The Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein showed how juxtaposing one image with another (montage) could create a third idea by associating the two (metaphor). In this famous example from October, Eisenstein cuts from a scene of post-Tsarist leader Kerensky to a shot of a mechanical peacock and back to Kerensky to reveal not only the leader’s vanity but also the mechanistic, anti-human nature of his politics.
mechanical peacock
Kerensky
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Nazi film propaganda exploited the power of metaphorical montage. These frames from the anti-Semitic film Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) associate Jews with rats. Notice that both the rats and the humans move from right to left (a more sinister, unsettling direction than right to left–the normal order of reading).
Der Ewige Jude 1
Der Ewige Jude 2
Der Ewige Jude 3
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The John McCain TV ad “Fact Check” visually compares wolves to the team of lawyers allegedly sent to Alaska to discredit Sarah Palin. (For the full background on this charge, see the article by Factcheck.org). But the real association is not wolves = lawyers, but wolves = Obama (yet another attack on Obama’s humanity). Notice how the wolves initially run from left to right, but one wolf turns facing left. A head shot of Barack Obama appears in the following frames, facing left as well.
The pictures of Willie Horton in the following ad (courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image), made by an independent political action committee, burned into viewers’ minds the association of murderous black rage with permissive liberal policies on crime attributed to Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Although the commercial only aired once, it was picked up by national news programs, which served to further embed the image.
A favorite Republican trick is to associate positively-charged words with the conservative cause and negative terms with the opposition.
Newt Gingrich wrote an influential manual, Language, A Key Mechanism of Control, providing a list of “positive governing words” such as “citizen,” “peace,” and “truth,” and an opposing list of negative terms like “corruption,” “hypocrisy,” and “radical” for characterizing opponents.
The following Swift Boat Veterans ad (courtesy of YouTube) uses both types of terms masterfully in their attack on Presidential candidate John Kerry.
Negative terms: lying / lied / not honest (6 times); lacks the capacity to lead; could not count on; no war hero; betrayed (twice); dishonored; cannot be trusted.
Positive terms (used to characterize veterans in video): served (4 times); truth.
Note how the ad progresses from “not honest” to “lied” to unheroic to “betrayed / dishonored” and finally back to “cannot be trusted.” Such a strategy was designed to shift attention away from Bush’s lack of combat experience toward a debate over the trustworthiness of Kerry and an unsupported characterization of his service.
