In the depths of Great Depression USA, a 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, art with propaganda, actuality with drama, to document, communicate, and even help resolve the significant issues of troubled times. As the New Deal pursued another America, documentary did too. The weaponised cameras of revolutionary collectives (Film and Photo League, Frontier Films), ambitious US government productions, and directors including Joris Ivens, Leo Hurwitz, Pare Lorentz, Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand, evidence a unique decade of possibilities and experiments in both cinema and society, whilst showing how many of today’s contemporary challenges are mirrored in our past.
Retrospective Documentary on the March: The Turbulent 30s in New Deal America
The Passaic Textile Strike
In 1926, 16,000 workers in Passaic, New Jersey shut down their textile mills for over a year, and organised an agitprop documentary to accompany their action in realtime. After a…
Becoming Camera: Formal Experiments in and with ‘The Reality Film’
In the 1920s a generation of experimental filmmakers would mount an ‘aesthetic revolt’ against Hollywood, exploring other uses for cameras, other forms for films. Inspired by Modernism and the metropolis, objects and things, they sought to craft reality into visual poetry. The worsening Great Depression (1929-39) would soon lead them to abandon artistic experiment for social concern, leading to “a new kind of film making: the documentary”.
Introduction by Tom Hurwitz.
Manhatta
Considered the first American avant-garde film, and perhaps first city symphony, an ode to Manhattan through Modernism, with inter-titles from Walt Whitman’s poetry. A canonical still photographer, Strand would later…
H2O
Already a successful commercial photographer, H2O was Steiner’s first film. The visual poetry and rhythms of water won him the ‘nondramatic’ award at Photoplay’s 1929 annual amateur film competition. Steiner…
A Bronx Morning
In 1930 Leyda moved to NYC to assist Ralph Steiner. This intimate register of a New York borough earned Leyda a fellowship to study with Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow, leading…
Oil: A Symphony in Motion
A paean to modernity by two amateur movie enthusiasts. Through Soviet-inspired montage and an epic first person monologue, Oil itself narrates how it ‘came out of the earth to speed…
Footnote to Fact
A Hollywood screenwriter, experimental filmmaker, pioneering film critic and historian, through a hybrid of drama and document Film and Photo League affiliated Jacobs crafts a macabre Depression parable, from footage…
Hands
The US government looks to experimental film for inventive propaganda, hiring two veterans of the American avant-garde and cultural Left to depict the socio-economic value of collective hands put to…
RUSSIA
With capitalism in crisis, many liberals and labourers looked to Russia’s alternative. Affiliated to the Communist International sponsored Workers International Relief, the New York headquartered Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL, 1930-1936) looked to images to effect radical social change. Through their films, reportage, and screenings (including many Russian films), the WFPL, and Soviet cinema, would foment American social documentary.
Today
Filmmaker and editor Shub was a pioneer of the ‘compilation film’: a radical form of non-fiction transforming vastly different footage into an ‘ideological weapon’ through creative montage. Segodnya weaponises images…
The Road – To Jail [Reenactment]
Taking workers films to workers was a key WFPL activity. In 1934 Lester Balog toured California with copies of League newsreels and the Soviet feature Road to Life. After a screening to migrant Mexican labourers, Balog was arrested, fined and sentenced to 45 days in jail. This programme recreates, from existent material, a screening that led to jail.
Introduction by Tom Hurwitz on October 20th.
Workers Newsreel: Bonus March 1932
Asserting a bridge between patriotism and civic protest, this WFPL film documents the destitution and march of thousands of WWI veterans upon Washington, at the peak of the Depression, to…
Road to Life
A compassionate state proposes an unprecedented experiment to reform criminal street kids—a labour commune, to build a new society and new citizens. But old ties die hard. This very first…
A New Hope?
March 1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt takes office and Gabriel Over the White House is released – media tycoon Hearst’s motion picture play-book for his preferred candidate, in which a fictional president (Walter Huston) saves the USA through benevolent dictatorship. Hunger 1932 depicts protests and poverty both presidents have to contend with.
Introduction by Tom Hurwitz.
