The United States
After Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration as President in early 1933, the American government sought to alleviate the problems relating to the Depression. As a result, some filmmakers who had started in the early 1930s as members of the leftist Film and Photo Leagues moved into government-sponsored documentary filmmaking.
In the mid-1930s, the Resettlement Administration wanted to disseminate information on the dust bowl, the southern plains states whose drought conditions contributed to the Depression. Pare Lorentz, a young intellectual interested in politics, had never made a film, but he was given a $6,000 budget to make The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). Convinced of the socially beneficial uses of cinema, he wanted to show The Plow as a short in commercial-film programs. He hired Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, and Leo Hurwitz, all members of the New York Film and Photo League, as cinematographers. The group found themselves up against the Hollywood establishment, which regarded their work as government-supported competition. Just finding a firm willing to sell them raw film stock was difficult. No distributor would release The Plow That Broke the Plains. A major selling point was achieved when prominent composer Virgil Thomson agreed to write a score for the film, drawing on folk songs.
Despite running over budget, the film proved a success. The manager of New York’s Rialto Theater scheduled it and publicized it widely, resulting in bookings at thousands of theaters nationwide. This triumph and
White House approval led to a higher budget for Lorentz’s next film, The River (1937), photographed by Willard Van Dyke and again provided with a rousing score by Thomson. The filmmakers demonstrated how logging had led to massive erosion in the Mississippi valley (14.15). A flood forced them to extend the shooting schedule but the dramatic footage supported arguments for the benefits of the government’s Tennessee Valley Authority dam program. After Lorentz’s previous triumph, Paramount distributed The River, and it also proved widely popular.
Roosevelt admired The River and had the U. S. Film Service formed to make films for various government agencies. Lorentz, as head of this service, began to assemble a group of filmmakers to work on several projects. Joris Ivens, for example, was brought in to make Power and the Land for the Rural Electrification Agency. Lorentz, however, proved to have little administrative ability, and the service was dissolved in 1940. Its projects were turned over to individual government bodies, so Power and the Land (1941) was finally completed by the Rural Electrification Agency. Soon, with the beginning of the war, the military would make some documentaries, while others were commissioned from Hollywood firms.
Some of the filmmakers who worked in the Film and Photo Leagues and for the U. S. government were able to find institutional sponsorship to make significant documentaries. For example, the American Institute of Planners commissioned The City for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. This film was directed by Ralph
14.16 The City emphasizes urban congestion in a sequence of outbound weekenders inching along a road, ironically accompanied by jaunty Aaron Copland music.
14.17 Drifters deemphasized the scientific and economic side of British fisheries, stressing the dynamism and dignity of the workers’ labor.
Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, from an outline by Pare Lorentz. Again music played a key role, with Aaron Copland composing the score.
The City resembled government documentaries, particularly The River, in its presentation of a problem (overcrowded cities) followed by a solution (rebuilding through city planning). Humorous vignettes caught by concealed cameras, combined with fast pace, yielded entertainment value as well as informational content. In one celebrated scene, an automated cafe serves food to lunch-hour customers as if they were on an assembly line. Other scenes emphasize traffic and congestion (14.16). Sponsorship of documentaries by institutions and corporations would become increasingly important in succeeding decades.
While the American government’s sponsorship of documentaries was short-lived, in the United Kingdom a major national filmmaking body was built up during the early 1930s. It produced so many classic documentaries that for years historians focused a great deal of attention on this realist streak of British cinema, often to the exclusion of other, more entertainment-oriented filmmaking.
This burgeoning of the documentary mode resulted largely from the efforts of Scottish-born John Grierson. Educated in the United States during the 1920s, Grierson was impressed by how powerfully American cinema and advertising shaped mass audiences’ responses.
He deplored, however, the way Hollywood cinema missed its opportunity to combine entertainment with education. And Grierson admired the Soviet cinema, not simply for its artistic innovations but also because the government had sponsored films designed to affect viewers intellectually; he helped prepare the version of Potemkin released in the United States. He also strongly approved of Robert Flaherty’s tactic of locating corporate funding outside the commercial-film industry for Nanook of the North (sponsored by a fur company). At the same time, he thought Flaherty was too fascinated by primitive cultures and too little concerned with influencing modern society.
Grierson returned to Britain in 1927 and encountered a sympathetic supporter in Sir Stephen Tallents, head of the Empire Marketing Board, a government institution charged with promoting British products around the world. Tallents arranged financing to allow Grierson to make a documentary on herring fisheries (supposedly because a key official in the Treasury was an expert on the herring industry). The result was a short feature, Drifters, released in 1929. Grierson’s interest in Soviet Montage cinema was apparent: he cut quickly among parts of the fishing boats, and his images presented ordinary work as heroic (14.17).
World History
