Went The Day Well

Whilst there are many ways of viewing film, perhaps the best place to start is the most obvious- the actual content one watches. At a basic level, all films communicate a message, idea or ideology in the content it produces. This act of mimesis can be fairly valuable in finding out about the time in which the film was produced, as it will in some way be reflecting or recreating reality, and thus its politics and reaction to certain events. Much can be extracted from the 1942 film Went the Day Well, a British war film in which an English village is taken over by Nazi paratroopers. This can be analysed as a reflection of the fears of the general public- the fear of Fifth Columnists working from the inside to expedite German invasion being the …show more content…
Instead, one must also think of the world outside the screen that contributed to the film. Jean-Louis Baudry’s analogy of spectators and the prisoners in Plato’s cave watching the shadows on the wall, which conjures images of complete immersion into the projected, illusory world, is useful when evaluating fictional content. The projected ‘representations experienced as perceptions’ must always be seen as representations of a single viewpoint at a specific time, and contextualised with historical knowledge, no different from the way a historian might utilise fictional literature to extend a historical study. One film which benefits from this type of historical analysis is Mission to Moscow, chronicling the experiences of the second American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies. This pro-Soviet dramatisation displays a clear message about the unity between the two countries. This is most overtly shown in the scene where the ambassador’s wife meets the wife of Premier Molotov in a department store. The similarities between the nations are extolled repeatedly; both literally, with Mrs Johnson exclaiming that one display ‘might be in a Fifth avenue window in New York’, and between the people themselves, documenting the similarities of Madame Molotov’s duties as commissar of the cosmetic industry and Mrs Johnson’s responsibility ‘running my father's business’. The line ‘I think we have much in common Mrs Davis’ represents the crux of the message running throughout the film. Thus, Mission to Moscow could be used as a document for looking at the way the Russians were portrayed in American wartime culture. However, one can’t just rely on subject matter of a film, the ‘perceptions’ that we experience, if one wants to use fiction films in a more valuable effort to studying history. When contextualised with

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