NotInchoateHand1
03-23-2005, 01:21 AM
MUSE's limited input:
Miller, James S.
Inventing the "Found" Object: Artifactuality, Folk History, and the Rise of Capitalist Ethnography in 1930s America [View in PDF]
Journal of American Folklore - Volume 117, Number 466, Fall 2004, pp. 373-393 - Article
Subjects:
Lange, Dorothea - American exodus.
Taylor, Paul Schuster 1895-
Steinbeck, John 1902-1968 - Grapes of wrath.
Agee, James 1909-1955 - Let us now praise famous men.
Evans, Walker 1903-1975
Ethnology -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
United States -- Civilization -- 1918-1945.
Material culture -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
Abstract
As numerous scholars have chronicled, the decade of the 1930s in America witnessed an explosion of popular interest in the presumptions and protocols of cultural ethnography. The Depression years were a time when such academic-sociological studies as Constance Rourke's American Humor, Zora Neal Hurston's Mules and Men, Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture, and Howard Odum's various studies of rural Appalachia became virtual bestsellers in their own right—each animated by what might be called an indexical-excavatory enthusiasm for unearthing, itemizing, and exhibiting the vestiges (both material and human) of America's putatively "vanishing" past. This article sets out to assess the cultural and ideological work this wide-ranging impulse performed, probing the ways that mainstream or popular ethnography in the 1930s (despite its often explicit interest in critiquing or challenging commercial modernity) came to underwrite a particular and highly overdetermined narrative of corporate-capitalist "progress." To accomplish this, I examine three discrete yet exemplary ethnographic texts: Dorothea Lange's An American Exodus, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Documenting places and people feared to be most immediately threatened by industrial-commercial development, I argue that these writers ultimately depicted America's socioeconomic fringes not as the repository of a redemptive "folk" culture, but as the site and source of commercial capitalism's own heroic and authentic "roots." Behind their interest in excavating and documenting the artifacts of a bygone age was a more formative desire to invent a model of the vernacular past that could somehow imbue capitalism's rationalized and articulated operations with a tangible sense of historicity, a palpable and authenticating texture of "pastness."
(There might be some good contextualizing crap in this article, and it DOES mention the film at least.)
INFOTRAC---Expanded Academic results:
(yeah, its Canadian stuff, but lots of good stuff too)
Full article:
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Oct 1999 v19 i4 p439
Canada's Heritage (1939) and America's The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). BLAINE ALLAN.
Abstract: An analysis of two films' portrayal of rural citizens living through economic depressions is presented. Government agencies' relationship to farmers, government's social responsibility to citizens during depression years, and questions of which movie came first are examined.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 Carfax Publishing Company
The Great Depression and the drought of the 1930s formed both metaphorical and actual pretexts for the production of The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and Heritage (1939) [1]. The former has stood for years as a well-known example from the United States of the socially oriented documentary that proliferated in the period between the World Wars. Funded by a New Deal agency and a precursor of films produced by the short-lived US Film Service, it also demonstrated problems in state-sponsored film making in the country that also houses Hollywood. The latter film remains considerably less known even in Canada, where it was produced for the Dominion Department of Agriculture by the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau. These two films clearly spoke for their respective governments, charged with responsibility to win consent for their programs of farm relief and remedy in response to the economic and natural crises that faced farmers in the 1930s. One of the principals in the production of the Canadian film wrote, a few years later, 'There is no more essential function of rehabilitation work than that of securing direct co-operation between farmers and governmental agencies and among farmers themselves' [2]. Although he was not referring specifically to them here, he suggested that such films did not just explain or publicize their governments' activities, but can be seen as having formed part of the programs.
Which Came First?
In his account of federal government filmmaking in Canada, C. Rodney James indicates that Heritage was 'conceived along the same lines as Pare Lorentz's The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) produced for the Resettlement Administration in the United States' [3]. Picking up the parallel, Peter Morris has suggested that Heritage, 'comparable in theme' to Lorentz's 1936 release, was completed as early as 1934. Noting that it was viewed by members of the federal cabinet, he speculates that its release might have been delayed some five years because 'the subject matter was too sensitive while the Depression was at its height' [4]. Although he does not explore the question or its implications, he raises the possibility that a Canadian film, now nearly unknown, might have preceded a US picture that continues to serve as a model of 1930s social documentary. Had this been the case, then any viewer of the two films would have raised significant questions about their relations to each other and about which actually was completed first, because they compare in much more than style or theme. They also resemble each other in structure, imagery, expressive use of music, and commentary, to the point where actual phrases echo from one film to the other.
Another film to have been titled Heritage did stand on the point of completion in autumn 1934, though not the government-produced film that would ultimately appear under that title. Prime Minister R.B. Bennett had been petitioned for an order-in-council to release archival footage for a production on the subject of war, which had the promise of theatrical exhibition. The twentieth anniversary of the onset of hostilities was passing, and an autumn release, the producers' goal, would have placed the film near the commemoration of the armistice. To consider the request, the Prime Minister invited his cabinet to review the film at a noon screening on 31 October. Renamed Lest We Forget, it premiered the next spring. Credited to Motion Picture Bureau director Capt. Frank Badgley and W.W. Murray, it was produced by the Photo-Sound Corporation, a partnership of John Alexander and J. Booth Scott, who directed the later film that finally bore the title Heritage [5].
A copyright application for The Plow That Broke the Plains was filed in April 1936; the chain of events that produced Heritage started in summer 1937, and the first shots were made that autumn. The tantalizing possibility that a Canadian film might have informed Pare Lorentz's production thus turns out to be less than a chance. Although there are clearly defined resemblances between the two pictures, the producers of Heritage did not simply copy The Plow That Broke the Plains. Faced with the option of using film material from the United States, they chose instead to learn from the US example and to produce a film particular to the Canadian situation in order to make a national case for a federal government program that concerned a regional issue.
