Edward Brunner

Department of English
Southern Illinois University
ebrunner@siu.edu

 

Prelinger, Rick. Ephemeral Films 1931-1960: To New Horizons and You Can’t Get there from Here. CD-ROM. New York: Voyager, 1994.

 

Prelinger, Rick. Our Secret Century: Archival Films from the Dark Side of the American Dream: Volume 1: The Rainbow is Yours with Volume 2: Capitalist Realism; Volume 3: The Behavior Offensive with Volume 4: Menace and Jeopardy; and Volume 5: Teenage Transgression with Volume 6: The Uncharted Landscape. CD-ROM. New York: Voyager, 1996.

 

When W. H. Auden supplied the foreword to John Ashbery’s first book of poetry in 1956–Some Trees, which Auden had chosen for publication in the Yale Younger Poets series that year–one of the few poems he singled out for attention was “The Instruction Manual.” Ashbery’s speaker was so bored with his task of writing a technical manual that he instead daydreamed of a trip to Guadalajara, Mexico. Auden praised the poem for its contrast between the speaker’s “historically real but profane situation, doing hackwork for a living” and “his sacred memories of a Mexican town,” and quoted from these lines near the poem’s close:

 

How limited, but how complete withal, has been our
     experience of Guadalajara!
We have seen young love, married love, and the love 
     of an aged mother for her son.
We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and 
     looked at colored houses.
What more is there to do, except stay? And that 
     we cannot do.
And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered 
     old tower, I turn my gaze
Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream 
     of Guadalajara.

 

“Reading this,” Auden remarked, “I who have never been to Mexico nor wish to go there translate this into images of the happy life drawn from quite different cities.” Yet it seems all too obvious that Ashbery, exactly like Auden, had also never been to Mexico nor had he any wish to go there. This “tour” has all the earmarks of a cheap travelogue, the kind of thing one might have dozed through as part of a double bill in movie theaters in the 1940s. As a conveniently-located band plays excerpts from Scheherazade, Ashbery sweeps us from one side of the public square to the next. If, at first, the sights seem suitable enough, though a bit mundane–“Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-colored flowers, / Each attractive in her rose-and-blue stripe dress (Oh! Such shades of rose and blue), / And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit”–by the time we enter a “typical” household to be introduced to family members (“Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the wide streets” where an “old woman in gray sits… fanning herself with a palm leaf fan”) we realize we have by now been trapped wholly in the realm of the cliché, the unreal, the “picturesque.” The colors that play throughout each description–as pushy as any technicolor print–give an impression of “detail” and individuation even as they relentlessly neutralize any information, reducing each scene to a play of picturesque tints, as is evident when we look out from the church tower: “There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy terraces. / There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue.” (These particular colors are precisely weighted, but it takes a moment’s pause to recognize Caucasian skin coloring and the hue of despair associated with poverty.) Ashbery understands the daydream perfectly, of course; it is precisely an exercise in looking without seeing. So we never have left home–we never have even escaped the simple rigidity of the instruction manual. As “the last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower,” we should realize how often we have been at this same juncture in the closing images of a slipshod documentary. This old tower has been in need of a freshening breeze for a long time indeed.

 

Auden had a particular talent for misunderstanding Ashbery that has not gone unnoticed. “Remarkably disaffected” is how Richard Howard summarized Auden’s foreword. In fact, Auden had decided that no manuscript submitted to the Yale series in 1955 merited publication, and only the intercession of his companion Chester Kallman prodded Auden into reconsidering two manuscripts from writers in the New York gay subculture. (Ashbery won over Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency.) Still, the question arises: how could Auden have so completely mistaken Ashbery’s send-up for a solemn work of poetic art? One answer might be that Auden came from a generation with a heavy investment in the authority of the documentary. Arguably, documentary was the form that originated with and was nurtured by the generation of the 1930s. Auden himself worked in 1935 with the Film Unit of the General Post Office as assistant director, writing texts for half a dozen documentary films, including the much-heralded “Night Mail” (music by Benjamin Britten). To Auden, it must have seemed natural for the speaker in Ashbery’s poem to jog memory by drawing upon images that might have been at home in a documentary. To Ashbery, however (about to embark on a career as an art critic for the International Herald Tribune), some documentary embodiments of “reality” could be so maladroitly organized that they were not just profoundly suspect but even objects of lampoon.

 

I.

 

While postmodernist Ashbery was able–even ready–to regard the form of the documentary with distrust, as though the stage-management of the “realistic” visual image in film was already complicit with a form of commercialization, a modernist poet such as Auden, who came of age with the documentary, must have found it difficult to conceive of the extent to which others might violently abuse it. Yet almost from its inception, the film documentary perfected in the 1930s was understood by business, professional and government interests as a particularly enticing form that lent itself to manipulation in ways from which they could profit both directly and indirectly. Any doubts about this are thoroughly dispelled by Rick Prelinger’s invaluable assemblage of industrial, promotional and educational films that are available on a one-disc CD-ROM, Ephemeral Films, 1931-1960, and on a series of two-disc sets that will eventually be six in number appearing under the overall title Our Secret Century: Archival Films from the Darker Side of the American Dream.¹ These are films that we are sure to believe we have seen at one time or another, though we cannot precisely remember their details. Rather than remembering the films, we are likely to remember the circumstances under which we first saw them, for these films have been designed essentially to lack presence, to blend into the circumstances that surround them as if they were incontestably representations of the ordinarily “real.” What places, then, do these films return us to? Watching “Safety Belt for Susie” (1957), which uses first a doll, then human-scale crash dummies, to demonstrate the value of safety belts, will evoke driver education classrooms in second- or third-rate public high school in the 1950s or the 1960s. “A Date with Your Family” (1947), which suggests that happiness in families is a learned behavior, and family-members who begin to play the role of the happy child or happy parent may eventually find it easier and easier to fall into that self-assigned part, will recall the brightly-painted basements and metal fold-out chairs of well-meaning suburban churches where such films might be shown as part of a catechism class. The Union Pacific Railroad’s use of three unhappy examples of injudicious behavior to dramatize how feckless judgment could have lasting repercussions, in “The Days of Our Years” (1954), will remind employees of large corporations of “Safety Week” or some other program with a promotional slogan and extended lunch-hours with time set aside time for worker incentives. A half-hour production such as “Freedom Highway” (1957), sponsored by Greyhound, which extols the patriotic lessons to be gleaned by traveling from the West Coast to Washington by bus–as well as the pleasures of such a luxurious mode of travel–will recall the tarnished elegance of long vanished theaters of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s with their double bills and the “short subject” interspersed between the coming attractions and the cartoon. And “Design for Dreaming” (1957), which ends with an array of the General Motors automobiles of the future, vehicles built in prototype but never actually put into production, like the turbine-powered Pontiac Firebird II, may remind some of us of an early autumn ritual for families in the 1950s, the annual visit to the showroom of the local automobile dealer for the unveiling of the “latest models.” (Bouquets of flowers, a variety of hors d’oeuvres, and a professional pianist softly playing “standards” in the background were all elements that my father, who owned a Packard franchise in New England in the 1950s, deemed essential when he plotted the stagecraft for the new arrivals, including his own custom-stylized one-of-a-kind variant on a 1954 Packard, the “Monte Carlo.”)

