When watching a film, or admiring any form of art, it’s important to consider the time period in which it was created. Today we see Hollywood as this machine that pumps out lukewarm billion dollar remakes of old movies, due to the fact the industry seems to be out of ideas. But at one time Hollywood was known for being useful. During World War II, movies were the best way to depict and let the public know what was going on during the war. Some of the films being released were approved by the government, while some was not. I am going to be taking a closer look at the production codes of World War II and its impact on film by analyzing and close reading Ernest Lubitsch’s 1942 film To Be or Not to Be, while using information I have learned in Stuart Hall’s essay “Encoding and Decoding”. In Hall’s essay, he lays out a diagram that analyzes the structural components of communication, primarily focusing on television and movies. Hall promotes the idea that the audience is in fact not a passive consumer of whatever media they are watching. Instead he creates this idea of the decoder/receiver (an individual audience member), in relationship to the encoder/producer (those who created the film that is being analyzed). Hall’s theoretical framework is an important tool when thinking about how the culture of a specific time period influenced the final product of a film. This film, To Be or Not to Be really challenges the way we should think about art and war. Through a framework of a smaller play within the movie, To Be or Not to Be expertly criticizes actual events happening during WWII when this movie was released, and alludes to how important it is to not halt the production of art just because of hypothetical circumstances, especially in wartime. 

Since the scenes of warfare that appeared in a brief 1898 silent movie filmed during the Spanish American War, Hollywood has been a tool used to inform people about events happening overseas during foreign wars. In September of 1941, the Senate launched an investigation looking into whether the movie industry had been campaigning for the U.S. to enter World War II. Hollywood was accused of doing this by inserting pro-British and pro-interventionist messages in its films. Gerald Nye (North Dakota isolationist Senator) charged Hollywood with generating "at least twenty pictures in the last year designed to drug the reason of the American people, set aflame their emotions, turn their hatred into a blaze, fill them with fear that Hitler will come over here and capture them” (Nye 1941). Nye convicted many studio executives (most of whom were Jewish) as inflicting “a raging volcano of war fever” (Nye 1941), on the American public. Although Hollywood did release a few anti-Nazi films, in retrospect it’s astonishing how long it took them to open their eyes to the very real fascist threats. Hollywood feared offending foreign audiences due to the fact that they were extremely dependent on the European markets for revenue. The Nazis’ actually requested that all ‘non-Aryan” employees in the German offices in Hollywood to be fired.

 Although the movie industry produced anti-fascist movies such as The Great Dictator, and the pro-British film A Yank in the R.A.F, prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor not a single film advocating direct American intervention in the war was released. However, after Pearl Harbor, Hollywood quickly embraced the war cause. For example, Warner Brothers ordered a hasty rewrite of Across the Pacific that involved a Japanese plot to blow up Pearl Harbor. Hollywood's greatest contribution to the war effort was morale. Many of the movies created during World War II were particularly patriotic and affirmed a sense of national purpose. “They portrayed World War II as a peoples' war, typically featuring a group of men from diverse ethnic backgrounds who are thrown together, tested on the battlefield, and molded into a dedicated fighting unit” (Mintz). From the moment America entered the war, Hollywood feared that the industry would be subject to heavy-handed government censorship. Less than two weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt declared that the movie industry could make "a very useful contribution" to the war effort. 

The government wanted to utilize Hollywood in their war efforts, believing that movies could help contribute to national morale and patriotism. However, in 1942, fearing outright censorship the federal government established low agencies within the already existing Office of War Information (OWI). These were the Bureau of Motion Pictures (which created educational films and reviewed scripts before they were sent to the studios) and the Bureau of Censorship (which oversaw all film exports). When these departments were first founded, government officials were unhappy with the films Hollywood was producing. The OWI was concerned with the movie industry’s representation of the war was not accurate and more “escapist.” A study conducted in 1942 reaffirmed the OWI’s concerns. It found that almost two-thirds of the war movies coming out of Hollywood were either spy movies, comedies, or musicals about life in a camp. These escapist type films were conveying a highly-distorted image of the war. Like many forms of art, To Be or Not to Be was not as widely appreciated in its time as it is today. The film opened just months after the United States entered World War II, and was received by many as tasteless. It was repudiated and detested by critics and audiences who criticized the film for being in poor taste to juxtapose comedy against the background of the Nazi’s invasion and occupy of Poland. This uncommon style of Black Comedy was not well 

