Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 28

Although the CAD ramped up its production efforts by 1948, I have not been able to locate production records for individual titles. In part, this may be due to the fact that the films were produced by outside companies, and the scripts that are held by the National Archives and Records Administration served as adequate textual records for government purposes, which meant that no other records were kept. Further complicating matters was the tendency for other government agencies to later reclaim the CAD’s films as their own. NARA lists just 28 extant films in their records, along with another dozen production records of motion pictures that may no longer be extant. In what follows, I will focus on three films that were made in, and depict, small towns: A Town Solves a Problem (1950), made in Pittsfield, Vermont; Women and the Community (1950), made in Monroe, New York and Social Change in Democracy (1951), made in Biloxi, Mississippi. Although these films were made for different reasons, all are invested in portraying the small town not as just a pleasant setting for a picture, but as the essence of American democracy.

This message is made explicit in A Town Solves a Problem, which was filmed in Pittsfield, Vermont, in March 1950, and depicted the “town meeting” form of government used in New England as a model of democracy. Like other CAD films, A Town Solves a Problem was made by a private contractor, in this case James and Schwep, headed by director William James and screenwriter Charles Schwep. The New York firm had previously made films for the religious market, including several titles made in Japan, and James had worked previously for the International Film Foundation, which was founded by Julien Bryan, who produced the “Ohio Town” series discussed earlier. As a result, James, at least, was well versed in the kinds of audiences the CAD sought to reach. The film’s subject was chosen because the CAD believed that there were no films that adequately depicted the town meeting. In a letter from Patrick Belcher to Pittsford’s town archivist, he observes that:

there never has been a film that showed what a New England Town Meeting is. That is certainly our oldest form of government, here in the States, and it is one of most significant contributions to democratic action. Yet it had never been presented in a film. … But to just make a film about a Town Meeting, without giving it some dramatic story, would make a pretty dull film. So we turned to the minutes of the 1949 Meeting and discovered that right there, in Mr. Dopp’s own words, was a perfect outline for our story, and one that would have very real meaning to the Japanese audiences.²⁵

According to this letter, the CAD had already ended its role as a film supplier for Germany and Korea, and thus the only audience for the Pittsford motion picture was to be found in Japan. Even so, the film was to have wide release there, with 35 mm prints screening in movie theaters, and 16 mm prints made available to “Unions, Women’s Clubs, school groups, etc.,” as well as local prefectures, who would lend the picture out to “all those little isolated farming communities which never see a Hollywood movie.” A copy of the film was also provided to the State Department, who, Belcher noted, might elect to distribute it worldwide and translate the narration into dozens of languages. However, Belcher feared that the “Pittsford Film may be too strictly an educational, how‐to‐do‐it film, for the State Dept. to use.” Finally, Belcher’s letter lamented that the film would probably not be seen in the United States, as the government did not want to compete with commercial producers of short films. Pittsford residents would have to be content with their film earning the town a global reputation, even while their fellow Americans would not even be aware that a movie was made of their town.

Although A Town Solves a Problem opens much like earlier small‐town films, with shots of the landscape and paeans to the village’s townspeople, the film is distinguished by the fact that it identifies both the town and its inhabitants by name, though in the latter case pseudonyms are used. Very quickly, the narrative focuses on two inhabitants, Mr. and Mrs. Croft – the janitor and teacher, respectively, at a community school. The voice‐of‐god narration moves effortlessly from describing the people and places depicted to an analysis of Pittsford’s political economy. For example, in a medium shot of Mrs. Croft sitting at an old desk while looking at a school supply catalog, the narrator observes, “today Mrs. Croft is going to order a new desk that she has long hoped for. The Superintendent of Schools has finally approved the purchase with funds which the townspeople voted for school improvements.” At the moment that the narrator says “funds,” the film cuts to a close‐up of Croft’s hand over the catalog itself, showing a picture of the new desk. In this way, the film associates the acquisition of new materials with financial support from the town’s inhabitants, a dynamic that sets up the remainder of the film’s narrative.

