Film Diplomacy

Film Diplomacy

What if the most consequential alliance between the United States and Turkey was not signed—but screened? Beginning in 1930 and crystallizing during the Cold War, the two nations forged an alliance through film: American and Turkish institutions used educational films—short documentaries shown in schools, villages, theaters, and public spaces—not just to inform but to persuade. These films promoted cooperation, encouraged economic development, and modeled ideals of modern citizenship. Yet beneath their instructional surface, they also advanced a racialized vision of progress. Film Diplomacy offers a powerful new account of how film shaped international relations and national identity. Drawing on previously unexamined and recently declassified archives in Turkey and the United States, Ayşehan Jülide Etem demonstrates how both countries used educational films to align institutional agendas and geopolitical interests. The United States built on missionaries’ earlier use of film programs while shifting from Christianization to modernization to promote free market capitalism and prevent the spread of communism. Turkish officials embraced film to promote a homogenous, secular, and Western-facing national identity that erased groups such as Armenians, Blacks, Greeks, Jews, and Kurds. In both contexts, whiteness operated as an invisible standard—shaping who belonged, who was excluded, and what counted as modern. By tracing the transnational network of educational cinema, Etem uncovers how film functioned as infrastructure, circulating ideologies, organizing institutions, and training citizens. Moving beyond conventional accounts of propaganda and soft power, this book exposes how film was central to the making of modern Turkey and sheds new light on media’s role in global politics.

Politicised Cinema

Politicised Cinema demonstrates how taking a collection of seemingly apolitical films and using them as an instrument for serving explicit political aims can be used as a force for good. Through an analysis of Orient: A Survey of Films Produced in Countries of Arab and Asian Culture, a film catalogue published by UNESCO and the BFI in 1959 to promote intercultural understanding between the East and the West, this book argues for the importance of studying the ways the interpretation of films can be guided to serve a specific political agenda, even when the films themselves were originally produced with very different aims in mind. The author focuses on how the catalogue positions culture and its cinematic representations as a marker of difference between the Eastern and Western worlds, and shows that even major cultural conflicts such as the Cold War and the decolonisation process can be reframed in service of UNESCO’s cultural diplomatic agenda. The book explores the ways in which the catalogue of Eastern films deemed suitable for Western audiences became a weapon to fight against prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry in a politicised battle over dismantling the proclaimed link between difference and conflict. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and academics in visual politics, cinematic international relations, cultural diplomacy, global governance, and international cultural politics, as well as film studies, Asian studies, and cultural studies. In addition, policymakers and practitioners in the fields of cultural diplomacy and cultural policy will find the empirical case study to be of use in practical work.

Film & Video