Dawson Chen - 2022 Near Scholar

2021-22 JOHN NEAR GRANT Recipient Composition, Casting, and Counterpoint: How the New Deal Films of Pare Lorentz Redefined the American Documentary Dawson Chen

Chen 1

Composition, Casting, and Counterpoint: How the New Deal Films of Pare Lorentz Redefined the American Documentary

Dawson Chen 2022 Near Scholar Mentors: Ms. Katy Rees and Mrs. Meredith Cranston April 13, 2022

Chen 2 Amid the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, Pare Lorentz created a series of pioneering documentaries, sponsored by the Roosevelt administration. Through both tried and trusted methods and novel film techniques, Lorentz told stories through his documentaries that garnered public attention and support for New Deal programs, such as the Resettlement Administration (RA), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA).

In The Plow that Broke the Plains, Lorentz pioneered his original style of combining detailed images, poetic narration, and a masterful score in documentary form. By capturing the terrors of the frequent storms and barren fields of the Dust Bowl crisis, Lorentz brought a national spotlight to the Resettlement Administration’s vision of providing communities to migrant farmers.1 In The River, Lorentz further developed his style, blending music, sound effects and poetry with nature images to bring attention to the flooding crisis along the Mississippi. With his second highly marketable film, Lorentz demonstrated that motion pictures had the potential to be purposed for more than fictional entertainment, and that documentaries sponsored by the government could effectively tap into that potential, uniting Americans behind social and environmental causes.2 As a part of the United States Film Service, Lorentz’s later films The Fight for Life and The Power and the Land detailed the difficulties of childbirth and the importance of electrification. These productions represented expert executions of documentary filmmaking.

Key techniques used in Lorentz’s later films included contrapuntal sound, the casting of a

1

Jon Wilkman, Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2020), 88 2 Fanning Hearon, "The Motion-Picture Program and Policy of the United States Government," The Journal of Educational Sociology 12, no. 3 (1938): 156.

Chen 3 mixture of non-actors and actors, repetition in dialogue and imagery, and parallel storytelling.

From 1935 to 1941, Lorentz’s expert use of these film techniques throughout his New Deal films proved that documentaries backed by the government that have artistic merit could accrue commercial success, educate national audiences, and unite citizens behind the nation’s missions and agendas during times of crisis. 3 An Evolving Medium in Troubling Times As the prosperous decade of the 1920s transitioned into the depression-ridden thirties, social issues came to the forefront of the minds of every middle-class American citizen. A “narrative of conflict” became the dominant interpretation of the time, giving the 1930s names like the “Fervent Years,” the “Angry Decade” and the “Years of Protest.”4 In the entertainment industry, themes of escapism became prominent, and popular films fell into genres of fantasy, adventure, and science fiction.5 However, despite this label of escapism that critics and producers had put on the motion pictures of the thirties, modern film historians argued that the Depression Era fiction films merely served as a vehicle to deliver powerful allegories and metaphors regarding the most prominent social issues.6 Hollywood did not dare to take commercial risks or provoke controversy by explicitly centering their films around political or social messaging, but the underlying need for such a medium was there. For now, this desire for dialogue and activism in media was hidden behind fictional storytelling, and as a result, movies could not illuminate the most pressing social issues to national audiences.

3

Lisa Thompson, "Resettlement Administration (RA) (1935)," The Living New Deal, last modified November 18, 2016, accessed February 17, 2022.

4 David Eldridge, American Culture in the 1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 4, accessed March 19, 2022, ProQuest.

5 Eldridge, 65.

6 Eldridge, 68.

Chen 4 Viewers of these fiction films could not be inspired to act, in an organized or scalable way, upon the ideas carried by the so-called powerful allegories analyzed by film historians.

A closer attempt at illuminating social issues in film was the movement of social documentaries by independent organizations. The most prominent of which, the Film and Photo League, was a group of somewhat qualified, amateur filmmakers, photographers, film critics, and primarily activists and political theorists. 7 Together, they documented numerous foreclosures, strikes, and protests on video.8 While they began as loosely organized activities, the Film and Photo League eventually grew to create larger productions that attracted larger audiences. Nonetheless, such productions still operated on a miniscule scale and did not stand a chance against the mainstream films coming out of Hollywood. Part of the reason was that in the early 1930s, the monopoly that Hollywood established on the distribution and exhibition of motion pictures prevented any radical films from screening on a national scale. More importantly, the nonfiction activist films lacked sponsorship, professional filmography, and at its core, artistic recognition by film critics and general viewers alike.