received in this time period, especially since the subject of War hit too close to home for many people. However, time has been kind to one of Lubitsch’s greatest films. Looking back it’s now easier to fully appreciate how daring it was for Lubitsch to taking on such edgy and controversial material at this time Hollywood. He took an extremely sensitive topic and criticized it using comedy by making one of the powerful regimes in the world fall victim to a theatre troupe.  Lubitsch was more known in Hollywood for writing and directing adaptations of already established novels or plays, To Be or not to Be was one of his originals. This film was his way of dealing with the Nazi threat in a way that was satirical as well as topical. Lubitsch was best known for light fare, his insightful sex farces lacking in prudery still remain startlingly modern and funny to this day. Although the film takes place right when the Nazis invaded Poland, it doesn’t revolve around this  as much as it revolves around a  group of actors trying to deal with Nazis, and against all odds they are successful. University of Southern California professor Leonard Maltin said it best when he said “The film isn’t so much about Nazis overtaking Poland as a troupe of Polish actors invading the world of Nazidom; therein lies its brilliance as a topical satire” (Maltin 15). Lubitsch was able to take a very real and present world threat, and depicted them in a way that made them look foolish. The fact that a theatre troupe was able to intercept Nazi secrets and successful halt their plans, is so impractical it’s hilarious. The way Lubitsch made the Nazis out to look like incapable idiots must have put the American public at ease. 

In 1973, Stewart Hall published an essay in which he explains a revolutionary process on analyzing the structural composition of communication. Until the publication of Hall’s Encoding/Decoding, mass-communications research has theorized the process of communication in the terms of a continuous loop. The traditional model (sender/message/receiver), has been criticized for its linear approach to how information is understood. Hall suggests that there is more to the traditional model of mass communication. Hall said it best when he said “To put it paradoxically, the event must become a story before it can become a communicative event” (Hall 232).  He rejects the traditional model of the passive consumer, and points out that audiences create their own interpretation and find their own meaning based on their cultural background. The willingness to think freely and without boundaries is the cornerstone of determining meaning. In Hall’s model, each of us as individuals personally decides what something means; once we start to think for ourselves, we can tap into our past experiences and knowledge and determine the significance of the cultural product in question. Hall’s approach to mass-communication restores hope that audiences are not just passive consumers of the media and use intellect and reason to come to their own conclusions.

The development of the encoding/decoding model signifies an important stage in the conceptualization of watching and analyzing television. It allows the viewer to be an active contributor, instead of a passive consumer. Hall's essay offers a theoretical approach of how media messages (encoded messages) are perceived and interpreted by the audience. The basis of this essay revolves around a viewer watching some type of media (primarily television), and being able to decoded the message based on that viewer’s background, economic standing, and personal experiences. “The degrees of symmetry- that is, the degrees of ‘understanding’ and ‘misunderstanding’ in the communicative exchange- depending on degrees of symmetry/asymmetry (relations of equivalence) established between the positions of the ‘personifications,’ encoder-producer and decoder-receiver” (Hall 234) Since the way a message is decoded depends on the viewer’s cultural background, Hall argues that viewers are in fact not passive but play an active role in decoding messages. When a message is decoded, it is broken down in a way that makes the most sense to the viewer, a way that only the viewer understand. 