After drawing an explicit relationship between school expenditures and democratic action, the film proceeds to present its central “problem,” the fact that the students bring their lunches from home, rather than eating a “hot lunch” prepared at school. At this moment in the film, the narrator explains that hot lunches would lead to “healthier pupils” and “better classwork,” as medium shots of a dozen schoolchildren eating their homemade lunches are intercut with medium shots of Mr. and Mrs. Croft shaking their heads. Exterior shots of the Crofts leaving the school are paired with the narrator outlining the next steps for the “hot lunch” plan, including the recruitment of parents to assist with building local support for obtaining a kitchen and stove. As the film’s characters traipse across the snow, the narrator identifies the challenges ahead: raising taxes to pay for the purchase of a stove, or, perhaps, using existing funds, including those designated for a new desk, to help offset the cost. Following a meeting of the parent‐teacher association, which takes place in the classroom, the group reaches a decision to bring it to the upcoming town meeting.

The second half of the film takes place at the town meeting itself, which is presented by the narrator as a “get‐together, when [the townspeople] elect new offices and discuss problems of the town … finances, health, safety, the library, the schools and any other questions which anyone wishes to bring before his townspeople.” Several shots of an impressive two‐story brick building are followed by a series of interior shots of the auditorium, with the parent‐teacher association just one of many groups of citizens present to discuss town issues. As the narrator argues, “everyone welcomes a new problem put before the people,” so the hot lunch proposal is welcomed not on its merits, but rather for its capacity to generate debate. Despite the fact that the film depicts participatory democracy in action, the narrator, not the townspeople, vocalizes the perspectives of those in attendance. Anna McCarthy has argued that many mid‐century educational films and television programs presented “group discussion” as a model for governance, as it privileges the “democratic values of creativity, choice, and freedom,” as a counter to authoritarian tendencies.²⁶ Given the purpose of the CAD films, it is not surprising to see A Town Solves a Problem adopt this strategy, even if the use of the narration undercuts the idea of individual expression. While CAD films used a narrator for pragmatic reasons – since these films were used in many countries, new narrations needed to be recorded in a variety of languages – such techniques meant that local voices were not heard.

After some discussion, the hot lunch program goes to a vote, and the participants decide in its favor. The film closes with a five shot sequence of the program in action – a medium shot of three women, including Mrs. Croft, serving bowls of hot soup, followed by a close‐up of the soup itself, followed by another medium shot of the schoolchildren eating soup, followed by a second shot of the women in the kitchen, and a second shot of the children eating soup. These images of the fruition of democratic action are accompanied by the narrator’s praise for the town’s capacity to analyze and resolve the challenges that face it, calling the decision a “gift of good health from the people of a town that can solve its own problems.” This image of warmth and companionship is a sharp contrast from that of the snowy plain that opens the film, a closing that is also very different from the small‐town films made by other agencies, which instead resolved their narratives with long shots of the local landscape. In this way, A Town Solves a Problem invites audiences to draw parallels with their own situation, even if the problems at hand, and the ways to resolve them, appear to be very different. That is, by deploying a structure in which problems are presented, debated, and addressed in a community setting, the film implies that issues of shelter and sustenance can be resolved internally, without the need for outside intervention. In this way, films such as A Town Solves a Problem may also have been intended to model how communities could address issues after the end of occupation, when foreign aid was no longer available.

One of a series of films about women in the United States, Women and the Community, made by RKO Pathe’s nontheatrical production unit, opens similarly to A Town Solves a Problem, with an aerial shot of Monroe, New York, a small town 60 miles northeast of New York City. Like A Town Solves a Problem, Women and the Community is intended to bring the viewer closer to a particular community, but its opening narration takes the opposite tack:

What is a community? To a pilot it is a cluster of buildings seen as the birds see them.

To the locomotive engineer it is another “stop on the line.” He knows it only as a station name on his schedule.

To city planners a community means an area on a map, where everything is laid out in orderly, geometric patterns.

To the garbage man it just means rubbish – and more rubbish.