A New Era of Government-Sponsored Art Before the New Deal documentaries and career of Lorentz, the federal government had already established numerous programs to create and distribute art, from murals to photographs, for the purpose of promoting its political agenda and social programs.

The shift from the Hoover to Roosevelt administration in 1933 meant a sharp increase in government spending and involvement in social programs. Historian Eric Barnouw writes that “President Hoover considered the Depression . . . a crisis of confidence; undermining confidence

7

Wilkman, Screening Reality, 79.

Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 112.

8

Chen 5 was therefore a public disservice, and optimism was statesmanship.”9 Since shedding light on the dire economic situation through media would be directly undermining confidence, the Hoover administration’s relatively laissez-faire approach to the depression also meant minimal publicity.

This also provides some cause for the escapism genre, or fictional facades, that dominated motion pictures. Barnouw continues to describe how “radio concentrated on smooth music, fortune-telling, and advertising.”10 Hoover and the Republican press encouraged stories of fantasy and adventure that distracted Americans from daily realities.

In an introduction to a film review, Lorentz recounts an encounter with Will Hays, chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, in which Hays would not allow any newsreels or newspapers to capture “any sound pictures of the Hall-Mills trial, the Sinclair trial, or any other real news story” because he only wants to “give us pleasant little glimpses of jazz bands and foreign lands.”11 If instances described by Lorentz were pervasive, it would have been nearly impossible for small, private productions on highly contentious social issues to distribute their stories and messages. As can be predicted, the government’s attitude on publicity changed completely when Roosevelt came into office.

The new administration, with its alphabet soup of federal administrations, social programs, and economic policies, needed ways to broadcast the message of the New Deal on a national scale. In the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the federal government employed artists in public projects, where themes like joblessness, poverty, and environmental crisis became heavily expressed and publicized, in a genre that historians refer to as social realism.

Dorothy Lang, a WPA photographer, documented the plight of the Dust Bowl crisis, eliciting

9

Barnouw, Documentary: A History, 111.

Barnouw, 111.

11 Pare Lorentz, Lorentz on Film: Movies, 1927 to 1941 (Norman (Okla.): University of Oklahoma, 1986), 39.

10

Chen 6 social reform and support for federal programs like the Resettlement Administration.12 The Federal Art Project, an initiative sponsored by the WPA, contracted painters and sculptors to create murals, galleries, and more than 100 community art centers across the country.13 While the primary purpose of the WPA and Federal Art Project was to create jobs for artists, these programs signified that the federal government would no longer shy away from bringing the Great Depression and the national crisis into public spotlight.

How Pare Lorentz Became FDR’s Filmmaker With improved cinematography and filmmaking technologies, a desire for quality nonfiction films on social issues, and a new administration eager to invest in various art forms, the environment was ripe for a government-sponsored film project. The film would be The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), and the man to propose and execute it would be Lorentz.

Born on December 11, 1905, Lorentz grew up in West Virginia, in a considerably wealthy household. His father was a publisher, and his mother a professional singer. 14 Throughout high school and university, Lorentz pursued an interest in writing and journalism, editing the humor magazine and serving as president of the Southern Association of College Editors at the University of West Virginia. 15 After leaving university, Lorentz pursued several career paths to earn money to continue his education, one of which was as a music critic. In his journals and memoirs, Lorentz often reviewed film scores and consistently expressed how much potential was wasted in the soundtracks that seemed disconnected from the picture. 16 In 1927, he

12

Janie Hubbard, "Dorothea Lange," Social Studies Research and Practice 14, no. 3 (2019): 1.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, "WPA Federal Art Project," in Britannica, 1, last modified April 4, 2019, accessed March 19, 2022.

14 Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 14.

15 Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 15.

16 Snyder, 15.

13

Chen 7 became a film reviewer for Judge. In the next two years, he moved to the New York Evening Journal and Vanity Fair.17 Lorentz later collaborated with Morris Ernst to write a book, Censored: The Private Life of the Movies, advocating for more realism in movies.18 Lorentz aspired to become a filmmaker, to realize the potential of this powerful medium, which he felt Hollywood had yet to fulfill. His first vision for a project was a newsreel documentary about the first year of the Roosevelt administration, but due to lack of funding, he eventually turned it into an illustrated book, The Roosevelt Year: 1933. In 1935, Lorentz’s book, his film reviews, his political columns, and his frequent advocacy for a film on the Dust Bowl caught the attention of people in the Resettlement Administration.19 At the time, Rexford Tugwell, an economist on Roosevelt’s brain trust and the director of the RA, had found success in publicizing the RA through photographs and was now seeking to extend the marketing campaign. 20 Tugwell onboarded Lorentz, the film critic and writer, to find a filmmaker to produce a documentary on the dust bowl, and Lorentz recruited himself for the job of director.21 Over the next five years, Lorentz would produce four major documentaries for various New Deal agencies, ranging from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the Rural Electrification Administration. While Lorentz was involved in several other productions, this analysis of Lorentz’s techniques and impact will be limited to The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), The River (1938), The Fight for Life (1940), and The Power and the Land (1940).

