Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 25

In June 1942, the United States government created the Office of War Information (OWI) to collect its propaganda efforts under the administration of a single agency. Although the OWI’s efforts within the US are well known, the organization also created a series titled Projections of America (or, in some instances, The American Scene) that was designed to promote American ideals internationally. Other US government agencies – including the Council on Inter‐Cultural Affairs and, after the end of World War II, the Civilian Affairs Division of the United States Army – produced or commissioned their own motion pictures, also for consumption overseas. Within a few years of the war’s end, propaganda efforts were taken up by the US Information Agency, which remained active even after the United States Congress placed limits on the domestic distribution of its films.¹

In this chapter, I focus on a narrow band of these documentary films that promoted small‐town politics and culture as the essence of American values. In recent years, scholars in a number of disciplines have argued that the American small town was a powerful ideological topos in the mid‐twentieth century, as it allowed the US government to present its cultural and economic imperialism abroad under the guise of local, common‐sense values.² Small‐town films such as Julien Bryan’s five‐film Ohio Town series (1945), indeed, used government resources to promote a “local view” that was then sent around the world as a documentation of American values in practice. Although a number of agencies produced these films, I focus on the Reorientation Branch of the Civil Affairs Division (CAD) of the United States Army, which, starting in 1947, produced documentaries for exhibition in five countries occupied by the US military, Japan, Germany, Korea, and, for a briefer period, Austria and Italy, many of them set and filmed in small towns in the United States. In addition to analyzing these films, I consider how their production and reception was covered in the towns where these films were made. While these films’ domestic distribution was limited, they were publicly screened in the towns where they were made. As a result, these motion pictures also functioned as local films – motion pictures made in order for people to see themselves, and places they recognized, on screen. As such, they served as sites where small‐town, and implicitly American, ideals were performed and critiqued by local and global audiences alike.