Sharon Delmendo

∫ 2006 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Designed by Eric M. Brooks Set in Jenson and Seria Sans by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of ...

The Axis and Allied powers waged World War II on both literal and figurative fronts. With the technological advances of moving pictures and the development of film as a form of popular entertainment, the American government and Hollywood formed an unprecedented alliance to mobilize films for the war effort after the Japanese attracts on December 7/8, 1941. In June 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt creates the Office of War Information (OWI). The OWI, in turn, created the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP), an organization that worked directly with Hollywood studios to facilitate the production of popular films to disseminate the government’s war policies to the general population and military personnel. This presentation will examine the OWI guidelines regarding films for and about the Philippines, analyzing how these guidelines reflected U.S. military priorities. This presentation will also analyze what the OWI guidelines reveal about American attitudes toward Philippine sovereignty and...

From the beginning of the colonial period, both Filipino and U.S. officials used exaggerated stereotypes of "wild" Filipinos – particularly the Moros – as stratagems in arguments over Filipino independence. Caricatured images of Moros were propagated, particularly in U.S. popular culture, including by the American film industry. Even before the advent of World War II, Hollywood feature films functioned as propaganda on the Filipino independence issue. But as the war started and the Philippines became the focus of American identities – mainly because the "fall" of the Philippines constituted the largest American military surrender in history, but also because of anxiety over the upcoming grant of official Philippine independence set for July 4, 1946 – Hollywood began a new era of films set in the Philippines. Although Mindanao did not, from the American perspective, constitute a major military theater, Hollywood again harnessed caricatured Moros to serve the U.S. ...