But do you consider all films art? In a broad, generic sense, all films do convey messages. And that’s an argument liberals in particular are always stressing to me, saying every single artifact is innately embued with politics. In other words, EVERY film is propaganda of some kind. I don’t really buy into that. But some films are designed to convey an ideology, while others might be strictly designed to appeal to an aesthetic, while yet others might be made for the singular need to fill as many empty theater seats as possible.
Generally speaking, I don’t like films that are deliberately peddling ideology, as the self-consciousness of those efforts invariably take me ‘out’ of the story. That’s probably also why, as a film buff, I have a preference not for classics, but for little b-films, which are so distilled down to basics and are less apt to serve up unwanted subtexts.
Of course they’re art. What else are they? The idea of ‘propaganda’ as pejorative materialized in the wake of the Soviet and Nazi era. Prior to that it was assumed that books, plays etc had some sort of instructive or prescriptive value. The idea of a narrative work as purely aesthetic would have baffled people like Dante, Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens. If it holds up as a work of art then it doesn’t matter what the intent was. Reducing something like ‘The Big Parade’ to propaganda is reductive. What you said about ‘Force of Evil’ could be said about The Godfather as well couldn’t it?