 

It is easiest, perhaps, to think of these films as Americana, as fragments of settings and circumstances and rituals that have long been materially erased. But they are a good deal more than that, as Prelinger’s illuminating introductions always succeed in demonstrating. The rich vein of primary materials that Prelinger has reconstituted recommend themselves at once as potential texts for scholars in a number of disciplines–cinema, history, literature, popular studies, cultural studies, sociology or anthropology. Like a collector who realized that the coming of the LP threatened the preservation of the music on fragile 78s, he began in the 1980s to rescue from obscurity, and from outright destruction in some cases, those reels of film by small commercial filmmakers that no one could imagine a use for. (In a 1995 interview, he estimated he had around 90,000 cans of such film stored around the country and in his own Manhattan archives–a small portion of the 600,000 marginal films that he estimates were produced between 1920 and 1960.)² He has culled the most suggestively complex of all the films in his collection, and he has deployed the resources of the video disc as ingeniously as anyone could wish. Not only has he grouped the films in categories and in sequences that present something of the range that exists in sub-genres that may seem to be inordinately constricted, but he has also bundled alongside many of the films a slew of additional documentation, including excerpts from other films, contemporary interviews, segments from popular books, articles from trade journals, related advertisements, and (for one film) the front-page illustration from service station road maps of the 1950s (it is in itself a valuable brief anthology). Each CD contains approximately 100 minutes of viewing. But the time to be spent among these archives is extended immeasurably by the remarkable amount of extra data that Prelinger makes available.

 

The films Prelinger places before us are peculiar artifacts, half-familiar, half-alien. The experience of seeing them might recall another experience, that of discovering the pleasures in hearing musical recordings from decades past that we are better poised to appreciate than the audiences for whom that music was performed. Will Shade’s Memphis Jug Band must have seemed, to a street corner audience in Memphis in the 1930s, just one more hodge-podge band of blacks working with outrageous instruments (jugs, washboards, kazoos along with guitars and banjos) to play their “hokum” music that most audience members would associate with traveling medicine shows. To an audience listening sixty years later, however, Shade and his band represent an astonishingly complex moment in the evolution of American jazz as a vernacular African-American art form. To us, their recordings occupy a point midway between a just-about-outmoded rural blues tradition with its solo guitar and an about-to-be-invented urban jazz with its leanings toward group improvisation and orchestrated sequences. And to us, their instruments, while unbelievably crude, demonstrate the interplay possible between music built upon the regularities of the western diatonic scale and music driven by an attentiveness to sheer sound, in which timbre and tone are no less important than pitch. Their songs are clearly not yet jazz, but they are far more intricate than the Delta Blues, even as they borrow freely from the commercial music of their own time, even venturing unhesitantly into novelty effects. They were considered popular musicians in their own time, and they were relatively successful as entertainers. Only later is it possible to appreciate the complicated strands that they were mediating to perform their music and to understand the degree of inventiveness in their decision-making.

 

Prelinger’s films can be regarded with a similar zest. There is both pleasure and scandal in viewing these films. The pleasure lies, in large part, in being placed as late-coming viewers who are in the powerful and superior position of looking over, around, through, and beyond these films. The only subject position never inhabited by the present-day viewer is that of the gullible audience-member who would take them at face value. These films carry within them, almost as a defining element, the husks of the audiences for whom they had been previously intended. And an added pleasure is the level of sharp and critical engagement that is always elicited by the category of the “bad.” At some level, Plan 9 from Outer Space and Last Year at Marienbad are similar in that both works encourage us to see there is more than one version of a story, more than one way to narrate events, for no scene can appear in Plan 9 without us seeing at once how it might have been presented in another way. The pleasure of bad art is that it so invites the play of our ingenuity (a pleasure that, it is true, can exhaust itself with dangerous speed). At the same time, these films are never merely laughable. They are scandalous examples of how thoroughly the media environment has been penetrated by schemes for social engineering.

 

Prelinger has a devastating eye for a telling detail. Our Secret Century dazzles most when he arranges his material to disclose the cultural and historical framework within which the films sought to nestle. Consider one example: what may be one of the most straightforward of the discs, Volume 2: Capitalist Realism, which places on display the corporate mentality of a time (the late 1930s) and a business (General Motors) as represented by a single firm, the Jam Handy studios of Detroit, the largest and by all accounts most lucrative of the commercial filmmakers. By turning to “the Archives” section of the disc, we can read six accounts of Handy’s developing career, all plucked from a slew of hard-to-uncover trade publications, beginning with “Motion Pictures–Not for Theaters” from the February 1940 Educational Screen to “Jamison Handy: Master of Show ‘Em” from the March 15, 1963 issue of Sales Management. Handy even talks for us in excerpts from a 1961 TV interview (in which he explains that the first moviemaker was Christ because he used images to illustrate his parables). Handy began as an editor of newspaper comic strips (he discovered Popeye’s creator, E. C. Segar) but found himself drawn into the volatile marketing strategies of the early 1920s that centered around various alternate designs for projecting slides and short moving pictures. Handy understood that salesmen had to be equipped with inexpensive movie projectors if films were to become successful merchandising devices, and he bankrolled the development of cost-effective models. Handy’s shrewdest move, though, was to center his operations in Detroit and take advantage of a friendship with Richard H. Grant, a General Motors executive who carried Handy with him as his own star rose (he eventually became President of the Chevrolet Division). Linked strongly with GM–he wisely rented space in the new General Motors building downtown and used the opportunity to proselytize–his fortunes grew rapidly. By 1936 he was employing 400 people, including eight directors and twenty-eight writers.

