A fierce ideological fight between two rival camps on the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain lasted for more than forty years. It was not a real war with conventional weapons. It was the Cold War and the weapons weren’t less dangerous. They were just less visible. Propaganda film production used to hire outstanding artists to enhance films with the right portion of professionality and convincingness and to make the ideological overtones almost unnoticeable. Four pairs of American and Czechoslovak films will serve us for the demonstration of the methods and the ways how popular culture, and film especially, influenced public opinion, manipulated people’s attitudes and created false knowledge of the outside world.