The encoding of a message is how the message is produced. It is a system of coded meanings that the sender (or the encoder) needs to understand for the message to be comprehensible to the members of the audience, in order to be it to be decoded. The encoding process accounts for all areas of the message, including the design, casting, writing, directing, when and where its aired, and how its marketed. The content we see on television or in the movies is vetted very carefully. In the process of encoding, the sender uses verbal and non-verbal symbols for which he or she believes the receiver (the decoder) will understand. “Encoding as a signifying practice, negotiating with the ‘social and cultural world’ to produce the programme as a meaningful discourse. The programme thus becomes a ’framework of ... preferred structures of meaning which have been encoded” (Hall 1976: 67).   The production of the encoding process is the most important part, it’s also where Hall’s process begins. The production process is also the framing of the meanings and ideas of each message. The creator of the message is operating on society’s beliefs and values, for the message to be properly decoded. 

Using Hall’s abstract theoretical framework is important when close reading cultural products. To Be or Not to Be expertly criticizes actual events happening during WWII, and alludes to how important it is to not halt the production of art just because of hypothetical circumstances, especially in wartime. In the movie, the characters are trying to put on a play in which Adolf Hitler is a character. The Polish government is scared to put on the play because they are afraid the play might offended Hitler and lead to Poland becoming involved in the war. What the Polish government didn’t understand is that you can’t rationalize with an insane dictator like Hitler. They worked hard trying not to provoke him and he attacked Poland anyway. How you perceive the events I just explained is when Encoding/Decoding comes into play.  Lubitsch set everything in motion to exactly how he wanted, in order to create a satirical situation poking fun at the Nazi’s, while alluding to how negative of an idea it is to halt the production of art during war. He wrote the script, casted the right actors, set the scenes, and produced this movie to accomplish these goals. 

When I look at this movie, I perceive it in a way based on my beliefs and cultural background. Considering myself as an artist I think it’s crucial to keep the production of art during war. Art is such an expressive thing, were all of someone’s feeling come pouring out into medium you can share with others, whether is a song, painting, or play. War can often be the thing that can spark all of these emotions considering war is arguably the most emotional event to ever happen in mankind. That’s exactly what the director of the play in the movie did. He created a play based on his surrounding, and because his surroundings were war the government shut the production down. The kicker in all of this is that Hitler decided to come in and occupy Poland anyway, to me this is Lubitsch criticizing censorship of art during war time. According to Hall, not everyone will perceive this movie in the same way I do. Some people will see this as the Polish doing the right thing trying to protect their country by all means possible, by trying to fly under Hitler’s radars. The problem with that approach is that they were thinking very short term and not big picture. Hindsight is 20/20, however I believe if I was alive back then I still would have been in support of allowing the show to go on.

A very common recurring theme in this movie is standing up for what you believe in, especially when it comes to promoting communication during war.  Each character in the movie at one point or another risks their life for standing up against Hitler. The most obvious one is mocking Hitler in the play they are trying to put on.  Eventually Hitler invades Poland and they all work toward the common goal of stopping him. If you think it was a bad idea to stop the production of the play, then you probably think it was a bad idea for Stanislav to parachute into Poland to warn the others about Siletsky. Stanislav saved many lives and the others couldn’t have been as successful as they were without him. Its’s very ironic how this movie that promotes never stopping communication, revolves around trying to stop communication. The movie successfully proves without a doubt that it never ok to stop communication, especially art during war time. However, the only way these actors can save their way of communication is stop someone else’s. I feel like this theme is still applicable today. Some group or another is always trying to disrupt someone else’s beliefs so they can make theirs more prominent and well known. Communication is defined as “the means of connection between people or places, in particular.” This movie successfully prompts being open to as well as always trying to advance the communication of ideas, a topic that is still relevant to this day.

To Be or Not to Be is a very brave movie that was ahead of its time. When watching a film, it’s important to consider the time period in which it was created. Knowing the time period of a film can be critical to understanding the message the film is trying to convey. To Be or Not to Be criticized the events that were happening during World War II, which made it much more meaningful. An after the fact criticism doesn’t carry the same credibility. The movie also criticized production codes in Hollywood during World War II, by having the characters in the movie put on a play that was shut done due to censorship. The shutting down of the play alludes to America trying to not provoke a war effort as well.  Hall’s theoretical framework can be a very important tool when thinking about how the culture of a specific time period influenced the final product of a film. This film, To Be or Not to Be really challenges the way we should think about art and war. 
