of these films focus on ordinary people and use children as a way into telling the story. Blue is especially interesting in Letter from Columbia because he actually includes a film within a film, a little parody documentary mocking the idea of progress from the top down and saying that he wants to tell the story from the point of view of Colombians and actually admitting to the artificial elements in the documentary. He narrated himself and I found that this film was used worldwide, not just in Latin America and used very effectively, for example, in India. The idea was that the US could show the world what advantages could come from being allied to the US rather than to the Soviet Union. A second soft policy film is Bridges of the Barrios created in 1963 by the conservative filmmaker, Bruce Hershinson. Hershinson had his roots in the US Air Force and in films for the aerospace industry. He'd also worked making films for NASA. His brief for USIA was to create a film that could sell the military to Ecuador and sell the idea of the military to the whole world as a useful civil development resource. Hershinson decided and he got these orders direct from Morrow. Hershinson decided to avoid a crude story of progress in the same way that Blue wanted to avoid that and he also thought that children would be a great focus for the story. But his particular, the story that he finds in Ecuador is a story of the Ecuadorian military creating, delivering water to one of the poorest neighborhoods and the way in which this has made life in the Barrio much better. The Alliance for Progress is mentioned only in passing, I think there's a, you see the logo in one of the scenes. So it's a light touch even if it's dealing with a heavy subject and Paul Newman delivered the narration which added to the appeal of the film it for elite audiences outside the region. It was used as I'm saying, this was also used worldwide. The problem is that a Valentine to the Ecuadorian military wasn't necessarily appropriate. Within a few months of the film being completed they had actually perpetrated a coup and overthrown the democratic government in Ecuador. The later Kennedy years and the post-Kennedy period see an emphasis on creating anti-Cuban material for Latin America. One of USIA's best projects is called Cuba a World Verdict which interviews journalists from around the world and these journalists explain what's gone wrong with the Cuban Revolution from their point of view. USIA also includes Latin American scenes in films that cut between many locations around the world including Herschenson's film Years of Lightning Day of Drums which is the Kennedy obituary film. There's also a film called Eulogy to 502 made by Herschenson which has three sequences shot in Latin America and James Blue's final film for USIA. A few notes on our food problem has some very moving scenes shot in a barrio sorry in a favela rather in Brazil. The most successful films in the region were probably not the USIA documentaries but NASA films dealing with the conquest of space but USIA's TV shows did very well especially a soap opera called Nuestra Barrio created in 1965 which topped the ratings in many Latin American countries. It was originally created in Mexico. The problem is that behind the scenes there's a political neglect of Latin American issues and a drift into simply supporting autocracy rather than working for reform. So the phenomenon we saw in Ecuador spreads to other countries as Latin militaries take control. A coda to the story. George Stevens left USIA as early as 1967 and began working at the American Film Institute. He's still alive and well and is working as a writer and producer of documentaries. James Blue left USIA and went to be a filmmaker and teacher. He died age just 49 in 1980 but still has a great influence. Bruce Hershenson went on to be an aide for Richard Nixon. TV pundit he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate and then worked as a teacher, writer and voice of America commentator in later years. He died in 2020. USIA was folded into the Department of State in 1999. So my final thoughts on this is that USIA's films for Latin America I think deserve a second look, especially given that they were intended to promote admiration for the US outside of the region as well as inside. I think that the policy issues within the films are unresolved and it's interesting that Blue and Hershenson have such different political takes but also have a different political remedy in the film. Hershenson is obviously a top down politics whereas James Blue favours a bottom up. The importance of public diplomacy however is not in the outgoing communication. It's getting the policy right and I think in Latin America the problem was that the underlying policy was still deeply flawed. There's value in studying public diplomacy history and I think that film is a wonderful resource especially when combined with the textual records that we have for public diplomacy. The next frontier in this kind of research is to think about reception and the reactions of the audiences in the region and around the world to these films. Thank you so much for your attention. I look forward to our discussion period. Thank you very much. Hi, my name is Humway Thorn Chen. I'm an assistant professor in communication at Tulane University. The title of my talk today is Projecting China in the 1940s Philanthropic Media Network. And this is part of my book project on Chinese educational film at mid-century. Today I will be discussing a number of films that I found at NARA's Harmon Foundation Collection which were originally produced by the China based University of Nanking. I show how non theatrical film mediated by missionary and church institutions. What I call a Philanthropic Media Network. Note the change from the original title became a key site for the articulation of a new public image of China for the United States and one that could be read alongside more state oriented accounts of public diplomacy. So let me just spend the first part of my talk detailing the object that I'm discussing and how I found it. So the film that I'm gonna be focusing on is called China Gets Her Salt. It is in the Harmon Foundation at NARA. The film was originally shot by Sun Mingjing as a co-production between the University of Nanking and the National Educational Cinematographic Society of China. I first saw this film at the China Film Archive where it was ran at two reels. There's another one real version that I saw at the United Board of Christian Higher Education Archives of the Yield Dominity School. And that version is Chinese titled and it was also cut by the filmmaker. And then of course I have this version at Harmon. And China Gets Her Salt is an industrial process film about the production of salt from Brian Wells in the municipality of Zagong in Sichuan province, a region that had long been important salt produced in Western China and which took paramount importance during the war. And I'm just gonna let the inner titles kind of tell you the story of this year. And these maps, these animated maps are only in the Harmon Foundation version. So they were introduced when the film was recut. And I want you to just remember this inner title here because I think it's important. So as I mentioned, this film was produced by Jingling University's Department of Educational Cinematography. And this was another name for University of Nanking. Jingling was a missionary university that was governed by a board of Protestant churches in the US, but by the 1930s it had acquired a significant degree of autonomy under the nationalist government's educational policies and became one of the premier universities for science and engineering education in China. Salt, the salt film is along, comes alongside around 40 industrial process titles that were produced in conjunction with the NECS, a per governmental organization founded to build the educational film sector. And here are some skills from other Jingling University films. These were known as industrial know-how films or Gongye Chan Shui Pian. And this is another one from the film about embroidery. Jingling educational productions were shown both in the university's own classrooms as well as on the Ministry of Education's National Projection Circuit, which consisted primarily of mobile teams. So I was really quite pleasantly surprised when I found this film or something to match this description at the NARA catalog finding aid through really what was a random search. And I was then able to identify seven other films that were produced by the University of Nanking that are in the same Harmon Foundation archive. In some senses, this is not a total surprise. In 1940, Sun Mingjing took a Rockefeller funded trip to the United States where he visited many AD institutions and he brought several films with