17

Snyder, 16.

Wilkman, Screening Reality, 87.

19 Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 24.

20 Wilkman, Screening Reality, 88.

21 Wilkman, 88.

18

Chen 8 Preproduction - Repetition, Refrains, and Allusions in Poetic Screenwriting The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River represented government-sponsored documentaries that served to glorify and honor national natural landmarks, highlight the crises that these environments were in, and promote a government program that would alleviate those crises.

The motivation for The Plow was to demonstrate to the American public the importance of the Great Plains and the severity of the Dust Bowl environmental crisis. By doing so, the RA hoped to rally support for the federal communities established to provide housing and jobs for migrant farmers. With the public firmly behind the RA, Roosevelt and Tugwell could more effectively negotiate with Congress, keeping the agency alive and sustained with a budget.

Furthermore, Lorentz hoped to make a film of merit, which he defined to be a documentary that would not be forced onto commercial theaters by the government but would hold up to Hollywood quality and prove the potential for documentaries as a medium of large-scale social discourse and political activism.22 Leading up to the production of The Plow, Lorentz only wrote a rough outline of a script and focused his efforts and funds on collecting the highest quality footage of nature. 23 To illustrate and emphasize the importance of the Great Plains in The Plow, Lorentz concentrated a majority of scenes to show the landscape before, during, and after the droughts and dust storms. 24 Then, to give deeper meanings to these pictures, Lorentz wrote stanzas of poetic narration with repetition, refrains, and allusions to American themes, creating a mood of patriotism and engaging viewers in familiar American narratives.

22

Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 25.

Snyder, 26.

24 Pare Lorentz, dir., The Plow That Broke the Plains, Resettlement Administration, 1936, accessed August 3, 2021, Youtube.

23

Chen 9 As the film followed the history of the Great Plains, the stanzas split the story into sections, from its initial settlement to the building of railroads, to homesteaders, to World War I.25 In the prologue of The Plow, displayed on screen as white text scrolled over a black background, Lorentz described the glorious, natural landscape before the cattle and the settlements arrived.26 He repeated the phrase “a country of high winds, and sun . . . ” at the end of the first two stanzas, to paint a picture of the beautiful, original Great Plains in the viewer’s mind, before any images are shown.27 Mentions of how “wind-swept grasslands” connected the “Texas Panhandle” to Montana and Canada also recurred. 28 In these refrains and references to distinctly American names like “panhandle,” Lorentz emphasized the national pride that was the vast Great Plains.

Later in the script, Lorentz lamented the over farming of the Great Plains with literary techniques pervading the poetic narration. In the ninth stanza, Lorentz employed alliteration in an exclamation that the plains are “baked out—blown out—and broke!”29 The repeated, harsh consonants b, k and t added to the bitter conditions and regrettable situation of the grasslands.

Nature was personified in the final lines of the narration that concluded “the suns and winds wrote the most tragic chapter in American agriculture.”30 With the personification in this closing sentence, Lorentz reemphasized that these precious plains must be treated as a living being to be preserved and honored by Americans.

25

Pare Lorentz, FDR's Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts (Reno, Nev.: Univ. of Nevada Pr., 1992), 4550.

26 Lorentz, The Plow.

27 Lorentz, The Plow.

28 Lorentz, The Plow.

29 Lorentz, FDR's Moviemaker, 48.

30 Lorentz, FDR's Moviemaker, 50.

Chen 10 Following the release of The Plow, Lorentz gained tremendous support from audiences and critics alike. Whether or not they supported the production and showing of a government documentary or not, theaters could not deny that it contained writing, directing, and editing talent and a compelling and well-composed message.

For his next film on the Mississippi River, Lorentz prepared a script and detailed plans for collecting the necessary footage before production, in contrast to his approach with The Plow.