As the narrator offers this list of possible frameworks one might use to interpret a community, a series of shots – train locomotives, city planners looking at a map, and, of course, a garbage man – underscore the validity of these possible interpretations. But the film settles on another way to see a community: through the eyes of a mailman, for whom the term “means familiar houses with well‐known numbers of them. And it means the people who live inside these homes.” In the next several shots we see the mailman visit the town’s grocer and dentist, a widow and senior citizens. The choice of the mailman and, by extension, the postal service to articulate the ties that bind a small community to its national government is a common trope in government documentary film; Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s 1936 Night Mail, produced by the UK’s General Post Office Film Unit, is the best‐known example. The CAD even made its own version of such a film, R.F.D. (1949) using as its title the abbreviation for Rural Free Delivery.

But Women and the Community is not interested in praising the virtues of the postal service. Rather, the film is invested in democracy itself, particularly the role women play in sustaining its local institutions. After commenting on the mailman’s rounds, the narrator returns to seeing the town as a representative of democracy:

Though the town is a small one like thousands of others that will never get into the headlines, important things happen here, too. At least the people who live in the town think so, and they are right. This is a special day. Elections are being held and the people are taking their place in line to vote.

Although the film takes place on Election Day, the narrator emphasizes the democratic process as a whole, arguing “the actual casting of the vote is an end result, not a ‘spur of the moment’ action.” The male narrator then turns his attention to the unpaid, and, in this case, female, labor of democracy itself, presenting the League of Women Voters’ work educating the public on civic matters. For example, in a scene in which women are calling registered voters, close‐up shots of lists of names are superimposed with medium shots of women making phone calls, as the narrator comments on the “tedious” work that the women find “worthwhile because it led to a more satisfactory community life.”

In the film’s second reel, the story shifts focus once again, this time to the use of private and public resources to provide services for schoolchildren, from recreation centers to educational films to hot lunches to dental visits. Although the film’s title suggests that its true subject is the important roles women play in civic and community life, Women and the Community is somewhat sly about making this point, as it presents the institutions of small‐town life first, and only then shows the role women play in sustaining them. Toward the end of the film, the narrator speculates on the future of a young girl. After running through various things women can do in small towns, from donating blood to joining a garden club, the narrator observes “whatever she does, as an interested and intelligent American woman, she will become part of the bloodstream of her community.” At the same time, the narrator argues that voting will be the “climax of her civic career,” as it allows her to “register her will as a self‐governing citizen.” The film ends with a shot of a closing of a curtain, in this case the one that wraps a voting booth. Unlike the pat story presented in A Town Solves A Problem, then, Women and the Community is burdened by a surplus of ideas, moving from a disquisition on small‐town life to an explanation of the role nongovernmental civic organizations play in a democracy.

If CAD’s early films were as interested in the image of democracy in action as they were in seeing it actually practiced, Social Change in a Democracy (1951) was intended to illustrate how democracies were different from totalitarian societies. The film was produced by the New York firm Sun Dial Films, Inc., which was incorporated in 1944 and headed by Samuel Datlowe, who made B‐movies before turning to the nontheatrical field after the war.²⁷ Although the script itself did not indicate a specific setting for the film, H. M. Lambert, a production manager for the company, was sent by the company to Biloxi, Mississippi, presumably because of its fishing industry. The local newspaper in Biloxi emphasized the fact that the picture was for Japanese audiences. As Lambert told the local newspaper, it was intended to “show how the people in a democratic fishing town overcome a local problem by democratic methods.”²⁸ Like the other films discussed in this chapter, the film used local actors, who were asked to give freely of their time and other resources for government benefit. The Biloxi Chamber of Commerce assisted with the casting of students in exchange for an English‐language 35 mm print of the film, and, according to the newspaper, “local boat owners … agreed to let the company film their boats and plants as scenic backdrops for the movie, which will also include scenes of classrooms, and of the mayor and local administrators at work.”²⁹ The film was directed by Joseph Henabery, best known for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of A Nation (1915).³⁰

Despite the film’s Southern setting and provocative title, Social Change in a Democracy does not address the struggle for civil rights for African Americans in the American South, a political movement that garnered international attention in the late 1950s and 1960s. Instead, the “social change” with which the film is concerned is narrower in scope. Like Women and the Community, Social Change opens with a series of shots of its setting, in this case the residential and business districts of Biloxi. From the outset, the script emphasizes the contradiction at the heart of many of these films, as the narrator notes:

Every small town in the United States has its own special character – it is unique – quite unlike any other place in the world. But in a larger sense, each small town can be taken as typical of many other small focal points of population in America. There is the same easy space, the same unity of culture, tradition, background – a cohesiveness of society.

