A Companion to Documentary Film History. Группа авторов
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the postal service to articulate the ties that bind a small community to its national government is a common trope in government documentary film; Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s 1936 Night Mail, produced by the UK’s General Post Office Film Unit, is the best‐known example. The CAD even made its own version of such a film, R.F.D. (1949) using as its title the abbreviation for Rural Free Delivery.
But Women and the Community is not interested in praising the virtues of the postal service. Rather, the film is invested in democracy itself, particularly the role women play in sustaining its local institutions. After commenting on the mailman’s rounds, the narrator returns to seeing the town as a representative of democracy:
Though the town is a small one like thousands of others that will never get into the headlines, important things happen here, too. At least the people who live in the town think so, and they are right. This is a special day. Elections are being held and the people are taking their place in line to vote.
Although the film takes place on Election Day, the narrator emphasizes the democratic process as a whole, arguing “the actual casting of the vote is an end result, not a ‘spur of the moment’ action.” The male narrator then turns his attention to the unpaid, and, in this case, female, labor of democracy itself, presenting the League of Women Voters’ work educating the public on civic matters. For example, in a scene in which women are calling registered voters, close‐up shots of lists of names are superimposed with medium shots of women making phone calls, as the narrator comments on the “tedious” work that the women find “worthwhile because it led to a more satisfactory community life.”
In the film’s second reel, the story shifts focus once again, this time to the use of private and public resources to provide services for schoolchildren, from recreation centers to educational films to hot lunches to dental visits. Although the film’s title suggests that its true subject is the important roles women play in civic and community life, Women and the Community is somewhat sly about making this point, as it presents the institutions of small‐town life first, and only then shows the role women play in sustaining them. Toward the end of the film, the narrator speculates on the future of a young girl. After running through various things women can do in small towns, from donating blood to joining a garden club, the narrator observes “whatever she does, as an interested and intelligent American woman, she will become part of the bloodstream of her community.” At the same time, the narrator argues that voting will be the “climax of her civic career,” as it allows her to “register her will as a self‐governing citizen.” The film ends with a shot of a closing of a curtain, in this case the one that wraps a voting booth. Unlike the pat story presented in A Town Solves A Problem, then, Women and the Community is burdened by a surplus of ideas, moving from a disquisition on small‐town life to an explanation of the role nongovernmental civic organizations play in a democracy.
If CAD’s early films were as interested in the image of democracy in action as they were in seeing it actually practiced, Social Change in a Democracy (1951) was intended to illustrate how democracies were different from totalitarian societies. The film was produced by the New York firm Sun Dial Films, Inc., which was incorporated in 1944 and headed by Samuel Datlowe, who made B‐movies before turning to the nontheatrical field after the war.27 Although the script itself did not indicate a specific setting for the film, H. M. Lambert, a production manager for the company, was sent by the company to Biloxi, Mississippi, presumably because of its fishing industry. The local newspaper in Biloxi emphasized the fact that the picture was for Japanese audiences. As Lambert told the local newspaper, it was intended to “show how the people in a democratic fishing town overcome a local problem by democratic methods.”28 Like the other films discussed in this chapter, the film used local actors, who were asked to give freely of their time and other resources for government benefit. The Biloxi Chamber of Commerce assisted with the casting of students in exchange for an English‐language 35 mm print of the film, and, according to the newspaper, “local boat owners … agreed to let the company film their boats and plants as scenic backdrops for the movie, which will also include scenes of classrooms, and of the mayor and local administrators at work.”29 The film was directed by Joseph Henabery, best known for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of A Nation (1915).30
Despite the film’s Southern setting and provocative title, Social Change in a Democracy does not address the struggle for civil rights for African Americans in the American South, a political movement that garnered international attention in the late 1950s and 1960s. Instead, the “social change” with which the film is concerned is narrower in scope. Like Women and the Community, Social Change opens with a series of shots of its setting, in this case the residential and business districts of Biloxi. From the outset, the script emphasizes the contradiction at the heart of many of these films, as the narrator notes:
Every small town in the United States has its own special character – it is unique – quite unlike any other place in the world. But in a larger sense, each small town can be taken as typical of many other small focal points of population in America. There is the same easy space, the same unity of culture, tradition, background – a cohesiveness of society.
Like Women and the Community, Social Change makes a sharp transition from an overly generalized look at small‐town life to a lecture in a high school civics class on the subject of democracy. In this case, the lecture, on the “philosophy of government,” is delivered by a teacher who is particularly adept at drawing on the chalkboard. In the lecture, the teacher first criticizes what the narrator calls a “pyramid” structure of government, in which all decisions are made by a few people at the top. In contrast, a democratic government is portrayed as a “kind of house designed to shelter and protect citizens.” While pyramid‐style governments offer little hope to those who are unhappy with their lot, the narrator argues that the “house of democracy” has a “workshop – available to all citizens – in which significant changes in the structure can be made – changes designed to satisfy the growing needs of the people.” A close‐up of a chalk drawing of a house, with one stick figure holding a hand saw while another holds a hammer, makes literal this image of a house of democracy, which seems primarily to serve as a support for the narrator’s next point – “citizens never change the basic foundation of a house,” such as laws that guarantee freedom of speech, assembly, and the right to vote. The fact that this scene is shot in a segregated school is not commented on in the film itself, and the absence of African Americans in this film, and the absence of racial or ethnic minorities in other small‐town films, suggests that its democratic vision is implicitly linked to whiteness. However, even if someone was not aware that this film was shot in Mississippi, which was a focal point for civil rights activists, the absence of nonwhites becomes a more prominent issue when the teacher shows a 16 mm film about the rise of Nazi Germany as an example of what happens in a “pyramid” government.
This film, which has a March of Time‐style narration, includes images of concentration camps and several reaction shots of the students that reveal their discomfort with seeing this footage, perhaps for the first time. But instead of analyzing Nazism as a belief system, Social Change argues that the government failed because it made the “welfare of the state superior to the welfare of the people.” This assumption allows the film to argue for a process‐oriented vision of government in which democracy, “ever sensitive to the needs and pressures of the people,” is able to resolve conflict between social groups.
After these long civics lessons, the film returns to Biloxi and to the conflict that is to be resolved through democratic action. As the narrator explains, several years earlier a factory had opened in the community, bringing jobs to the region, but “as a part of the plant’s operation, a waste material was being discharged into the bay – a foreign substance pouring into