“Sure I remember the Nineteen Thirties, the terrible, troubled, triumphant, surging Thirties. I can’t think of any decade in history when so much happened in so many directions. Violent changes took place. Our country was modeled, our lives remolded, our Government rebuilt, forced to functions, duties and responsibilities it never had before and can never relinquish… Looking back, the decade seems to have been as carefully designed as a play. It had beginning, middle and end, even a prologue—1929 gave contrast and tragic stature to the ensuing ten years.”
John Steinbeck, “A Primer on the 30’s”, in Esquire, June 1960
“In today’s troubled times, the documentary film has come into its own; it meets an urgent need for a medium of mass education and finds a highly receptive audience eager for the information, instruction, or propaganda it presents. Time, spirit and technique are well matched: the documentary film is on the march.”
Lewis Jacobs, “Documentary Film Advances”, in Direction 3, no.2, February 1940
In the depths of Great Depression USA, a delicate coalition of radical filmmakers fought to birth the new genre of social documentary. They confronted crisis by creating a new cinema of reality, infusing facts with feelings, blurring art with propaganda, actuality with drama, to document, communicate, and even attempt to resolve the significant issues of extremely troubled times. As Roosevelt committed to “social justice through social action” via the policies of his government’s New Deal, as he pursued another America and committed to speak “the whole truth, frankly and boldly”, filmmakers did too in sometimes frictious parallel. By the end of the decade, ‘documentary’ had become a widely used term, signalling a new development in the history of cinema.
Documentary on the March addresses America of the 1930s, and the role that a newly invented form of uniquely American non-fiction cinema played in the decade’s attempt to address national and international political and socio-economic crises, against the spectres of fascism, populism and war. By offering a portrait of a period in which it was hoped that cinema might be employed as a progressive agent of change, through an amalgam of cinematographic and social proposition, these films implicitly demand that we question the potential and limits of cinema’s sociopolitical capacity, the porous boundaries between non-fiction as an art form and as a form of propaganda, and the bridge between reality and ideation that documentary seeks to shape. Through the distance of time, these films offer a visit to the ‘prologue’ of almost 100 years of non-fiction experiment and invention, laying bare its formal and ideological foundations.
Designed in a form of chronological narrative, focusing on a core group of filmmakers (including Joris Ivens, Leo Hurwitz, Herbert Kline, Irving Lerner, Pare Lorentz, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, Willard Van Dyke) the programme starts with precedents and the influence of Russia, moves on to a dialogue between the weaponised cameras of revolutionary activist filmmaking collectives (Workers Film and Photo League (1930-6), NYKino (1935-7), Frontier Films (1937-41)) and ambitious US government productions, and ends with a coda of resonances. Three historic ‘reenactments’ recreate contemporary screenings, acting as time machines.
For the Film and Photo League, theirs was “a gigantic task, challenging the most institutionalised of all the bourgeois arts with its monster monopolies and gigantic network for mass distribution” (Sam Brody, 1934), using film as “a very important political weapon, more effective at this time than carloads of bullets and machine guns” (Leo Hurwitz, 1934).
For ‘FDR’s moviemaker’, Pare Lorentz, the aim was to create films “produced by the federal government that could stand on [their] own merits and share billing with commercial Hollywood productions”, in a unique public relations campaign designed to address the great problems of the day, the New Deal’s solutions, and the fundamental question of American identity—through aesthetically sophisticated cinema.
From Workers Newsreels seeking to provide ‘alternative facts’ to dominant narratives to government-funded ‘musical documentaries’ recounting the destructive impact of Americans on their very own land, from independently produced dramas of organised labour to avant-garde sponsored films seeking to remedy social inequity, via innovative and influential formal hybrids of reality and reenactment, the retrospective revisits the crucible of American non-fiction to evidence a unique decade of possibilities and experiments in both cinema and society—which continue to be felt, and inscribed within, today.
The extreme depth of crisis in the 1930s cannot be overstated, but its cocktail of challenges are increasingly resurfacing today—rising populism and social division, the socioeconomic impact of new technologies, threats to nation states and political orthodoxy, pending ecological catastrophe and international conflict—and as the cinema of our time attempts to shape and influence how we mediate our own contemporary crises, looking to past paradigms offers evidence to inform our future—whether as filmmakers, citizens or both.
Special thanks to Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, our partners in this retrospective, to Tanya Goldman and Tom Hurwitz for accompanying us in Lisbon to share their valuable knowledge, and to all of the archives that have loaned us their precious historical prints and preservations—with particular gratitude to MoMA.
Justin Jaeckle
Co-curator of the retrospective together with Cinemateca Portuguesa