The reel Deal: How nation looked in '30s
MOVIES | Parallels with present emerge during 75th anniversary festival
Today Chicago gets a look at New Deal films made in the 1930s and '40s, and the parallels with our times are uncanny.
Cities are being rebuilt as planned communities in the stark black and white films. There's a shortage of doctors in "The Fight for Life." And in the 1933 short "The Road Is Open Again," singer Dick Powell writes a patriotic song inspired by the ghosts of former presidents. He sings how "there is hope in the hearts of men."
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Hope.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs were built on hope to snap the country out of the Depression. Programs included the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps and government-sponsored films made to pep up a lethargic America.
The 75th anniversary of the New Deal Film Festival has its Midwest premiere from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. today at Columbia College Chicago Film Row, 1104 S. Wabash. The free festival is the first showing of 13 of the films outside of the National Archive in Washington. They were produced between 1933 and 1949.
Besides the screenings, commentary and discussion will be offered by cultural critics, historians and documentarians. A late-afternoon set of live music will be played by the Swing Doctors, a four-piece band who cover tunes Django Reinhardt recorded in the 1930s with the Hot Club of Paris.
Although most New Deal works are set in rural America, the underbelly of Chicago is depicted in "The Fight for Life," a 70-minute film that employs actors such as Will Geer (the future Grandpa Walton) to depict the real-life hazards of childbirth in the Chicago slums. Woody Guthrie makes an uncredited appearance. Also featured is the work of the government-funded Chicago Maternity Center, which in the 1940 film is set just south of Lincoln Park. The "slums" feature single-family homes and apartment buildings sunken off the street, which could have been Bucktown.
"The street scenes of slums and children are all Chicago footage," said Columbia oral history teacher Erin McCarthy, who brought the films to Chicago. "There's a renewed interest in the New Deal because much of it is relevant to today. 'An Inconvenient Truth' has to look to these films as a precedent for that kind of awareness."
Guthrie's vibe re-emerges in the midafternoon screening of "The Columbia." In 1941 the Bonneville Power Administration invited Guthrie to Portland, Ore., to record songs for this 30-minute promotional film. The BPA was created to provide electricity to farms and small communities. Guthrie's classic song "Pastures of Plenty" emerged from the 26 he recorded in a monthlong visit.
But the evergreen of today's event is "The Plow that Broke the Plains," which will be screened at 4:30 p.m., after the Swing Doctors. The 1936 half-hour film about the Dust Bowl was directed and written by Pare Lorentz, who works from a 1933 thesis that the "old grasslands became the new wheatland," arguing that uncontrolled farming helped create the Dust Bowl. Lorentz was hired by the Agriculture Department to make the film, although he financed much of it himself. His use of dramatic music and big-sky imagery of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas and Texas influenced a generation of filmmakers as well as contemporaries such as John Ford.
"There was no TV, and people went [to theaters] to see this stuff," said panelist Don Smith of Columbia's Film & Video Department. "It did get people to think about it, which is how documentary filmmakers think about it. You make documentaries because they effect social change."
What do the New Deal films tell us about the relationship between art and government?
"In [former WPA writer] Studs Terkel's book Hard Times, there's a passage that says before FDR the only time you had any contact with the federal government was through the post office," McCarthy answered. "We've seen so much undermining over the years in any administration in funding of the arts that the New Deal was a very prolific period. We need another chapter to document American lives and what America is."