He still filmed almost entirely on location, following floods and refugee camps across the country.31 In the narration of The River, Lorentz complemented the images of distinctly American landscapes with a roll call of familiar location names.32 Barnouw, in a book on the development of United States television, radio, and film, discussed that The River’s narrative style employed a “constant use of cadenced catalogs,” filling entire stanzas of his script with lists of American cities, landmarks, and rivers.33 As the narration deplored the “insensate destruction of primeval forests,” wide shots showed damaged homes left behind by a great flood. 34 These calls to American place names in the narration were followed immediately by a picture to cement the idea in the audience’s mind. With this technique, Lorentz could plant a natural sense of pride and sympathy for the American environments portrayed in his film. When the preservation of a given river was threatened by floods or over utilization, viewers could see this as a destruction of their homeland.

Jon Wilkman, a three-term president of the International Documentary Association, in his book, Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America, further explained

31

Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 24.

Lorentz, FDR's Moviemaker, 61-65.

33 Barnouw, Documentary: A History, 120.

34 Barnouw, 120.

32

Chen 11 how Lorentz strengthened his advocacy with “tricking, flowing, blank verse, assembling a litany of tributary names” all reminiscent of American culture and geography.35 An example of Lorentz’s roll call technique, laced with refrains and allusions, can be found on the first page of the script for The River: Down the Yellowstone, the Milk, the White and Cheyenne; The Cannonball, the Musselshell, the James and the Sioux; Down the Judith, the Grand, the Osage, and the Platt, The Skunk, the Salt, the Black and Minnesota; Down the Rock, the Illinois, and the Kankakee The Allegheny, the Monongahela, Kanawah, and Muskingum; Down the Miami; the Wabash, the Licking and the Green The Cumberland, the Kentucky, and the Tennessee; Down the Ouachita, the Wichita, the Red and Yazoo…

The Mississippi Runs to the Gulf. 36

At an unhurried pace, Lorentz paired shots of the Mississippi flowing down the continental United States, through hills, forests, and mountains, with a list of common, familiar

35 36

Wilkman, Screening Reality, 112.

Lorentz, FDR's Moviemaker, 61.

Chen 12 place names such as the Monongahela, a river in West Virginia and the Allegheny, a river that joins the Monongahela in Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. This passage, filled with dozens of proper nouns and no transitions between, served as an example of how Lorentz’s roll calls did not require any more contextualization or description to create powerful connections and emotions in the viewer’s mind. As familiar place names are heard, corresponding scenery faded in and out in a montage of rivers, woods, and valleys. 37 To draw attention to how essential the Mississippi is to the national identity of the United States, Lorentz painted both a literal and metaphorical image of the Mississippi incorporating various bodies of water as it flows southward. He did this in a familiar style of repeated phrases and allusions: Carrying every drop of water, that flows down two-thirds the continent.

Carrying every brook and rill, rivulet and creek, Carrying all the rivers that run down two-thirds The continent, The Mississippi runs to the Gulf. 38

Symbolically, the Mississippi united the people of several states, just as it joined rivers from various regions and carried them into the Gulf of Mexico. The repetition of “Carrying…down two-thirds the continent” built anticipation up to the reveal of the larger picture. Therefore, the final line about the Mississippi allowed the audience to better appreciate how monumental the Mississippi River is to the American land. Peter C. Rollins, a professor of

37 38

Pare Lorentz, dir., The River, Farm Studio Administration, 1938, accessed July 16, 2021, Youtube.

Lorentz, FDR's Moviemaker, 61.

Chen 13 English and American Film Studies at Oklahoma State University and a former editor of the journal Film & History, wrote that the narrator’s tone also varied with each roll call, being “expansive during the scenes of exploitation,” but “elegiac . . . when the film returns to calculate the cost of denuding the Northern hillsides.”39 Not only were the role calls significant for their allusions to American places, micro adjustments in the spoken audio contributed further to the themes of each sequence.

Two later films, The Fight for Life (1940) and The Power and the Land (1940), served to similarly promote New Deal agencies. As the screenwriter, Lorentz particularly demonstrated the power of symbolic repetition and parallel structure in his storytelling. While he did not direct The Power and the Land, he remained an integral part of the filmmaking process and impacted a substantial portion of the script. The Fight for Life was produced as a project of the United States Film Service, an agency headed by Lorentz.40 In The Fight for Life, Lorentz aimed to raise awareness for issues surrounding childbirth, unemployment, and malnutrition, in support of various New Deal agencies. The story was adapted from Paul de Kruif’s book with the same title, about the death of a mother in childbirth and the aftermath. Unlike in The River and The Plow, The Fight for Life had a protagonist—the doctor who saved the baby but failed to save the mother. The objective of the film was to portray the terrible, adverse conditions of Chicago neighborhoods affected by joblessness, poverty, and hunger, and the failing hospital that served those areas.

