A Companion to Documentary Film History. Группа авторов
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adequately depicted the town meeting. In a letter from Patrick Belcher to Pittsford’s town archivist, he observes that:
there never has been a film that showed what a New England Town Meeting is. That is certainly our oldest form of government, here in the States, and it is one of most significant contributions to democratic action. Yet it had never been presented in a film. … But to just make a film about a Town Meeting, without giving it some dramatic story, would make a pretty dull film. So we turned to the minutes of the 1949 Meeting and discovered that right there, in Mr. Dopp’s own words, was a perfect outline for our story, and one that would have very real meaning to the Japanese audiences.25
According to this letter, the CAD had already ended its role as a film supplier for Germany and Korea, and thus the only audience for the Pittsford motion picture was to be found in Japan. Even so, the film was to have wide release there, with 35 mm prints screening in movie theaters, and 16 mm prints made available to “Unions, Women’s Clubs, school groups, etc.,” as well as local prefectures, who would lend the picture out to “all those little isolated farming communities which never see a Hollywood movie.” A copy of the film was also provided to the State Department, who, Belcher noted, might elect to distribute it worldwide and translate the narration into dozens of languages. However, Belcher feared that the “Pittsford Film may be too strictly an educational, how‐to‐do‐it film, for the State Dept. to use.” Finally, Belcher’s letter lamented that the film would probably not be seen in the United States, as the government did not want to compete with commercial producers of short films. Pittsford residents would have to be content with their film earning the town a global reputation, even while their fellow Americans would not even be aware that a movie was made of their town.
Although A Town Solves a Problem opens much like earlier small‐town films, with shots of the landscape and paeans to the village’s townspeople, the film is distinguished by the fact that it identifies both the town and its inhabitants by name, though in the latter case pseudonyms are used. Very quickly, the narrative focuses on two inhabitants, Mr. and Mrs. Croft – the janitor and teacher, respectively, at a community school. The voice‐of‐god narration moves effortlessly from describing the people and places depicted to an analysis of Pittsford’s political economy. For example, in a medium shot of Mrs. Croft sitting at an old desk while looking at a school supply catalog, the narrator observes, “today Mrs. Croft is going to order a new desk that she has long hoped for. The Superintendent of Schools has finally approved the purchase with funds which the townspeople voted for school improvements.” At the moment that the narrator says “funds,” the film cuts to a close‐up of Croft’s hand over the catalog itself, showing a picture of the new desk. In this way, the film associates the acquisition of new materials with financial support from the town’s inhabitants, a dynamic that sets up the remainder of the film’s narrative.
After drawing an explicit relationship between school expenditures and democratic action, the film proceeds to present its central “problem,” the fact that the students bring their lunches from home, rather than eating a “hot lunch” prepared at school. At this moment in the film, the narrator explains that hot lunches would lead to “healthier pupils” and “better classwork,” as medium shots of a dozen schoolchildren eating their homemade lunches are intercut with medium shots of Mr. and Mrs. Croft shaking their heads. Exterior shots of the Crofts leaving the school are paired with the narrator outlining the next steps for the “hot lunch” plan, including the recruitment of parents to assist with building local support for obtaining a kitchen and stove. As the film’s characters traipse across the snow, the narrator identifies the challenges ahead: raising taxes to pay for the purchase of a stove, or, perhaps, using existing funds, including those designated for a new desk, to help offset the cost. Following a meeting of the parent‐teacher association, which takes place in the classroom, the group reaches a decision to bring it to the upcoming town meeting.
The second half of the film takes place at the town meeting itself, which is presented by the narrator as a “get‐together, when [the townspeople] elect new offices and discuss problems of the town … finances, health, safety, the library, the schools and any other questions which anyone wishes to bring before his townspeople.” Several shots of an impressive two‐story brick building are followed by a series of interior shots of the auditorium, with the parent‐teacher association just one of many groups of citizens present to discuss town issues. As the narrator argues, “everyone welcomes a new problem put before the people,” so the hot lunch proposal is welcomed not on its merits, but rather for its capacity to generate debate. Despite the fact that the film depicts participatory democracy in action, the narrator, not the townspeople, vocalizes the perspectives of those in attendance. Anna McCarthy has argued that many mid‐century educational films and television programs presented “group discussion” as a model for governance, as it privileges the “democratic values of creativity, choice, and freedom,” as a counter to authoritarian tendencies.26 Given the purpose of the CAD films, it is not surprising to see A Town Solves a Problem adopt this strategy, even if the use of the narration undercuts the idea of individual expression. While CAD films used a narrator for pragmatic reasons – since these films were used in many countries, new narrations needed to be recorded in a variety of languages – such techniques meant that local voices were not heard.
After some discussion, the hot lunch program goes to a vote, and the participants decide in its favor. The film closes with a five shot sequence of the program in action – a medium shot of three women, including Mrs. Croft, serving bowls of hot soup, followed by a close‐up of the soup itself, followed by another medium shot of the schoolchildren eating soup, followed by a second shot of the women in the kitchen, and a second shot of the children eating soup. These images of the fruition of democratic action are accompanied by the narrator’s praise for the town’s capacity to analyze and resolve the challenges that face it, calling the decision a “gift of good health from the people of a town that can solve its own problems.” This image of warmth and companionship is a sharp contrast from that of the snowy plain that opens the film, a closing that is also very different from the small‐town films made by other agencies, which instead resolved their narratives with long shots of the local landscape. In this way, A Town Solves a Problem invites audiences to draw parallels with their own situation, even if the problems at hand, and the ways to resolve them, appear to be very different. That is, by deploying a structure in which problems are presented, debated, and addressed in a community setting, the film implies that issues of shelter and sustenance can be resolved internally, without the need for outside intervention. In this way, films such as A Town Solves a Problem may also have been intended to model how communities could address issues after the end of occupation, when foreign aid was no longer available.
One of a series of films about women in the United States, Women and the Community, made by RKO Pathe’s nontheatrical production unit, opens similarly to A Town Solves a Problem, with an aerial shot of Monroe, New York, a small town 60 miles northeast of New York City. Like A Town Solves a Problem, Women and the Community is intended to bring the viewer closer to a particular community, but its opening narration takes the opposite tack:
What is a community? To a pilot it is a cluster of buildings seen as the birds see them.
To the locomotive engineer it is another “stop on the line.” He knows it only as a station name on his schedule.
To city planners a community means an area on a map, where everything is laid out in orderly, geometric patterns.
To the garbage man it just means rubbish – and more rubbish.
As the narrator offers this list of possible frameworks one might use to interpret a community, a series of shots – train locomotives, city planners looking at a map, and, of course, a garbage man – underscore the validity of these possible interpretations. But the film settles on another way to see a community: through the eyes of a mailman, for whom the term “means familiar houses with well‐known numbers of them. And it means the people who live inside these homes.” In the next