ABSTRACT
The propagandistic effectivity of audiovisual images has been proven time and again by numerous historical events from the media politics of the First World War to the Iraq War. This chapter outlines a few theses on the definition of the Hollywood war film and discusses the key concept of a "sense of community" along with its theoretical background. The chapter compares Frank Capra's Why We Fight series with a film by Leni Riefenstahl, Day of Freedom—Our Armed Forces from 1935. If the hypothesis that the question of the sense of community is realized at the aesthetic level as an affective attitude to the world is true, then Capra and Riefenstahl's directorial concepts would have to be radically different. In fact, Capra's cinematographic analyses seem precisely to capture the idea of community that the pathos of Riefenstahl's films is based on.