him. Films that he later donated to US institutions. And in 1946, he called for the Chinese film industry to pivot to educational 16 millimeter, which he thought could be marketed better on the US non theatrical circuit and hence bypassing the hegemony of Hollywood in generating ardent sympathy for the Chinese cause. And one of the main avenues for this distribution was the Harmon Foundation, a philanthropic institute that was established in 1922 and best known for its promotion of African-American arts. In 1925, Harmon opened its religious motion picture foundation which is part of its division of visual experiment that was entrusted with supplying high quality motion pictures for church services. And here are title cards from a couple of other China films that were in its collection and they were produced by a variety of different entities. And this is where the salt film is found in the catalog under three different headings. So these are not governmental films per se. And in fact, however, we can see the Harmon Foundation's China films as part of a people-to-people network of public diplomacy before that phrase became really part of the embedded lexicon. And it was part of these networks of effectivity and mediation that contributed to but were also heterogenous from the state. And overall, I wanna argue for a shift in our understanding of public diplomacy from sovereignty defined by state agents to governmentality or the pervasive and heterogenous mechanisms that govern the circulation and the crafting of national images. And in the context that I'm discussing here, missionary institutions and church circuits were in fact paramount. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was the so-called modernist versus fundamentalist controversy in missionary work with promote proponents of the modern missionary turning away from a conversion and towards educational and technological aid. And this was buttressed by an anthropological discourse that saw national and local cultures as structural functionalist holes rather than barbaric and primitive. And in China, this was pushed along by anti-Christian sentiment in the 1920s as well as the nationalist government, which really turned these missionary institutions in China towards science and engineering education. The Religious Motion Pictures Foundation was aligned with this modern camp and it saw the non theatrical film circuit as a counterpoint to Hollywood representations of Asia and Africa as primitive and barbaric. And this was done in conversation with many other associations. Importantly, I wanna point out one, which was the China Film Enterprises of America. And this was an organization founded by Wang O'Wen, a Chinese American art collector and who was trained in the U.S. at the Harmon Foundation after being educated at a U.S. university. And he made a number of educational films about China including ones about Chinese art. He was also one of the main consultants for the Battle of China segment of Frank Capra's training film. He was employed by the China Institute of America, which was founded by Chinese graduates of U.S. institutions in connection with diplomatic circles. And this organization supported Chinese international students in the United States amid anti-Asian sentiment and also was in charge of mediating a kind of national respectability politics, one that presented China as a modernizing nation, but one that was in the image of the United States. And here's just a quick example from a film by the director of the Institute, which literally superimposes the United States on China and also reads modern Chinese women in the image of their American sisters. And this is an image from a department store in Shanghai. So the salt film fits very strangely in this dynamic, largely because it did not depict Chinese modernization in the image of the United States. So the salt wells were a mixed industrial site making use of multiple modalities of construction materials as well as power. And note how these inner titles in the Harman Foundation cut emphasizes the lack of these modern materials and methods, but rather ingenuity and age-old methods. And I think this is interesting if we compare it to the original cut of the film or the UBCHEA cut that actually shows, for example, this coal-powered steam engine bringing Brian to the surface. And then, and I'm gonna just skip a bit because I'm running out of time. And then later shows oxen or water buffalo being used to raise Brian up to the Derrick. And these are, of course, industrial process images that follow the kind of kinetic energy that is being generated. In the Harman Foundation version, there's an emphasis on the lack of these modern methods. It's actually recut, everything is reordered, in part to create a more dramatic kind of kinetic effect. But in other parts to really sideline the mixed industrial modalities and to put the emphasis on this kind of Chinese age-old ingenuity. So see how these images are put entirely out of order compared to the original film. And you see how these images are put over here. So Salomi Soverski argues that processional representation needs to be thought in terms of and in conjunction with theories of cultural evolutionism. And we can see how in the multiple cuts of this film, we have a recrafting of the temporality of process in order to fit very particular developmentalist syntax. And in conclusion, mapping the circulation of Zugun Saltwells via these Protestant philanthropic networks undercovers multiple levels of mediation. It allows us to better understand the production of China as an object of cultural understanding. And moreover, the multiple versions of this film show us the contested imaginary of national culture and development across this network of public diplomacy. Thank you. The clip that we just saw is the introductory logo of Aqbari Iran, Iran news series. I am Hadi Tharabaghi, an adjunct assistant professor at Drew University. And I'm going to speak about these newsreels. Over 300 episodes of Iran news have recently become available online as high quality digital videos for viewing, download, and research on the website of National Archives and Records Administration. Iran news was the first nationally distributed local newsreels in Iran, and ran from 1954 to 1962. Running between seven to 10 minutes, these weekly newsreels often included three local news segments and one to three news reports from around the world. While a binational team of Iranians and Americans supervised the commentaries and offered infrastructural support, a majority of the production was completed entirely by Iranians. Iran news was a screen boast in movie theaters before feature films and via mobile trucks equipped with projectors. Through Iran news, Iranians became gradually used to the format of a news report that spoke to them in person. These publicly funded newsreels were sponsored by people who did not speak the language of the voiceover, however. It was the early cold war and justification for funding was Soviet containment. United States government approached countries with invitational packages of monetary aid and technical assistance. And in turn, countries accepted and formed by national governing groups to build institutions of media governance and public training. This was how the early cold war warriors approached the crisis of liberal governance. As the official diplomacy mediating the emerging ideological conflict became increasingly a strength, media diplomacy proliferated through binational and multinational groups working together through uneven chains of bureaucracy and personal contact. Characteristic of a messy rationality, sometimes public health programs, geopolitical publicity and anti-Soviet propaganda shared objectives and operated continuously and concomitantly. Today, Iran news segments offer a rare access to perhaps the least represented and most formative post-war Iran of the 50s through heavy voiceover of mid-century news reform. Historically, Iran news episodes show a country whose democratic government of prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeh, had recently been overthrown by a coup d'etat orchestrated through the collusion between the intelligence agencies of a dying empire and an emerging one. Punishing the country for nationalizing its oil fields and fearing communist influence, Iran became subject to severe economic sanctions before the coup. Furthermore, U.S. government waited until the coup was complete to release the monetary aid Iran desperately needed for modernization. The aftermath of the coup therefore set in motion a period of rapid modernization which is fully evident in Iran news series. Metaphorically speaking, a smiley face stretches over military training, policing, public management, institutions of social service, higher education, arts and sport. The