Comparative Analysis: Are Political Films Necessarily Propagandistic?

Dara Oliver Andia

The relationship between cinema and politics is inseparable, yet political films vary in how directly they persuade or invite reflection. This essay argues that political cinema can transcend propaganda through stylistic complexity, moral ambiguity, and open-ended narrative form. Focusing on Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936, France) and Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950, Mexico), it explores how each film uses mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing to articulate political concerns without didactic closure. Drawing on readings by Martin O’Shaughnessy (2011), David Pettersen (2012), and Julie Jones (2005), this essay demonstrates that both Renoir and Buñuel employ form, rather than rhetoric, to engage with ideology. Through an analysis of key sequences and visual motifs, it contends that these films are political precisely because they reject the simplifications characteristic of propaganda.

Jean Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange was produced amid the optimism of the French Popular Front, a coalition of socialist and communist movements that sought social reform and solidarity through cultural expression. Renoir collaborated with poet Jacques Prévert and members of the left-wing Groupe Octobre to create a film that merges comedy, melodrama, and political allegory (Durgnat 1974). Yet, as O’Shaughnessy (2011, p. 27) notes, Renoir’s radicalism lies not in explicit slogans but in his “mise-en-scène of history”, his capacity to visualise transformation through spatial and temporal openness.

One of the most significant sequences occurs when Lange removes the advertising panel that Batala, the corrupt capitalist, has placed over the window of the bedridden worker Charles. The long take begins with a medium shot of Lange prising off the board and then pans across the courtyard, uniting the workers who watch from the windows. Without a single cut, the camera tracks upward, later craning down again to capture the collective labour as the sunlight floods the interior (O’Shaughnessy 2011, pp. 28–29). The removal of the panel becomes a symbolic act of liberation, connecting interior and exterior, individual and collective, darkness and light. In this scene, Renoir visualises the very essence of the Popular Front, the emergence of solidarity through shared space.

Lange and the workers remove Batala’s advertising panel, sunlight entering the courtyard.

Renoir’s use of deep focus and fluid camera movement embodies what Pettersen (2012, p. 108) calls the “participatory” function of popular culture in the 1930s. Instead of the rigid montage of agit-prop cinema, Renoir employs mobile framing to construct a sense of social permeability; the courtyard becomes a microcosm of a re-organised society. The camera’s motion enacts the political process itself, the slow dismantling of hierarchy. Even comic gestures, such as the playful exchange of bow-ties between the bourgeois Meunier and the worker Louis, contribute to this ideological fluidity. As O’Shaughnessy argues, the “theatricalisation” of Renoir’s style allows reality to be seen as mutable, no longer confined by the conventions of class or order.

Camera pan across the courtyard showing interconnected workers at windows.

The film’s moral climax, the murder of Batala, offers another layer of formal and political ambiguity. Pettersen (2012) argues that Renoir stages the murder between two genre traditions: the fait divers (crime melodrama) and the American Western. This hybridisation frames Lange’s act simultaneously as a crime and a revolutionary gesture. The famous 270-degree pan that accompanies the killing, often mistaken for a full circle, is crucial here. Its incompleteness, as O’Shaughnessy (2011, p. 27) observes, symbolises the film’s refusal of total ideological closure: history remains “open,” defined by struggle rather than resolution.

The 270° pan around the courtyard during Batala’s murder.

Rather than glorifying violence, Renoir invites spectators to interpret it. The framing and depth staging emphasise hesitation and collective witnessing, positioning the audience as part of the moral jury. This is echoed in the film’s structure: the story is told retrospectively by Valentine to a group of bar patrons who decide whether Lange and she deserve escape. The scene mirrors the audience’s own interpretive role, what Pettersen (2012, p. 109) calls the “popular jury” effect. By embedding judgement within the diegesis, Renoir transforms spectatorship into a political act of deliberation.

Through such techniques, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange engages the question of whether political films are propagandistic by showing that persuasion can occur through form rather than exhortation. The flowing mise-en-scène, ensemble acting, and playful genre blending encourage ambiguity and empathy rather than indoctrination. Renoir’s cinema thus becomes political in its openness, a collective space where ideology is negotiated rather than imposed.

Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950) similarly resists propagandistic clarity, though its tone is far darker. Set in the slums of Mexico City, the film exposes systemic poverty and moral decay, blending social realism with surrealism. Julie Jones (2005, p. 19) describes Los Olvidados as Buñuel’s “most clearly documentary film,” yet one that “makes room for parody, social satire, and surrealism.” The film uses the visual language of the documentary to build credibility, only to disrupt it through oneiric imagery and ironic narration.

