By Armond White

SELLING DEMOCRACY:
FILMS OF THE MARSHALL PLAN 1948-1953

THURS. & FRI., OCT. 14 & 15

ON MAY 10, 1948, the first delivery of U.S. aid as devised in the Marshall Plan arrived in Europe—all the way from Galveston, TX, to France. This year, the New York Film Festival's most unique sidebar is five programs of vintage government films that packaged post-war goodwill yet were never before exhibited to the American public: Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan 1948-1953.

Timed to catch the wave of cynicism that has flourished stateside since the 2003 Iraq invasion, these documentaries, cartoons, short fiction and newsreels (part of more than 250 films made under the Marshall Plan initiative) present a surprisingly complex picture of modern American imperialism. Not just textbook examples of what propaganda looks like (for that go to Seabiscuit, Lost in Translation and 8 Mile), these movies demonstrate how a government articulates itself. Tales like Story of Koula, in which farm animals and equipment are delivered to Greece, mix humanism with didactic politics—a hearty spin on neorealism. Only a churl would deny that this smiling face of American capitalism is also capitalism at its most candid.

Me and Mr. Marshall, about Germany's coal-mining industry, shows how European recovery was helped by U.S. involvement. This arranged-history was also the fantastic engineering of Western Europe's recovery; these films prove, as much as Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, the extent to which history comprise theater and will. Selling Democracy becomes a wake-up call to today's guilt-faddists who'd like to pretend that Europe could have come back as quickly on its own. The fact that our government manifested our collective will in policies like the Marshall Plan is easily misunderstood by people caught up in the current pique of political dissent. Viewed in the correct spirit there is no shame in the films.

The sidebar's title Selling Democracy seems intended to reflect on Iraq. Unfair. It could as well be a synonym for Hollywood. But in these films the goal is not personal wealth or glory; the aim is global health through the economic recovery and rearmament of the Allied Nations (even though some of them now resent us). By the time the Marshall Plan took effect in 1953, Europe's quality of life was vastly improved.

Anyone who is dismayed by these optimistic films has never contemplated how the U.S. really works—or what political benevolence really entails. In Whitsun Holiday, the dialectic about freewill and free choice (exemplified in the contrast of how open and closed nations celebrate their beliefs) will seem Godardian good—but only to the fair-minded. These movies are lively civics lessons that jaded Americans need now more than ever.

Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln
   Center, 165 W. 65th St. (betw. B'way       & Amsterdam Ave.), 212-875-5050;       call for times, $15.