Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Facts of War: Cinematic Intelligence and the Office of Strategic Services
- 2 ‘What is Past is Prologue’: Hollywood's History of the OSS and the Establishment of the CIA
- 3 Quiet Americans: The CIA and Hollywood in the Early Cold War
- 4 The Death of the ‘Big Lie’ and the Emergence of Postmodern Incredulity in the Spy Cinema of the 1960s
- 5 Secrecy, Conspiracy, Cinema and the CIA in the 1970s
- Conclusion
- Select Filmography
- Bibliography
- Film and TV Index
- General Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Facts of War: Cinematic Intelligence and the Office of Strategic Services
- 2 ‘What is Past is Prologue’: Hollywood's History of the OSS and the Establishment of the CIA
- 3 Quiet Americans: The CIA and Hollywood in the Early Cold War
- 4 The Death of the ‘Big Lie’ and the Emergence of Postmodern Incredulity in the Spy Cinema of the 1960s
- 5 Secrecy, Conspiracy, Cinema and the CIA in the 1970s
- Conclusion
- Select Filmography
- Bibliography
- Film and TV Index
- General Index
Summary
If official secrecy had a devastating impact on American history, its impact on Americans’ understanding of that history was a collateral disaster.
Richard Gid Powers, introduction to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience13 Rue Madeleine, a 1947 semi-documentary that commemorates the sacrifice and courage of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), opens with a shot of the US National Archives Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The building's location, at the heart of the nation's capital on the Washington Mall, amidst so many iconic monuments to American democracy, is no accident. Like the Washington Lincoln Memorial, it is a depository of historical experience that binds the nation. In its inner-sanctum, as audiences then and now would know, the United States of America's founding documents, including the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, are housed. After the establishing shot the camera slowly tilts from top to bottom, surveying the archive's columnar neo-classical facade – a common architectural feature of America's monuments that evokes a sense of both history and authority. Finally, it comes to rest on a statue in the forecourt of the archive called Future. On Future's plinth, the inscription reads: ‘What is Past is Prologue’. At this point hear the booming voice of an omniscient narrator – an oratory style borrowed from the newsreels of the time that was also a defining feature of the semi-documentary format:
Yes, here in the National Archives in Washington, DC, past is prologue. For this is the final resting place of the histories and records of tens of thousands of illustrious Americans. World War II has come to a victorious conclusion. And now new names and new records are being added to the list. For the nation and the world are for the first time learning of silent and significant deeds performed in foreign lands by a legion of anonymous men and women, the Army of Secret Intelligence.
The combined effect of the images and the dialogue is clear: America's past, even the very recent past of its secret wartime intelligence activities, is transparent and accessible to the American people. All they had to do is look in the nation's official historical depository, and an authoritative vision of those ‘silent and significant deeds’, now no-longer silent, would be plain for all to see.
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- Information
- In Secrecy's ShadowThe OSS and CIA in Hollywood Cinema 1941–1979, pp. 1 - 21Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016