In scenes throughout the film, Lorentz repeatedly showed a receptionist asking “Has she had a baby, or is she having a baby?” building tension and reminding the audience of the

39

Peter C. Rollins, ed., Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context (University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 42, accessed March 19, 2022, JSTOR. 40 Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 109.

Chen 14 precarious situation our protagonist and his patient are in. 41 The events of pregnant women entering the maternity center, family members waiting in the reception room, and doctors bringing both good and bad news out of the operating room also repeated.42 This cycle signified the cycle of birth, life and death, and it also built an idea that the crisis of poverty and maternityrelated deaths was never-ending. Additionally, Lorentz used symbols in The Fight for Life to connote these themes. In particular, the image of blood signified the frequent loss of life in childbirth at the time. Scenes of the protagonist getting a cup of coffee showed how the maternity center is working 24/7 and never stopped serving the needs of its patients, cultivating empathy for the hospital staff and support for programs that might improve these operations.

Since The Fight for Life had the support of the United States government medical agencies and several top medical schools like the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University, it was received well in the medical community and responded adequately to criticisms about accuracy. In the weeks following its release, it achieved commercial success in many New York and Chicago theaters.43 In that same year, Lorentz helped produce another film, Power and the Land, although he did not end up as the director since the project was transferred to the Rural Electrification Administration. The purpose of the film was to demonstrate and prove how electricity could transform a typical family’s life on a farm, to promote the REA’s efforts. The story of Power and the Land comprised two days on the Parkinson family farm in Ohio, one without electricity, one with electricity. 44

41

Pare Lorentz, dir., The Fight for Life, by Louis Gruenberg, FDR Presidential Library, 1940, accessed March 19, 2022, Youtube.

42 Lorentz, The Fight.

43 Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 116.

44 Snyder, 123.

Chen 15 Although Lorentz was not as involved in the shooting and editing process as he was for his earlier films, which were produced under the United States Film Service, he plotted the overarching themes and storyline followed by the script. In particular, he used parallel structure in his storytelling, pairing up scenes in the first half of the film with ones in the second half. One scene of obtaining and heating water for usage in the Parkinson house was shown as a laborintensive, inefficient task without electricity in the first half. 45 After the family installed electricity on their farm, pipes, drains and sinks made the job pleasant and easy. 46 By matching the outline of the first half of the documentary with the second half, Lorentz was able to draw sharp contrasts between a farm with and without electricity. Following its production, Power and the Land premiered in St. Clairsville, Ohio on August 31, 1940 and was subsequently distributed nationally by RKO Radio Pictures. 47 Production - Mixed Casting, Cinematography, and Location Shooting In addition to Lorentz’s expert use of poetic narration and screenwriting in the preproduction of his New Deal documentaries, the second key cluster of techniques that Lorentz employed, specifically in the production stage of documentaries, that caused his films to succeed with consumers and critics was his mixed casting of both professional and non-actors, his simplistic, natural cinematography, and on location shooting.

Many nonfiction films of the early twentieth century opted to cast real people, rather than professional actors, for the protagonists of the story. For instance, Robert Flaherty’s The Nanook of the North depicted the lifestyle of an Innuit hunter and his family, who portrayed themselves

45

Pare Lorentz, prod., Power and the Land, directed by Joris Ivens, Rural Electrification Administration, US Department of Agriculture, 1940, accessed January 24, 2022, Youtube.

46 Pare Lorentz, Power and the Land.

47 Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 130.

Chen 16 in the film.48 In The Plow that Broke the Plains, the protagonist was simply the Great Plains.

Lorentz took the approach of casting real people, but not as protagonists; instead, he used real migrant farmers and victims of the Dust Bowl as illustrations of larger social and environmental themes.49 Lorentz’s casting choice made every scene and picture more realistic, since the actors did not need to accustom themselves to a specific role in the story and simply assumed their natural relationship with the environment. When Lorentz directed a seventy-two-year-old farmer, Bam White, to herd his cattle on horseback, lean on his plow, and look to the sky for rain, Lorentz personified the ubiquitous daily worries of Dust Bowl farmers and represented the large population of plains inhabitants effectively because of the realness of White’s activities and situation.50 By casting real farmers who were passionate, effective, and inexpensive Lorentz was able to concentrate his funds on capturing high-quality footage of nature with high-level technical production, rather than hiring star actors. Using the additional resources he allocated to cinematography, Lorentz certainly made a noticeable improvement to The Plow with highquality images of nature.