Propaganda of the Wrong Type
The Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau produced Heritage for the Department of Agriculture in order to publicize the activities and successes of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA), a program established in spring 1935, and which exists to this day. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act passed in the last weeks of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett's Conservative government, six months before Canadians voted William Lyon Mackenzie King's Liberals into power, and just two weeks before US President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration. Started with relief funds as the first Roosevelt administration neared an end, the program met Republican fire for its quasi-socialist measures, and the legislation under which the Resettlement Administration had been founded was, in spring 1936, successfully challenged as unconstitutional. Politically, in Canada the PFRA was situated differently, as a program introduced by the Conservative party just as Bennett expeditiously changed h is position and championed government intervention to confront the Depression, then adopted and sustained by the Liberals into the war era. Where the US program stressed relief and direct assistance to family farms, the PFRA had as a primary goal to enable farmers to sustain themselves with revised schemes for the use of land and water. As director of the Experimental Farms Service, Edgar S. Archibald had a vested interest in evolving research in the science and practice of agriculture; a few years later he explained that the Act had as its object 'securing necessary revisions in farm practices and land use policies in the light of advanced knowledge of prairie climate and soil conditions' [6].
In addition to their roles as relief or reform agencies, both the Resettlement Administration and the PFRA generated and disseminated information about the conditions they were mandated to address and the measures that they were taking. Archibald, a key agitator for a PFRA film project, was well aware of the existence of 'news reels', as he termed them, concerning rehabilitation activities in the United States, implying that films should be produced to promote the Canadian program [7]. As the summer of 1937 passed, he further addressed the option of using US-produced films by quoting one of his agents, L.B. Thomson, who had attended many farmers' meetings and who in Archibald's opinion wrote with authority based on field experience:
I was wondering if anything further had been done with the Motion Picture Bureau in sending a man out West to take some films. The reason I am writing is that the Wheat Pool Extension Service are getting films from the Soil Conservation Service in the United States and showing them around the country. I have seen the films and they are largely propaganda of the wrong type. I believe we should have a film from our own Department, giving the correct picture. Films showing how the United States Government is spending millions on no self-help plan is to my mind the wrong propaganda to be spreading [8].
As Thomson indicates, Archibald had already consulted the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau. Before he and Deputy Minister Horace Barton had travelled west, Archibald had contacted Bureau director Frank Badgley, though Archibald kept his superior in the dark about his plans while he asked field Superintendents whether they thought the development of a motion picture might not be a good idea [9].
Fred James, Director of Agriculture's Press and Publicity Division, quickly took up the task, consulting Badgley further about the possible costs--a one-reel sound picture for $2000, with print costs of $35 for each 35 millimetre copy and $12 for each in 16 millimetre--and contacting his counterpart at the US Department of Agriculture to obtain a list of pertinent films in order that he might borrow them. 'From such pictures,' he wrote, 'we can then get some ideas for a preliminary scenario which should be prepared before the photographer goes out to take the pictures.' A note likely scribbled by James, probably during his discussion with Badgley, indicates that he was pointed to the work of the WPA and a film maker whose name he heard as 'Pierre Lorenz' [10]. James requested a viewing copy of The Plow That Broke the Plains so his colleagues could see the film for themselves, though they had to wait. Fire had destroyed the US Department of Agriculture's distribution copies, necessitating a new print from the Resettlement Administration [11].
The Plow That Broke the Plains had been screened publicly in Canada already, particularly in educational venues and film societies. Not long before plans for a PFRA film arose, on 17 June 1937 Lorentz's picture was presented at a conference on Canadian-American relations held at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, as part of a program of films 'illustrating problems of adaptation to [the] North American environment' [12]. Considerably earlier, in October 1936 Donald W. Buchanan reported to his Canadian Forum readers that the National Film Society planned to program The Plow That Broke the Plains the next month. A founding director of the Society, Buchanan held Lorentz's film up as exemplary of the documentary cinema for which he argued: 'In Canada, we need to see more documentary films if we are to understand properly their power and their meaning.' Although this argument appears to revolve around film itself, his appreciation of The Plow That Broke the Plains applies the US program, the film's sponsor, directly to Canada:
We, too, in Canada have seen the dust storms; we, too, have seen the abandoned farms. What we have not seen in Canada is a Resettlement Administration established on a truly ambitious scale to take title to damaged prairie land in order to retire it from use until the grass has had a chance to come back, when it will be returned to natural use and leased for restricted grazing purposes [13].
Despite the drought it depicted, at least the proposals in Lorentz's film evidently found fertile ground. Although his mission was nationalist, as Charles Acland has indicated, Buchanan's approach was internationalist. Whether or not his conclusions imply an evaluation of the PFRA, his acceptance of the US Resettlement Administration program echoes his approach to developing institutions of film culture in Canada, which looked overseas and over the border for models and support [14].
The Plow That Broke the Plains is the work of a novice film producer and director. Pare Lorentz had intended the project that became his book The Roosevelt Year: 1933 to be a documentary about the first year of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, but he failed to secure backing for a movie [15]. Lorentz campaigned to make a film on the Dust Bowl and, fired from his job as a Hearst columnist, he came to the attention of Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace in 1935. Wallace referred him to the Resettlement Administration, a new New Deal office, rather than the Agriculture department itself [16]. The agency was established by Executive Order of US President Roosevelt on 30 April 1935, with part of its goal to augment and correct measures taken in the year-old Agricultural Adjustment Act. F. Jack Hurley writes, the Resettlement Administration 'was typical of the early experimental period of the New Deal, a hodgepodge of old programs that nobody wanted to administer, along with some very interesting new idea s' [17]. Lorentz's chronicler Robert Snyder remarks, its 'purpose was to provide new methods to solve awkward agricultural problems,' though this understates the scope of the problems and of a program that initially devoted over $330 million to relief, housing development, and land purchase and development [18]. From the earliest point, however, Lorentz's goals seem to have been a film that he later explained in a July 1936 apologia for his own film:
We had two prime objectives in making the picture: one, to show audiences [the Great Plains] a specific and exciting section of the country; the other, to portray the events which led up to one of the major catastrophies [sic] in American history--to show, in other words, the Great Drought which is now going into its sixth year [19].