 

Capitalist Realism features two examples of Handy’s work from the 1930s, “Master Hands” (1936) and “From Dawn to Sunset” (1937). Both reveal how elaborate the sponsored film could be. Both are extended operations, thirty minutes in length, with striking visual presentations. At the same time, the limits of these films are also evident. Both represent a corporate position toward labor that is subtly demeaning. These two films also indicate how deftly Prelinger has chosen his examples, for the first was filmed just before and the second was filmed just after the 1936-1937 sit-down strikes by assembly-line workers that forced major concessions from GM. Two rather different attitudes toward workers, then, can be read back into each film. Indeed, the first often views the workers in settings that heroize them–enmeshed within the intricacies of the modern factory, manipulating formidable and mysterious slabs of machinery. The image of the worker borrows heavily from socialist realism films. In the second film, however, the worker is represented as first and foremost a consumer. As Prelinger notes, the film dwells on the worker receiving a paycheck, often through images of disembodied hands reaching out. With references to plants in far-flung areas (Buffalo, St. Louis) instead of celebrating a single plant in Flint, the film reminds workers that overall prosperity depends upon nation-wide cooperation.³

 

These two Jam Handy films are offset in Capitalist Realism by a third, but this is a project that might better please Auden. Willard Van Dyke’s “Valley Town” (1940) offered a view of the devastation wrought by unemployment in New Castle, Pennsylvania. Subtitled “A Study of Machines and Men,” the film was intended as part of a series to be produced by the New York University Film Institute that would publicize the effects of automation on American life.⁴. (The series was, in fact, bankrolled by a foundation spearheaded by Alfred P. Sloan, then chairman of GM, who withdrew his funding of the project shortly after viewing “Valley Town”). Although it ultimately delivers a compact little message–the solution to automation is educational programs that will teach displaced workers new skills–it does so after a series of powerfully disturbing scenes. The shots of workers in “Valley Town” contrast pointedly with those in “Master Hands.” Van Dyke’s workers speak back and forth to one another as they toil. Their conversational exchanges imply that work is an extension of social life. Yet the drudgery and routine of laboring in a steel mill is not downplayed. Shots of disembodied feet move back and forth in a dance-like shuffle. Still, while such repetitive motions indicate the mechanical pressures of assembly-line operations, they also convey how a worker can embody a particular rhythm that can be imposed over and against the demands of the job. These images, however, of active, satisfying labor belong to New Castle’s past. (The footage was actually assembled from a visit by the crew to prosperous Lancaster, Pennsylvania.) When the mills in New Castle began to reopen–European rearmament was just under way–they reopened as state-of-the-art operations whose automation cost hundreds of jobs. Current shots in the modern New Castle mills show glowing slabs of steel floating mysteriously over mechanized rollers, and in the rare moment when a worker appears, he is only a disembodied face.

 

Van Dyke’s documentary is sharply distinguished from Handy’s pseudo-documentaries through its use of numerous narrators and multiple points of view. Handy sets out to construct a single voice, a corporate voice, that speaks for all workers. Van Dyke lets a range of voices speak for the worker and indeed, his project sets such voices free, for it concludes with scenes in which a group of workers are openly discussing their predicament, without any final position dominating. Before that conclusion, moreover, Van Dyke has used voice in unusually compelling ways. At the opening of the film, a single voice narrates, that of the mayor who functions as an objective chronicler. But at its midpoint, when the film shifts to investigate the unemployment caused by automated mills, the job of narrator transfers to a young husband reluctantly returning home after unsuccessfully searching for a job. At home, the governing narration passes to the voice of his young wife who, in a strikingly effective shift, not only speaks but sings–and sings in words and music composed by Marc Blitzstein.⁵ Everything, in short, demands that we attend with care to a range of different voices, each representing a view by a worker in this film, beginning with the thoughtful public official, moving on to the unemployed husband, then to the young housewife (who also is configured as a worker in that she must provide a meal without adequate financial resources), to flourish with the musings of the unemployed at the end. Because of the importance accorded to voice, one of the most powerful passages in the film turns out to be a long scene at the kitchen table where the unemployed husband, the wife, and their small child eat their meager fare–in silence. Poverty has robbed this family of speech, that communal interchange that is the basis of so much that the film reveals as positive.

 

Capitalist Realism as a volume is somewhat atypical insofar as its supplementary source material is exceptionally rich. Other items that Prelinger posts for our usage include a statistical map that dramatically indicates where supplies of tear gas had been shipped from 1933 to 1936 (most went to the industrial belt as manufacturers prepared for labor unrest); a 1940 article from Harper’s, “War and the Steel Ghost Towns,” and a 1936 article from Barron’s Weekly, “Detroit: the Commercial Hollywood.” What is typical, though, is the care with which this volume establishes a framework and helps provide a groundwork for later films. These 1930s films, the earliest from Prelinger’s archive, foreground issues that will return, notably inflected, in later films, including: an aesthetic based on appearing as up-to-date as possible, as if the need to take continual surveillance of one’s position should be a source of continual anxiety; the prestige-value of the documentary approach and its co-option by corporate enterprise; the appeal of “education” as a concept that invites endless redefining; the search for a strategy that will define the identity of the worker to the worker; the difference between the worker figured as an element in a working class community and the worker figured as a consumer moving upward into a middle class; the predominance of a male point-of-view; and the utterly complete erasure of even a hint of the existence of the African American or, for that matter, any substantial minority presence. The WPA guidebook to Michigan, in Prelinger’s excerpt, mentions that “Negroes form the largest racial group” in Flint, the setting of “Master Hands.” Not one is in sight in the film.

 

II.

