THE CELLULOID WAR

...All are polemical and, given the broad spectrum of their politics, they amount to a major effort to sway public opinion in the debate over U.S...

...Limited theatrical runs in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle (where it was shown together with Americas in Transition and tallied a record $20,000 in one week at a 350-seat theater) were also clear indications that there was a substantial audience for this sort of film...

...Archival footage and interviews with such conservatives as Henry Kissinger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Lieutenant General Gordon Sumner Jr., former chairman of the Inter-American Defense Board, raise the alarm over alleged Soviet-Cuban plans to take over strategic Latin American and Caribbean countries in an effort to wrest control of sea lanes from the United States...

...We have already been scared out of our wits by stunning footage of the relentless violence in El Salvador...

...The film was researched, shot, and edited in only five weeks during the spring of 1981 to be ready for campus showings before summer vacation...

...Today, El Salvador and Guatemala...

...In a sequence that shifts from statements by Junta members to the comments of Archbishop Romero and Ita Ford, one of the missionary women murdered in 1980, the discrepancies between the two positions become clear...

...According to Gerard Willis, the Unification Church views American involvement in Vietnam as a "mistake rather than a crime," which should not deter involvement in El Salvador...

...The first half of the film defends President Duarte and his agrarian reforms as the surviving democratic element between greedy oligarchs and the totalitarian Left...

...It is a propaganda film, we have no problem with that," says Diego de la Texera...

...Pulsating maps were used to illustrate the encroachment of military dictatorships...

...Without explicitly stating that this is the body of the student, the film leaves a strong suggestion...

...is a slick, if shrill, scare film...

...Revolution or Death is a powerful film that derives its strength from extraordinary footage obviously shot under precarious circumstances...

...If Attack on the Americas...

...customs, much less to theatrical distribution or television...

...Like Revolution or Death, the Dutch film Decision to Win captures the sense of being there...

...But about two-thirds of the material was not in the first version, and the film was more polished in style and more sophisticated in its historical analysis than its predecessor...

...This latest wave of political films marks at least two significant developments in filmmaking...

...evokes the spirit of the Cold War but fails to appeal to a new generation of viewers...

...Cut to sobbing Salva-doran women and children and more mutilated bodies: "What is at stake here is more than the freedom of our neighbors____" Cut to a map that lights up with pulsating bullseye targets as each country is named: "More than the natural resources of our allies in the Western Hemisphere...

...One sequence ends when President Duarte explains, "There is no repression in this country...

...Although the Council spent at least $80,000 for AttackPs television debut (a half hour can cost from $400 at smaller stations to $10,000 on prime time in New York City), the viewers did not respond to direct marketing...

...They have fallen into a 'Fortress America' mentality and don't want to get involved...

...In 1981, The People Will Win was released with the specific goal of informing sympathetic American audiences about the history and objective of El Salvador's broad opposition coalition, the newly formed FDR-FMLN...

...Ed Asner, controversial president of the Screen Actors Guild, was enlisted as narrator...

...We've seen lasers beaming out of a map of Cuba, slashing Central America to ribbons...

...The Vietnam war has been described as the first television war, but only one independently produced documentary, Inside North Vietnam (1968) by Felix Greene, was broadcast to a national audience, and it was carried on public television, which had few viewers at that time...

...Asked about this segment, Powell couldn't cite anything more substantial than "common knowledge...

...Two major Latin American contributions to the field of documentaries, El Salvador: The People Will Win (El Pueblo Veneer a) and El Salvador: Decision to Win, grew out of what is now a substantial body of Latin revolutionary films...

...And when there is violence, it is somehow different...

...was responsible, in part, for production of a half-hour film called Americas in Transition...

...Diamand had previously made documentaries on Vietnam and on the civil war in Nicaragua...

...While the Unification Church is well known for its internal organization, it has no significant roots in Middle America and has been unable to utilize church and university networks to distribute its film...