voice image combination in these scenes is uncannily reminder of the documentaries of the New Deal era. Positivist images of activities organized by an official and often cheerful male voiceover, however, switches to a threatening tone when reporting confiscation of leftist press, booklet burning, Iranian refugees returning from Soviet Union, warnings against listening to Soviet communist radio and during a few months compilation episodes of misrepresenting in 1950 to recall as a day when people came to the street and demanded Shah's return. Those people were paid by CIA and MI6 and led by a street talk named Shaban Jafari who also appears in one episode of cultural reportage in Iran news featuring performances in the Zurghane, the space designating the traditional system of athletics in Iran. I interviewed Muhammad Ali Isari, the key person responsible for planning and production of Iran news in his residence in California in 2007, shortly before he passed away. Isari spoke little. He occasionally remembered names and the stories while watching a few Iran news segments with me. Back in early 1950s, Isari worked as an Iranian liaison first with British Center and then with the US IRS office in Iran. Isari fully supported Iranian monarchy and played a key role in bringing images of the Shah and his family to the weekly attention of Iranians in scenes of royal family inaugurating a factory, a dam, a hospital, the sport event or attending official diplomatic visits, trips or during scenes of villagers paying respect by kissing Shah's hand for returning to them some share of the land which Shah's father, Redar Shah, had initially claimed by force. Isari learned the craft of New Zealand production through working with the documentary crew associated with Syracuse Group contracted by the USIA in Iran. Isari emerged as the authority mediating by national contract bureaucratically while facilitating the growth of documentary knowledge production and training as well as the institutionalization of a central organization of media governance. The objective was fostering the growth of public administration, military and policing as well as arts and culture while suppressing leftist descent. Isari's vision of Iran news therefore aligned very well with the USIS policy of promoting local news magazines as a means of both publicizing the geopolitically reasoned goodwill gesture of US government in Iranian modernization and a darker propaganda tactic of demonizing communists and scaring Iranians from supporting them. Scenes of American officials visiting Iran and paternalistic mentions of American monetary, military and technical support therefore pervade Iran news segments. The messy cool war rationality behind the production of Iran news continues to shape its discourse today. Pro-monarchy media diplomacy platforms such as Manuto have been posting Iran news episodes on social media regularly for an example as nostalgic images of democratic Iran. These social media publications never mentioned anything about the USIS, of course. Dated as it has become the official mail and accent-free voiceover in Iran news fills both familiar and alien today. Sometimes we can recognize echoes of its outrageous sexism, propaganda threat and funny references in documentaries appearing on Iranian television. Moreover, Iran news stands out today. As an archival evidence of the messy rationality of the early Cold War group of governing planners who infantilized the economically impoverished nations and stepped into racist footprint of British empire in the region. Who would put a knife into someone's back while reaching out for help at one's presence and expecting a handshake? What happened to this post-war American governing generation whose logic of genuine diplomacy and treacherous betrayal could align seamlessly as two sides of a coin? Iran news series is now with us as the evidence of a nation just betrayed and it stays with us to ponder. Thank you. I'm Brett Vakoda from the University of Delaware. My presentation today is titled Solidarity Through Satellite. You sick as global broadcast of Let Poland Be Poland. Though the US Information Agency produced or distributed roughly 20,000 moving image titles over its 46-year run, the 1982 television spectacle Let Poland Be Poland represents a unique artifact within the archive. It's strange aesthetic and tonal hybridity falling somewhere between telethon, documentary and awards show reflects the liminal moment from which it emerged in the USIA's history. On the crest of a reactivated Cold War, new capabilities in satellite television and a vast shift in the culture of agency leadership. Let Poland Be Poland both reflects this transitional moment and presupposes forces that were to shape USIA media in the coming years. The ostensible impetus behind Let Poland Be Poland was to build international support for the Polish Solidarity Movement, a nationwide workers union that emerged in response to flattening wages, rising food costs and poor working conditions. With Solidarity's membership peaking at 10 million in late 1981, provoking Soviet friendly leaders to declare martial law, the movement reached a boiling point in the American agency's brash new director, Charles Wick, saw his opportunity to make a splash on the global stage. And what became the most expensive production in the USIA's history would gather 23 world leaders, Polish artists and activists and a slew of Hollywood celebrities to project a multinational consensus behind the workers union. Broadcasting Let Poland Be Poland live across television and radio to 46 countries and 39 languages. When Ronald Reagan nominated Wick his close friend from Hollywood to run the agency in 1981, he inherited Jimmy Carter's US International Communications Agency or USICA. In the wake of the agency's often hardline approach to the Vietnam War, President Carter reorganized and re-organized and rebranded the office to reflect what he called the second mandate, which called for USICA to not only tell America's story, but also welcome the stories of other cultures into its own, prioritizing a much more dialogic approach to public diplomacy initiatives. Reagan and Wick reeled back Carter's reforms though, even changing the agency's name back to the USIA in late 1982. Compared to the previous administration, Wick and Reagan favored an agency model that re-amplified mannequian, bipolar and globally rendered framework similar to those employed in the USIA's early years. And looking where to make his first mark, the research wing of Wick's USIA highlighted general unrest in Poland with wide support for solidarity, which sought to effect quote, great changes in the social order. The situation in Poland offered an apt opportunity through which to return to the political sensibilities of the early Cold War. During the USIA's first two decades, images from such events like the resistance fighting in East Germany, the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968, defined the Cold War writ large in the American imaginary. In that tradition, Wick believed he could productively disseminate scenes of the Polish workers' resistance, leveraging them towards anti-Soviet sentiment. In line with another approach of the early USIA, the agency could also resituate conceits employed by the Soviets, rendering the leftist ideal of workers' solidarity into vague expressions of liberty and sovereignty. Relative to these earlier events, so Wick had more tools at his disposal. With new satellite technologies, he could coordinate a live global broadcast to premiere immediately after an international series of rallies backing solidarity, using footage of the rallies within the broadcast to further underscore the immediacy of the stakes. It could be a profound television and radio event collectively experienced throughout the world. During let Poland be Poland's development, Wick aggressively hyped the program and sought to maximize its reach, attaching famous names from politics and show business, creating a network of private funding and ensuring the program would be broadcast to as many televisions and radios as possible. First, he looked to Hollywood for a director that could strike an effective balance between spectacle and solemnity within a satellite event. He hired Marty Posetta, who had experienced directing shows like the Academy Awards and the Grammys. Next, he and the agency somehow recruited an assortment of 23 political leaders from around the world, several Hollywood stars, Polish artists and activists, and even the leader of the AFL-CIO to participate in the program. As the program gathered more firepower, early estimates put the budget as high as $700,000, nearly half a million more than the agency's second most expensive production, the 1971 Vietnam Vietnam. While nearly all of the show's participants offered