Although, according to Snyder, Administrator Rexford G. Tugwell's August 1935 appeal for production funding went through several hands intended to translate Lorentz for the bureaucracy, Lorentz's voice remains clear:
The Resettlement Administration proposes to have a motion picture with sound accompaniment made at an estimated expense of $6000, which will have for its subject matter the extent and richness of the western plain lands before their abuse, the settlements thereon, the beginning of misuse, such as overgrazing, overproduction, mechanized farming by absentee owners, etc., and the results thereof, such as wind and soil erosion, drought, dust storms, floods, worn land and poverty. There will also be animated maps showing the area of lands now unfit for profitable farming, and the areas where farmers must be supported, rehabilitated or moved, and animation showing soil areas which can be farmed scientifically and profitably [20].
As important as the persistent traces of Lorentz's voice, the chronicle structure of The Plow That Broke the Plains is evident in this letter, and with it an approach to the subject matter that stresses description over prescription. Although the animated sequences the letter proposes imply the intervention of the government agency, the maps mainly locate areas where the problems named in the first part of the letter exist. To an extent this approach reflected the youth of the agency and the timeline for effectiveness of government aid. Hurley observes:
The years 1935 to 1937 were terribly hard for small farmers and tenant farmers. It took time for federal aid programs to have an impact. By 1937 and thereafter, there would be positive sides of the story to tell, stories of families rescued and fine new farms established, but at the beginning there were only problems [21].
Instead of arguing its role as a publicity tool for the agency's achievements, Tugwell's letter stresses the function of the film as an internal, educational tool for a widely dispersed staff, 'to help the Resettlement Administration and its employees to visualize and understand better the problems confronting them, and to aid them in the prevention of the results of soil erosion and related problems' [22].
Endorsed by Tugwell, Lorentz's goals were partly consistent with those of the Resettlement Administration still photographers. They too were charged to bring back images of the land, the people, and the problems. The photographers, however, were agents of the Historical Section supervised by Roy Stryker, who had been Tugwell's academic protege at Columbia University. Although he was not a committed academic, for Stryker the still photos formed historical records and tools for widespread publicity of contemporary conditions, the Resettlement Administration's client citizens, and the activities of the agency [23]. Many of the famous images made by Resettlement Administration (later Farm Security Administration) photographers, such as the black blizzard depicted by Arthur Rothstein, effectively communicated impressions of the immense and severe natural trauma suffered in the middle of the country [24].
For readers of Fortune late in 1935, a couple of pages of photographs credited to the local newspaper editor, including three shot in quick succession, suggesting the apparent motion of flip-book pictures, similarly illustrated the movement, force, and deadening effects of a Texas dust storm, while a second-person caption drew readers into engagement and sympathy:
You are John McCarty, the editor of the Dalhart Texan. You are standing on the porch of your house at six-thirty on the evening of February 28 last. You are looking west toward Derrioch Street as the dust comes racing down on you. You click your camera three times, as fast as it will work ... Or you are one of the three men walking along a street in Stratford, Texas, on April 14. You are looking back over your shoulder at the overwhelmed and vanishing city ... Either on the Dalhart porch or the Stratford Street you feel the violence and the terror of the dust. On the opposite page, in the dead house, you feel its desolation [25].
According to Richard Dyer MacCann, Lorentz had met Fortune writer Archibald MacLeish shortly after joining the Resettlement Administration, around the time the article appeared. MacLeish later implied that it was the source of Lorentz's film, also faultily recalling the title of his own publication as 'The Plow That Broke the Plains' [26]. When Lorentz came to make his film, he had certainly read 'The Grasslands', if only for the few phrases he borrowed for the commentary, but also for the example provided in the illustrations. The imagery of The Plow That Broke the Plains similarly delivered information and evoked emotional response among its viewers. In particular its own dust storm sequence suggests the additional potential of moving images to convey the disaster to widespread audiences.
Dalhart in 1935, the year of MacLeish's account, recorded over 60 dust storms, so it should be no surprise that Lorentz and his crew found their own to shoot there. According to Snyder's account of the film's production, Lorentz scouted locations by examining the still photographers' pictures and by research. Although he was able to plan production that stretched from Montana to Texas and research his subject matter, script preparation became a point of conflict between Lorentz and his crew. Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, and Leo Hurwitz, all members of the independent documentary organization Nykino and experienced film makers in contrast to Lorentz, had prepared an outline at his request. From that Lorentz developed a shooting script, which Steiner, Strand, and Hurwitz thought unshootable, Strand recalling, 'It just wasn't a guide to the sort of action that we could take with the camera' [27]. Lorentz had sent them on ahead, so he was not even on site to clarify his intentions. Once in production, Hurwitz and Strand constructed a counteractive script, which restored their political position, indicting capitalism for the assault on the land. After joining the crew in Dalhart, Lorentz dismissed them. The conflict between the New Dealer and the three left-wing film makers revolved around scripts as methods of preparation and means of understanding the significance of subject matter and political positions. Strand and Hurwitz, and with evidently lesser commitment Steiner, dealt with causes and the systems that underpin them. Lorentz concentrated on current events, the past of the Plains leading to the present-day crisis. None of them seemed particularly concerned with the government program or the political intervention that formed the pretext for the film's existence [28].
Before Fred James requested a copy to be sent to Ottawa, The Plow That Broke the Plains had gone through some turbulent changes. In his recent investigation, John O'Connor explains that 1936 audiences likely saw a version of the film that included a three-minute segment concisely outlining specific Resettlement Administration programs, including land improvement projects, direct financial aid to farmers, and the relocation of farm families to new, planned communities [29]. Compared to the sporadic and evocative, headline-like declamations that characterize much of the film's spoken commentary, most of the concluding narration is informative, prosaic in tone, and verbally dense. Over the first 25 minutes of the film, narrator Thomas Chalmers reads only about 700 words, but in these final three minutes he speaks nearly 400 [30]. And while Virgil Thomson's score runs throughout the film, no music accompanies the epilogue until its final phrases of commentary.
In the version that has circulated since the film's rerelease in 1962, The Plow That Broke the Plains ends accompanied by the movement Thomson titled 'Devastation.' The theme underscores the migration of farm families from the drought-stricken territory, the barrenness underlined with the concluding images of a leafless tree in the grassless terrain, an empty bird's-nest in the branches a metaphor for the farmers' vacated homes and emigration to more promising terrain. 'All they ask,' pleads the commentary, 'is a chance to start over ... And a chance for their children to eat, to have medical care, to have homes again. 50 000 a month!' The text concludes, 'The sun and winds wrote the most tragic chapter in American agriculture,' offering no indication of measures taken by the state. The epilogue introduces hope in the form of government-sponsored remedies, but it ends with a warning not to repeat the errors of the past that Chalmers reads, as the 'Devastation' theme again rises, resuming his declamatory tone :
The Resettlement Administration is bringing these benefits to thousands who were left stranded and without hope.
