Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 27

After World War II ended, the US government found itself not simply communicating with other nations, but occupying several, with peacetime operations in, among others, Germany, Japan, Korea, Italy, and Austria. At this point, government films began emphasizing the United States’ distinctiveness, rather than its similarities with other nations, perhaps in recognition of the country’s new prominence on the global stage. Two years earlier, in 1943, the War Department had established a Civil Affairs Division (CAD), which was tasked with coordinating all nonmilitary operations in occupied nations, including cultural production and dissemination. Pare Lorentz, well known for his government film production in the 1930s, was selected to head this effort in 1945. Among the responsibilities of the CAD’s “reorientation branch” was the distribution of US‐approved motion pictures to theaters in occupied nations. While the exhibition of American movies in occupied Germany, Japan, and Austria has been the subject of many monographs and articles, there has been considerably less written about the production of the films screened in these countries.¹⁴ As Hiroshi Kitamura explains in his introduction to Screening Enlightenment, which focuses on Japan, this emphasis on the circulation of American cinema within occupied countries is part an effort to counter the “sender’s perspective” that marks much of the scholarship on Americanization and cultural imperialism in the post war period.¹⁵ By assuming that US interests were well‐defined and consistent regardless of whether a film was made by the government or a Hollywood producer, such studies neglect the extent to which production decisions, not just those related to distribution and exhibition, had considerable impact on the efficacy of propaganda. Government‐produced documentaries, in particular, have been neglected in these studies, perhaps because heavy‐handed attempts to control which Hollywood films were permitted to circulate in occupied countries was seen as a more pressing matter, particularly when such films were intended to counter the occupied nation’s own cinema.¹⁶

Leaving aside questions of cultural imperialism for the moment, it seems worth emphasizing the pragmatic questions involved in selecting and distributing films for millions of people. At first, the CAD relied on its existing catalog of pictures produced by the OWI and other agencies, along with those Hollywood films that met their standards and, more importantly, were made available to them by the motion picture industry.¹⁷ The task of assessing Hollywood films for ideological content proved difficult for the Army. As Susan Smulyan has noted, the Civil Information and Education (CIE) section of the CAD’s efforts in Japan “found the content of documentaries and newsreels easier to control and understand than the slippery ideology presented by commercial films.”¹⁸ For this reason, it is no surprise that the government invested considerable time in selecting, distributing, and even producing nonfiction films.

The CAD’s first proposed documentaries sought to cover a range of topics, from rural cooperatives to juvenile delinquency, the American university to the Columbia River Valley, but it is unclear how many of these were actually produced.¹⁹ Within a year, however, their focus narrowed. For fiscal year 1947, the CAD committed $1.7 million for the production of original documentaries that would “show how essential aspects of democracy work in the United States.”²⁰ According to an article in Motion Picture Herald, the Army had produced just three documentaries in the previous year, and was now committed to making 52 documentaries, with half shot by the Army in Germany and Japan, and the other half “made on contract by independent producers on the coast.”²¹ The decision to rely on outside producers was likely guided by an awareness that the industry itself was no longer interested in deploying its considerable talents to help government film production, and the Army’s existing motion picture unit in the Signal Corps was more accustomed to training films and newsreels than the kind of films Civil Affairs wished to make. Several people who were affiliated with the CAD felt frustrated by the organization’s slow progress, including Lorentz, who left the organization in May 1947.²²

A few months later, in late November 1947, Major General Robert McClure, who headed the CAD’s New York Field Office, sent a long memo to the CAD’s Washington‐based chief, General Daniel Noce, on the division’s documentary production plans. Having decided that they had had their fill of motion pictures on music and art, World War II, and international relations, the division targeted five categories of production. The first four all dealt explicitly with America – “Our Democracy,” “Our People,” “Our Land,” and “Our Industry” – while the fifth focused on “community resources.” In a policy statement that was included in the same memo, McClure argued:

Wherever possible, we should tell our story in terms of real, down‐to‐earth people. Foreign audiences know us as an industrial colossus, but not as a nation made up of middle‐class working people who are the real strength of country. We should emphasize the routine rather than the spectacular; the small rather than the large; the rural rather than the urban; the faulty rather than the perfect; the struggle rather the ease – so that our audience will see us against our real, not our glamorized, background.²³

By suggesting that the “real” America was its ordinary, middle class, flawed, and struggling people living in rural areas, McClure laid the groundwork for films that would celebrate small towns and their inhabitants. While this statement echoed earlier comments, given in various venues, about the necessity of counteracting, or supplementing, other views of America that circulated worldwide, here McClure established the thematic line that the CAD would follow in the next few years’ productions, which focused on small towns, even when they were nominally depicting other issues, from the first amendment to women’s rights.

According to the memo, the Signal Corps’s procurement office handled contracts for screenplay writers and filmmakers, who would be asked to submit a “six‐ to seven‐page treatment on how they propose to treat a film on the subject.” If the CAD was interested in the proposal, they commissioned a script, and after it was accepted a contract went out to production companies, many of which were private firms that serviced the nontheatrical market. As stated earlier, this model of production was sharply different from that used by the OWI and other agencies, which did the work in house or took a more direct supervisory role over production. In the memo, McClure justified the need for each production, citing both demand from CAD staff in the occupied nations and the absence of similar films made by either private companies or other government agencies. Another limiting factor was technical – because color film could not be duplicated overseas, all films had to be in black and white – and a number of existing films were rejected for this reason.

Because the CAD sought to cover topics that were not addressed by other filmmakers, the list of films they sought represented an unlikely set of concerns. For example, in justifying the need for motion pictures on women and democracy, the memo noted that they needed one or more films that showed the “general attitude of comradeship and respect between American men and women, and the equality accorded women in America.” For its proposed six‐film series on the city, McClure echoed earlier government critiques of Hollywood:

Commercial films project chiefly the lush “play‐boy” groups – or the lower class “problem” groups. The real working middle class – the strength of our country – has no adequate film treatment.

Cities, such as Minneapolis, Winston Salem, Akron, would be used, not the large cities such as New York, San Francisco and others that have been covered in many ways in other films. Also, the life of the family will be tied into the main industry of that particular city.

Even though the CAD occasionally filmed in small cities such as Tulsa, Oklahoma, and suburban communities such as Yonkers, New York, these films tended to emphasize community life and the values associated with small towns rather than metropolitan aspirations.²⁴ It is not surprising, then, that most of the films that made it through the CAD’s production process were set in small towns, even when the subject matter of the picture was not geographically defined.