 

Capitalist Realism is also atypical in that the comparisons it offers between its films (between Jam Handy and Willard Van Dyke) are quite pointed. In part this is an offshoot of a subtext in this volume, profiling the early days of the Jam Handy Studios. But Jam Handy is a sort of mini-mogul of commercial films; his jobs turn up on almost every disc. His relentlessly bland commercialism becomes a standard against which other commercial filmmakers come to be defined. Indeed, if there is a hero who emerges from the first six volumes of Our Secret Century–a foil to Jam Handy–it would have to be Sid Davis, whose productions dominate Volume 5: Teenage Transgressions. Davis specialized in films about youth in trouble. Working closely with actual figures from the judicial establishment who appear with all their disapproving gruffness intact, Davis captured an ominous and menacing Southern California environment in which youngsters were the victims of drug-dealing sharpies and sexual predators or of broken families or of neighborhood gangs. The script he commissioned for “Gang Boy” (1957) even went so far as to acknowledge ethnic differences between Chicanos and Anglos at the base of L.A. gang violence, though the shooting script altered the original script so that “Emilio” became “Martin,” “Luis” became “Larry,” “Gabriel” “George,” and “José” “Joe.” If the films sometimes seem immersed in a cop’s eye-view of the world, the mask-like and toughened faces that regularly appear among the main figures (the credits for “Gang Boy” offer thanks to members of “the following clubs:… Red Hearts, Red Dragons, Sharkies, Vikings, Lancers”) testify to a pervasive brutality that is more than simply a mark of the street-wise. 1950s popular culture was notorious for being unable to decide whether the Juvenile Delinquent was a psychopath or a Byronic hero and thus opted for a combination of both, in the character fleshed out by Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones or in the adulatory sketch of Dean Moriarty in On the Road.⁶ Davis’s gritty films expose the unlikelihood of such elegant archetypes. Relentlessly recording an irredeemably harsh environment–not only in the visages of participants but in the backlot locales, in the littered streets and noisy rail yards, in rooming-house interiors, and last but not least (especially in “The Dropout,” 1962) in the frenetic fourth-rate jazz that careens irritatingly through the background–these films offer persuasive testimony that no one person can survive as larger-than-life in this environment. Everyone gets beat. Merely to survive in such hard and cruel circumstances requires stamina, good luck, and most important of all but hardest to convey to teen-agers–a willingness to cooperate with others.

 

The pivotal figure in Davis’s films is the dedicated professional–the case worker or district court judge who understands that a troubled youth may be, in fact, a sensitive youth. But that professional, perhaps not surprisingly, is apt to be a bit crusty. No one could mistake the air of chilly disapproval that clings to the chambers of Judge William B. McKesson of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, as he soberly recalls, in “Name Unknown” (1951) and “The Terrible Truth” (1951), the errors of judgment by innocent teens that led to drug addiction, rape, and murder. Indeed, the most terrifying faces in these films are not worn by the miscreants–they often seem remarkably vulnerable, their faces open and wide–but by the adults in the police department into whose hands these kids eventually fall.

 

It is almost a signature of a Sid Davis Production that the forces of authority will be associated with brutality, especially in “Gang Boy” and “Age 13,” both written and directed by Arthur Swerdloff. Andrew, in “Age 13,” has been unable to mourn the loss of his mother. In his case, his mother has died abruptly of unknown causes, though even this small detail is a mark of the sensitivity evident in these films: it is most important that the central character should suddenly experience an absent parent and a broken home, and it is not necessary to supply a scandalous version of that loss. Andrew’s behavior is ultimately explained as stemming from his difficulty in working through anger and mourning, but before the film reaches this conclusion it has presented so many examples of truly dark and quirky behavior that the explanation seems all too simple, even optimistic. Andrew seals up his father’s favorite cat, who had been competing with Andrew for his father’s affection, in the boxcar of an outgoing train and watches stonily as it departs–a scene that is not simply illustrative of Andrew’s anger but, as filmed, stands as a deviant mock burial that replays the voyage into the unknown of his lost mother. Andrew’s efforts to comprehend her loss lead him to the master bedroom where he sniffs perfume from her cosmetics and examines the room with her hand mirror, which shatters when he drops it (startled by his father’s cat). His father’s dismissive comment on the accident–“More bad luck!”–only dramatizes to Andrew his father’s ignorance of his mother’s sacred status. Scenes so disturbing lodge firmly in the viewer’s mind, as do similar kinds of images in “Gang Boy” which traces the social networks that a Chicano male learns to rely upon even as a youngster, all of them tests of endurance and courage that confer “manhood”: standing by the edge of the railroad tracks without flinching as a train bears down, high-diving into the depths of a treacherous quarry. The sheer amount of violence that the central characters experience on an everyday basis undermines even the modest message of hope that the film wants to deliver at its end.

 

Fifties-culture fantasizing about the Teen Rebel may suggest that the films in Teenage Transgression that cite the dangers of adolescence are exclusively the product of areas of social anomie like southern California. (Various Sid Davis films credit the police departments of Santa Monica, Inglewood, Pomona, and Los Angeles for aid with the production.) But the notion of the postwar teenager as a troubled figure turns out to be a durable concept that translates into a wide variety of situations. All the films in Volume 3: The Behavior Offensive, present teens whose situations and whose problems are light-years distant from “Gang Boy” and “Age 13.” In these films, there are no gangs, unless we count the girls who invite Barbara over after school (in “Habit Patterns,” 1954) for such conversation as

 

First Girl: I didn't even want to go to my first concert because I thought it would be too long-haired. Oh, but the music is wonderful! Now I want to go to the whole series!

Second Girl: My mother had to drag me to the museum. They have a wonderful costume exhibit there. I got an idea for a new dress!

 

And moms don’t vanish from these households–they stay in them all day, bedecked in tasteful jewelry, outfitted in heels ‘n’ hose, planning and cooking the six-course meal that father, sister and brother will gather over at nightfall, to make amicable small talk. These, in short, are fantastic films, positing ideals of social harmony that would be barely attainable except under the most affluent situations. The unreality of this set of films is itself a striking testimony to the ambitions of a postwar America that, in fact, fell far short of realization. Most of the films were made between 1946 and 1955, and they assume that within a short generation the upward mobility fostered by advances in technology, wide access to education, and the elimination of cultural problems thanks to the advice of sophisticated social scientists will result in a country that is astoundingly prosperous, wonderfully stable.

 

Were these films trying to keep the lid on social change by rigidly proscribing the rules for middle-class behavior or were they promoting successful upward mobility by openly instructing a new audience in social protocols that might otherwise remain mysterious? One might ask the same question of Evelyn M. Duvall’s Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers (1950), segments from which Prelinger places alongside two films, the somewhat menacingly-titled “Are You Popular?” (1947) and “Shy Guy” (1950). Duvall addresses awkward topics–under what circumstances might a girl telephone a boy, the occasion on which a “first kiss” is appropriate, the distinction between fondling and “petting.” Her comments do indeed establish definite boundaries that curtail the range of the discussion (no category exists beyond “petting”) but her frankness also serves to demystify taboo topics.⁷ The films divide along similar lines. They always set out to address a specific problem. (For a sample, just consider films by Coronet alone that Prelinger cites in his selected readings under “W” : “Ways to Good Habits” (1949), “Ways to Settle Disputes” (1949), “What Makes a Good Party?” (1950) [I think the question mark in this title is absolutely essential], “What To Do on a Date” (1950) and “Why We Respect the Law” (1950). By always setting out to address a specific problem, the films give an illusively narrow range to social contact; they reduce behavior to a matter of strategy and awareness. Social problems can be solved through better guidance. The idea that there might be significantly larger problems in need of attention is never considered. Instead, the films instruct individuals in how to adjust their attitudes. What is being cured, then, is the impression that a problem exists. That a problem may have root sources seems to be unthinkable.

