Why We Fight: Prelude to War

1942

The first film in Frank Capra's series made for the United States War Department in 1942 to explain to newly enlisted soldiers what they were fighting. Capra's decisive move was to build the film largely out of captured enemy footage, including Riefenstahl's, so that the case against the Axis appears to be made by its own cameras. The simplified free-world and slave-world division that structures the film is its argument, not a description of the period.