The Plow entered production with a simple outline of a script and the idea of capturing raw footage of dust storms in a variety of locations—a risky approach of starting with the footage and letting the raw material guide the storytelling. Before venturing across the country and shooting on location, Lorentz took advantage of the Resettlement Administration’s still

48

Patricia R. Zimmermann and Sean Zimmermann Auyash, "Nanook of the North," in Library of Congress, 1.

49 Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 26.

50 Wilkman, Screening Reality, 89.

Chen 17 photographs of agricultural America.51 He studied these photographs and then preselected filming locations to optimize his route across the country, like the one seen in Figure 1. 52

Figure 1: Ominous dust storm rolling over homes in The Plow that Broke the Plains53 When he arrived on his set—the Great Plains—he brought cameras and crew to capture the dust storms as they happened, as seen in Figure 1. These real, terrifying, and emotionstimulating images of storms and droughts were rarely captured from up close, with such high frequency in a documentary.

In The Fight for Life, Lorentz continued the technique of casting non-actors as symbols integrated into the environment, but this time, he mixed them with professional actors as protagonists of the narrative. Furthermore, Lorentz once again focused his resources on capturing

51

Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 28.

Snyder, 28.

53 Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker, 49.

52

Chen 18 high-quality, raw footage filmed on location—this time, in real hospitals and operation rooms, to encapsulate the uncensored reality of chaotic nursing centers.54 This combination of on-location shooting, and mixed casting meant numerous logistical challenges, but eventually, it became a masterful, seamless integration of skilled actors, real physicians, and raw hospital environments with technically advanced film crews. In preparation for filming, Lorentz’s professional actors, among which were Myron McCormick and Storrs Haynes who portrayed staff at the Chicago Maternity Center, lived among interns and underwent training as clinicians.55 For six weeks, they learned the routines, techniques, and processes of the center.56 McCormick reported to the New York Herald Tribune that “we learned their ways and their minds until we behaved and thought as they did.”57 By combining these intensively practiced techniques with their experience as professional actors, McCormick and Haynes could find the perfect balance between acting as a character in Lorentz’s story and as a genuine physician in the nursing center.

The non-actors served as interns, passersby, patients, and families of patients, to encapsulate the typical, uncensored mood of real hospital delivery and reception rooms. Lorentz mixed in, with the intricate performances of the main actors, myriad everyday hospital interactions to make his message even more convincing to a wide-ranging national audience. In The Plow, Lorentz used these non-actors, blended into the environment, to create symbols that bring deeper meanings to problems the film is intended to highlight. In one scene, a crowded waiting room full of women, adjacent to a Social Security room with interns questioning

54

Wilkman, Screening Reality, 95.

Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 105.

56 Snyder, 104.

57 Snyder, 105.

55

Chen 19 pregnant patients, represented the two closely related issues of poverty and child-birth.58 The worried looks on the women’s faces suggested that their lives had been made difficult and their everyday moods anxious by the lack of financial security combined with health risks of childbirth. Viewers then heard a patient called Mrs. Alson, who was portrayed by a professional actor, tell the center’s interns that her husband only works two days a week and that they receive little help with housework. These scenes, made from techniques of mixed casting and a real and meaningful setting, invited sympathy and anxiety for the terrible conditions and livelihoods of Chicago’s struggling families.

Further, the attention to detail and high regard for precision in The Fight for Life’s cinematography added another key quality to this documentary, described by a New York Times article as “some of the most candid footage of human life ever caught by the camera.” 59 In the “Night Walk” sequence, for instance, just after failing to save a mother from death in childbirth, McCormick left the maternity center and walks slowly through the nighttime Chicago streets. To add to the ambience of the scene, the film crew arranged with the local fire department to wet the sidewalks and therefore allow dim light leaking through nearby store windows to reflect off the floor.60 Since wet, reflective surfaces could often be reminiscent of one’s tear-filled vision, this small detail contributed a highly emotional and regrettable mood to the shot.

Postproduction - Counterpoint Music, Repeated Themes, and Sound Effects On top of his screenplay, casting choices, and cinematography, the final stage of Lorentz’s filmmaking process, the postproduction stage, added one more layer of complex artistic choices. In particular, Lorentz emphasized the relationship between editing and

Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker, 185.

Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 107.

60 Snyder, 107.

58 59

Chen 20 composing of the score and used music as a powerful counterpoint to his images. An imperative part of this relationship was Lorentz’s frequent collaborator and composer, Virgil Thomson.