But the winds still blow and the sun still bakes the land. We must practice control and conservation if we are to save the rest of the grass. The rains will come again. The plow will dig again. Another decade of reckless use, and the grasslands will truly be the Great American Desert.
Even though the epilogue purports to outline government measures to fix the problems for the future, it ends in the present and projects a conditionally disastrous tomorrow. Appropriate visuals accompany these words of caution: three dry, dusty landscapes to reprise the familiar conclusion of devastation and desertion of the Great Plains.
A Nykino co-founder with Steiner and Hurwitz, Irving Lerner severely criticized the picture, drawing on the outline his colleagues had written at Lorentz's request. If Lerner and Lorentz would have agreed on anything, though, it is the epilogue [31]. Almost immediately Lerner called the sequence 'unnecessary and a little silly (done in the standardized manner of the regular commercial film), which makes a sorry attempt to show what the Resettlement Administration wants to do--and has done. Millions of people are homeless; and by means of an animated map you are informed that 4500 families have been resettled' [32]. Asked about the sequence late in his life Pare Lorentz disavowed responsibility for the epilogue, which he termed a 'sales pitch.' The script he prepared for publication just before his death in 1992--omissions indicate it is edited, and not simply a transcription of the film's commentary--stops before the epilogue starts. In Lorentz's brief memoir accompanying the script, moreover, 'ending' and ' the last sequence' refer to the farmers' displacement and emigration from the region, suppressing any mention of the original conclusion [33]. The sequence may have been removed, O'Connor suggests, as early as 1936. That year, a supportive representative from Texas--the distinctively named Maury Maverick--circulated to his constituents a detailed summary of the film with no mention of the informational conclusion [34]. Yet the newly struck copy sent to Ottawa in late 1937 appears to have included the final outline of government programs, which depicts newly constructed resettlement communities, but apart from maps and graphic titles little other visual information to illustrate or dramatize Resettlement Administration projects. While the sequence makes a strenuous, verbal case for government programs and projects, its few minutes can hardly counteract the dramatic sweep and impact of the prior 25 minutes, which end in a despair so pervasive it seems to rise as both a musical and an emotional echo in the epilo gue's final caution.
E.S. Hopkins of Canada's Division of Field Husbandry submitted a report on Lorentz's picture to Archibald in early October 1937. He commended the film generally for its dramatic representation of the drought and of the toll it exacted on people, who ultimately deserted their homes on the plains. Yet according to Hopkins, what the film depicted so forcefully, and perhaps the force of expression itself, also constituted significant shortcomings:
One serious fault with the picture is that it seems to present an utterly hopeless situation in which the only solution appears to be to leave the district. Nothing is shown in regard to methods of overcoming the various problems so that farmers might utilize their land by improved methods.
The entire picture is too highly dramatized and contains very little useful information. Besides, it would appear that the entire region was very nearly, if not completely, worthless, while in reality there must be only a relatively small percentage of the area so severely affected that it could not be restored to profitable production of some kind. Undoubtedly, much of the area is quite satisfactory for grain production in normal years, and the remaining land could be used for ranching purposes [35].
By the time Experimental Farms director Archibald and Publicity director James were agitating to produce a movie, the PFRA had been active for over two years, while the US agency had been up and running in its reformulated incarnation only a year when Lorentz and crew ventured into the field. What Hopkins saw in The Plow That Broke the Plains coincided with the 'no self-help' measures his colleague Thomson had seen in US Soil Conservation Service films. Not surprisingly for an official of a remedial public program, Hopkins objected that Lorentz's film did not adequately represent government measures, and further that it suggested counterproductive results:
Only a very few statements are made in regard to the rehabilitation program. With the exception of some scenes showing resettlement in other regions, no pictures are presented showing rehabilitation measures. A few statements are presented listing some of the measures taken, but this is extremely brief and not sufficiently clear to be of very much value.
If it were desired to show that the entire country was useless and that the people should leave it, I think the United States picture would be very valuable for presenting such an idea. However, if, as I am sure is the case, it is desired to show, first, some conception of the extent and seriousness of the problem, and then some information on the measures being taken to correct it, I believe that the proposed moving picture which is being prepared in regard to the PFRA program, should be arranged on an entirely different basis [36].
A Film from Our Own Department
Only days after Hopkins reported, Archibald submitted to the Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Barton, an eight-page 'Suggested Scenario' that both echoes The Plow That Broke the Plains, fresh in their thoughts, and clearly demonstrates divergences. The Canadian scenario, like Lorentz's film, starts with an animated map, which locates the site of the drought in the country. Where the US map shows the drought as a band stretching from the northern border to Texas, Archibald's scenario depicts place progressively and relatively, first specifying, 'Relation of Prairie Provinces to Canada,' then second, 'Agricultural area of Prairie Provinces,' and third, 'Drought area in relation to Prairie Provinces.' Lorentz's map describes state boundaries in the affected area, but clearly insists on the importance of the regional crisis to the national whole. The Archibald plan, as a tool to educate viewers about an Ottawa program and not incidentally to win and maintain consent, still localizes the problem [37].
The most important distinction between The Plow That Broke the Plains, as Lorentz planned and executed the film, and Heritage, as it was prepared and to some extent realized, involves the representation of time. Lorentz clearly outlined his film as an evolutionary chronicle to describe a path leading from the past to the catastrophe of his present day. Archibald's account incorporates a historical introduction; the following headings indicate successive scenes:
2. Buffalo Grazing. To illustrate original condition of prairies. Natural grass cover prevented drifting.
3. Indians on Blood Reserve
4. Cattle Grazing on Range. To illustrate first stage of development in drought area. Soil drifting not so great a potential danger as under farming conditions.
