These “unattributed” images were particularly valuable for the USIA, as they could be disseminated within major television news platforms, including domestic networks. This first class translated nearly 500 hours of moving-image footage into narrative documentaries and footage for journalists. Launched as “Operation AFCAM”, the USIA (with Boston University) trained its first class of 100 students at the AMRC in February 1987, sending “courageous” audiovisual teams into all parts of the country shortly thereafter. government’s made-for-TV movie.” Yet at that point, according to Snyder, the war was “Moscow’s Vietnam without reporters.” With the intent to circulate images of Soviet aggression and leverage the footage as evidence of the superpower’s decline, the agency sought to gather “authentic” on-the-ground footage of both the war and the plurality of cultures throughout the region. The USIA’s Film and Television head at the time, Alvin Snyder, believed the conflict could become the “U.S.
Information Agency initiated a program to train local mujahideen in documentary techniques with portable video cameras. Six years into the Soviet-Afghan War, the U.S.
This presentation will explore the history, moving image output, and legacy of the Afghan Media Resource Center (AMRC), seeking to parse the complex political, technological, and aesthetic ecosystem surrounding the Center’s creation between 1985-1988 to help delineate the unique documentary idioms within AMRC’s extensive footage. One key methodology will be the production of granular analyses of hundreds of USIA films that engage perspectives from multiple areas of the world.
The ongoing growth of access to this previously fugitive archive represents a context of unprecedented opportunity for the study of primary texts of historical visual culture and moving image diplomacy. Indeed, the majority of creative and administrative labor behind the making, distribution, curation, and exhibition of USIA films and television programming happened outside of the United States. A substantial number were made and distributed regionally by non-American persons in collaboration with American agency officials. Roughly 20,000 motion picture titles were created or distributed by the USIA, in more than 50 languages spread over 150 countries for an annual audience that numbered as high as 600 million.
USIA films represent a diverse and idiomatic series of topics and aesthetic approaches. The USIA was the primary public diplomacy and propaganda office of the United States during the Cold War. It will describe the rationale and strategies for the team to collectively study the motion picture activities of the USIA, including theĪgency’s considerable investment in developing media infrastructures of film production training, audio-visual centers for media consumption and distribution, and innovative exhibition practices around the world. This presentation will detail the “Legacies of USIA Moving Images Through International Lenses” project which will bring together a team of international scholars who are committed to developing studies of the USIA in relation to the tools of The Media Ecology Project.