...The film cuts to a 1980 military attack on the National University, where we witness the shooting of a terrified student who is lying on the ground, begging for mercy...

...Its crew spent less than a week in El Salvador, so the film relied heavily upon archival footage...

...Yet this film wants things to be calm—the camera pans from the soccer game up to the approaching helicopter and back to the boys dashing for cover all in one smooth, uninterrupted shot...

...Our film was originally conceived in response to Attack on the Americas!," says Obie Benz, a social activist and film producer...

...In emphasizing the normalcy of life—the rebels farm, run a crude sugar mill, set up a makeshift classroom—the film marks a significant shift from the terror of daily life in the previous films...

...The People Will Win was shot in El Salvador and post-production work was done in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Havana, and New York...

...El Salvador: Decision to Win was made in 1981 by a team of three Salvadorans working out of Mexico City...

...Indeed, most of the major documentaries critical of U.S...

...For all its fast-paced editing, subliminal sound effects, and other modern television techniques, Attack...

...Another Vietnam opens with 1954 news-reel footage of then Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson assuring the public that U.S...

...Also like Another Vietnam, it was nominated for an Academy Award (in the best short-subject category) and has won several awards at smaller festivals...

...Says Michael Smith, head of CARP: "The Church wants to present students with alternatives to the Marxist-Leninist models...

...When almost eighty paid airings had generated only meager returns, the Council dropped the television campaign and concentrated on distribution through its grass-roots networks of conservative church and civic groups...

...This massacre was belatedly reported in the U.S...

...Diamand interviews the young man before he is hauled away...

...But the film gets beyond the violence, too...

...The camera follows guerrilla troops into battle as they take over the National Guard headquarters in the small town of Perquin...

...Still, Vietnam to a great extent is responsible for the explosion of independent films on El Salvador...

...Benz's heavy use of interviews, on the other hand, is far more successful than the predictable statements by conservative luminaries in Attack!: Central figures in Americas in Transition include Lyman Kirkpatrick, former director of the CIA, Murat Williams, former ambassador to El Salvador, and Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist, who speak with extraordinary candor and authority as they debunk the basic theses of Attack...

...But Mike [Smith of CARP] felt a pro-intervention line would muddy the film politically...

...There was a real need for an in-depth assessment of El Salvador, but I couldn't get the networks interested," says Silber...

...Latin folk music was carefully blended into the soundtrack during appropriate segments to underscore Latin attitudes at those points...

...Fuentes, for example, is adamant and eloquent as the Mexican addressing the American public: "You cannot import or export revolution...

...Even more than Revolution or Death, Texera's film has been criticized for being too heavy-handed politically...

...Because PBS twice made Another Vietnam available to its affiliate stations, the film achieved exceptional exposure...

...PBS funded the production, which included a whirlwind visit to El Salvador, on the condition that Silber and his co-director, Tete Vasconcellos, a Brazilian filmmaker, complete the documentary before Ronald Reagan's Presidential Inauguration, when it was felt the situation might change dramatically...

...The seventy-five-minute film, released in the United States last January, depicts life in a guerrilla camp in the liberated territory of Morazan province...

...In many respects, Attack...

...Demand for information about El Salvador markedly increased in 1980, when eight Americans, including four missionary women, were murdered in El Salvador, all by right-wing elements...

...Revolution or Death was released in the United States in mid-1980, when the media had not yet "discovered" El Salvador and were largely uncritical of the official Washington line on Salvadoran politics...

...If Another Vietnam went the way of PBS and the grass-roots solidarity circuits, Attack...

...Despite the apparently balanced presentation of both, sides, our sympathies are constantly engaged on the side of the people victimized by cynical and murderous politicians...

...Impressed by the slickness of Attack!, Benz took several steps to broaden the popular appeal of Americas in Transition...

...We witness, for example, the arrest of a student by National Guardsmen on a street in San Salvador...

...In another sequence, a group of day laborers go on strike at a plantation in the Salvadoran countryside...