Hunger 1932
A radical WFPL newsreel, detailing the destitution of 17,000,000 unemployed Americans and the National Hunger March to Washington – a very real contemporary protest incorporated into the screenplay of Gabriel…
Gabriel Over the White House
After a car crash puts tawdry President Hammond (Walter Huston) in a coma, he awakens a new man of moral fortitude. A remarkable film, implicitly indicting FDR’s predecessor whilst offering…
Infowars, 1930s Style
During the 1930s’ ‘war for the survival of democracy’ (FDR), newsreels were a key part of the moviegoing experience, the cinema a social site for information’s distribution and debate. This programme places corporate newsreels and cartoons in dialogue with the ‘alternative facts’ of WFPL productions and sponsored films, to depict America’s mediation of its own, then under question, identity; its thoughts on itself, and the rest of the world.
Pre-recorded introduction by Tanya Goldman.
The News Parade of 1934
Informed by the Hearst empire’s tabloid aesthetics, distributed and half-owned by MGM, Hearst Metrotone News issued newsreels to theatres from 1929-67. This round up of 1934 reveals its own politics…
The World in Review
For a Left alternative to Hearst, Fox et al, the WFPL produced their own newsreels. This panorama of international events centres on the labor movement and fascist threat, compiling footage…
America Today
For America Today the WFPL applied its tactics of compilation and montage to narrate its own vision of the struggles of working America against injustice. Demonstrations, police brutality, and even…
Confidence
A ‘cartoon comedy’ featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, released by Universal Pictures. After Oswald’s farm is visited by the ghoul of the Depression, his doctor sends him to Washington to…
The Great Depression
An underground docudrama of the Depression, and rare surviving film from Chicago’s WFPL. The protagonist looks in vain for work, only to find ‘no help wanted’. Acerbic editing transforms his…
Century of Progress
During the 1930s’ ‘war for the survival of democracy’ (FDR), newsreels were a key part of the moviegoing experience, the cinema a social site for information’s distribution and debate. This…
Marian Anderson: The Lincoln Memorial Concert
After African American contralto Anderson was refused a stage at Constitution Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt helped arrange a performance to 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial.
Excerpt from concert, reconstructed from newsreels,…
One Tenth of Our Nation
A sponsored film decrying the poverty and limits of opportunity of the Black population in the American South, remarkably produced during enforced racial segregation. Written and narrated by actor Maurice…
Dramatic Facts for Dramatic Times
Some revolutionary filmmakers began to worry their direct reporting might just be preaching to the choir. At a 1934 FPL conference Hurwitz pleads for ‘a shock-troupe of full time film workers’ to increase quality, new publics, and pursue ‘other film forms… not accessible to the documentary camera-eye’. The FPL folds in 1936, collectives NYKino (1935-7) and Frontier Films (1936-41) enact his thesis instead. Drama and reenactment enter social documentary.
Introduction by Tanya Goldman and Tom Hurwitz.
Pie in the Sky
Collective NYKino and Group Theater collaborate to expand the formal repertoire of the Left’s social critique, through an irreverent slapstick satire of Christian charity, referencing a popular folk song. Staring…
Millions of Us
A desperate man contemplates breaking a strike, before being converted to the union cause. Produced surreptitiously in Hollywood with money ‘supplied by some of the more prominent movie men with…
People of the Cumberland
A test case for the collective’s ambitions, Frontier Film’s landmark first full production combines documentary and drama in a rousing case for the plight of a rural Tennessee population, and…
The World Today & The Wave [Reenactment]
A docudrama starring mainly local non-professionals, shot by legendary photographer Paul Strand, co-directed by a young Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel, commissioned by a progressive Mexican government, The Wave spelt out a new set of possibilities for documentary. Strand would soon join NYKino and co-found Frontier Films. This programme recreates The Wave’s premiere run in New York, in which it screened with NYKino’s new take on the newsreel.
Introduction by Tom Hurwitz on October 23rd.
