Bending Time and Space for Pan-Americanism: Shots of the “Western Hemisphere” in Wartime Cinema

Abstract

Analysing World War II films, from Allied propaganda to Good Neighbor Policy productions, this work probes the visual construction of the idea of the Western Hemisphere and Latin America’s place in it. It finds how war propaganda carried messages beyond the explicit anti-Axis one. In the films discussed here, the resources of novel aerial photography, cartography, and time-travel plots achieved the contradictory effect of showing the entire continent as one, while North and South were in contrast. During the war, Good Neighbor Policy productions promoting a continental alliance used many of the same visual elements as war propaganda to shore up morale ahead of battles. A focus on Brazil offers a counterpoint to US-based pan-Americanism, considering its nationalist discourse in the Estado Novo. Wartime cinema created a New World where the US was the future of “Western” civilisation as a continuum of Europe, while Latin America was visualised as existing in the past, resulting in a deeply ambivalent Western Hemisphere.