Cinema as Soft Power: American Film, Propaganda & Imperial Imagination 4219-SD0098
This course examines American cinema not simply as entertainment but as a vehicle of cultural power. Writing in 2004, Joseph Nye defined soft power as a nation's ability to get what it wants through attraction rather than coercion or payments. From the silent era's nation-building myth-making to the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster's entanglement with the Pentagon and post-9/11 geopolitics, American film has consistently served — and occasionally contested — the projection of American values, interests, and identity on a global screen.
Drawing on Nye's framework alongside critical counter-arguments that reframe it as cultural imperialism, students will analyze how American films construct national identity and serve strategic political purposes, whether consciously propagandistic or ideologically ambient. The course moves chronologically through American film history while maintaining a persistent analytical focus: what is this film asking you to think about these people? That question can be pursued with precision — by examining who the camera follows, how light constructs authority or threat, and whose death receives a close-up and whose does not.
Hollywood is not a monolith with a single political program. Individual films can simultaneously recruit for the military and satirize imperial hubris; studios can champion diversity for market reasons while reproducing structural exclusions. The course attends to this complexity, and to non-American filmmakers who have used cinema to contest the values projected by US cultural production.
Because ideological work is done not only through narrative but through image-making itself, this course integrates a strand of visual analysis throughout the semester. Week 1 establishes a shared vocabulary — framing, angle, lighting, composition, sound design, and editing — drawn from Roland Barthes's concept of the rhetoric of the image and from what scholars of colonial representation have termed the imperial gaze. No production background is assumed or required. This is a course in cultural studies and film analysis, not film production.
Course coordinators
Type of course
Mode
Prerequisites (description)
Learning outcomes
KNOWLEDGE
Student has knowledge of the theoretical frameworks central to this course: Joseph Nye's concept of soft power, Tanner Mirrlees's critique of soft power as cultural imperialism, and Walker and Ludwig's concept of sharp power — and how each illuminates different aspects of American cinema's global role.
Student has knowledge of the historical development of the relationship between the US film industry and the US state: from Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information and the Office of War Information through the Pentagon's documented editorial involvement in over 2,500 productions to the CIA's role in post-9/11 Hollywood.
Student has knowledge of the key institutional structures — the MPAA Production Code, Pentagon and CIA script review processes, and studio self-censorship — that shaped the political content of Hollywood film across distinct historical periods.
Student has knowledge of major scholarly frameworks for analyzing representation in American cinema: Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model, Jack Shaheen's documentation of Arab and Muslim stereotyping, Edward Said's concept of Orientalism, and Richard Dyer's work on whiteness.
Student has knowledge of the visual and cinematographic vocabulary used in this course: framing, angle, lighting, composition, sound design, editing, and the concept of the imperial gaze.
SKILLS
Student is able to apply theoretical concepts from cultural studies — ideology, hegemony, discourse, representation — to the close analysis of specific American films, grounding interpretations in textual evidence from the film itself.
Student is able to critically evaluate competing scholarly arguments about Hollywood's political role: distinguish between a soft power reading, a cultural imperialism reading, and an ideological ambivalence reading of the same film.
Student is able to produce original written analysis — response papers, a midterm close-reading essay, and a final research paper — that makes a defensible argument about what a specific film constructs, promotes, or contests.
Student is able to identify and analyze the institutional conditions of production that shaped a film's political content: reconstruct what government agencies, studios, or industry structures were involved and what their documented editorial interests were.
Student is able to interpret a film's visual and sonic choices — casting, framing, light, music, and whose point of view the camera adopts — as forms of argumentation rather than neutral aesthetic decisions.
Student is able to communicate analytical positions on American cinema, culture, and politics using appropriate specialized English-language terminology from cultural studies and film theory.
SOCIAL COMPETENCES
Student is prepared to critically evaluate representations of the United States, American foreign policy, and non-American peoples in media and popular culture, applying the analytical tools developed in this course beyond the classroom.
Student is prepared to form informed, evidence-based opinions on contested cultural and political questions — including debates about American soft power, cultural imperialism, and the ethics of military entertainment — using the interdisciplinary perspectives of American Studies.
Student is prepared to engage with difficult historical materials — including racist imagery, military propaganda, and representations of political violence — in a spirit of critical inquiry rather than either uncritical consumption or unreflective dismissal.
Student is prepared to recognize and responsibly address the ethical implications of cultural representation: whose voices are amplified, whose are silenced, and what real-world effects representations can have on how groups of people are perceived and treated.
Assessment criteria
1. Seminar Participation — 20 pts
Active, prepared engagement with weekly screenings and readings.
2. Weekly Response Papers (x5) — 25 pts
Five 300-400 word analytical responses to a screening or reading. Due before class.
3. Midterm Essay — 25 pts
1,500-word close analysis of one film from Weeks 1-7 in its political-historical context. Due Week 8.
4. Final Research Paper — 30 pts
2,500-3,000 word analytical essay on a theme, film, or period of the student's choice. Topic approval required by Week 10.
Grading scale (100 points total):
100-88 pts: 5 (excellent)
87-73 pts: 4 (good)
72-57 pts: 3 (satisfactory)
56-0 pts: 2 (fail)
Bibliography
Core Reading:
Nye, Joseph S. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. PublicAffairs, 2004.
Mirrlees, Tanner. "American Soft Power or American Cultural Imperialism." In The New Imperialists: Ideologies of Empire, 2006.
Alford, Matthew, and Tom Secker. National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood. 2017.
Schwartzel, Erich. Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. Penguin Press, 2022.
Robb, David L. Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies. Prometheus Books, 2004.
Shaheen, Jack G. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Olive Branch Press, 2001.
Stahl, Roger. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. Routledge, 2010.
Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture. University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Barthes, Roland. "Rhetoric of the Image." In Image-Music-Text. Hill and Wang, 1977.
Supplementary Bibliography:
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers, 1971.
Hall, Stuart. "Encoding/Decoding." In Culture, Media, Language. Hutchinson, 1980.
Polan, Dana. Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950. Columbia University Press, 1986.
Alford, Matthew, and Tom Secker. Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood. Media Education Foundation, 2024.
Carruthers, Susan L. The Media at War. 2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Christensen, Terry. Reel Politics: American Political Movies from Birth of a Nation to Platoon. Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Kellner, Douglas. Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Mirrlees, Tanner. "The Militarization of Movies and Television." Costs of War Project, Watson Institute, Brown University, Feb. 2025.
Rangwala, S. "Liberal Containment in Marvel Movies of the Trump Era." Canadian Review of American Studies, 2022.
Rogin, Michael. Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. University of California Press, 1987.
Suid, Lawrence H. Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
Walker, Christopher, and Jessica Ludwig. "Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence." National Endowment for Democracy, 2017.
Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin, eds. America on Film. 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.