DOCUMENTARY FILM

The American people spent more time at the movies during the Depression years than in any other decade, and they wanted their money's worth. Before each feature they expected to see a cartoon, a short comedy, and a newsreel.

Newsreels were the documentaries of the 1930s, and the newsreel archives are an important source of visual evidence of the period. All five major studios produced their own twice-weekly editions. Five items were generally packaged together, and few items ran for more than two minutes. The studios, ever conscious of their vulnerability to government censorship and the disapproval of powerful religious and special interest groups, favored lighthearted fare. Beauty pageants, animal acts, and novelties were staples. Many items were faked by stringers, the freelance cameramen who got paid only when their coverage appeared on the screen. So it is astounding to see the degree to which the true life of the times actually got recorded, in spite of all the obstacles.

In many newsreels, it was the voiceover narration that provided both the comedy and the political bias. Stripped of this sound, as most footage is in today's archives, modern filmmakers use this haphazard documentation to say something more than the original filmmakers intended. It is important to keep in mind that a great deal of the most revealing material recorded at the time was never projected in theaters. Considered too gloomy and depressing to please audiences who had come to escape their own dark times, the unused footage went directly into the vaults, considered hardly worth the storage costs involved.

By 1967, when the last of the newsreel makers went out of business, the owners of these archives gave them to universities and the U.S. government in exchange for generous tax write-offs. Given the highly biased origins of the newsreels, today's filmmakers and their audiences need to view their legacy with caution, if not outright skepticism. Yet when guided by historians and witnesses with hindsight, the material the 1930s cameramen left us can help bring the period to life in a way that printed evidence alone seldom can. This is best seen, perhaps, in the seven-part series The Great Depression, made for the Public Broadcasting Service by Blackside in 1993.

The March of Time, a newsreel-like affiliate of Time magazine that appeared in 1935, was produced by filmmakers with more serious intent. Chapters were issued monthly, ran as long as twenty minutes, and were devoted to a single topic. In 1937 the series showed the bombing of Manchuria by the Japanese. The next year a chapter called "Inside Nazi Germany" showed American audiences vivid pictures of the racial policies of a rapidly rearming future enemy. In 1939, The March of Time included film of sharecroppers in Mississippi in a pathetically unequal struggle with plantation owners. The series often resorted to dramatized recreations when reality footage could not be obtained, a practice much criticized at the time by professional observers and now considered unethical. Though the series received an Academy Award in 1937, its producers lacked the bargaining power of the studio-sponsored newsreels, and many theater managers found their audiences did not clamor for The March of Time's tendency to present unpleasant news. The series ceased production in 1951, a decade and a half before television brought all newsreels to an end.

The early days of the Depression were also recorded by a small group of politically radical members of the New York Film and Photo League, an organization that for a short time had corresponding chapters in half a dozen other cities. Thanks to the Film and Photo League, the major protest movements of the 1930 to 1934 period can still be brought to life, though the bulk of their footage was not saved. The Museum of Modern Art in New York circulates brief compilations, silent with titles (as they were originally shown), that are powerful reminders of the days when tens of thousands of people were thronging the streets carrying banners for such "socialist" programs as unemployment insurance and subsidized public housing.

The most notable documentary filmmaker of the period was Pare Lorentz, a film critic turned producer, who persuaded the Roosevelt administration to present the need for its reform programs in films of such power and quality that they could, and did, win widespread theatrical distribution in spite of strong film industry opposition. Lorentz's first film, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), dramatized the disasters caused by unwise land use, a condition made all too evident by massive dust storms that swept across middle America that spring. His next film, The River (1937), was an equally powerful lesson about flood control, again made vividly current by news of recurring disastrous floods along the Mississippi. Building on his critical success, Lorentz and his New Deal supporters established the U.S. Film Service, which they hoped would nurture the production of still more "films of merit." However, both of Lorentz's films, although popular with critics and the public, were greeted by howls of protest from local and state government officials, who resented their cities and states being depicted as problem areas. Only three other films were finished and released by the U.S. Film Service, with increasingly less success.

Many contemporary viewers find both The Plow and The River flawed by the features that won them widespread critical and public acceptance at the time of their release: namely, narrations composed in Whitmanesque poetics and delivered with over-whelming stridency. But it would be a mistake to ignore the message underlying the persuasive visuals; Lorentz, in these two films of less than one half hour each, managed to state the essential philosophy of the New Deal, both its willingness to accept responsibility for correcting the sins of the past and its certainty that its methods of alleviation, its "social engineering," would triumph over all adversity. Many contemporary environmentalists and social scientists, however, question the "solutions" presented in Lorentz's films.

Toward the end of the 1930s, a small but growing group of filmmakers was beginning to produce documentaries that were more in line with contemporary documentary film. Film was an expensive medium, so the filmmakers were dependent on foundations or corporations for sponsorship, with the inevitable artistic and political compromises this type of partnership implies. Yet some veterans of the Film and Photo League and some who had gained experience under Lorentz managed to make a few films that are clear-eyed about the hard truths the nation faced as it reluctantly prepared for war.

Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke's The City (1939) remains a sharp, poignant, and even witty comment on urban society and its discontents, though its utopian solutions now seem unconvincing. Van Dyke's Valley Town (1940) probes the dilemmas of automation, unemployment resulting from new technology, and social upheavals that are as baffling now as then. These films put us inside the heads and hearts of those who lived in the 1930s in a way rarely achieved in any other medium.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, William. Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942. 1981.

Barnouw, Erik. The Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, 2nd rev. edition. 1993.

Blackside, Inc.; WGBH Boston; and BBC, producers. The Great Depression (a seven-part television series). 1993.

Fielding, Raymond. The American Newsreel: 1911–1967. 1972.

Lorentz, Pare, director. The Plow that Broke the Plains. 1936.

Lorentz, Pare, director. The River. 1937.

MacCann, Richard Dyer. The People's Films: A Political History of U. S. Government Motion Pictures. 1973.

Seltzer, Leo, ed. Film and Photo League: Compilations 1930–34. 1982.

Snyder, Robert L. Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film. 1968.

Steiner, Ralph, and Willard Van Dyke, directors. The City. 1939.

Stoney, George C., and Robert Wagner, directors. Images of the Great Depression: A Two Hour Compilation. 1988.

Van Dyke, Willard, director. Valley Town. 1940.