5. Breaking Prairie for Grain The beginning of agricultural settlement.
Following these images--of present-day bison and aboriginal people to indicate a pre-contact past, and ranching and sodbusting to describe the growth of more recent agricultural practices--the scenario indicates another map, 'showing expansion of wheat area in successive years' and 'Data from census reports.' These scenes constitute the total representation of events leading to the drought. A series of 13 more scenes to the end of page two describes the present-day drought, a couple of images of more fruitful and 'normal' conditions included by way of contrast. The remaining five pages--starting with 'View of Parliament Buildings, Ottawa,' captioned 'The national importance of the drought problem justifies Federal action'--incorporate a series of scenes depicting various measures of the PFRA in the sites where they were practiced.
The metaphoric and impressionistic shooting script Pare Lorentz had written was not usable in any practical sense, his crew complained. In contrast, Archibald's scenario appears probably to have been more useful practically and politically than artistically. It served as an itinerary, indicating where and when scenes ought to be shot, and comprehensively outlined important elements of PFRA operations. So it had utility, even if it were not a coherent or compelling blueprint for a movie. Frank Badgley had been contacted and the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau effectively contracted to make the picture. There exist no clear indications, however, that Bureau personnel had a hand in design of the project at this point, though there are no recorded complaints or amendments on their part, either. Deputy Minister Barton approved the project within days, and a few days after that Motion Picture Bureau staffer J. Booth Scott was on his way west to start shooting before winter set in and he came home to Otta wa [38]. Scott returned west the next year to complete production, and edited the film in autumn 1938 [39].
At $6000, the budget for The Plow That Broke the Plains compared to the non-salary costs of Heritage, though Lorentz's finished film came in at the considerably higher price of $19 260 [40]. Some of the hallmarks of Lorentz's film--the extensive location shooting, the use of Great Plains farmers in the production's small but evocative roles, the incorporation of commentary read by narrator Chalmers and Thomson's musical score rather than location sound--have been attributed as much to budget limitations as expressive properties. The costs, however, included fees for the experienced crew members. As 'Technical Consultants,' a reclassification Lorentz instigated, for the seven weeks they shot throughout the western states they received salaries of $25 per day plus expenses, a fee considerably higher than the customary scale of about $10 per day for civil service cinematographers and less than Lorentz's own daily earnings on the project [41]. Proportionally, their fees also topped the salaries of the Motion Pic ture Bureau staff responsible for Heritage. In addition to writer and director Scott, who earned $3120 for his year's work, they included motion picture photographer Ernest R. Wilson, who is credited with 'Optical Effects' and who earned an annual $2520, and W.H. (Bill) Lane and Charles J. Quick, who recorded sound, were paid, respectively $2760 and $2520, all of which were reported separately from the cost of the film's production. Apart from salaries, Heritage cost the Dominion Department of Agriculture $6452.46 [42].
By the time the entire project was fulfilled, the Motion Picture Bureau had actually produced a total of five films for the Department of Agriculture. Four silent pictures, each on a specific facet of PFRA activity, were made to be used as educational aids for farmers [43]. The fifth, the sound production Heritage, was directed toward a more general viewership, and had a broader goal of promotion and publicity for the PFRA, even though questions about access to that audience and distribution plans persisted. While generally supportive throughout the production, Deputy Minister Barton also expressed reticence and a need for reassurances about routes such a film might take to reach viewers. Archibald and James tried to convince Barton to authorize the start of shooting in autumn 1937. Their desire to get the project underway before winter set in may help to explain a change in opinion. In August James seemed to note that theatrical distribution was doubtful, but a month later, reporting Motion Picture Bureau d irector Badgley's ideas, he tried to set Barton's apprehensive mind at ease:
He says he has no doubt but that most of the theatres would readily accept for free showing a one reel film if it was explained to them the national importance of the problem we are trying to meet. This, of course, would be a standard size film, that is 35 mm. From the negative of the picture taken a 16 mm. film could be made and he says this could be shown at meetings of service clubs, women's institutes and similar organizations throughout the country with a portable machine. Such service clubs and private organizations would, no doubt, be glad to see such a film if accompanied by a speaker [44].
Distribution questions had raised comparable problems for Pare Lorentz, whose goals were similar to Archibald's. Lorentz believed that The Plow That Broke the Plains was of a quality such that commercial exhibitors might provide the wide exposure that their theatres afforded a pro-New Deal tract [45]. Although Lorentz may have expressed his belief that this pilot government film could have commercial outlets, Tugwell emphasized the educational role for the film and its internal uses, not any release to a wider public in commercial venues. Although Snyder affirms that 'this was Lorentz's recommendation and Tugwell's hope,' perhaps Tugwell anticipated objections or problems if the issue of commercially releasing a publicly funded picture concerning a controversial New Deal program were raised [46].
Lorentz, however, played both public and commercial ends. He had engineered the film's initial, private screenings for both publicity and reassurances, with a world premiere at the White House for President Franklin Roosevelt and invited members of Congress, and a Hollywood show for such directors as his friend and benefactor King Vidor, Rouben Mamoulian, and Lewis Milestone. When Lorentz showed it more publicly, Washington press coverage was enthusiastic enough to be placed in the Congressional Record by that same Roosevelt-supporting member of the House who thought enough of the picture to inform his Texas constituents. Rep. Maverick added his own criticism of a Washington Post review that compared Lorentz's film less favourably to a Soviet film on agriculture. (According to Lorentz, the reporter later admitted that he was just following his paper's editorial line against the Resettlement Administration, and that he had actually left the screening before the US film was shown in order to meet his deadline [47].
Despite positive response, commercial exhibitors resisted Lorentz's attempts to place the film. It ran nearly a half-hour, perhaps an awkward length for conventional programming. The Resettlement Administration might have called the film 'instructional,' but, as Robert Snyder indicates, opponents were more inclined to call it 'propaganda,' without the sanguinity with which Canadian bureaucrats used the word [48]. Lorentz had also complained off the record to the White House about Will Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association. After the showing that the Post had excoriated, Hays had threatened to cut off aid from the sponsoring Museum of Modem Art Film Library, and further banned Lorentz's film from distribution within the movie industry that Hays oversaw [49].
