Moulding and Mutilating: Newsreels, the British State, and Yugoslav ‘Exceptional’ Socialism, 1946–1961

Abstract

This paper uncovers British newsreel media’s largely unknown role in propagating Yugoslavia as a country that defied the Cold War binary. My archival research of the British Information Research Department (IRD), the first anti-communist propaganda agency, shows how the IRD and British newsreel companies’ cooperation helped establish Yugoslavia’s Cold War myth as ‘a pleasurable’ albeit socialist country. From 1946, numerous newsreel films established representational tropes that became synonymous with Yugoslavia’s role in the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. This is also a story of how the British state reshaped and appropriated British newsreel media and photojournalism from their politically subversive role in the 1930s to the post-war British state’s greatest asset in the Cold War. This article expands our usual understanding of newsreel media as tools of propaganda by insisting on the history of their unruliness and subversion; the British state appropriated newsreel media within the debates over the future of the liberal world-system. If we want to understand mid-twentieth century politics, this article argues that we need to pay closer attention to the role of non-fiction media such as newsreels in undermining and supporting official governmental policy.