practices,” asking us to pay attention, instead, to the “actual conditions that informed these activities' emergence at a specific moment in history.” He also critiques the common assumption that the West was the primary point of origin for theories of cinema. Documentary theory in Japan, he argues, emerged as part of a larger international conversation about cinema, one in which Japanese critics and filmmakers played an active role.
While all four of these essays examine documentary's geographies, they are also concerned with the history of documentary, and documentary theory, at a distinct moment in time: from the end of World War II to the mid to late 1950s. Wedged between the flourishing nonfiction film cultures of the 1930s and World War II and the emergence of cinéma vérité/direct cinema (as well as the essay film) in the late 1950s – and defined politically by the polarized height of the Cold War – the first postwar decade is typically remembered as a period of sober, unimaginative films. In Bert Hogenkamp's words, “the common view was this: after the 1930s nothing happened” (Hogenkamp 2001: xi). These essays, however, make clear that from North America to East Asia, from Europe to Africa, filmmakers, film institutions, and governments were deeply invested in working out what documentary – in its production, distribution, and exhibition – could mean and do in the postwar world. Moreover, to the argument that this period was formally barren, films as divergent as Soviet Armenia, Africa 50, and A Town Solves a Problem respond that the question of documentary form in these years was not only active, but had very much to do with geopolitics. If, as these essays demonstrate, these geopolitics extended beyond the nation (or at least any simple understanding of it), so too did the conversations that helped shape documentary, and its films, institutions, and theories.
References
1 Aston, J., Gaudenzi, S., and Rose, M. (2017). i‐Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press.
2 Druick, Z. (2008). “Reaching the Multimillions”: Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment of Documentary Film. In: Inventing Film Studies (eds. L. Grieveson and H. Wasson), 66–92. Durham: Duke University Press.
3 Druick, Z. and Williams, D. (2014). The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary's International Movement. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute (Cultural Histories of Cinema).
4 Grant, B. and Sloniowski, J. (1998). Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
5 Grieveson, L. (2011). The Cinema and the (Common) Wealth of Nations. In: Empire and Film (eds. L. Grieveson and C. MacCabe), 73–113. London: BFI.
6 Hogenkamp, B. (2001). Film, Television and the Left in Britain, 1950–1970. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
7 Jeníček, J. (1940). Krátký Film. Prague: Nakladatelství Václav Petr.
8 Kahana, J. (2008). Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press.
9 Malitsky, J. (2013). Post‐revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
10 Nichols, B. (2001). Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant‐Garde. Critical Inquiry 27 (4): 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