...For this reason, the film has been credited with helping to revitalize the grass-roots solidarity movement that had formed around the Sandinista struggle against General Anas-tasio Somoza in neighboring Nicaragua...

...policy in Central America than the fragmented network news coverage of Salvadoran events...

...The films on El Salvador have already had an incalculable impact on the public perception of the crisis there...

...involvement in Vietnam were produced outside the United States and rarely made it through U.S...

...Like Attack!, Americas in Transition relies heavily on stock footage, which tends to weaken the film's credibility...

...or The People Will Win, to the cinema verite style of Decision to Win...

...Americas in Transition remains an eloquent, if overwrought, indictment of American support for military dictatorships in Latin America and a defense of the right to self-determination in such nations as El Salvador...

...CARP officials say forty prints were made: some were given to Young Republican organizations and others are used by the Freedom Leadership Foundation to lobby on Capitol Hill...

...policy toward Cuba, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Nicaragua, covering some eighty years of relations between the United States and Latin America...

...The fighting rages, the air force drops bombs on the attackers, but finally equally young National Guardsmen, bloody and frightened, surrender...

...It then cuts to State Department spokesman John Bushnell assuring a Congressional audience that El Salvador is not another Vietnam...

...Yet thanks to their informative historical background material and original footage of life in the liberated zones in El Salvador, they have enjoyed surprising success on the solidarity circuits around the country...

...Like SALT Syndrome, Attack...

...Designed for nationwide television distribution, the twenty-five-minute documentary was the fourth film produced by the American Security Council, the education branch of the Coalition for Peace Through Strength, an influential lobbying group closely identified with the Pentagon and the arms industry...

...provides the John Wayne-style analysis of events in Central America, El Salvador: Romance and Reality, a thirty-minute Moonie production, opens with a surprisingly middle-of-the-road analysis of events...

...Texera's team of three spent two months in El Salvador, first as an officially accredited crew and then in the hills of Chala-tenango province—territory under the control of the Popular Liberation Forces, a guerrilla group of the FMLN...

...It also assesses U.S...

...There is a problem of abuse of authority, which is not the same...

...Together, these documentaries form, as film maker Diego de la Texera put it, a mosaic of the situation in El Salvador...

...Six months and another $100,000 later (Silber says $87,000 was raised from some 150 organizations and individuals ranging from sympathizers in Hollywood to the United Auto Workers) El Salvador: Another Vietnam (without the question mark) was ready...

...They are grown there and they stay there and they obey to very local circumstances...

...The first major film on El Salvador to receive extensive American distribution was a 1980 Dutch production called El Salvador: Revolution or Death, directed by Frank Diamand...

...I've been told it contains too much politics, too little politics," Texera continues...

...The struggles in El Salvador and Guatemala are described as the initial stages of this effort...

...Paul Heath Hoeffel writes about Latin America for The New York Times Magazine and other publications...

...Together, they provide far more depth to the debate over U.S...

...441 JANUARY 1983 4Attack on the Americas!9 is a slick, if shrill, scare film that disregards the indigenous nationalist origins of the conflicts in Central America while stressing East-West confrontation Except for The People Will Win and Decision to Win, made by Latin Americans, all of these are fast-paced, professionally made films designed for mass American audiences, especially television viewers...

...They are unabashedly propagandist^ and make no attempt to adapt to A growing number of gifted independents are scraping together the funding for political films, and the audience is growing, too...

...Here the critics are upset that it doesn't conform to 'objective' documentary television films...

...This is cinema engage...

...The sequence abruptly cuts to a shot of Fidel Castro and Leonid Brezhnev embracing as the narrator intones: "The communist attack on the Americas is not over—it will continue...

...Violence emerges as a central theme for several of these early films, and Revolution or Death clearly seeks to determine responsibility for all the killing: Diamand edits his material to lead the audience to the inexorable conclusion that government forces and right-wing paramilitary groups are behind the bloodshed...

