Manish Tewari | Why Cinema More Powerful Than A Thousand Speeches

From the arrival of the motion pictures in the 1920s to today’s OTT, the moving image has remained a singular constant across generations, and by extension, the most potent tool of mass influence ever devised. For over a century, while other mediums have risen and fallen, the cinema screen has held families and youngsters alike in its thrall, a shared ritual that transcends mere escapism. This is not an accident of culture but a feature of deep political utility. The transition from the static word of print and the disembodied voice of radio to the full sensory immersion of film was a psychological conquest.

For the first time, an idea, no matter how political, could be given a human face, a stirring score and a narrative arc that felt not like instruction, but like lived experience. A propagandist could now weaponise empathy, creating fictional characters to embody a manufactured reality, making an abstract ideology feel like a visceral truth. This power to set the agenda, to tell the public not what to think, but what to think about, transformed cinema into the supreme political medium of the 20th century, a legacy that the digital age has only intensified.

While technological novelties were still being explored elsewhere, Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, were among the first to truly grasp that film was not mere entertainment but a central nervous system for the state. The establishment of a dedicated Department of Film-Reich Chamber of Film (Reichsfilmkammer, abbreviated as RFK) within the Nazi Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda recognised that a nationalistic idea, packaged in the emotional grandeur of cinema, could bypass rational critique and lodge itself directly into the soul of a populace.

Yet, the fall of Berlin did not extinguish this cinematic propaganda impulse; it merely devolved and diffused. The Allies too, having fought the Nazi machine, recognised the tool’s utility for themselves. It became the engine for promoting soft power and fundamentally attempting to reshape the world as cultural clones premised on new found hegemonistic or erstwhile colonial cultural influences in the newly liberated geographical spaces in Asia, Africa Latin and South America who were finally overthrowing the yoke of colonialism and imperialism.

The Soviets and the Americans, locked in the Cold War, simply divided the spoils of this technique, crafting a binary world through celluloid. Both sides constructed simplified, monstrous images of the other. In American cinema, the fear of communist infiltration was masked as an alien invasion narrative, while Soviet films exalted collective technological progress as a marker of socialist virtue. This cinematic space race was a shadow conflict, a “hot” war of banal ideological indoctrination that defined broader pan nation ideological constructs for over half a century.

In America, this fraternity of culture and statecraft was perfected into an industrial art form that the world came to know as Hollywood. Hollywood has been the most effective force multiplier for American soft power, consistently leveraging cultural appeal for raw, hard power interests. Through countless blockbusters, the US Marine Corps has been glorified, transforming complex, multifactorial conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan into simple morality plays where the American soldier emerges as the messiah of a beleaguered people, fighting not for empire but for a universal, selfless ideal.

The narrative architecture of a fight against local militants or a shadowy global threat serves a potent “banal propaganda” function: the audience internalises the premise of American exceptionalism and benevolent power, so that when a real-world crisis erupts, the “hot propaganda” of official statements and news reports finds a perfectly ploughed field.

This model of cinematic persuasion, perfected for the silver screen, has metastasised in the 21st century into a far more pervasive and personalized apparatus through OTT platforms. The economics of this transition explain its psychological triumph: paying a few hundred rupees for a single, time-bound ticket has been replaced by an endless, on-demand library of global content for a negligible monthly sum. This unlimited access transforms the propaganda model from a broadcast into a data-driven, personalised drip feed. A smartphone is a repository of consciousness, where an algorithm silently curates reality by recommending only content that mirrors a user’s existing watch history and interest.

This is the age of computational propaganda, where the manipulation of opinion is no longer just about the content of a singular message but about engineering the entire contextual environment of consumption. The earlier models of agenda-setting, where the media told people what to think about, have been replaced by a closed-loop system that dictates how one should feel while thinking about it, tailoring the emotional and ideological payload with surgical precision.

For a digitally native Gen Z, a politically engaged and emotionally vulnerable cohort, this system is especially potent. A spy thriller or political drama, available at the tap of a screen, pushes narratives through the seemingly objective guise of slick, premium entertainment. Nowhere is the corrosive duality of this cinematic weapon more apparent than in its contemporary deployment on the domestic front, where it serves not to unify against a foreign power but to fracture society from within. The distinction between social messaging and political propaganda, always a fine line, has been obliterated by a wave of films that aggressively rewrite history to serve immediate political convenience. The swirling narratives around pivotal events exemplify how cinema can be deployed as ‘hot propaganda’ to proselytize by retrofitting the past. Films like Emergency, Dhurandhar I & II fall squarely in this genre.

Concurrently we are witnessing the rise of a distinct genre of propaganda filmmaking that connects disparate historical threads into a grand narrative of one end of the political spectrum. These films are declarations of identity that use the emotional veracity of cinema to lend historical and moral weight to a majoritarian political project. A fictional character, armed with a thought process perfectly molded by the propagandist, can demonise a political ideology or a community more effectively than a thousand speeches.

The strategic genius of cinematic propaganda across all eras, from the Nuremberg Nazi rallies circa 1923-1938 to the personalised Netflix recommendation, has been its ability to fuse the communication of power with the illusion of choice.

The state and corporate actors, and even decentralised ideological entrepreneurs, have understood that in an age of information saturation, the ultimate power lies not in filtering what we see, but in shaping the cognitive and emotional architecture of how we see it. The goal is no longer just to manage opinion but to codify identity, to provide a complete emotional and sensory home for a political self.