The World Today: Sunnyside: The Second Battle of Long Island
NYKino’s radical-Left response to Time Inc’s popular novel theatricalisation of the news, The March of Time, applied progressive politics to its dramatic tactics. Real residents co-wrote and acted in Sunnyside’s…
The World Today: Black Legion
Planned as an ongoing series, only two The World Today episodes were made. The second: a dramatisation of the murder of a WPA worker by the Ku Klux Klan adjacent…
The Wave
Conceived as a documentary, this work of fiction features local fishermen on the Mexican gulf acting out the drama of their labour’s exploitation. Inspired by Soviet cinema, prefiguring neorealism, the…
THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS
With documentary maturing, journalist Pare Lorentz boldly pitches the US government a film to push its New Deal policies. He hires NYKino’s best—Steiner, Strand and Hurwitz—to shoot a grand ‘picturisation of what we did’ to turn the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl. Critically lauded, seen by millions, decried as New Deal propaganda (especially by Hollywood), for Paul Rotha The Plow ‘showed that the documentary film was no longer the monopoly of Europe’.
Propagandists of the World, Unite! [Reenactment]
The Plow premiered to a distinguished invited audience at the Mayflower Hotel on May 10, 1936. Organised by the MoMA Film Library, the event positioned it in a programme of non-fiction funded by other foreign governments, to win support for the New Deal’s film endeavour and show how ‘the new film of reality is being used today, all over the world, to bring the new world of citizenship before the public imagination’. This screening partially recreates that programme.
Introduction by Tom Hurwitz.
A Colour Box
Animation pioneer Len Lye’s experimental rhythmic fusion of Cuban rumba music and hand painted film, commissioned by John Grierson for Britain’s General Post Office Film Unit. An avant-garde music video…
The Face of Britain
A Central Electricity Board sponsored history of Britain’s landscape and society, their disfigurement through the industrial revolution and coal, and the promise of electricity to clear the smog and squalor…
Triumph of the Will [Reel 1]
The choice to include the first reel of Riefenstahl’s spectacular propagandist chronicle of the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress apparently led the French delegation to walk out of the Mayflower…
The Plow That Broke the Plains
Presenting the New Deal’s solutions to America’s self-inflicted wounds, the ‘musical documentary’ that launched the US government’s ambitious experiment in film production led Lorentz, who had never made a film,…
Lorentz & Vidor
With his crew rebelling and The Plow in crisis, Hollywood-banned Lorentz reached out to King Vidor, who sneaked him into Fox to smuggle out the stock footage needed for completion. Made independently during FDR’s first term, Vidor’s back-to-the-land Our Daily Bread shares a similar conviction. Two landmark Depression epics from outside the studio system.
The Plow That Broke the Plains
Presenting the New Deal’s solutions to America’s self-inflicted wounds, the ‘musical documentary’ that launched the US government’s ambitious experiment in film production led Lorentz, who had never made a film,…
Our Daily Bread
“Inspired by the headlines of today”, made independently during FDR’s first term with his own home as collateral, Vidor’s dramatisation of the back-to-the-land and co-operative movements is a vital document…
THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS
With Mussolini and Hitler entrenched, the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) and Japan’s full-scale invasion of China (1937) motivated an international collective of socially conscious filmmakers to aim their revolutionary cameras against the global spectre of fascism. With natural empathy for old world Spain and Communist China, they tested their theories of the camera ‘as a weapon in the class struggle’. These films evidence an internationalist America.
Ivens’ War on Two Fronts
The popular success of Joris Ivens’ tribute to Loyalist resistance, penned by Hemingway and Dos Passos, The Spanish Earth, emboldened the left’s confidence and hope in documentary film. Ivens would next turn to China, to detail with urgent topicality its fight on the ‘eastern front of the same assault against democracy’.
Introduction by Tanya Goldman.
The Spanish Earth
Directed by Joris Ivens, written by John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, narrated by Orson Welles, with music by Marc Blitzstein arranged by Virgil Thomson: a united front of the…
The 400 Million
Ivens next turned to China, to detail ‘a struggle involving one fifth of the world’s population’ on the ‘eastern front of the same assault against democracy’. A celebration of China’s…
New Frontiers
These two early Frontier Films productions, crafted from raw footage received from others on the frontlines in Spain and China, saw the collective test its approach to shaping emotional stories from disparate images and dialectic editing—raising funds for a new blood transfusion service, and presenting the world never seen images of Mao Tse-Tung.