 

The assumption that social problems can be cured by a strategic shift in public attitude rather than through large-scale alterations of the political, social, or economic system is probably the one theme constant to all these films, but it surfaces most consistently in the films in Volume 4: Menace and Jeopardy. As Prelinger notes, “We Drivers” (1936), produced for General Motors in 1936, with updated versions released in 1947, 1955 and 1962, places the burden for road safety directly on the shoulders of the drivers. With no consideration given to lobbying county engineers to redesign dangerous curves, we are that much further removed from thinking automobile manufacturers might shift their resources away from styling innovations to safety improvements. And the corporate underwriting of these films almost guarantees a variety of subtexts will co-exist. Prelinger suggests that one of the agendas at work in “Last Clear Chance” (1959), produced for the Union Pacific R. R. and displaying the vivid cinematography of Bert Spielvogel, is to shift the responsibility for safety at unprotected highway grade crossings from the railroad to the motorist. “Why are so many grade crossings unprotected?” Prelinger asks. “Obviously gates and signals cost a lot of money.” But a more substantial subtext in “Last Clear Chance” is even more obvious: the extraordinary hazards of travel by highway. The film is narrated by a Highway Patrolman who is recounting the terrible accidents he has witnessed, and they occur even under the most up-to-date of roadway conditions. The 4-lane open highway lends itself to “inattention,” and “another hazard of our superhighways” is the tendency of lax motorists to drift from one lane to the next. Indeed, improvements in roadway engineering turn out to have increased the dangers of driving: “Those narrow two-lane country roads that used to be so peaceful are now several lanes of high-speed traffic.” To be sure, the overt message works to shift responsibility to the operators of vehicles (“everything in the world of transportation has improved,” the patrolman growls, “–everything except the drivers”), but surely the covert message–rendered about as penetratingly as a text can be and still remain subliminal–is that if one must travel the best way to do it is by train. After all, one reason why grade crossings pose hazards is they are traversed by high-speed trains delivering people rapidly (and without danger) from one spot to another. Spielvogel’s eye for a sharp design cannot entirely account for why most of the trains shown are passenger-and-mail combinations in the distinctive yellow colors of the Union Pacific.

 

Subliminal messages can easily nestle in these films about safety because the films themselves are so distracting. Unlike other sponsored films, these always have a series of climactic moments in which danger strikes and violence explodes across the scene. Prelinger is typically insightful when he points out that our anticipation of these dramatic pay-offs inevitably shift attention from the safety habits we are supposed to be internalizing. What we may internalize instead is that the world is a place of endless dangers–the very point Thomas Hine developed in his New York Times book review of Our Secret Century, entitled “Disaster Is Imminent, So Plan Ahead.”⁸ The conservative mind-set that dominated the early and mid-1950s was deeply indebted to a similar conviction, but these “menace and jeopardy” films also work against their own agenda of caution by cultivating an appetite for explosive moments. One of the films that seems to be especially allied with the devil’s party is the deliciously bizarre, almost voluptuous “Time Out for Trouble” (1961), produced through the ingenuity of the University of Oklahoma General Services Extension Division. The film purports to deliver an important 3-step message that will help us avoid accidents, viz.: “Face Your Feelings,” “Beware of Boredom” and “Watch for Danger.” But these rubrics are so hopelessly bland that their vast parameters free the filmmakers to concoct any number of peculiar episodes to illustrate them. In addition, it is never clear just what the specific danger is that is under scrutiny. One episode involves the courting and marriage of Jeff and Martha, which begins with the camera lasciviously eyeing from the waist down the provocative strut of a tight-skirted female, a shot that melts into a close-up of the upper half of a female torso swiveling to display breasts enclosed in a form-fitting sweater–scenes that will be used to explain why Jeff sits alone in a tavern, drinking one of many whiskies. Jeff is by himself, we are told, because his relationship with Martha was based only on physical attraction. (And we can easily see how this might have happened.) After the two of them were married, a female narrator purrs in a disarmingly throaty voice, “only then Jeff found out there was just one thing wrong with Martha: she didn’t have anything in that pretty head of hers but buckwheat batter.” So Jeff, apparently bored by mere erotics, compensated by having more than one too many at his local, until that fatal night when, as the filmmakers show, he staggered outside to walk in front of an oncoming car. He will live, though crippled, and ironically even more dependent on Martha’s buckwheat batter personality. The question that remains, though, is what danger exactly is this episode a warning against? Excessive drinking, one might think, or possibly even jaywalking. But so many dangers surround this brief episode that the mind boggles. What about the danger of drunken driving (would Jeff have survived once he started driving under the influence)? And of course there is the danger of the femme fatale: isn’t Martha indirectly culpable, by being only an attractive woman? Or is that our schools have failed by letting some students fall into the role of bimbo? Once we begin to look for dangers, the horizon recedes. The film itself, however, is prepared to state directly why Jeff was maimed: it was due to his boredom, to extensive boredom (the second, we now recall, in that list of alliterated warnings: beware of boredom). Perhaps the hidden agenda in “Time Out for Trouble” is that films themselves should strive to be entertaining or at least startling enough to ward off boredom. This gives new life to the title, which no longer functions as a shorthand piece of advice but denominates a site in which the filmmakers themselves take time out in order to play around with trouble. This wildly unfocused film (it is also narrated at times by a talking clock with vicious designs on humans), with organ music improvised by one Baird Jones in a vernacular manner reminiscent of a score for a Fellini movie, remains for me a high point in sheer loopiness and a superb example of how a text that sets out to be restrictive can unwittingly sanction permissive (and even subversive) behavior.

 

III.

