The battle for meaning: A cross-national film reception analysis of The Battle Cry of Peace in Switzerland and the Netherlands during World War I

This article offers a cross-national analysis of the historical reception of the American war film The Battle Cry of Peace (J. Stuart Blackton and Wilfred North/Vitagraph, 1915) in the neutral countries of the Netherlands and Switzerland during World War I. Treating propaganda as a mode de lecture, the authors demonstrate how a fiction film that was originally intended as preparedness propaganda picked up very diverse and often conflicting meanings in cinema cultures outside the United States. In the eyes of its audiences, the film could have been qualified as ‘entertainment’ or ‘propaganda’,... Mehr ...