their services for free, the high production value, translation fees, and cost of satellite distribution balloon the budget. True to the administration's ethos, though, Wick found outside money to fund his spectacle. He recruited organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the U.S. Tobacco Company, along with individual donors to back the program. And as a boon to Wick's efforts, Congress declared January 30th as an official day of solidarity with the Polish people and opened up the domestic dissemination of the show to 297 local PBS stations across the U.S., which would have typically been prohibited per the Smith-Montact. Let Poland Be Poland premiered on January 31st, 1982. It's strange combination of spectacle, celebrity, and solemnity has the feel of an international telecon with the glamour and editing style of an awards show resulting in a somewhat surreal 90-minute television event. The description of the opening sequence within the program script previews the pathos-laden tone and general aesthetic of the show. The program again says the script describes with quote, images of normal everyday life before the imposition of martial law, which are later drained of colour and replaced by black and white shots of the recent events in Poland. Following the fade to black quote, we hear the voice of Charlton Heston speaking from the darkness. And after he literally lights a candle for the Polish people, Heston reflects quote, solidarity. This program itself is a display of solidarity. It is a gathering place for people and ideas from all over the world collected by satellite, demonstrating that freedom speaks in many tongues, but one voice. In addition to Heston, two other emcees lead the viewers through four different elements interwoven throughout the program. First, Heston takes us through a historic assemblage of political figures claiming quote, never before has such an array of world leaders gathered together under one electronic umbrella. Heads of states such as the UK's Margaret Thatcher, Francis Francois Mitterrand, and Iceland's Gunnar Thordeson, expressed their support of Polish solidarity and recorded 90-second speeches. Second, actress Glenda Jackson with a dynamic digital map behind her points her attention to rallies occurring throughout the world on the day of solidarity, using on-the-ground footage to give evidentiary weight to the theme of global consensus. Third, actor Max von Siedau details the history behind the solidarity movement, introducing segments featuring talented Polish artists and dedicated activists, which are many critics views became the highlight of the program. Fourth, a variety of scenes featuring American celebrities such as Bob Hope explaining radio jamming, Frank Sinatra singing ever homework, and Henry Fonda giving an ironic reading of Frederick Engels' service interludes throughout the show, often undercutting the more earnest tone throughout much of the rest of the program. Although WIC promised nearly 300 million viewers, more reasonable guesses estimate 100 million people tuned in to let Poland be Poland. Following the program's premiere, critics reactions were mixed, many questioning what exactly it was they just watched. Time magazine labeled it as, quote, a singular cross-speed of documentary and a star-studded entertainment, politics and theatrical bazaars. The Christian science monitor called it, quote, worthwhile as propaganda, though dull and sometimes repetitive. Reviews outside of the U.S. were generally more negative, such as one in the London Daily Nails, which argued, quote, only in the United States would such a vulgar spectacle be mounted. And the Soviet news agency TASS expectantly went further, calling it, quote, a provocative act of telescope version. As WIC's tenure as U.S.I. director continued throughout the whole of Reagan's presidency, let Poland be Poland seemed to presuppose three key trends that came to inform agency and media throughout the 1980s. One, for much of Reagan's term, the more widely disseminated U.S.I.A. films and programs, such as those covering the Soviet-Afghan War, reflected the rhetorical tone of let Poland be Poland, pigeonholing complex geopolitics into reductive good versus evil binaries that underscored Reagan's re-amplification of the Cold War. Two, as the funding model behind the program foreshadowed, private and partisan interests had more means to influence agency operations, which often came in tension with agency officials still upholding Carter's second mandate. And three, and most importantly, let Poland be Poland, though very imperfectly, established proof of concept for the agency's investment in televisual technologies. In late 1983, the U.S.I.A. launched its first live WorldNet press conference to mitigate the fallout of the U.S. innovation of Granada, allowing journalists throughout the world to speak directly to leaders like Gene Kirkpatrick, what was originally a specific type of program, WorldNet later became the U.S.I.A.'s brand to what many identify as the first true global satellite network. In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, WorldNet offered a prolific and diverse programming output. However, none of it ever quite matched the strange hybridity of let Poland be Poland. Thank you. Thank you so much for those wonderful presentations. So I'm gonna start with kind of a broad question and then we can go in. And again, you can ask questions via the Q&A. And so this comes from someone I posted. One question I have is, what makes a film a tool of public diplomacy versus a propaganda film? Does it depend on who we ask and how our values align with those portrayed in a given film or is there something more fundamental that distinguishes the two? And so I think I'd be interested in hearing from all four presenters on that question. Martin, if I can start off with this one. I've spent my life thinking and talking about public diplomacy. And to be honest, the term began as a euphemism. The United States wanted to be able to say, we virtuous Americans do public diplomacy. Those wicked communists do propaganda. And it was because of the negative associations of the word propaganda that the United States looked for a different empty benign term that they could fill up with good meanings. But once the term was in existence, then the practitioners filled it with the meanings they wanted. And in the years since it was coined, it was coined around 1965 by the US government or for the US government. It's come to emphasize dialogue, exchange, openness to learning and a kind of a two-way process. And so part of the question would be, can we see films as being opening to a two-way process, opening to a learning process? Or is the film just about getting to yes, just about bullying the audience into taking the point of view that the filmmaker wants? And it may be that sometimes the two-way process is adopted as a kind of rhetorical strategy. And arguably the soft policy films from the George Stevens era, they're there to advance policy, even if they take a kind of a dialogue, an openness to learn as part of the rhetoric of the film. I wouldn't put up any fight if somebody said all those films were propaganda, as long as it's propaganda in the sense of, yeah, sure, they're one-way communication intended to make a policy point, but I'd be interested to know what my colleagues make of that. Can I follow? Yes, that'd be great. Yeah, excellent question. I mean, in the course of my work, I also noticed that doing my research, when I use these terminologies, phrases, public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, I noticed I have to do something with them because people are still writing about public diplomacy in the contemporary context. People are still writing about cultural diplomacy in the contemporary context. And I started, okay, I'm gonna call this weaponized cultural diplomacy in the context of what I was doing because that's not the same. Practices cannot be just collapsed onto each other, same experience I felt with public. And, you know, most of these categories, public and cultural, also have a very rich and contested, theoretically, philosophical underpinning, public start with Hannah Arendt, we have Habermas, we have Foucault himself. You know, the whole thing that goes around, including the liberal conceptualization of public. So what I suggest here is that for us to be film and media scholars to allow for the ideological variations and the kind of potency and complexity, we just describe the media that becomes the means and mediating means of exchange. And then it brings people together, even if it's categorizing that propaganda or referred of a book burning, it's still people come together, create certain negotiations together to make that. That culture, that relations are extremely important to me. So I would call it