The Psychology of Persuasion

At the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, politics was staged as spectacle. Architecture, banners, marching bodies, music, repetition and carefully constructed entrances turned ideology into an emotional environment. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will preserved that environment through cinema, arranging scale, rhythm and image into an impression of order so complete that politics could be experienced as destiny. The film remains disturbing because its technique is recognisable. Cinema still relies on many of the same mechanisms: anticipation, release, identification, repetition, music, framing and the emotional authority of the crowd.

Propaganda understands something fundamental about human beings. Certainty can be comforting. Belonging can feel safer than doubt. A clearly identified enemy can simplify anxieties that are otherwise difficult to explain. Fromm spent much of his work examining this temptation to escape the burden of freedom by surrendering judgement to authority, ideology or the group. Film can participate in that surrender because it is extraordinarily good at arranging experience. A close-up invites intimacy. A score can dignify a gesture. Editing can make violence exhilarating, grief noble, revenge satisfying or obedience heroic. By the time thought arrives, feeling may already have chosen a direction.

Cinema does not merely show emotion. It can organise the conditions in which emotion appears.

That ability extends far beyond political propaganda. Advertising uses it. Franchises use it. Campaign films use it. News packages use it. Social media systems now distribute emotional material through recommendation mechanisms capable of observing what retains attention and supplying more of it. The scale has changed because persuasion can increasingly adapt itself to the individual viewer. A rally once needed thousands of people in the same place. A feed requires only one person and enough battery.

None of this makes emotional storytelling suspicious by default. A filmmaker has to shape experience; otherwise there is very little filmmaking left. The more useful question concerns how much space remains inside that experience for the audience. Some films close every emotional door except one. The score tells us when to grieve, the edit identifies whom to hate, the dialogue explains what the scene means and the ending reassures us that our response was correct. Others create tension between feeling and interpretation. They allow a character to remain contradictory, a silence to outlast comfort, or an ending to refuse the emotional receipt.

That space matters because doubt is a human faculty worth protecting. Baldwin understood the artist as someone who unsettles the assumptions through which society keeps itself comfortable. The artist makes familiar things strange enough to be examined again. Cinema can do this with extraordinary force because its images arrive through the body as much as through argument. It can disturb an inherited certainty without immediately replacing it with another.

A filmmaker therefore works with one of the oldest human vulnerabilities: our willingness to trust what we feel. Technique can intensify that vulnerability or make us more conscious of it. The distinction often appears in tiny decisions, in how long a shot lasts, whose reaction we see, whether the music resolves, whether contradiction survives the edit.

Cinema will always influence us. Its more interesting possibility is allowing us to notice ourselves being influenced.

And then decide what to do with the feeling.

Love.