Furthermore, the film appeared in a politically contentious year for the president and the New Deal, when Roosevelt was fighting his first reelection campaign after introducing sweeping social reforms. In spring 1936, the Republicans in Congress intensified their attacks on Rexford Tugwell and the Resettlement Administration, aiming at the planned communities program, which The Plow That Broke the Plains had illustrated in its initial presentations. In mid-year the legislation that enabled the reform agency was ruled unconstitutional [50].
In a New York Times report on the film's difficulties, a distributor was quoted, 'If any private company or individual made this picture, it would be a documentary film. When the government makes it, it automatically becomes a propaganda picture.' Yet the report also suggests that the resistance was motivated not only politically, but also economically, by a resistance to perceived state competition with the private enterprise of Hollywood. Perhaps ironically, what exposure the film finally did gain in commercial cinemas Lorentz attained by drumming up business in individual theatres and independent chains, more like a merchant than a civil servant [51].
Giving the Correct Picture
Clearly the Canadians intended to follow a route different from Lorentz's to describe the drought and make a case for government intervention. Lorentz wrote about his own film for McCall's in 1936, only a couple of months after he had finished it, when Roosevelt was campaigning for a second term, and while the Resettlement Administration was under attack. With modesty or diplomacy, or second-guessing his own production, he avoided questions of partisan politics and forcefully commented on his film in terms of emotional appeal:
The Plow That Broke the Plains is an unusual motion picture which might have been a really great one had the story and the construction been up to the rest of the workmanship. As it is, it tells the story of the Plains, and it tells it with some emotional value--an emotion that springs out of the soil itself. Our heroine is the grass, our villain the sun and the wind, our players the actual farmers living in the Plains country. It is a melodrama of nature--the tragedy of turning grass into dust, a melodrama that only Carl Sandburg or Willa Cather, perhaps, could tell as it should be told.
You will not see the full horror of the dust storms in the picture, a horror that drove men to kill their cattle because they could not stand their ceaseless bellowing, the horror of children choking and dying of dust pneumonia. You will not see it because we had limited funds and a skeleton staff, but you will see enough of the Plains and the Great Drought to make it worth your while [52].
Where Lorentz's film has the sweep of time, and for a short while included the contemporary measures that for the Resettlement Administration likely formed the reason for the film's being, the Canadians' plans entailed broad coverage of space and scrupulous inclusion of the government schemes and activities that the film was intended to represent. Diverting attention from issues of government intervention, Lorentz implies that the land itself and the natural conditions form the source of the impact that the finished film contains, yet the Canadian scenario similarly suggests that whatever effect and value the completed film will have is principally to be found in the objects it will represent.
Canadian agriculture officials found what evidence of corrective measures existed in Lorentz's film to be inadequate. Not only is it restricted to a few, final moments, ultimately removed from the picture, but those moments concern measures that differed from the mandate of the PFRA. Practically point for point, the epilogue to The Plow That Broke the Plains echoes the program of the Resettlement Administration, noting its plans for relief loans to farm families in need and emergency grants, homestead development and suburban, low-cost housing, and acquisition and development of damaged lands [53]. Though an important agency, as the epilogue commentary also indicates, the Resettlement Administration formed only part of the New Deal's plans for drought rehabilitation: 'The Soil Conservation Service, the Forest Service, and C[ivilian] C[onservation] C[orps], and the Resettlement Administration are cooperating with the Department of Agriculture in working 65 Land Improvement Projects in the Plains.'
Lorentz's film poses technology as antagonist, while also ultimately both proposing and deemphasizing technological remedies for the woes of US agriculture. The more expansive commentary in Heritage clarifies the economic determinants of the rapidly growing agriculture industries, and the economic and social effects for both the West and Canada before the climatic changes in the latter 1920s strained the means of the region to a breaking point. Rather than an afterthought, moreover, Heritage clearly indicates the organizational work that forms part of such a program. Images of surveyors and planners at drawing tables on the one hand and typists and adding machines on the other suggest the range of work necessary to implement the policies of the PFRA. The commentary refers to the engineers as 'trained men schooled to fight the relentless forces of nature,' and the machinery mustered for the task as '[t]wentieth century wheels against the hidden power of timeless forces.' Rather than suppressing ideas of techn ology, Scott's film vigorously affirms its potential value. Moreover, the metaphor of combat that pits engineering against nature suggests the social and economic forces of war that previously had generated an economic boom in the agriculture industries, and which shortly would do the same again.
Aside from their similar subject matter, Heritage echoes The Plow That Broke the Plains in other, formal terms, including structure. The film makers and subsequent commentators have differed in determining the parts that constitute Lorentz's film. The synopsis submitted by the Resettlement Administration to the Library of Congress for copyright purposes in 1936 describes 10 sequences, including the conclusion, a plan that Lorentz echoed when he published his own nine-segment outline (which omits the final sequence) 56 years later. A group of Northeastern University graduate students who prepared a detailed breakdown of the film divide it into six major sequences--some subdivided into discrete, smaller sequences--not including in their numbering the opening titles or printed 'prologue' text or the original conclusion excised from the film shortly after its completion, while John O'Connor portions the film into seven segments. In all these cases, both informational content and music, indicated by the structure of Virgil Thomson's score, play important roles in determining the film's organization [54].
Heritage does not strictly follow the blueprint its 'suggested scenario' represented, although it holds to the general pattern of the written plan. Although divisible into a greater number of segments than Lorentz's, Scott's film also clearly divides in two. The first part is over 10 minutes long, and the second is about seven minutes. By comparison, Heritage is also verbose. The commentary in Part One runs to about 950 words, and in Part Two approximately 550 words. The first part of Heritage parallels The Plow That Broke the Plains as an account of the past to the present-day dust bowl, but the second part distinguishes it from its US counterpart. It compares to the jettisoned epilogue that Lorentz disdained. Actually longer, and proportionally a much greater segment of the whole film, the second part of Heritage similarly acts as a 'sales pitch' for the PFRA and its programs. Although, to follow Irving Lerner's critical approach, its 'standardized manner' might prove less evocative, the sequence also offe rs a significant mark of difference.