 

The University of Oklahoma film is about as far from a Jam Handy Production as one can get, even as it moves in a direction very different from that of Willard Van Dyke or even Sid Davis. Yet it is Jam Handy whose influence seems most pervasive in the other two volumes. This should not be surprising, given the commercial nature of this enterprise. Handy always followed the money, producing everything from one-minute infomercials in the 1930s for Singer Sewing Machines (in the 1938 “Three Smart Daughters” [in Ephemeral Films], the social life of three beauteous teens is saved when they are directed to a Singer Sewing Center where they can hand-craft elegant dresses for an upcoming party) to thirty-minute epics that sought in the 1950s to associate the future of America with the fortunes of Chevrolet. Of course the Jam Handy film was by definition bound to be elaborate. Typically, it always wore a double disguise: it was crafted to imitate the look of the moment, to appear as if it was a production undertaken simply to entertain its audience, precisely to mask the fact that it was film with a sponsor. The extent to which “American Harvest” (1951)–one of the Jam Handy films in Volume 6: The Uncharted Landscape–is an advertisement for General Motors is by no means evident. It appears to set out to celebrate the abundance of American life at mid-century. Only about halfway through its thirty minute run does it settle on the concept that the nation is bound together by “air-lanes” and steel rails and highways, all of which are also the avenues through which corporations guarantee the distribution of abundance. By film’s end, all that “America” represents to the film’s audience is conflated with the automobile, represented here by the Chevrolet. Indeed, in a concluding movement, it seems that, in some peculiar way, America is actually brought to us by Chevrolet. As the melody of “See the USA in a Chevrolet” plays softly, the camera tracks across a variety of landscapes–a cliff-side view of the ocean, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, masses of people walking quietly toward a looming factory–and a voice-over (the astonishingly oily voice of John Forsythe) declares:

 

And so it is that all of us in interdependence live independently on wheels. And all this far-reaching interdependence is the great secret of why it is possible to put America's automobiles within the reach of so many people. And all America, all its rockbound beauty, all its pleasant vistas, all its historic shrines, and all its ways of living, all its sports and recreations, all its scenic grandeur, along all its far-flung highways, within the reach of all.

 

The referent of “its” begins to get a bit fuzzy as this unending no-verb sentence rolls onward. “It” is America, but it also lends itself to the automobile (“its far-flung highways”) and the automobile is always Chevrolet–as the very air of the landscape itself testifies, with its strings that sigh out the Chevrolet theme song.

 

As the films in The Uncharted Landscape indicate, big business found it easy to regard the whole of the country as a blank slate upon which corporations could inscribe their own standards. Few of the productions are as lavishly narrativized as Greyhound’s Freedom Highway (1957), in which a transcontinental bus becomes a stage for a drama that links patriotism and marriage in parallel plots. Riders who happen to be sharing a coast-to- coast journey, the Attractive Babe and the Old Curmudgeon, will find their lives changed. The Attractive Babe (a young Angie Dickinson) will find true love: traveling back to her New York fiancé, she will coincidentally meet on the bus a Handsome Football Player who is just plain more virile than her fiancé (we are sure of this because her fiancé’s name is Waldo). And the Old Curmudgeon will find his faith in his country restored: traveling to Washington with bitterness in his heart, to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor awarded posthumously to his son, he will meet on the bus a Mysterious Stranger who will open his eyes to the need to sacrifice the lives of young men for the country to continue. These two narratives intertwine. At issue is no less than the continuation of the human race in America. For the contest over the body of the Attractive Babe is (as Jam Handy’s scriptwriters might say) “in interdependence” with a contest for the body of America. Virility triumphs in both instances, restoring a balance that had been perceived to be threatened: as the Attractive Babe enters the protecting orbit of the Football Player (and rescued from the effeminate Waldo), so America is saved by its military conquests (and protected from the encroachments of alien enemies). As the bus travels across country and the Football Player makes his pitch for the Attractive Babe, so the history of America is recapitulated, thanks to an Inquisitive Young Boy, whose questions always provoke a response from various passengers, remarkably knowledgeable about American history from a military perspective. (“Have you ever heard of the Alamo, boy?” inquires the latest passenger, Country-and-Western Star Tex Ritter as he reaches for his guitar.) But then American history in this film is always already military history–the Alamo, the Battle of New Orleans, the Battle of Gettysburg. These battles, in fact, stand for the history of America, or more accurately, they signify its scarred yet beloved body. The story of liberty is a story of armed aggression. The Mysterious Stranger who directs the Old Curmudgeon to Gettysburg (and who allows the filmmakers to recall the spirit of sacrifice that Lincoln consolidated in the Gettysburg Address) and thus transforms the Old Curmudgeon into the Solid Patriot–that Stranger turns out to be a ghost: the ghost of the Unknown Soldier, no less (Tex Ritter says to him as they disembark at one bus stop: “Now I know where I’ve seen you! Weren’t you in my old outfit, the Second Division?”). This ghost is presumably driven to walk the land (or nowadays, ride the bus) when unpatriotic sentiments begin to flow. “America” exists as a great battlefield, over which we can now travel in comfort and safety, thanks to sacrifices like that of the Old Curmudgeon’s son. Their deaths allow America to continue, always ready to fight the next necessary battle (in which some day no doubt the Inquisitive Young Boy may have a chance to become a player).

 

It would be difficult to determine at what point to be most offended by “Freedom Highway,” though the profound anti-intellectualism that underwrites every moment in the film would be a fine place to start. (When Waldo meets his fiancée at the New York bus terminal, he greets her with words whose bookish vocabulary paint him as a man who reads: “Welcome, thrice welcome! I trust you feel completely rejuvenated!”–though Angie is most offended, it turns out, when he plants a very wet smooch on her kisser: or is she just flabbergasted at the blatant pretense of a man so effeminate?) Prelinger has arranged a particularly eloquent counter-response to these corporate expropriations of the territory of America by concluding The Uncharted Landscape with an unusual example of “home movies”–brief clips of life on Main Street in Britten, South Dakota, as filmed in 1937 and 1938 by the owner of the town’s movie house, Ivan Besse, who then screened them as a kind of local newsreel. Besse’s films portray Main Street as a space where ideology is in recess, the very opposite of the interlocking and coercive narratives produced for Greyhound and Chevrolet. Santa’s arrival in a pickup truck becomes an occasion for the whole town to turn out, even though closeups of “Santa” reveal just how casually he had been dressed for the part. One might surmise that simple poverty, or worse yet, lack of basic imagination, could explain the rather flimsy attempt at disguise. But a better explanation suggests the disguising was deliberately sketchy. Surely everyone in Britton over age twelve knew who would be playing “Santa” that year–it would have been a topic of discussion throughout the town. Besse’s film immediately instructs us in the intricacy of an everyday life in which rituals have been localized, in which a community delights in the inflections its members bring to their various roles. By contrast, the rigidly “interdependent” narratives that regulate every technicolor moment in “Freedom Highway” reveal a desire for control and order that verges on the terrifying.

