Film, the artistic extension of Literature, has been at the heart of social controversy and societal change for the better part of the last one hundred years. Even before film, literature that focused on social change in the 19th Century played a role that many have argued caused the very change it sought. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which first came before the public as an 1851 serialized story in a Northern abolitionist magazine, played a significant, indeed a causal role in the North’s backing of the Civil War – a necessary war of Emancipation – or so the argument goes. It would be nice to think that Art has such formative power. If it had, then we could easily see it as an overwhelming influence or primal cause, everywhere. Leni Reifenstahl’s propaganda masterpiece, Triumph of the Will, for example, then could be seen as factor that caused, rather than influenced reflectively, the machinations of the Third Reich, as it hurtled towards WWII. But even the Nuremburg Tribunal......
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