Lorentz worked with Thomson closely and thoroughly over the course of his filmmaking—from planning shifts in music to pair with narration to matching melodies with scene and mood changes.61 His approach was that “the music must always precede the picture; the picture must always precede the words—it is our dramatic procedure; also the eye sees faster than the ear hears” (Lorentz in the script for The Fight for Life). Thus, Lorentz ensured that sound not only played a supporting role but led the viewer into the picture and then into the narration. With this approach, the first sensory layer captivated the viewer, then each progressive layer gave increasing levels of detail. As a result, the documentary expertly coordinated its parts to impact the audience as a cohesive piece, rather than a good soundtrack plus a good picture plus a good script.

In The Plow the score included numerous repeated musical themes that complemented the photography and poetic narration about disaster on the plains. Lorentz stated in his memoirs that “my intent [in The Plow] was to have the pictures tell the story; to augment that story with music that would not only be an accompaniment but also would evoke emotions related to the lives of the people concerned.”62 This objective provides a useful context in which Lorentz’s production as a whole could be analyzed—the deeper meanings in the story and the reactions that Lorentz and his sponsor, the RA, were trying to elicit came through largely in the music.

This technique appeared evidently in section six, titled “War” in Lorentz’s final script. 63 As

61

Barnouw, Documentary: A History, 115.

Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker, 43.

63 Lorentz, 47.

62

Chen 21 farmers and their tractors marched through wheat fields, shots of newspapers announcing the first world war were woven in, accompanied by a crescendoing military theme. 64 While the sequence began with calmer string instruments, as the war announcements ramped up and increased in frequency and more farmers began plowing the land, the music turned to trumpets and heavy drums.65 The violent pace and volume of the music, contrasting with the monotonous plowing of the plains, made the latter seem like a regimented military march. As a result, these techniques portrayed farming as analogous to a war effort: justified but harmful to the long term well-being of the nation. Not coincidentally, this interpretation, created by the music together with the imagery, fit perfectly with Lorentz’s message without harming the image of the federal government’s expanding power.

Lorentz also paired the war section’s score with slow, dramatic narration like that of a politician delivering an inspiring speech to rally the nation around a war effort. Following the sound of an exploded bomb shell, deep, a commanding voice pronounced that “Wheat will win the war!” as the score momentarily deadened to emphasize the narration.66 This arrangement of sounds added to a similar note that, just like a turbulent bomb, the overplanting of wheat would help us achieve our goals but inevitably leave behind regrettable consequences. While the words helped centralize the message around using farmers for war, Lorentz expertly added to the narration but cutting the images in a meaningful way—war headline, then tractors, then back to war, at an increasing pace—and matching the cuts with intentionally crescendos and variations in instruments in the accompanying music.

64

Lorentz, The Plow.

Lorentz, The Plow.

66 Lorentz, The Plow.

65

Chen 22 This relationship between editing and composing was pioneered by Lorentz in The Plow, and it would go on to define his expertise in documentary postproduction. In The River, Lorentz furthered his use of contrapuntal relationships between sound and picture—this time, to illustrate the crucial American identity of the Mississippi River and its regrettable destruction over the past decades.

The story is told by photography, explained and elaborated on by the narration, and filled with emotion and mood by the soundtrack. A few minutes into the film, a dramatic river sequence applied this technique skillfully. The photography showed a series of images starting from close up shots of water droplets, to medium length shots of thin streams flowing down hills, to wide shots of epic, stirring bodies of smoothly flowing water. To complement these edited pictures, the narrator poetically listed off dozens of American landmarks and described how various bodies of water string them all together and carry their nutrients all down to the Gulf of Mexico.67 Finally, the music blended both the photography and narration together into a cohesive message, by accompanying the flowing pictures and dramatic descriptions of the rivers with emotional, long and smooth notes by violins and cellos. As the shots of bodies of water widened, encompassing more scenery, the “River Theme” became more drawn out and epic, incorporating a larger variety of louder instruments.68 While the wide shots showed a calm and tranquil river flowing down a valley, the music added a poignant, sentimental dimension, giving the scenes a deeper meaning and a national identity, as viewers were invited to feel proud and celebrate the unity of the Mississippi River as it connected brooks and creeks across the United States.

During the lumbering sequence, where thousands of logs were seen sliding down a sluiceway made by the river, an orchestra played a glorious tune titled “Hot Time in the Old

67 68

Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker, 61.

Lorentz, The River.