Like Women and the Community, Social Change makes a sharp transition from an overly generalized look at small‐town life to a lecture in a high school civics class on the subject of democracy. In this case, the lecture, on the “philosophy of government,” is delivered by a teacher who is particularly adept at drawing on the chalkboard. In the lecture, the teacher first criticizes what the narrator calls a “pyramid” structure of government, in which all decisions are made by a few people at the top. In contrast, a democratic government is portrayed as a “kind of house designed to shelter and protect citizens.” While pyramid‐style governments offer little hope to those who are unhappy with their lot, the narrator argues that the “house of democracy” has a “workshop – available to all citizens – in which significant changes in the structure can be made – changes designed to satisfy the growing needs of the people.” A close‐up of a chalk drawing of a house, with one stick figure holding a hand saw while another holds a hammer, makes literal this image of a house of democracy, which seems primarily to serve as a support for the narrator’s next point – “citizens never change the basic foundation of a house,” such as laws that guarantee freedom of speech, assembly, and the right to vote. The fact that this scene is shot in a segregated school is not commented on in the film itself, and the absence of African Americans in this film, and the absence of racial or ethnic minorities in other small‐town films, suggests that its democratic vision is implicitly linked to whiteness. However, even if someone was not aware that this film was shot in Mississippi, which was a focal point for civil rights activists, the absence of nonwhites becomes a more prominent issue when the teacher shows a 16 mm film about the rise of Nazi Germany as an example of what happens in a “pyramid” government.

This film, which has a March of Time‐style narration, includes images of concentration camps and several reaction shots of the students that reveal their discomfort with seeing this footage, perhaps for the first time. But instead of analyzing Nazism as a belief system, Social Change argues that the government failed because it made the “welfare of the state superior to the welfare of the people.” This assumption allows the film to argue for a process‐oriented vision of government in which democracy, “ever sensitive to the needs and pressures of the people,” is able to resolve conflict between social groups.

After these long civics lessons, the film returns to Biloxi and to the conflict that is to be resolved through democratic action. As the narrator explains, several years earlier a factory had opened in the community, bringing jobs to the region, but “as a part of the plant’s operation, a waste material was being discharged into the bay – a foreign substance pouring into the salt water for two years.” Over time, the pollution began to impact the shrimp population, and thus the fishermen who relied on shrimping for their income. As was the case with the other two films, this initiative begins as something organized by a group of private individuals. In this case, the fishermen raise money to hire “experts, scientists, to investigate” the cause of the decline in the shrimp population. Although this problem is, first, an environmental one, the use of close‐up of the fishermen’s faces suggests that it is the interpersonal conflict that is most critical here. Medium and long shots of the private investigators show them collecting water samples and determining that the factory pollution has hurt the food supply for the shrimp. After learning this news, the fishermen approach the plant manager, who is unsympathetic to their plight.

The fishermen’s first response is to destroy the plant – as the narrator notes, “these are simple people. Violence seems to be their only solution” – but then one fisherman, identified as a veteran, suggests a democratic solution instead. Once again, the local government, here identified as the “Board of Selectmen,” is offered as the institution that can resolve this conflict. The film’s reference to a governmental structure most common in New England is only further evidence that there was little thought given to the production location of Social Change, which is a shift from both earlier CAD films and, in particular, those made by the OWI and the CI‐AA, which wished to explore the particularities of American places and people. At the meeting, the town’s elected officials realize that, as the narrator observes, “what began as a dispute between two small groups in the community has grown into a recognition of a basic evil, menacing the entire community,” and must be addressed by the town, which now plans to build a “sewage disposal plant” with taxpayer dollars. Instead of this action being seen as absolving the factory of any responsibility for its own pollution, the narrator argues that collectivizing the cost of pollution benefits all. The film ends with a shot of three fishing boats on the water, suggesting that the waters were made safe again by the government’s action.