Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 26

In the later years of World War II, film producers in the Office of War Information and other offices in the United States government shifted focus from making films intended to help win the war to creating motion pictures that would help the United States secure peacetime prosperity. For example, in early 1943, Robert Riskin, head of the Overseas Bureau of the OWI, launched a new documentary film series titled “Projections of America” that was intended to counteract negative images of the United States perpetuated through Hollywood film.³ Meanwhile, with the sponsorship of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter‐American Affairs (CI‐AA), the lecturer and documentary filmmaker Julien Bryan shot a series of five films in Mount Vernon, Ohio. As one newspaper put it at the time, the series, which was filmed in 1944, was produced “to give the people of other nations a true picture of how the greater part of America lives,” and, once again, counter Hollywood’s presentation of the United States.⁴

While some government critiques of Hollywood focused on the industry’s depictions of sexuality and violence, others centered on its perceived anti‐urban bias. In keeping with this, many government‐produced films intentionally highlighted places that were thought to be neglected by Hollywood.⁵ In turn, those places that were filmed by the government came to think of themselves as the essence of American identity. Soon after Bryan’s Ohio films were exhibited in the town where they were made, for instance, another paper in the state called them “a true picture of how that average American family lives in the nation’s thousands of small and medium‐sized towns and villages.”⁶

Although historians have speculated on these films’ ideological functions, government agencies did not hide their intentions from domestic audiences, particularly from the towns that were asked to participate in the films’ production. For example, when a representative from Riskin’s Overseas Bureau of the OWI arrived in Cummington, a small village in western Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1944, the region’s newspaper announced that the film was intended to “inspire confidence in America and to promote a better understanding of the American people and their way of life.”⁷ More specifically, it was to do so by depicting the “small group of refugees who settled in Cummington and learned about the people, the traditions and the workings of democracy that make New England so distinctive a region of the United States.” Just as local residents of Mount Vernon, Ohio, were expected to appear, unpaid, in Bryan’s films, the newspaper suggested that The Cummington Story (directed by Helen Grayson) required “whole‐hearted co‐operation on the part of the people who made up the community,” who were expected to be “on hand” the following Sunday, September 17, for the initial shoot. The article also noted that those who attended services at the Community Church for the benefit of the picture would be served free meals, and another shoot would take place at the town hall on October 8. By agreeing to materially participate in the production of the film, the people of Cummington implicitly supported the film’s ideological objectives as well. Although The Cummington Story was completed in 1945, the film was not exhibited in the town until January 1946, when more than 700 people crowded into the town hall to see the picture.⁸ While an article on the screening emphasized the fact that the town of Cummington was able to “see itself” in the movies, it also praised the picture’s high production values, as did an article in Time.⁹

Like other films produced by the OWI, most notably Josef von Sternberg’s The Town, filmed in Madison, Indiana, in September 1943, The Cummington Story valorizes the stability and resilience of American small towns.¹⁰ But rather than serving as a paean to rusticity, The Cummington Story narrates the experience of political refugees as they transition to life in the United States, with a focus on two characters, Joseph and Anna. Narrated by a pastor, who identifies himself as the person who brought a family of refugees to Cummington, the film presents the town as an idyllic space, with traditions and landscapes largely unchanged since the town’s founding in the late eighteenth century.¹¹ The film’s score, by Aaron Copland, invites the viewer to lose oneself in reverie, as images of Cummington ’s farms, churches, and historic sites underscore its idyll. Copland’s stature as national hymnist was such that he was the only individual listed in the film’s credits.¹²

Even though the film acknowledges that, in this snow globe of a town (which one can observe, but never change), Joseph and Anna are not welcomed by all, the narrator attempts to reconcile the differences between Joseph and Anna’s old life in Austria and their new one in the United States. For example, as Joseph and Anna play Mozart, the film cuts to a slow pan across the New England landscape, while the narrator notes that “our land is similar to their own, chopped into small one‐man, two‐man farms.” And after Joseph gains acceptance in the close‐knit community, he starts a job with a local book publisher, his previous profession. The end of the film returns to a crowd scene, this time a town meeting, with Joseph announcing that, having learned the value of community from his neighbors in Cummington, he is returning to his home country to help rebuild it. Here, Grayson suggests that American small towns are not permanent homes for immigrants but can provide models for how foreigners might improve their own communities.

In fact, although The Town, The Cummington Story, and many films like it shared a reverence for small‐town life, they were not particularly invested in promoting the towns they depicted as places welcoming to immigrants or people of color looking to resettle in the United States. Rather, they were an attempt by government filmmakers to connect with foreign audiences by presenting societies and landscapes that might be more familiar to people living in rural areas abroad than the cities that were more frequently depicted in Hollywood films. As the narrator asks in von Sternberg’s The Town, “Where is this town? Where you can find an old English tower, an Italian campanile, down the street a Gothic doorway?,” and proceeds to identify a half‐dozen national architectural styles that appear in the community. “Few,” he continues, “may have guessed that this is a town in the United States of America,” a message that argues against the distinctiveness of the United States (if only architecturally). And indeed, small towns were useful for the OWI because they served as a point of connection between rural sites across the United States, as well as between rural sites internationally. Moreover, they allowed for encounters between cultures and populations to be depicted in a space that was familiar to many viewers, regardless of their nationality. If urban imagery in film, at this moment, promoted national exceptionalism with depictions of skyscrapers and other symbols of modernity, rural images in small‐town films instead suggested partnerships between nations through the uniting lens of local values.¹³ When the Office of War Information was disbanded at the end of the war, films such as these, now orphaned, were ripe for adoption by other agencies.