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 farms, churches, and historic sites underscore its idyll. Copland’s stature as national hymnist was such that he was the only individual listed in the film’s credits.12
Even though the film acknowledges that, in this snow globe of a town (which one can observe, but never change), Joseph and Anna are not welcomed by all, the narrator attempts to reconcile the differences between Joseph and Anna’s old life in Austria and their new one in the United States. For example, as Joseph and Anna play Mozart, the film cuts to a slow pan across the New England landscape, while the narrator notes that “our land is similar to their own, chopped into small one‐man, two‐man farms.” And after Joseph gains acceptance in the close‐knit community, he starts a job with a local book publisher, his previous profession. The end of the film returns to a crowd scene, this time a town meeting, with Joseph announcing that, having learned the value of community from his neighbors in Cummington, he is returning to his home country to help rebuild it. Here, Grayson suggests that American small towns are not permanent homes for immigrants but can provide models for how foreigners might improve their own communities.
In fact, although The Town, The Cummington Story, and many films like it shared a reverence for small‐town life, they were not particularly invested in promoting the towns they depicted as places welcoming to immigrants or people of color looking to resettle in the United States. Rather, they were an attempt by government filmmakers to connect with foreign audiences by presenting societies and landscapes that might be more familiar to people living in rural areas abroad than the cities that were more frequently depicted in Hollywood films. As the narrator asks in von Sternberg’s The Town, “Where is this town? Where you can find an old English tower, an Italian campanile, down the street a Gothic doorway?,” and proceeds to identify a half‐dozen national architectural styles that appear in the community. “Few,” he continues, “may have guessed that this is a town in the United States of America,” a message that argues against the distinctiveness of the United States (if only architecturally). And indeed, small towns were useful for the OWI because they served as a point of connection between rural sites across the United States, as well as between rural sites internationally. Moreover, they allowed for encounters between cultures and populations to be depicted in a space that was familiar to many viewers, regardless of their nationality. If urban imagery in film, at this moment, promoted national exceptionalism with depictions of skyscrapers and other symbols of modernity, rural images in small‐town films instead suggested partnerships between nations through the uniting lens of local values.13 When the Office of War Information was disbanded at the end of the war, films such as these, now orphaned, were ripe for adoption by other agencies.
Motion Pictures for Occupied Territories
After World War II ended, the US government found itself not simply communicating with other nations, but occupying several, with peacetime operations in, among others, Germany, Japan, Korea, Italy, and Austria. At this point, government films began emphasizing the United States’ distinctiveness, rather than its similarities with other nations, perhaps in recognition of the country’s new prominence on the global stage. Two years earlier, in 1943, the War Department had established a Civil Affairs Division (CAD), which was tasked with coordinating all nonmilitary operations in occupied nations, including cultural production and dissemination. Pare Lorentz, well known for his government film production in the 1930s, was selected to head this effort in 1945. Among the responsibilities of the CAD’s “reorientation branch” was the distribution of US‐approved motion pictures to theaters in occupied nations. While the exhibition of American movies in occupied Germany, Japan, and Austria has been the subject of many monographs and articles, there has been considerably less written about the production of the films screened in these countries.14 As Hiroshi Kitamura explains in his introduction to Screening Enlightenment, which focuses on Japan, this emphasis on the circulation of American cinema within occupied countries is part an effort to counter the “sender’s perspective” that marks much of the scholarship on Americanization and cultural imperialism in the post war period.15 By assuming that US interests were well‐defined and consistent regardless of whether a film was made by the government or a Hollywood producer, such studies neglect the extent to which production decisions, not just those related to distribution and exhibition, had considerable impact on the efficacy of propaganda. Government‐produced documentaries, in particular, have been neglected in these studies, perhaps because heavy‐handed attempts to control which Hollywood films were permitted to circulate in occupied countries was seen as a more pressing matter, particularly when such films were intended to counter the occupied nation’s own cinema.16
Leaving aside