television diplomacy, newsreel diplomacy, documentary diplomacy because it allows all other kind of, allow us to think through it. And I think maybe, maybe a kind of a way for us to de-emphasize propaganda as a kind of shit. It's that phrase that is sitting behind and the least thing it does, it reduces. We're all trying so hard to make our audiences and people to become cognizance of a complexity involved in how United States, you know, people go in the mong of other cultures and create a meaningful conversation. At the time that people talking about atomic explosions here and there, this was a addressing liberal crisis, crisis of liberal governing. That's how our grandmas did it. Now we look back at them and there's something to learn to my suggestion that if we look at it from this perspective. Thorn, yes. Thanks, that's a, yeah, that's a very interesting question and I entirely agree with both of these responses. I guess two things I wanna add, one of them is that I do think that once, even as public diplomacy is a euphemism for propaganda, once that term gets coined, there are a whole series of norms that then emerge around it and institutional practices that then there's a way in which to do public diplomacy, how do you differentiate this from propaganda? How do you prevent other people from pointing the finger at you and saying that this is also propaganda? And so then public diplomacy suddenly has an institutional and practical reality, right? I think in the context that I work in, this is particularly interesting. So the word propaganda never really became a bad word in China, Shenzhuang, up until relatively recently. I think it was just very recently that they started in official publications translating, when they translate them into English, translating Shenzhuang into publicity instead of propaganda. Very, very smart public diplomatic move, so to speak. I think for the archive that I'm looking at, there was, we should think of the idea of public diplomacy in relation to a series of other terms that give it some more weight, because it was actually not a word that was used in the 1930s by the folks that I'm looking at. But rather, the word was in fact in Chinese, at least propaganda. So propaganda was external. So these films, when they were shown internally, people said that this was about education internally in China. And then when they were shown to the world, that was termed propaganda. So suddenly that becomes another distinction that emerges. And I think in the US, I mean, the keyword here is goodwill, right? We want the goodwill of the American people for the Chinese cause. And so that I think is connected in other ways to I think missionary discourses and a variety of different other keywords as well. And Brett, yeah. I don't have too much to add. I think my colleagues expressed kind of the difference between public diplomacy, the differences in similarities between these two concepts quite well. And maybe the one thing I'd add is that even through the 1980s, we do see the word propaganda within the US context still used within particular professional discursive spaces. Charles Wick comfortably used the words, for example, like communications conferences. He would refer to WorldNet, the satellite network that I talked about in my presentation as the quote, the greatest device for propaganda the USI ever employed. So they didn't necessarily steer away from the word. And I think there's a cognizance of the power of that word but kind of in terms of professionalization, institutionalization, public diplomacy for people working within the agency and for their marketing of the agency was much more palatable. That was my one addition to the excellent responses by my colleagues. Great. So yeah, I think I'll switch. There's a great question about thinking about paratex, text of this company, these films. So I'll read this. So in the educational context, films are often accompanied by pamphlets, discussion guides or instructions on how to stage debates. Did any of these films arrive with similar paratex representation strategies? One thing we'll be talking about tomorrow is paper records associated with films held by the National Archives but curious in your own research how that textual material kind of shapes how these films might have been received or gives us information about how they were presented to audiences. Some of these films were part of overall campaigns. So for example, USIA would have an Atoms for Peace exhibition. They'd have Atoms for Peace press releases and they'd have a documentary film tied into it. So you have Atoms for Peace, the leaflet, Atoms for Peace, the documentary, Atoms for Peace, the whatever, multiple speeches and so forth. The one that I'm aware of that had the biggest collateral around it was the Kennedy obituary film, Years of Lightning Day of Drums where they turned the film into an event but typically the embassy would be involved and it would even be a ritual to go and see the film, to remember the president. It would be built into a kind of a ceremony of mourning and there's a lot to be that you can put together about that particular film. That's the one that springs to mind but it's a great question. Yeah, I just have a quick comment on that that a lot of the times where there is a campaign like Atoms for Peace you might find material in motion pictures. This is at the archives but also in still pictures and textual documents and also in presidential libraries. So oftentimes it's not just one, you have to look in several different areas. I can add to it as well. I mean, I did show posters in my presentation that so basically they were advertising these newsreels. Beyond that for the training funds that were done early 1950s, it was different and for those they had questionnaires would go around and then oftentimes they would have the screening if they went to villagers and then they would bring people in a cafe and then they would distribute questions and have sit down and have a tea and ask questions but then these would involve oftentimes agricultural films. If it was about childbirth and that kind of conversation they would bring women together and start having questions, discussions would be and sometimes even there were activities involved with that. Okay, after watching the film we're gonna do this activity maybe workshop that the agricultural modernization was a very extensively involved and embedded within point four which is the USAID program. These were and they had a success rate in Iran and all this conversation can be verified and researched more, et cetera building wells, preventing malaria it was very extensive. If I can add, I'd point a lot of people I'd point you to a particular film from 1951 called New Eyes New Year so it was produced by SCAPCIE in Japan. I deferred to you because she is gonna be presenting later today to talk a little bit more about this but within that film you actually see kind of this process of teaching films codified into its own sort of pedagogy. They give a step by step process of how someone can rent a film from the USIS library take it to their particular location their particular community, their club and kind of teach the film. They teach kind of the process by which to foster discussion. And this is something that's hung around through today. If you look on the State Department's website for example, you still have discussion guides for Hollywood films, documentary films, PBS documentaries in places like American Corners and American Spaces which still operate probably in over like 250 locations throughout the world. So there's even kind of like a kind of a pedagogy that is taught by these institutions like the State Department in the USIA for people to employ themselves. It's a thing that goes right back in film. I mean, it was funny, nice to see George Stevens yesterday when I was working on some of his dad's films. I found that when they released Gunga Dinn as a RKO feature film they had supporting teaching material so that teachers could teach the history of India based on what was in the movie Gunga Dinn. And that's like releasing stuff about the life of gorillas to accompany the release of King Kong. It's completely crazy, but it goes right the way down. And I found I'm always running into this stuff. Champion the Wonder Horse was released with material to help people teach classes on the American West. So for decades and decades, Hollywood is positioning itself to try and, oh yeah, we're going to use those teachers to be the marketers for our output. And that's, I'm sure there are people out there doing great stuff working on that collateral material. I want to just add that the translational and or transcultural context of the film, film salt that I'm dealing with has an interesting story with in terms of the paratex. So there was a teaching guide and