The films, to include Colonial films, Nazi, Soviet, Hungarian and American military, educational, documentary and fiction films, and newsreels, will be shown each week for a month.
The series began with a screening of five short films, made between 1910 and 1921, showing the "exotic cultures" of Sumatra, Java, Borneo and Celebes through the eyes of Dutch colonialists. The films were introduced by the cultural anthropologist Miklós Vörös.
Zsuzsa Zádori, the curator of the Open Society Archives audiovisual section, says the aim of the series of films, which were selected by film researcher Oksana Sarkisova and the historian István Rév, is to get audiences to ask the question: Where does propaganda start?
Among the highlights of the series will be Dziga Vertov's One-sixth of the World, to be shown on April 23 with an introduction by Ms Sarkisova. The film, made in 1926, shows the Soviet people, its industry and agriculture. On May 2, the former Soviet Union's labour camps will be examined in a film made in 1928 as well as one made sixty years later after the fall of communism. The Nazis Strike (1943), Frank Capra's contribution to the US government's Why We Fight series, will be shown on May 14. And on May 21, Herbert Biberman's 1954 film Salt of the Earth, banned by the US government because of its treatment of a strike by Mexican workers at a US mine, will be shown.
