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4 - Activism and Advocacy: The Depression Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2013

Jeffrey Geiger
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Summary

In 1936, an article in the Mid-Week Pictorial took some sideswipes at avant-garde films like Rain (1929) and Lot in Sodom (1932) while praising the varied, low-budget efforts being made for politically active projects:

Not all the films that are made are the product of Hollywood. […] There are little fadistic art movies – studies in light and shade of a box of matches, or a prolonged camera attack on an afternoon of rain. There are films made obscurely without box-office appeal, by serious craftsmen who wish to experiment with the medium of pictures; wealthy amateurs who do symbolic stories out of the Bible; and amateur rookies who try their hand at direction with the Brooklyn Bridge as the cast. But the really important films, made outside the iron conines of Hollywood, are those produced by genuine film artists, seriously experimenting with the young technique of the camera, and the producers of the scattered films that attempt to portray American Labor Problems.

(‘Dignity of Toil’ 1936)

As this overview attests, the 1930s was marked by beliefs that the ‘really important’ work was not taking place in major studios nor in the aesthetic experiments and armchair travels of wealthy cineastes, but in street-level political films. The Mid-Week Pictorial singles out here the American Labor Productions' union activist film Millions of Us (1936).

Type
Chapter
Information
American Documentary Film
Projecting the Nation
, pp. 86 - 120
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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