Introduction by Tom Hurwitz.
Heart of Spain
When Kline and Karpathy returned from Madrid with rough rushes documenting a new blood transfusion service, Frontier Films found its first film. Strand and Hurwitz edited the picture into a…
China Strikes Back
Raw footage received from photographer Harry Dunham revealed never before seen images of Mao Tse-Tung and the Eighth Route Army, inspiring Frontier to collectively shape a new film from desperate…
A River Runs Through It
Claimed the ‘finest documentary’ and ‘most viewed motion picture’ ever made, with its Mississippi protagonist Lorentz’ second ‘US documentary film’ again depicts America’s suffering through its abuse of its own land—and New Deal remedies. Depression vet Kazan puts tradition and progress in conflict, centring his drama, staring Montgomery Clift, on one of those New Deal dams.
The River
More epic and double the budget of its Plow predecessor, with a surging Virgil Thompson score and lyrical (James Joyce beloved) poetry, Lorentz presents the socio-environmental catastrophe of ‘the greatest…
Wild River
Kazan revisits the Depression-era of his youth through a tense drama of the struggles of a Tennessee Valley Authority worker (Montgomery Clift) with a rural Southern community, racism, and romance,…
Crisis: A Film of ‘The Nazi Way’
The chilling Crisis was the first documentary to report on Europe’s approaching catastrophe. Following Germany’s annexation of Austria, Hitler and the world’s eyes turned to Czechoslovakia. FPL and Frontier Films…
This Land Is Our Land
At the invitation of his government, documentary godfather Flaherty crafts a bleak (and never released) account of America’s erosion of its rural soil—and people—through over farming. A landmark film for the 1939 World’s Fair, meanwhile, seeks to remedy toxic urban chaos through a blueprint for suburbia: ‘close to the soil once more’.
Introduction by Tom Hurwitz.
The Land
To stunning images, Flaherty narrates ‘the story of how rural America used machines to achieve an unbelievable production – but at a terrible cost to land and to people’. A…
The City
A commission for the American Institute of Planning, this treatise for degrowth beseeches America to return to the scale and ideals of small town life. After an outline from Pare…
Industrial Revolutions
Three different, dramatic tales of the impact of industry and technology. A genuine farming family stars in Ivens’ upbeat U.S. Film Service depiction of the wonders of rural electrification. Brechtian song and a fictive mayor describe the havoc of automation on a valley town’s increasingly redundant steel workers, who play themselves. With incredible formal and stylistic invention, Lee Dick advocates for better labour conditions for dying miners.
Introduction by Tanya Goldman.
Power and the Land
For the US Film Service, Ivens depicts the patriotic wonder of a New Deal rural electrification programme for a single farm and family—The Parkinsons—in an upbeat celebration of progress, starring…
Valley Town
Brechtian song and a fictive mayor bitterly narrate the havoc of automation on a town’s increasingly redundant steel workers, who themselves act out the drama. Genres and approaches combine in…
Men and Dust
The findings of the Tri-State Survey Committee on industrial health issues devastating mining communities are transformed into a polemic essay-poem of public service, through utterly remarkable formal and stylistic invention.
…A House Is Not a Home
Lerner uses the device of a fictional mother and son to advocate for better homes for the maligned urban poor, who just need ‘a place to live’. At 14, Sidney Lumet features in Paramount’s adaptation of a Federal Theatre Project play: tragedy and romance conspire to convince a wealthy landlord to replace his decrepit tenements with public housing.
A Place to Live
FPL and Frontier vet Lerner uses the device of a fictional mother and son to advocate for better homes for the maligned urban poor—who just need ‘a place to live’—transforming…
…One Third of a Nation…
At 14, Sidney Lumet features in Paramount’s adaptation of a Federal Theatre Project play. Tragedy and romance conspire to convince a wealthy landlord to tear down his decrepit apartments and…
Health: a Melodrama
In a noir-ish fiction of fact, heroic modern doctors in urban slums combat death during childbirth, as Lorentz turns to pure drama for his own USFS film. In Kline’s John Steinbeck-written ethnofiction, set in a Mexican pueblo with locals playing themselves, a young boy becomes an advocate for modern science, after disease afflicts his people.