...Dissolve to Ronald Reagan, looking grave, who appears to pick up the thread and provides his apparent endorsement: "Whether we like it or not, it is our responsibility to preserve world peace...

...He secured loans and paid out of his own pocket for the remainder of the year-long production...

...tomorrow, Honduras, Costa Rica, Belize, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Mexico...

...But when the American Security Council virtually withdrew its film from circulation, ours changed dramatically...

...has much in common with the other films, although they range in style from the "objective" television documentary style of El Salvador: Another Vietnam or El Salvador: Romance and Reality to the unabashed agit-prop or cinema engage styles of Attack...

...Two years after its release, non-theatrical screenings of the film continue to bring in substantial revenues...

...The generation of film makers which began making movies in the 1960s has become increasingly sophisticated over the years...

...The average citizen understands conventional military power a lot better than wars of liberation," he speculates...

...It disregards the indigenous nationalist origins of the conflicts in Central America, while overemphasizing East/West confrontation in the most blatant agit-prop style...

...Last March, a Dutch camera crew—working for the same network that sent Diamand's team to El Salvador—was executed by an army patrol as it tried to make contact with the guerrillas in the countryside in an attempt to update Diamand's original work...

...Its original footage is limited to half a dozen interviews, while the bulk of footage comes from commercial archives...

...The following shots are of peasants' bodies sprawled in inch-deep blood inside a farmhouse...

...The viewer's initial astonishment that the camera has been witness to such events gives way to the realization that this sort of savagery has become commonplace in El Salvador...

...was the creature of the direct marketing approach that has served American conservative interests well in recent years...

...Originally we hoped to interview military experts who could describe America's successful counterinsurgency campaigns," Willis said...

...If Attack...

...press...

...It was written and directed by Diego de la Texera, a Puerto Rican who had made a number of films for PBS...

...What seems to be a combined soundtrack of Jaws and Them!, the classic sci-fi movie about giant red ants, comes booming and squeaking off the screen every time scruffy young guerrillas with big guns scurry ominously out of the bush toward what might well be Texas...

...It was the Institute's first production...

...backing of the repressive regime in El Salvador...

...The Unification Church's student organization, Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP), provided the funding (some $75,000) while Gerard Willis, director of the Church's lobbying group in Washington, the Freedom Leadership Foundation, provided ideological direction...

...We feel it is crucial to counter the negative image of international terrorists the media have provided the world, one which still lingers...

...In one sequence—a shot of Castro handing a wooden rifle to a peasant boy dissolves to shots of young Salvadoran guerrillas— the narrator explains that the Salvadorans use children to test the strength of enemy forces by deploying them before seasoned troops...

...military aid for Indochina would not lead to another Korea-type war...

...Even the many documentaries generated by the war in Vietnam failed to reach the audiences or achieve the impact of the films on El Salvador...

...The significance might not be clear to an American audience, but the grandfatherly guerrilla leader, sitting casually by a tree in the pleasant countryside explaining the new society the revolutionaries are seeking to create, is a striking contrast to the usual image of young, inarticulate guerrillas...

...As soon as Another Vietnam?, which had been produced in five weeks, was aired, a second, updated version of the film went into production...

...Like El Salvador: Another Vietnam, Americas in Transition was shown twice on PBS, the first time kicking off the Independent Focus Series of twenty documentaries...

...This is the concluding segment, less than a minute, of Attack on the Americas!, but it captures the film's tone and style...

...It proceeds to present contrasting viewpoints on who is responsible for the violence and the efficacy of U.S.-backed agrarian and banking reforms...

...More films continue to be made on El Salvador, and every film, like every revolution, increases the likelihood that another will be made...

...The American Security Council hoped to repeat the enormous success of its previous documentary, SALT Syndrome, which argued against the limitation by treaty of strategic arms...

...Network reticence, their unwillingness to take a chance with unfamiliar material, forced us to turn to PBS as the only alternative...

