Manufacturing Consent: How 9/11 Changed Hollywood

How did 9/11 change Hollywood and when does entertainment become propaganda?

Marking 25 years since 9/11 and coinciding with LAB111’s Manufacturing Consent programme, Elliot Bloom and film critic Hugo Emmerzael trace cinema’s long relationship with propaganda and political power. From revolutionary montage and The Battle of Algiers to Black Hawk Down, Zero Dark Thirty and Iron Man, they look at how wars are sold, enemies invented and ideology turned into entertainment.

At the centre of the conversation is the profound shift in American cinema after 9/11, when the War on Terror became embedded in Hollywood storytelling and spectacle. Elliot and Hugo unpack why propaganda rarely announces itself as propaganda, and how the films we watch can shape whose stories we believe, whose violence we accept and who gets cast as the enemy.

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A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.