The opening sequence exemplifies this duality. Against documentary-style shots of urban life, a voice-over declares that the story could happen in “any great city: New York, London, Paris, or Mexico.” The sequence combines wide street shots and handheld movement with a detached narration that frames the film as factual observation. Yet the neutrality is deceptive: Buñuel’s camera lingers on neglected children and deformity, transforming realism into confrontation. As Jones (2005, p. 20) notes, the director “anticipated and disarmed” potential outrage by presenting poverty as a universal problem, while his mise-en-scène reveals the hypocrisy of such universality.

Opening street sequence with narrator’s statement about major cities.

Buñuel’s visual style alternates between the impersonal distance of reportage and the intimacy of psychological exposure. When Pedro and Jaibo wander through the dusty outskirts, the wide framing isolates them within desolate landscapes, denying any sentimental connection. This anti-humanist framing distances the spectator from compassion and directs attention toward structural cruelty rather than individual misfortune. In this sense, Los Olvidados subverts the moral function typical of social-realist propaganda: it withholds hope.

The film’s surreal dream sequence marks its decisive break from both realism and propaganda. In the dream, Pedro imagines his mother offering him raw meat while bathed in ethereal light. The sequence employs slow motion, superimposition, and a disorienting soundscape that fuses tenderness and disgust. The camera floats weightlessly, contrasting with the gritty immediacy of the preceding scenes. As Jones (2005, p. 25) argues, Buñuel’s surrealism “grants the viewer freedom from passive consumption,” forcing an active interpretation of the image’s symbolic violence.

Pedro’s dream: his mother offering him meat.

The symbolic inversion, maternal nourishment turned into grotesque temptation, externalises the psychic damage wrought by poverty. Stephen Hart (2004) reads this mixture of the real and the irrational as Buñuel’s method for dismantling nationalist myths. By fusing documentary aesthetics with surreal imagery, Buñuel exposes the moral contradictions of a society that celebrates progress while abandoning its children. The tension between fact and fantasy is central to the film’s anti-propagandistic stance: reality itself becomes unsettling, unassimilable to moral reassurance.

The final sequence, in which Pedro’s body is discarded at a rubbish heap, denies catharsis entirely. The event is shown in stark long shots, devoid of music or sentiment, concluding with a return to documentary plainness. As Jones (2005, p. 27) observes, Buñuel “rejects redemption,” replacing closure with exposure. The film’s narrator reinforces this by stating that “this film offers no solution,” thereby negating any propagandistic impulse.

Final shot: Pedro’s body carried to the dump.

While Los Olvidados was controversial upon release, its political force lies precisely in this refusal of comfort. The film invites recognition rather than persuasion; it uses form to implicate the viewer rather than instruct them. Through its oscillation between documentary and surrealism, Buñuel transforms reality into an arena of moral uncertainty, a political gesture achieved through ambiguity.

Both Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and Los Olvidados challenge the notion that political films must be propagandistic. Renoir’s film embodies the optimism of the Popular Front, yet its humanism and spatial openness resist dogma. Buñuel’s film, made amid postwar disillusionment, exposes the persistence of inequality without offering ideological consolation. In each case, style becomes politics: Renoir’s moving camera enacts collective awakening, while Buñuel’s fractured realism dramatizes systemic despair.

Their differences, one utopian, the other nihilistic, nonetheless converge in their formal strategies. Both directors insist that cinema’s political power lies not in prescribing belief but in provoking thought. Propaganda simplifies; these films complicate. By anchoring ideology within image, rhythm, and mise-en-scène, they show that political cinema, far from being synonymous with propaganda, thrives on ambiguity, contradiction, and the spectator’s freedom to interpret.

References

Durgnat, R. (1974) Jean Renoir. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hart, S. (2004) A Companion to Latin American Film. London: Tamesis.

Jones, J. (2005) ‘Interpreting Reality: Los Olvidados and the Documentary Mode’, Journal of Film and Video, 57(4), pp. 18–31.

O’Shaughnessy, M. (2011) ‘Breaking the Circle: Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and the Contemporary Illegibility of the Radical Text’, South Central Review, 28(3), pp. 26–44.

Pettersen, D. (2012) ‘The Politics of Popular Genres in Jean Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange,’ Studies in French Cinema, 12(2), pp. 107–122.

Filmography

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange / The Crime of Mr. Lange. 1936. Dir. Jean Renoir. France: Films Régent.

Los Olvidados / The Forgotten Ones. 1950. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Mexico: Ultramar Films.