A Lost Legacy of Labor Films

Abstract

A LOST LEGACY OF LABOR FILMS By Leslie Fishbein The Great Depression has long been regarded as a stage for the dramatic relief and recovery efforts initiated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the New Deal. Whether pictured as the savior of capitalism, or of the starving masses, Roosevelt remained the chief actor, prodding needed change, inspiring faith, effacing public hopelessness and despair. Only recently have historians begun to limn a new portrait of the era, paying tribute to millions of Americans whose efforts in trade unions, farm associations, neighborhood groups, and other self-help organizations served to alleviate economic distress and to create a demand for social services which only later might be met in part by the New Deal J The cinematic record of these years appeared no more enlightening. As Hollywood churned out escapist fare--Busby Berkeley extravaganzas, gangster films, Frank Capra's resuscitations of homespun values--, the newsreels accompanying these features concentrated on entertaining a public presumably too overwrought by the Depression to pay to see more of it. Moreover, commercial newsreel producers claimed that the theatre should be devoted strictly to entertainment and hence excluded elements of social criticism from their productions. Just as President Herbert Hoover attempted to cure the Depression by the steady application of positive thinking (after all, he dubbed it merely a "crisis in confidence"), so, too, did commercial news producers seek to dispel doubt and uncertainty from the public mind. In the spring of 1931 a Fox Movietone executive announced that his newsreel would disregard all Leslie Fishbein teaches American Studies and Film at Douglass College, Rutgers University. Her article describing a course on women through failm appeared In Film è Hlstony last yean. 33 subjects of a "controversial nature. "¿ Apart from self-censorship, commercial newsreels also were subjected to censorship by state and police. 3 Hence the public record of working class activism was distorted and obscured. For decades this cinematic portrait of the era remained unchallenged . But in May 1973, at the University of California - Berkeley campus, pioneer film distributor Tom Brandon presented, for the first time in America, a program of independently produced political documentaries made throughout the Depression. For more than five years Brandon has been touring the United States to relocate this lost film heritage, and along with Leo Seltzer, who had filmed and edited much of the original footage forty years ago, Brandon has restored these films and displayed them to college audiences on over eighty campuses across the country. This "missing chapter" in film history serves to reveal an equally neglected period of American radicalism: the Communist-led mass marches of the unemployed, battles against eviction, farmers' milk strikes, workers fighting back against police and company goons and dying in the struggle for unionization. Radical cinema in the Thirties was a curious blend of Russian and American influences. The Workers Film and Photo League in the United States (known as the Film and Photo League after 1933) was a section of the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe or Workers International Relief (WIR), founded in Berlin in 1921 by German Communist Willi Münzenberg to support Lenin's desire for worker-organized relief efforts to supplement bourgeois ones to the famine-stricken Bolshevik state. After providing famine relief in the Soviet Union, the WIR expanded its operations internationally to support strikers and their families and to organize radical activities in art, drama, music, photography, and film.5 Just as the Workers International Relief had been a mass-based organization from its inception, with support from prominent nonCommunists including Käthe Kollewitz, Albert Einstein, George Grosz, George Bernard Shaw, Anatole France, Henri Barbusse, and Auguste Forel , so, too, did its American branch encompass non-party memebers. Coinciding with initial Communist success in organizing the unemployed, the group concerned itself with distributing Soviet documentaries, discussing and analyzing films of significance to workers, and ultimately with actual production of films useful in furthering the class struggle.6 Instead of meekly accepting their lot, the jobless spontaneously evolved survival strategies ranging from family assistance 34 networks through group looting of supermarkets and also participated in radically organized "sit-ins at relief stations, national and state hunger marches, demonstrations at City Halls, and...