The Fight for Life
Detective-like doctors combat death during childbirth amongst the slum-living urban poor, in Lorentz’ film noir inflected fiction of fact. A symphonic piece of ciné-journalism, ‘as dramatic as life itself’, with…
The Forgotten Village
Guided by Steinbeck’s ‘elastic story’, Kline and Hackenschmied (Crisis) craft an ethnofictional docudrama, working with a Mexican pueblo’s inhabitants to enact the tale of a young boy’s conversion to modern…
Calm Within the Storm
In a rare break from politics, Frontier Films crafts Alaskan footage into a symphonic parable of geology, time and man. In an utterly charming tale from the nature-film specialists Woodard brothers (one of whom shot The River), a young Mexican boy with no one to play with befriends the desert animals around him. Documentary revisits its travelogue roots.
White Flood
In a rare break from politics and social issues, Frontier Films craft Alaskan footage shot by their board member into a symphonic parable of geology, time and man, via poetic…
The Adventures of Chico
A young Mexican boy with no one to play with befriends the desert animals around him, in ‘a tale of the strangest friendship ever known’ – an utterly charming diversion…
Native Land
‘A document of America’s struggle for liberty in recent years’, Frontier Film’s magnum-opus, and swansong, was a five years in the making culmination of their ideas and experiments in 30s…
LASTING RESONANCES
“The legacy of thirties documentary consists not simply of a body of films serving as historical artefacts of the Depression decade but of a set of concepts and questions about the possible forms and functions of documentary—indeed, the very name for one way of thinking about film images and sounds and the worlds to which we imagine they refer” (Charles Wolfe). A programme of later films, focusing on the aftermath of the 1930s documentary experiment.
Strange Victory
Following Native Land and the end of Frontier Films, Hurwitz’s extraordinary, provocative and harrowing essay film dissects post-WWII America to find the fascism, racism and prejudice the country had fought…
Song of the Rivers
Ivens’ grand compilation film resembles an epic inter-continental communist response to Lorentz’s The River from a director by now blacklisted in the USA (despite having made the patriotic Power and…
Continuity and Change
An Alan Lomax documentary on the evolution of American folk music continues Lerner and Van Dyke’s engagement with the story of the USA. The template for direct cinema and vérité was created through Hurwitz and Iannelli’s experiments in synchronous picture and sound. With sardonic montage akin to his Depression-era FPL production, 40 years later Bailen turns his wry camera on America’s 1970s social movements, in a silent film that speaks volumes.
Introduction by Tom Hurwitz.
To Hear Your Banjo Play
An Alan Lomax documentary on the evolution of American folk music, narrated by Pete Seeger, continues Lerner and Van Dyke’s engagement with the story of the USA. Van Dyke would…
Emergency Ward
The template for direct cinema and verité was created through Hurwitz and Iannelli’s experiments in synchronous picture and sound. Ianelli first approached Hurwitz to edit his innovatively captured sound-images of…
The Young Fighter
Now with a production partnership, Filmscope, an impressed CBS accepted the filmmakers’ pitch to portray the life of a young boxer through their new technique of ‘reality film’. The result…
Confrontation
With sardonic, satirical montage akin to his 1934 WFPL production, The Great Depression, 40 years later Bailen turns his wry camera on America’s 1970s social movements – for Civil Rights…
Savage and Joyous Eyes
A unique documentary experiment, Frontier alumni Maddow and Meyers craft a devastating portrait of American society through the eyes of a recently divorced woman in LA. A phantom narrator talks with the protagonist, as they, and the camera, viciously observe the city’s people. Decades after H2O, Steiner returns to his experimental beginnings in Look Park.
Introduction by Tanya Goldman.
The Savage Eye
Frontier alumni Maddow and Meyers craft a devastating portrait of American society through the eyes of a recently divorced woman in LA. A phantom narrator dialogues with the protagonist, as…
Look Park
Decades after H2O, Steiner returns to his experimental beginnings. Part of his Joy of Seeing series, ecstatic images meet Jacob Druckman’s electronic composition, in a film edited by a young…