lecture script in Chinese from the original film. When Sun Ming-jin came to the US he wrote an English language script that was doing something quite different. It did things like compare the image of the salt derricks to the oil derricks in Pittsburgh, things like that. He wanted that to get recorded onto gramophone records to be circulated with the films. I have not actually found any evidence that that actually happened or that came with these Harman Foundation films that got circulated. Great. I think I'll move on. This is a kind of, could be a fun question. If there's particular films that were very popular you've kind of discovered in your research that you haven't been able to locate yet. So is there a London after midnight version of a USA film? What is the kind of relationship between that text for research and then trying to find films or even the right copy? I was like, Thorn's gonna mention a multiple copies of a film, which looks very different depending on which one you encountered first. Well, I for years wanted to see the propaganda soap opera, Mr. Barrio. That is now in the National Archives and accessible. So it's like, if only it wasn't for COVID I'd be on the plane watching those old episodes. It's so exciting that that's resurfaced. The main one that I'd like to see is a thing called a blueprint of terror, which they was made very, very widely shown around the world to explain how Cuba was trying to export sabotage around Latin America. But I know that was on TV in India. It went very, very widely and was all explained to Congress how important this film is. So we have that congressional testimony about the significance of that film, but I haven't been able to see it. As far as I know, there's nothing quite on the scale of like, Poland, Poland, similar productions like Night of the Dragon in the 1970s, Vietnam, Vietnam which were all kind of big budget productions on behalf of the USIA that is kind of hidden from the archive right now. There are a series of productions made under the umbrella of Just Bow, the joint United States Public Affairs Office, which was kind of a conglomeration of agencies that was run by the USIA during the Vietnam War. Within some internal memorandum, you see Miriam Bucher who was a filmmaker herself, but also trained filmmakers in South Vietnam. You see citations of a lot of films that appear nowhere in any of the catalogs, at least that I've seen, probably at least 15 of those. And if you look to that period, a lot of these films are quite good, namely like the ragdoll, made with a lot of kind of Vietnamese artists, Vietnamese creatives. So I'd be really curious to look at those, but I think a really interesting question too is not necessarily are there films that we're missing, but are there films that had the USIA's involvement that we're not quite sure about? So in that sense, like the paper trail is really going to kind of point us to really some new insights. Like to what extent was USIA involved in certain documentaries that circulated throughout the world, certain national productions? I know, for example, they were involved in some productions in the Philippines. So I think the paper trail is going to really, that kind of highlight their involvement, their unattributed involvement in a lot of other productions outside of the agency too. And things that were made at the regional production centers that didn't end up back in DC for archival purposes. There's got to be some treasures out there, for sure. Yeah, I mean, we're still working and we've got a wonderful archivist Mike Taylor who's working on the USIA collection. So I mean, it's not completely processed yet, believe it or not. I mean, there's many, many series involved, including the general series. So there could be still treasures yet to be uncovered. Absolutely, I mean, I'm very happy. Just 400 episodes have been released. This is looking incredible. But the early training films, village training films that I'm just dying to watch, I have a feeling that they haven't been processed yet. So I'm going to put a request for them. They're sitting in national archives in Iran. So there is a documentary team when they're, and made a documentary, has made a documentary about those films. I helped them with documentation, et cetera. Haven't heard back from them, but maybe nine months or so. It's just such a archival fever I have for those. And they were translated commentaries into Urdu, Spanish, Arabic, and they're sent to other places. So these are agricultural films. And then also mentioning Hoja Nasrut in series. I was looking for that for almost eight years. And then I'm also so happy. Very happy person as it comes to my end. And always thriving for more. Yes. Great, I have questions for Brett. So first, just if you could say a bit more about the production process of the parts of the film that was made in Poland. And then there's kind of a way to expand that. Someone wrote, did the broadcast leverage the relative novelty of the satellite technology as part of its meeting? So could we see satellite technology as a technological outgrowth of solidarity itself? So a small question and a big question for you. Yeah, great question. So as far as I know, pretty much all of the program was shot in Hollywood or in probably domestically, likely in Hollywood, in a studio. Many of the Polish activists, the Polish artists were expatriates. So they were living in the United States at the time. So that's where they, but if they did use image, when they did use images from Poland, much of the footage would have been captured during the resistance in Gdansk in like 1976, 1977. And they just repurposed a lot of those images much like they did with the Why We Fight series during World War II. So, but the images on the ground of the day of solidarity, those would have been likely captured by satellite posts of the USIS to kind of conglomerate it into this, again, this kind of satellite display of a consensus and solidarity. And as far as I know, it's a bit tricky to kind of trace the history of the usage of satellite within this period of the USIA. Wick certainly marketed it more than any previous people associated with the USIA. He really sold it. He sold it to newspapers. He sold it to trade journals. He hyped up the audience numbers before the production too. He said, we're gonna have 300 million people watching this. It was probably more like a hundred million or even a little bit less. But I do know within some interviews within the frontline diplomacy collection put out by the State Department that they did have satellite broadcast as far back as the mid 1970s. Some people were even frustrated that Wick took credit in Alton Snyder, the director of the Motion Picture Division for a credit for satellite, but like salute by satellite, which I haven't had the privilege to watch during the bicentennial was one of these instances of a global broadcast. It's just Wick who was by all accounts a hustler and a charlatan, sold this as the first instance of like really kind of true, like the electronic umbrella to use charlatan Heston's word. And it really did like not long after this, a former RAF agent, Alan Simpson covertly, some say put satellites on top of like 125 embassies throughout the world. And that's why a lot of people look to this, like that television historian Shalabee, for example, as it's the first instance of a true global satellite network, even though it was done illegally in some cases, even in the USSR and China at that point, they installed satellites covertly. So I'm not sure if that answers the question, but... That's great. So I have a question for Thorne. I'll try to combine a couple. So first, is it correct to understand that the films produced by the University of Nanking is having been made with an eye toward gaining more military economic support for China? Or is that beyond their intent? And then kind of going on to thinking about the Department of Educational Cinematography, was that part of the film school, if there was a film school, and did that have any relationship to motion picture equipment manufacturing in the same location? So three combined questions. Thank you. So in terms of the first question, so I think that there were both international and local demands that shaped the original production of these films. I think the primary aim of the educational film production was in fact for mass education purposes in China. And that's the reason why they were commissioned by Ministry of Education and the National Educational Cinematographic Society. But there was definitely an understanding that these films would also be able to promote China's image abroad. And I think that once we get to how these films ended up being circulated in the United States, with Swimming Jin's visit to the United States, then we have a lot of very explicit kind