Chen 23 Town Tonight.”69 While the pictures showed the industrial activity of transporting timber, the themes of the music encouraged the viewer to interpret the river in this scene as a source of innovation and support for American people, as it helped bring fuel into people’s homes in an efficient and visually spectacular way. Furthermore, interspersed with “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” was the “River Theme” which was played in the beginning when introducing the Mississippi to the audience.70 As the soft strings in the “River Theme” return, the audience felt an even stronger emotional connection to the great American vessels that were rivers carrying logs downstream.

Also a significant technique in Lorentz’s soundtracks were leitmotivs: short, recurring musical phrases that reinforced the themes and motifs of the documentary. In The Fight for Life, which was composed by Louis Gruenberg instead of Virgil Thomson, Lorentz blended intentional sound effects with the musical score to create thematic meanings. For example, an orchestral heartbeat created by a pair of drums was repeatedly used throughout the film to create suspense in the delivery scenes.71 While viewers watched pictures of surgeons struggling to deliver a newborn child, they continuously wondered how much longer the mother and the child will stay alive. Thus, the heartbeat sound effect provided reassurance to viewers, but also highlighted the riskiness of the procedure—at any moment, the beat of the drums could disappear, and all hope would be lost. Further, the prominent, recurring sound stimulated the viewer to breathe faster, as it imitated the viewer’s own heartbeat.

As Lorentz switched composers between films, the compositions changed, but the fundamental strategies and relationships formed between the music and picture throughout his

69

Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 185.

Snyder, 185.

71 Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker, 168.

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Chen 24 filmmaking process endured. Music continued to be a priority, from first writing the script to finishing the edit.

Lorentz’s documentaries created dramatic accounts of the Dust Bowl, the Mississippi River Basin, and the poverty-stricken streets of Chicago. Each film resonated with audiences, brought attention to pressing problems and programs intended to be solutions, and demonstrated the potential for government-sponsored documentary films to inspire social change.

Fundamentally, Lorentz’s films of merit were studied and researched as classics in filmmaking because his notable techniques in casting, writing, production, and postproduction transformed the documentary form into a more effective medium for education and advocacy to the masses.

Chen 25 Bibliography Aufderheide, Patricia. Documentary Film : A Very Short Introduction. Cary: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2007. Accessed September 20, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Fogel, Jared A., and Robert L. Stevens. "The Canvas Mirror: Painting as Politics in the New Deal." OAH Magazine of History 16, no. 1 (2001): 17-25. JSTOR. From Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. "Lorentz." Lorentz, Pare. Accessed August 22, 2021.

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The Journal of Educational Sociology 12, no. 3 (1938): 147-62.

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Leab, Daniel J. "Pare Lorentz and American Government Film Production." Midcontinent American Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (1965): 41-51. JSTOR. Lorentz, Pare. FDR's Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts. Reno, Nev.: Univ. of Nevada Pr., 1992.

———, dir. The Fight for Life. By Louis Gruenberg. FDR Presidential Library, 1940. Accessed March 19, 2022. Youtube.

———. Lorentz on Film: Movies, 1927 to 1941. Norman (Okla.): University of Oklahoma, 1986.

Chen 26 ———, dir. The Plow That Broke the Plains. Resettlement Administration, 1936. Accessed August 3, 2021. Youtube.

———, dir. The River. Farm Studio Administration, 1938. Accessed July 16, 2021. Youtube.

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Nisbett, Robert F. "Pare Lorentz, Louis Gruenberg, and 'The Fight for Life': The Making of a Film Score." The Musical Quarterly 79, no. 2 (1995): 231-55. JSTOR. Pare Lorentz, prod. Power and the Land. Directed by Joris Ivens. Rural Electrification Administration, US Department of Agriculture, 1940. Accessed January 24, 2022.

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Robé, Chris. "Taking Hollywood Back: The Historical Costume Drama, the Biopic, and Popular Front U.S. Film Criticism." Cinema Journal 48, no. 2 (2009): 70-87. JSTOR. Rollins, Peter C., ed. Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context. University Press of Kentucky, 1983. Accessed March 19, 2022. JSTOR. Snyder, Robert L. Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.

Thompson, Lisa. "Resettlement Administration (RA) (1935)." The Living New Deal. Last modified November 18, 2016. Accessed February 17, 2022.

Wilkman, Jon. Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2020.

Woller, Joel. "First-Person Plural: The Voice of the Masses in Farm Security Administration Documentary." Journal of Narrative Theory 29, no. 3 (1999): 340–66. JSTOR. Zimmermann, Patricia R., and Sean Zimmermann Auyash. "Nanook of the North." In Library of Congress.

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