Why autocrats love cinema and how Directors are like Dictators

Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels fancied himself quite an artist, and regularly made films to mobilize people in support of Hitler.  In this delightful article based on a book, it is revealed that Stalin was quite the cinema buff, and had his own palatial private movie theater where he would retire to after a  tiring day's work of ordering the torture and murder of thousands. Lenin thought that cinema was the most important art form.  It is well-known that power flows from the barrel of a gun. But it might also flow to behind the camera. After all, both shoot. I wouldn't be surprised if it were to emerge that Saddam Hussain or Idi Amin were interested in films, or fancied their moviemaking talents - for it appears to me that moviemaking is a very dictatorial art, and that auteurs are mini-autocrats themselves.

Consider the word "director" itself and how it sounds like and is semantically similar to "dictator".  A moviemaker in essence creates his own little artificial world, of which he is the master (litsy types would probably recall Prospero and his isle from Shakespeare's "Tempest" at this stage), a world more of his own imagining than derived from any shared sense of reality,  and then directs the actors and technicians to go about putting things together in his own way. The director needs not only to be a  creative artist but also  has to have a sense of power and purposeful leadership to be able to drive his team bring to life his own conception.  The greatest directors are often the most megalomaniacal. Consider Werner Herzog having a real ship built and dragged overland through the rainforest while shooting "Fitzcarraldo".  

Dictators are often very creative when it comes to justifying their necessity to the world.  They are able to invent for themselves grand delusions of power - they see other people as mere puppets and pawns to be used and stringpulled in whatever way necessary.  Their conception of the world is often as removed from reality as a movie. They choose their team, their cabinet or coterie, with dispassionate care for detail - assigning each role carefully to what they feel is the best man for the job, who is also happy to work for the master.

If you consider the very nature of the cinematic medium, and the power of mass media to reach out to millions across time and space, you see very easily why cinema also tends to be a favorite tool for dictators. Movies are great propaganda resources. Orwell's dystopic world in 1984 features the use of movies by the government to whip up patriotic sentiment against enemy states. Movies appeal to or even assault directly on the senses. They lay out the world in black and white before the viewer leaving little to the imagination. In this way they are very different from books or other forms of print media. For one, and this is stating the obvious, movies can connect with illiterate people of which there are many in this world. The reader of books plays a much less passive role than the viewer of movies. She has to form her own images, debate the book's point with her own reason, before she can internalize its message. A critical viewing of movies is also of course possible. In fact the role of a film critic is as valuable as a dissenter's is in a democracy.

It will be interesting to look into possible relationship between the invention of cinema and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the first half of the twentieth century. I wish I had a research grant for that. But since I don't, I'll leave you with shallow speculation.