of discussion about how these films are specifically about promoting the US support of the Chinese war effort going into the 1940s. So what's interesting about the context of the film production is that these films were produced out of the Department of Educational Cinematography, which was part of the school of the sciences. Most of the people were engineers and chemistry professors. So it's people who are not actually trained in cinema as an art, but people who had competency in the scientific and technical knowledges necessary for kind of understanding the operating camera equipment as well as in some cases producing equipment and producing raw film stock. I actually don't know the answer to the question about the Nanjing kind of optical factories. I would actually, I'm curious because I'd like to kind of know what this factory was called because I know that there were a lot of film equipment, manufacturers that were being built in the post-war era and sometimes sponsored by the state, but I think probably there are precursor industries that enable this as well, but that's something that I would definitely want to look into. Thank you. I had a broader question about celebrity and because we have a model right where from World War II if not earlier, in which Hollywood kind of lends its talents as a way to kind of lend a technical and kind of a star support, but then it seems to be continued to go on even if these celebrities are less valuable. So how many would have seen Henry Fonda and thought, oh, here's someone I remember from movies of the 40s in 1980. Likewise, we're thinking of, of it varies how they're kind of into this. So do you sense that the celebrity mattered to audiences or how was that kind of read in these films or is it more just the appearance of someone and the assumption is that the star is already known and doesn't need to be identified as such? Well, I think that with regard to the US, in the George Stevens era, USIA seeks out celebrity narrators for films. So getting Paul Newman to narrate the Bridges of the Barrios is important to publicizing the film, but it also suggests that the English language print is a prestige object which is going around the world. Hershenson also seeks out foreign language narrators who are known and celebrities. So especially in years of lightning day of drums, they have Carlo Montaban, Ricardo Montaban's brother does the Latin version, Maximilian Scheld as the German version. So they're using celebrity narrators to show the prestige of the object. Regarding let Poland be Poland, yet these are internationally known celebrities. It was quite important to have Glenda Jackson in there as a British star to have a maximum sit out there as a Swede was part of the, it was part of the global nature of the products so that people were known all around the world. One piece of trivia, I looked through the accounts of let Poland be Poland, and the only people who demanded to be paid were Abba, who did her like a 30 second spot, but said, hey, we're Abba and we want Poland to be, they said, no, Abba never work for free. We don't care about, sure we want Poland to be free, but Abba don't work for free. So, but I think there's an attempt to articulate a global vocabulary of celebrity and the State Department still does this and sometimes they get it wrong. They send somebody who's a celebrity in the US overseas and people know nothing at all about them like they send a baseball star to a non-baseball country and it falls flat. But it's, I think, well, there is a whole discipline of celebrity diplomacy studies. So it's a whole subfield. If I can riff off, I agree that I think the usage of Glenda Jackson and Moxbad Sida was very, very deliberate. And honestly, in all thickness, Charlton Heston's, Jackson's and Von Sidao's portions are perhaps the most well-composed, the most well done within the program, but you see older celebrities. Orson Welles against Henry Fonda. Frank Sinatra. No man is an island, right? Yeah, he reads, yeah, the John Dunn poem for Whom the Bell Toll. Yeah, he quotes the Whom the Bell Toll, yeah. So it's, and he does it in the most Orson Welles way possible, right? He just reads it slow. He stares right into the camera. He's dressed in all black, really kind of like living up his kind of master, thespian persona, right? Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah, so it's, but it's interesting. It's in a lot of ways, the usage of those celebrities reflects the training and the background of Wick and Reagan together. They met one another in 1959 in Hollywood. And a lot of people define Reagan's presidency, right? Through like a pop nostalgia to use Dwyer's term, and also like a political nostalgia too. So like when you look at like project democracy, project truth, it's kind of a reconstitution of kind of the Truman and the Eisenhower years politically. And then in terms of style, there's a bit of a reconstitution too of kind of that 1950s era. So these older celebrities, even though Fonda won an Oscar that year, I don't know if they had the impact maybe that a Moxdowne Seedow or Glendon Jackson would have to international audiences. And there were other people that were in Wick's Rolodex. You know, he couldn't ring up Chris Christofferson or somebody, you know, he didn't have, he didn't have that relationship with them, but he could get Kirk Douglas to do things. And Kirk Douglas goes on to, he does a film called Thanksgiving in Peshwar about Afghan refugees and really comes out and says, you know, the struggle of freedom is being fought in Afghanistan. He's in that Poland be Poland too, isn't he? Can I come in? Yeah, he does, he does, he describes a trip where he made a film and trained actors within Poland. So he kind of like recounts that trip and talks about the Polish people. And another interesting piece of trivia is this is likely Henry Fonda's last screen appearance. So he won the Oscar not too long after his appearance in let Poland be Poland but Jane Fonda accepted for him on stage. So I think for anyone that's a scholar of kind of Hollywood history, this is, I'm fairly certain Henry Fonda's last on screen appearance too, which is interesting in his own right. What I can also add to this is that it was also an element of affording celebrity status to people who would not have that in the United States, especially in the field of the sport we see for African-Americans in field of music as well. They would come to these countries and they will really gain a kind of notoriety and they would be celebrities in outside of the United States. And they just wouldn't have that status. And with that notion of celebrity, I just wanna also add this governmental visiting projects that would be afforded to farmers, who would be picked up from Iran and other countries, they would be given free trip and stay and lodging and training all. And it was a kind of celebrity status for them to come and suddenly have this pleasure and come back. And I suspect that character, that strategy was also given to American farmers as well. And this is something that really works for more investigation. Great, just a small question. Does Nara have an original, I made a diversion of that poem by Poland, mentioned that some of the other copies are edited in various ways. Carol, this is, I mean, I owe my project to Carol and Mike Taylor. Seriously, I would not have gotten where I am today without Carol's help, she's been incredible. So this is, Carol was so kind to find this. And yes, I'll let you speak to it, Carol. No, it's, yes, we do have a full copy, both in Spanish, there's a Spanish version as well as an English version. The original is on one inch tape. So it's not in our catalog right now. It's not uploaded yet, but we do have a digital version available of that particular program. And it is the original. I don't know if it's the original original, it's one inch. So, I don't know, Brett, if you've been able to see more than one copy or one version of it. As far as I can tell, it was recorded from a broadcast on one of the PBS stations, I believe. I think it only ended up showing in like 90 PBS stations. Like, so that means 200 rejected its broadcast. But I think as far as I can tell, it is one of those recordings. So I think it's original as far as I can tell. Yeah, in the UK, it was sort of exerted on the news. So, sometimes when Wicks talking about the numbers, what he's talking about are people who had items about let Poland be Poland included in their news broadcast rather than watching it unedited beginning to end. At least that's my recollection. And was widely, we thought, oh, there's Americans. What are they doing? But that was 1982, you know. Now, we realize the wisdom of it always. Yeah, I had a question about the kind of genres of these sorts of films. I'm so curious for how are you thinking