Both The Plow That Broke the Plains and Heritage unfold as historical chronicles, which ultimately empty into evidence of the government programs that sponsored the films. As such, the chronological accounts that trace how the land and agriculture reached their current crises support the measures the programs take and suggest that the governments' action might redress the adverse conditions. Implicitly they also suggest that the crises have causes extending beyond the less predictable lack of rainfall, including political and economic forces on a global scale, and that those causes have grown over years of abuse.
Following opening titles, and in Lorentz's film a textual prologue, animated maps locate the general areas of concern within the countries. The maps themselves have purposes beyond simple, geographical information. The introductory material identifies the flat grasslands; by placing them within the greater United States and Canada it demonstrates both where the afflicted regions are and where they are not. As a consequence it suggests shared responsibility on the part of the unaffected regions for the welfare of the nations' midsections and supports the mandates of the federal programs the films promote.
Both follow chronological lines. They start with open vistas implying a time before human habitation, and proceed through aboriginal occupation to European settlement and cultivation of the regions in the nineteenth century. After their openings both films use contemporary images to depict the distant past and the process of development. The first sign of inhabitation in Lorentz's film is a lone cowboy, and his narrator intones, 'First come the cattle,' as the plains appear to fill with his herds. By contrast the Canadian account starts with the buffalo who roamed the range prior to domestic herds and, instead of the cowhand, an aboriginal man on horseback, connoting a time before European contact (Figs 1 and 2). Settlement by eastern Canadians consists of a wagon train (Fig. 3), while the US version comprises stock footage of a dramatic land rush, in both cases leading to cultivation of the grassland.
They chart the development of engine-driven means of tilling the soil and reaping harvest and recount the dramatically increased demand for wheat during the First World War and in the years afterward, and the response in overproduction until the end of the 1920s and the economic crisis and climatic disaster that followed into the 1930s. The revised version of the US film ends with a sequence depicting the migration of destitute farm families from the plains, the original version continuing to depict and describe briefly the Resettlement Administration programs; the Canadian film similarly dramatizes the decampment of a family from its farm, a pivotal point before outlining the remedial and preparatory measures taken by the PFRA.
The two films share not only general, structural similarities, but also details. Pare Lorentz's economical commentary, made authoritative in part by Thomas Chalmers's stentorian reading, includes vivid and allusive phrases. Scott clearly adapted some and copied others into his comparably more prosaic text. For example, as O'Connor indicates, Lorentz's opening, printed text introduces a phrase, 'high winds and sun,' that Chalmers later speaks as he describes the unbroken grasslands: 'A country of high winds and sun. High winds and sun. Without rivers. Without streams. With little rain [55]. Establishing the risks of farming this land, Chalmers reiterates, 'Progress came to the plains. High winds and sun. High winds and sun. A country without rivers and with little rain. Settler, plow at your peril. Two hundred miles from water! Two hundred miles from town! But the land is new.' At a comparable point in Heritage, as the prairies are tilled for the first time, the Canadian narrator reads,
Soon, the work began. There were no trees to clear, no rocks to obstruct the plough. Across the face of the virgin plains, long furrows appeared. And the prairie grass vanished on the wings of a new era. The world wanted wheat, and the land was new. But the sun was hot, and the rivers were many miles apart.
Later, to describe the drought of the 1930s, the Canadian film directly commandeers Lorentz's key phrase. A newspaper headline reads, 'High Winds and Sun Damage Wheat Crop' (Fig. 4). With resigned pathos, the commentator intones, 'For eight long years, the rains held out. The sun beat down upon a tortured earth. Deprived of its original covering of grass and unprotected by crop growth, the land lay exposed to the erosive influence of high winds and sun. High winds and sun.'
Apart from such direct, verbal plundering, Heritage also adopts moments of technique and tone from The Plow That Broke the Plains. Both, for example, use newsreel footage to represent the overseas combat of World War One, and convey the moment through complex editing strategies. Lorentz intercuts tanks and tractors, cannonfire and flowing wheat, and newspaper headlines to connote the interconnection of the war effort and wheat production, while Scott uses graphics denoting the passing years and a complex, composite montage to represent the war (Fig. 5), the volumes of wheat production economically depicted in a shot of cascading grain. The similarly fragmented, slogan-style commentary conveys the urgency of the moment, although with a significant difference. Lorentz's commentary declaims, 'Wheat will win the war! Plant wheat! Plant the cattle ranges! Plant your vacant lots--plant wheat! Wheat for the boys over there! Wheat for the Allies! Wheat for the British! Wheat for the Belgians! Wheat for the French! W heat at any price! Wheat will win the war!' Scott's narrator cries, '1914 and the world was plunged into war. From hungry, struggling nations of the Old World came the call to Canada: Send us wheat! 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918. From overseas still came the ever-increasing appeal: Send more wheat!' While Lorentz's film depicts farming as having produced a weapon that helped win the war, the Canadian account, spoken in part in the recipients' voice, offers relief and, not incidentally, the resources of a colony to its European ancestors, now described in desperate need. In this account of the war-driven boom in the wheat economy, moreover, the US film takes the supply side, while the Canadian stresses demand.
Both films convey the 1930s drought generally as a series of tableaus in motion, in contrast to the vigorous activity of the boom years. Dried-up crops, farmers looking skyward for rain clouds or stepping through the dust that encases their idle tractors and plows, windmills turning or dust blowing in the wind, and farm animals who have seen more contented times all stand for the experience of the persistent, desert conditions (Figs 6 and 7). Lorentz's depiction of the drought corresponds with the imagery of the Resettlement Administration's still photographers. He was reported to have used the Historical Section photographs to scout locations, and several filmed images are redolent of some of the most famous stills, such as Arthur Rothstein's, although the band of photographers was only starting its work when Lorentz had begun production. Rothstein made his pictures of dust storms and farms encased in dried earth in mid-1936, after The Plow That Broke the Plains had been completed. According to James Curtis , he borrowed Lorentz's imagery, themes, and, controversially, methods of dramatization and staging. For one photograph he even borrowed the film's title [56].
