580–610.11 Rotha, P. (1930). The Film till Now: A Survey of the Cinema. New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith.
12 Tallents, S. (1932). The Projection of England. London: Faber & Faber.
13 Waugh, T. (2016). The Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens, 1912–1989. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
1 A Distant Local View: The Small‐Town Film and US Cultural Diplomacy and Occupation, 1942–1952
Martin L. Johnson
University of North Carolina
Introduction
In June 1942, the United States government created the Office of War Information (OWI) to collect its propaganda efforts under the administration of a single agency. Although the OWI’s efforts within the US are well known, the organization also created a series titled Projections of America (or, in some instances, The American Scene) that was designed to promote American ideals internationally. Other US government agencies – including the Council on Inter‐Cultural Affairs and, after the end of World War II, the Civilian Affairs Division of the United States Army – produced or commissioned their own motion pictures, also for consumption overseas. Within a few years of the war’s end, propaganda efforts were taken up by the US Information Agency, which remained active even after the United States Congress placed limits on the domestic distribution of its films.1
In this chapter, I focus on a narrow band of these documentary films that promoted small‐town politics and culture as the essence of American values. In recent years, scholars in a number of disciplines have argued that the American small town was a powerful ideological topos in the mid‐twentieth century, as it allowed the US government to present its cultural and economic imperialism abroad under the guise of local, common‐sense values.2 Small‐town films such as Julien Bryan’s five‐film Ohio Town series (1945), indeed, used government resources to promote a “local view” that was then sent around the world as a documentation of American values in practice. Although a number of agencies produced these films, I focus on the Reorientation Branch of the Civil Affairs Division (CAD) of the United States Army, which, starting in 1947, produced documentaries for exhibition in five countries occupied by the US military, Japan, Germany, Korea, and, for a briefer period, Austria and Italy, many of them set and filmed in small towns in the United States. In addition to analyzing these films, I consider how their production and reception was covered in the towns where these films were made. While these films’ domestic distribution was limited, they were publicly screened in the towns where they were made. As a result, these motion pictures also functioned as local films – motion pictures made in order for people to see themselves, and places they recognized, on screen. As such, they served as sites where small‐town, and implicitly American, ideals were performed and critiqued by local and global audiences alike.
Domestic Films for Overseas Consumption
In the later years of World War II, film producers in the Office of War Information and other offices in the United States government shifted focus from making films intended to help win the war to creating motion pictures that would help the United States secure peacetime prosperity. For example, in early 1943, Robert Riskin, head of the Overseas Bureau of the OWI, launched a new documentary film series titled “Projections of America” that was intended to counteract negative images of the United States perpetuated through Hollywood film.3 Meanwhile, with the sponsorship of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter‐American Affairs (CI‐AA), the lecturer and documentary filmmaker Julien Bryan shot a series of five films in Mount Vernon, Ohio. As one newspaper put it at the time, the series, which was filmed in 1944, was produced “to give the people of other nations a true picture of how the greater part of America lives,” and, once again, counter Hollywood’s presentation of the United States.4
While some government critiques of Hollywood focused on the industry’s depictions of sexuality and violence, others centered on its perceived anti‐urban bias. In keeping with this, many government‐produced films intentionally highlighted places that were thought to be neglected by Hollywood.5 In turn, those places that were filmed by the government came to think of themselves as the essence of American identity. Soon after Bryan’s Ohio films were exhibited in the town where they were made, for instance, another paper in the state called them “a true picture of how that average American family lives in the nation’s thousands of small and medium‐sized towns and villages.”6
Although historians have speculated on these films’ ideological functions, government agencies did not hide their intentions from domestic audiences, particularly from the towns that were asked to participate in the films’ production. For example, when a representative from Riskin’s Overseas Bureau of the OWI arrived in Cummington, a small village in western Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1944, the region’s newspaper announced that the film was intended to “inspire confidence in America and to promote a better understanding of the American people and their way of life.”7 More specifically, it was to do so by depicting the “small group of refugees who settled in Cummington and learned about the people, the traditions and the workings of democracy that make New England so distinctive a region of the United States.” Just as local residents of Mount Vernon, Ohio, were expected to appear, unpaid, in Bryan’s films, the newspaper suggested that The Cummington Story (directed by Helen Grayson) required “whole‐hearted co‐operation on the part of the people who made up the community,” who were expected to be “on hand” the following Sunday, September 17, for the initial shoot. The article also noted that those who attended services at the Community Church for the benefit of the picture would be served free meals, and another shoot would take place at the town hall on October 8. By agreeing to materially participate in the production of the film, the people of Cummington implicitly supported the film’s ideological objectives as well. Although The Cummington Story was completed in 1945, the film was not exhibited in the town until January 1946, when more than 700 people crowded into the town hall to see the picture.8 While an article on the screening emphasized the fact that the town of Cummington was able to “see itself” in the movies, it also praised the picture’s high production values, as did an article in Time.9
Like other films produced by the OWI, most notably Josef von Sternberg’s The Town, filmed in Madison, Indiana, in September 1943, The Cummington Story valorizes the stability and resilience of American small towns.10 But rather than serving as a paean to rusticity, The Cummington Story narrates the experience of political refugees as they transition to life in the United States, with a focus on two characters, Joseph and Anna. Narrated by a pastor, who identifies himself as the person who brought a family of refugees to Cummington, the film presents the town as an idyllic space, with traditions and landscapes largely unchanged since the town’s founding in the late eighteenth century.11 The film’s score, by Aaron Copland, invites the viewer to lose oneself in reverie, as images of Cummington ’s