about, obviously the news reel and whether there were Soviet news reels also being made. And we had to compete with an American news reel. For Thorne, I was thinking like, do we call these films, again, educational films or the industrial films? How does that kind of genre change depending on kind of circumstances? And if like for both Brett and Nick, as well, we can think of that question like, what to call these films? And is there a way in which these become like their own kind of film? Or are they all in response of the certain kinds of genres? Even the fact that the documentary itself becomes more common as opposed to fiction filmmaking or other kinds of ways to communicate the ideas of public diplomacy. Let me start with Hadi. Well, I mean, no, there was no version that would compete with the way that United States operated in Iran. And the filmmaker process started prior to the coup and then intensified that the news reels started after the coup, et cetera. But there were a limited number of news reel format. We can not really just news reels, it's like more of a cultural films that were made at the time that part of Azerbaijan was under, it became basically an independent state. There were films made there. I think the Soviet filmmaker, if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, Shubh, but it could be wrong. But she went there, she produced the film. The film is available in a low quality and I really like to point a good version of it, very interesting film in a way. So there was this kind of tradition of Soviet filmmakers becoming active in these locations and places. We need to learn so much more about the Soviet operations and filming. I knew that they were very active in radio programming and these were also done by Iranian intellectuals who went to Soviet Union and they were operating through that. And we see how the Afghan Iran-Iran news makes these scenes of punishing people, threatening them if you watch this radio, bad things can happen to you, et cetera. So the fear of this propaganda operation. But when we come to the realm of film, I don't think they could keep up with the United States. My take on this is that you do see genre, and not only genre coming into James Blue's films, but he's also satirizing genre. So there's this sequence in the middle of Letter from Columbia, which is almost like the news on the March sequence in Citizen Kane, where he's actually making fun of it's a sequence. He says, progress on the March. And they have this sort of fake newsreel of speeding trains and building dams. And so he sets up this impersonal top down picture of progress. And then he unpacks it and talks about his sort of bottom-up idea of involving the people. And then there's a scene at a school. Who needs the food darker? Where people are pretending to finish painting the school. And James Blue actually explains, the people love this school so much that they wanted to restage the painting of the school for my documentary camera. So here we see pictures of people pretending to finish the building. So he's sort of opening up the secrets that sometimes a documentary film scenes are staged. And sometimes there are generic elements that come in. So I mean, that's why I think it's a great film and we'll commend it to people. All of his films bear watching, thinking, and talking about. Okay, so the genre certainly transforms when the films circulate. I think the, so these films in China were known as industrial know-how films. So they were very much understood as being about educating people in forms of industrial process and making them aware that there are these various forms of kind of heavy industry in various parts of the nation. When they, but I think the most, but when they come to the US, they really become understood as culture films or films that are about kind of knowing and understanding Chinese culture. And I think that that's an interesting aspect of industrial process films in general. Salome Soviersky makes this argument in her book where industrial process takes on different kinds of meanings when we're depending on the process that's being shown and the forms of etiology that come out of the process that is being depicted such that certain processes we see as ethnographic or anthropological, look at how they do things. Other ones have a kind of futurity to it. This is how, you know, this is where we're progressing. This is where we're moving. And I think that distinction is very important in how we understand how these films travel. And we can see that in the recutting and the reframing of that film about salt as well. And just to really quickly kind of build from what Thorn so wonderfully said there, process is central to so many USIA films too in the sense, as much as we can read technological apparatus into films, if we think to like maybe like some of the old war films where we see kind of the step-by-step process of kind of mobilizing war, mobilizing the machinery of war, some of that transfers to a lot of the early USIA films where they illustrate the process behind the dissemination of the film, the making, the distribution, the exhibition of the film. So process kind of takes shape in a different way. In that tradition, you know, we see it with kind of mobile film units in a lot of the films of the early 1950s, films about the mobile film units. We see that with let Poland be Poland too. There's this kind of idea of process through broadcast, process through satellite. But beyond that, beyond the technological apparatus, let Poland be a Poland perhaps resisted generating almost more than anything else within the catalog. It's, I can't express how strange and weird and surreal it is at certain moments. Maybe the closest, the closest paradigm that we can look to is like the telethon. And there's really not much work out there on the telethon outside of like Paul Longmore, but this kind of leveraging that like a lot of pathos as to generate kind of goodwill, kind of a vague sense of goodwill. So that's maybe the closest genre in which we could see that Poland be Poland operating. But yeah. I posted the link to Iranian snapshoots. It's a snapshot. It's not the actual tartanis and snapshoots. And this is, you know, we would expect that the local would come in with some kind of a funny responses. This is like a heavily didactic discourse. It comes from Syracuse group. They're two years in Iran and they produce this film and they basically discordance and satirizing itself. Their own mission is crazy. And they also been framed within an Iranian space. So it's like a very interesting take to that, which, you know, definitely worth 50 minutes of your time. Check it out. Great. I think I'll ask just one more question. And so think about what trace do we have? What evidence do we have for how these films circulated? For how long, where they played? I think even the artifact itself, what does it tell us about the relative popularity or at least use of these films? So any thoughts on that kind of question? Do we have any evidence in the material itself? So there's one particular document that Carol actually pointed me to. She showed it to me. It's a document produced in 1996 by the agency of all the retired titles in the agency's history. And it has certain metadata. It has like a description when there's one available, the title, but it also says year produced, year released, and year retired. Not all the films have that data, but you can really like with 18,000 titles on this list, you can really kind of begin to learn about certain circulation patterns. When there are peaks and when there are caverns, you know, when there are peaks and when there are lows and so it's that 1996 document is the one I'd point people to. So that where we can learn most about kind of, like at least on a macro scale distribution patterns. I mean, we would think of these films to this question pertains the primary production time. In case of Iran, it's not. So National Archives came out, received requests, and this film came out and these films are highly active in propaganda to win various Iranian factions. These are very lively being watched and seen and visited and always with the kind of framing, very important framing that wants to completely dissociate them from their main production culture, et cetera. So it shouldn't just be, I know it's like an exception of a sort. This film is highly valuable. I'll just let you guys know. Great. Okay. Well, thank you so much. I think we're at time, but this is a wonderful panel and really interesting research. So thank you so much for sharing it and thanks everyone in the audience for your terrific questions. We will be back at 7.30 for our final panel of today and welcoming scholars from Asia, which is really exciting. So I hope to see you in a bit. It's great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.