Lorentz's depiction of the drought also recalls a brief sequence in Our Daily Bread (1934), his friend King Vidor's tale of a communal farm that goes far beyond the measures of the New Deal, and which finally has to meet the challenge of drought. Paula Rabinowitz indicates that Vidor's film 'shifts registers ... from domestic melodrama to political exposition' and uses 'tropes' of both Hollywood and documentary, citing also Lorentz's 'appropriation of themes' from Our Daily Bread [57]. Vidor uses four images and, unusually for a fiction film and a unique moment in this particular picture, a superimposed title to stress the turn in the weather threatening the corn crop: a stilled windmill; a field of desiccated cornstalks, the word 'DROUGHT' superimposed; a farmer's feet as he trudges through the dust; and a dog lying on the ground. Similar images appear in both The Plow That Broke the Plains and Heritage; although their windmills turn and stress the erosive winds that exacerbated the effects of little rain, the documentaries also depict the ruined crops, dispirited farmers, and suffering animals. Vidor's and Lorentz's dogs pant and tremble in the heat, while Scott's appears healthier. In each case, however, the image suggests the effects of the drought on creatures even less able than humans to control their living conditions, and who depend for their now-threatened lives on human beings whose survival is also endangered.
A dust storm constitutes a key moment in depicting the harsh turns of nature in both films, and in each follows immediately on a sequence that describes the economic boom of the 1920s and the crash that marked the end of the decade. Lorentz's justly famous sequence combines images of harvesting at night, denoting the increased production, with more connotative shots--of a stock ticker printing quotations apparently so vigorously that it finally falls off the table into a pile of tickertape and of a swinging black jazz drummer--that visually echo the activity. The musician moreover suggests a source for Virgil Thomson's score, which has accelerated from a moderately paced blues to a frenzied tempo and dissonance. Scott's film represents the glut in production with parallel shots of tumbling grain and falling coins, but also more clearly denotes economic growth by depicting the buildings that have grown to create cities on the prairie, a stock ticker like Lorentz's to indicate market activity, and spinning ma chinery and a high-angle shot travelling over a factory floor to convey industry. As in Lorentz's film, changes in the musical score reinforce the frenetic qualities of the sequence, but Heritage also employs a series of complexly designed optical wipes in this sequence to generate the impression that all this activity out of control is coherently tied together.
Juxtaposed with the crash, the dust bowl in both films effectively responds to overexertion with enforced idleness, and unpredicted forces of nature supplant the uncontrolled human forces of economy. Typical of Lorentz's film, the sequence describing the boom and crash of the 1920s lacks explanatory, verbal commentary and relies on connotative associations in the pictures, sound, and music. In contrast, Scott's commentary details the increase in production, consumption, and employment, and verbally marks a break between the sequences. Accompanying images of industry that fade out at the end of the sequence, the narrator concludes, 'Employment increased. Labour problems were rare. Depressions were unknown. 'Then,'--after a shot of a farm buried in dust, a windmill turning above--'without warning, the West began to experience the first subtle indications of disaster.' The threatening stillness of farms engulfed in dust and crops that have dried up soon disappears as the wind rises.
Long-term patterns of land use and globally determined causes offered challenges to the documentary film makers attempting to outline the crisis in agriculture, but wind and dried earth provided visibly dramatic episodes to represent the natural forces that punished the farmers. Throughout both films, moreover, music plays an important, expressive role. Thomson has often been commended for his inventive use of the folk melodies and hymns that pervade his score, and such sources for the tunes contained in the score arguably underline a particular 'Americanness' in the film. The 'Wind and Dust' movement, which with some of the film's spare sound effects accompanies the storm, builds in dissonance and rhythm to convey the buffeting winds visible in their effects on people and the land. The movement ends, however, as the rhythmic score resolves into the more melodic theme, the hymn 'Praise God, From Whom All Blessings Flow.' Its appearance suggests Godly implications in the events of nature and perhaps, as it re curs through the following sequence, the need for faith as a precondition to survival.
By contrast, Howard Fogg's score for Heritage has little such evident resonance. A prolific composer and arranger, who had conducted on tour in Canada and the US with the popular troupe the Dumbells in the latter 1920s, prepared musical broadcasts for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and arranged and conducted for the Canadian Victor Talking Machine Company and for Associated Screen News, he also has the distinction of having written and conducted the score for Rhapsody in Two Languages (1934), generally accepted as the first Canadian film with an original, synchronized musical track [58]. In that composition Fogg had demonstrated himself as capable as Thomson of incorporating well-known tunes into an original score, but his music for Heritage is less readily traceable. As a result, it offers fewer incontestable links, changing in style from sequence to sequence, and offering different possible associations. Accompanying images of covered wagons taking European settlers west, it could have come from a romantic Hollywood score by Alfred Newman for a John Ford picture. Later, Fogg enhances the images of wind-blown dust and debris in this sequence in a loopier, dramatic form, more modern in style, that recalls passages by the German, Hanns Eisler, who also composed for documentary and dramatic films and theatre at the time (59]. Though a respected musician and composer of orchestral and small ensemble pieces and art songs, even within Canada Fogg achieved nothing like the status Virgil Thomson attained in the world of serious music in the United States, for which the music for Pare Lorentz's films comprised key stepping stones. While Fogg's score may have been more elusive than Thomson's, an evidently original composition, it was incorporated into the production as an expressive tool in a fashion consistent not only with sound cinema in general, but with the aesthetic practice of documentary in the 1930s [60].
Although the broadly described structures of the two films are similar, the film makers took different approaches to editing and arranging one shot or sequence with the next. The Plow That Broke the Plains opens with a technically intricate sequence: lines within a map of the US are animated to illustrate the boundaries of the Great Plains, and of the states included in the region, then an image of the grasslands fills the area and the region's borderlines wipe outward so the landscape fills the frame. With few exceptions, most of the remaining shots in the film are joined with straight cuts. The exceptions--the occasional link with fades; a superimposed image of a printing press and the handbills promoting homesteading; perhaps most notably the series of dried-up landscape images joined by dissolves that conclude both the main body of the film and the epilogue--are particularly expressive by comparison. The film incorporates only a handful of dissolves, near the beginning and at the end. One set joins a few shots of the virgin grassland before settlement, the other the concluding shots of the barren terrain after the desertion, creating an echoing frame for an account leading from unspoiled promise to disaster.
Lorentz's film includes rudimentary cuts that both create impressions of continuity and generate relations more akin to intell
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