...It is not until the second half, in interviews with Cuban and Vietnamese refugees, that the Moonie message is more sharply defined: Revolutions, beneath their romantic patina, are the work of forces of darkness that seek to subjugate mankind...

...failed to capture the public's imagination, John Fisher says, that is more a problem of national morale than a failure of the film itself...

...Attack on the Americas!, originally titled Caribbean Pearl Harbor, also was released in time for Reagan's inauguration in January 1981...

...The first person narration, the collective 'we' the Salvadoran people, drives them nuts...

...The next shot is of a mutilated cadaver discovered in a local park...

...And there are audiences around the country willing to patronize alternative films because they are interested in the subject...

...It provides the American viewer with the first unofficial view of the explosive new situation in El Salvador...

...The first segment of the film is without narration: Government soldiers speak for themselves, paramilitary peasant groups are seen, and the interrogation of terrified peasant prisoners is witnessed...

...We are not surprised when the narrator finally explains that the mission ended on May 14, 1980, when 600 peasants were massacred by these same soldiers as they attempted to flee into Honduras...

...At the same time, the civilian-military junta headed by Jose Napoleon Duarte consolidated its power...

...Romance and Reality was inspired by the impressive audiences Revolution or Death and Another Vietnam were drawing on college campuses around the country...

...We hear the plantation manager's exchange by ham radio with the German landlord, who tells him in thickly accented Spanish to get them back to work "or else...

...The resulting film, El Salvador: Another Vietnam?, a fifty-three-minute exposition in "balanced" television documentary style, was made available for nationwide PBS viewing on January 18, 1981...

...In the hills, the veteran military tactician Salvador Cayetano Carpio, coordinator of the FMLN, is interviewed for the first time on camera...

...For a mere $30,000 (the total budget was $50,000) PBS had scooped the networks with a highly informative news special that was openly critical of further U.S...

...features appeals for funds, and raised millions of dollars which were put toward buying more commercial television time...

...Life here is not normal either: There are rifles in the school room, and boys playing soccer rush for their battle positions when an army helicopter appears...

...The made-for-television documentary, produced by the American Security Council, an ultra-conservative military lobbying group, is one of a dozen documentaries inspired by recent events in El Salvador...

...It was directly financed (over $250,000, including camera equipment which remains with the guerrillas in El Salvador) by the Film Institute of El Salvador, an agency of the FDR-FMLN shadow government...

...A growing number of gifted independents are managing to scrape together the funding needed to make professional films...

...The urgency of these events, especially the rape and execution of the lay missionaries by National Guardsmen, enabled Glenn Silber, director of an exceptional post-Vietnam documentary, The War at Home (1979), to convince the Public Broadcasting System to finance an independent production focusing on American involvement...

...He arrived in El Salvador in time to capture the pivotal events following the military coup of October 1979, which set off the escalation of political violence, including the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the formation of the coalition of opposition parties called the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR...

...The camera actually participates in the scenes, and the editing does not hesitate to indicate its sympathies...

...The funders and the audience seem to be steadily increasing...

...It was also aggressively distributed through ICARUS, a New York-based distribution company that works with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES...

...policy toward El Salvador...

...Central America is very close but they don't see it in personal terms...

...Once again, we are led to believe that these were the striking workers...

...The film commanded a far larger audience than had been available for Inside North Vietnam in 1968...

...John Fisher, long-time director of the Council, says SALT Syndrome was aired on 500 independent television stations some 2,000 times and was seen by perhaps 100 million Americans...

...Revolutions are not tomatoes or bananas...

...Every film increases the likelihood that another will be made the tight, clipped format of American television...

...Benz raised approximately $60,000 of the film's $110,000 budget from friends...

...Vietnam helped create a wary and demanding audience—some tens of millions of Americans have seen the new El Salvador films either on television or through the grass-roots networks of church, university, and small theatrical runs...

...Romance and Revolution attempts to counter the Vietnam-El Salvador analogy developed in Another Vietnam...