 

Exactly as this sixth volume of films demonstrate that the American landscape, or the concept of “America,” was palpably reconfigured by corporate interests seeking to impose their designs upon it, so the films in Volume 1: The Rainbow Is Yours reveal the female body to be under a similar siege. Of course no filmmaker ever went broke (to paraphrase P. T. Barnum) by playing fast-and-loose with the female body. These films offer no exception to that dictum. Indeed, The Rainbow Is Yours is a veritable anthology of instances in which the female body is strategically repositioned to glamorize and eroticize objects to which it is supposed to be adjacent, beginning with the opening film, an excerpt from Jam Handy’s “Looking Ahead Through Röhm & Haas Plexiglass” (1947). Prelinger has chosen to reproduce just the technicolor portion of a longer film, but the panes of brightly colored plexiglass that no doubt guided the transition from black-and-white also invite us to peer voyeuristically through colored transparencies that effect ingress to a young lady’s boudoir. Even more dramatically, the young lady herself is in that boudoir–and deeply within it, lounging on a bed (reading a book, lonely thing), for we must peer past a plexiglass door to behold her. In one sense, she is dressed modestly, in a floor-length robe that is worn, open and belted, over a floor-length peignoir. In another sense, however, her dress spectacularly triggers voyeurism: the peignoir is orange-red, the robe is the color of tanned flesh, and the robe is belted open to present a frontal zone of vivid color that defines the body space from below the neck to the feet. The young lady detaches herself from her bed ‘n’ book, and as a voice-over declaims the virtues of plexiglass, wanders intriguingly from one area in her boudoir to the next, from her shower stall to her dressing table, all the while fondling plexiglass doors, shelves and drawers. She is willing, it seems, to reveal her inmost cosmetic secrets (or perhaps it is the transparency of plexiglass, so effortlessly framing these metonyms for her body, that put her in the mood for exposure). Seated at her dressing table, she opens drawer after drawer as the narrator murmurs approvingly: “on one side the pedestal swings open to reveal plexiglass trays for cosmetics, hose and lingerie.” Plexiglass not just refines intimate space but frames it so it becomes an arena for evocative display. Who would object to such gentle penetrations? This selective accessibility to private areas suggests an elaborate manipulation of sexual desire–a point of interest not only to the audience of tradesmen and contractors but, arguably, to the postwar woman as well.

 

Not all the films are willing to go quite this far in eroticizing a product (though the others lack the advantage of a product depending directly upon sight), but this group of films–most are from the mid- or late 1950s–is heavily committed to glamorization, and their sense of glamour takes its cues from a smarmy eroticization of the female body. In Jam Handy’s “American Look” (1957), something of a sequel to “American Harvest” in The Uncharted Landscape, the insuperably vacuous Jam Handy rhetoric begins its clog-and-choke procedure once again (“By the way things look as well as the way they perform, our homes acquire new grace, new glamour, new accommodations, expressing not only the American love of beauty but also the basic freedom of the American people which is the freedom of individual choice”) but before the numerous anvils it sets out to juggle while saluting the flag and simultaneously whistling “The Stars and Stripes Forever” cause it to collapse under its own weight, it gestures fleetingly toward linking the streamlined quality of well-designed products with adjectives associated with the performance of the female body: “In form, proportion, rhythm and variety, the stylists leave their own unmistakeable marks on everyday conveniences, in flowing lines and graceful shapes which we as Americans may enjoy”; “[modern packaging] brings festivity to the marketplace–tempting, hinting, and revealing.”⁹ When MPO Productions, working for General Motors, staged a lavish musical to introduce the 1957 automobile models in “Design for Dreaming,” it arranged a young lady to appear alongside each new car as it appeared, allowing the announcer to introduce not only “the Eldorado Town and Country Cadillac” but also to add “ensemble by Christian Dior–of Paris.” In one sense, of course, GM was merely underscoring the resemblance between its line of products and haute couture fashion; in another sense, GM was suggesting everything from the fantasy that each new car somehow included its own lithe paramour to the notion that if a man couldn’t easily trade in his old wife… (The wife, to be sure, could fantasize quite differently, as in all these films, associating with a product whose glamour would never threaten but only enhance her own attraction.)

 

Prelinger demonstrates how prevalent such concepts were when he juxtaposes an elegantly licentious four-minute dance routine excerpted from “Frigidaire Finale” (1957) with ads from 1957 and 1958 promoting something called “The Sheer Look.” “Frigidaire Finale” is at once the most erotic and the wittiest of these glamor pix, choreographed with a boy-seduces-girl/girl-seduces-boy narrative that integrates presentations of stoves, washer-and-dryers, and refrigerators. At first, boy and girl simply dance about appliances, opening oven doors, picking up sample pots, and generally framing the appliances with their own graceful movements. That their role could be something more is brought into the foreground in a sequence that centers on a single dark-hued refrigerator. (All the rest of the appliances had been white.) This curious dark interloper seems to signal or permit transgression, for the girl, instead of taking her usual place on the opposite side of the appliance, now jumps to its top and perches there, stumping her companion who cannot comprehend where she has gone. As he opens the refrigerator’s upper door and then its lower door, looking in as if to expect her to be inside, this redirection of his gaze from her to the appliance comes to seem a hint or clue he is offering to the audience as he models an act of transference. After all, she is not invisible to us but perched fetchingly (yet outrageously, transgressively) on top of the refrigerator, barely able to contain her vivacious glee, leaning her front over its front, eagerly dangling her legs along its side, swirling her body provocatively–all the time in a kind of oneness with the appliance. (The appliance may even be seen as eliciting her sexual glamour; at the very least, it is that which she transforms into an occasion for flirtatious play.) The more deeply he looks into the refrigerator cabinet, the more visible a presence she becomes to us. When he finally spots her, the reunion is joyous: a flirtation is definitely underway.

 

That this new flirtation is inseparable from the refrigerator is underscored in a follow-up scene in which she opens the door of the first in a series of refrigerators, then rushes behind it to the next, leaving her male companion to search for her by closing the door, at which point she has already stationed herself by the second refrigerator, whose door she now opens and so forth. This hot pursuit ends with her bestowing a peck-like kiss on his lips. This then escalates into even more direct foreplay that boldly centers on further exposure and display of the refrigerator. Now the girl pauses to run her hand down the length of a refrigerator door in a sweeping gesture that seems to enflame the lad who cannot help but rush toward her, arms wide open. She rebuffs him pertly, by detaching a tray from a compartment in the door and handing it to him and dancing off. Left holding that tray, his shoulders sink as if under a burden and he flips over the contents–spilling about four dozen eggs. But as the eggs fall, he looks briefly into the camera, with the flash of a satisfied smile.¹⁰. A conquest has been made. The facade has been deeply penetrated an exchange has occurred, and he has spilled (on?) the eggs. In final frames, the dancers join together, her legs happily twirling in a vivid display of new-found energy.

 

Only in a Jam Handy production, I suppose, would we get a money shot that is configured through the contents of a refrigerator. But the idea of equating the female body with a refrigerator cabinet is paralleled in Frigidaire’s own “Sheer Look” campaign of 1957, whose visual signature of a woman holding her arms (both encased in elegant shoulder-length evening gloves) up at a 90-degree angle was rendered so that the white space below her, where her body actually was, could be equated with the white space of the refrigerator. The glamour that Frigidaire associated with the refrigerator, by placing a model in evening dress in each of its ads, depended on transferring the appreciative gaze ordinarily directed toward the impeccably-dressed woman to the refrigerator cabinet. To open a refrigerator door, then, becomes as charged a moment as an act of undressing. But everything about “The Sheer Look” crackles with sexual innuendo. Why is the woman looking at us? Why is her face not visible? Her frank stare encourages us to come back with a gaze that is equally frank. Her face need not be visible because (a) we can fantasize about its particulars and (b) a face that is absent displaces attention to hair, eyes, and glove-encased arms-and-hands: all visual centers that signal the erotic.

 

For me, it is was with “Frigidaire Finale” that one of Prelinger’s ephemeral films attained a point of genuine sublimity. Here is a text that appears now to be both elaborately orchestrated and ridiculously crude, elegantly sophisticated and hopelessly vulgar, intricately convoluted and transparently clear. Who would have imagined that there could be so inspired a blend of commodity and sexual fetish? Prelinger has provided us with documents that offer epiphanic glimpses into the heart, soul, and pocketbook of America in the middle third of the twentieth century.

 

Notes

 

1. Only the first three of the 2-disc sets of Our Secret Century were available when research for this review began. Two more 2-disc sets have since been issued: Volume 7: Gender Role Call (films that instruct in gender distinctions) with Volume 8: Tireless Marketers (the evolution of the brief commercial from movie theater bills to TV); Volume 9: Busy Bodies (educational films about sex) with Volume 10: Make Mine Freedom (patriotic films). The final two collections, Volume 11: Nuts and Bolts (films about high-tech machinery) and Volume 12: Free to Obey, (extreme versions of social control) have been announced.

 

2. See Richard Gehr, “Rick Prelinger’s Ephemeral Films” at http://www.levity.com/rubric/prelinger.htm.

 

3. Here as elsewhere Prelinger’s supporting data is exemplary. As added material, he offers not just an account of the 1936-1937 sit-down strikes from the 1941 WPA history of Michigan but an excerpt from Mary Heaton Vorses’s Labor’s New Millions, a 1938 report from a left-wing perspective. He also includes an excerpt from a worker testifying before the 1937 Senate commission led by Robert LaFollette, whose charge was to investigate corporate violations of free speech and the rights of labor. That in turn contrasts with the prize-winning essay in a 1948 General Motors competition, “Why I Like My Job,” an explanation by 67-year-old Calvin H. Dunlap of the virtues of being loyal to the corporation.

 

4. Van Dyke went on to have a distinguished career as a conscientious producer of documentary and informational films that were supported by commercial sponsors, according to a 1960 article by Ralph Caplan in Industrial Design that Prelinger bundles with the first volume. According to Caplan, Van Dyke preferred to work as independently from his sponsors as possible, aiming to retain some of the integry of the explanatory documentary. In one example, a film devised in collaboration with poet Norman Rosten–a writer with strong left-wing connections to the 1930s whose The Big Road (1946) was an epic poem documenting the importance of the roadway in western European history from its inception to the apogee of the recently-completed Alcan (Alaska-Canada) Highway of 1942–for an unnamed manufacturer of communications was eventually modified to its detriment by the sponsor who added a three-minute prologue. In a second more triumphant example, Van Dyke produced “Skyscraper” under the sponsorship of Reynolds Aluminum, Bethlehem Steel, Westinghouse Elevators and York Air Conditioning; the film, which depicted the construction of a New York skyscraper, went on to win two first prizes at the Venice Film Festival, an award of merit from the Edinburgh Film Festival, and first prize for short subjects at the San Francisco Film Festival. Van Dyke’s independent operation, on a scale far smaller than Jam Handy’s 500-plus (in 1960) employees, became a successful alternate to large-scale producers who (in the case of Handy) were essentially the extensions of their influential corporate sponsors.

 

5. Obtaining Blitzstein’s services for Valley Town was an impressive coup: he was fresh from the Broadway triumph of The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and hard at work on No For an Answer (1941 ). It was a project, of course, for which he was eminently suited. The left-wing opera Cradle was set in “Steeltown, U.S.A.” And the musical form he was developing for the center of No For an Answer was the recitative. The song that the young housewife recites and sings in Valley Town, then, is something like a heretofore missing link between the operatic mixes in Cradle and the more vernacular-oriented recitatives in Answer. In an interview with James Blue in 1973 (that Prelinger has included in his disk), Van Dyke recalled the recitative as the high point of the film, the portion that he always listened to with the greatest emotion. (Still, Van Dyke may misremember how his alliance with Blitzstein occurred. He recalls that it was his admiration of Blitzstein’s work on No For an Answer that compelled Van Dyke to ask Blitzstein to contribute to Valley Town. But Valley Town, which premiered in May 1940, was completed before No For an Answer, which premiered in January 1941.) A condensed discussion of Blitzstein’s music in the 1930s is in Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (New York: Verso) 285-295.

 

6. “It was remarkable,” Kerouac writes in On the Road (1957), “how Dean could go mad and then suddenly continue with his soul–which I think is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road–calmly and sanely, as though nothing had happened” (qtd. in The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters [New York: Viking, 1992] 18).

 

7. A more accurate title for Duvall’s book might have been Facts of Life and Love for Teenage Girls. In addressing the problem of how to sustain a boy-girl conversation on a date, Duvall’s solution is for one of the member s to play the role of an interlocutor:

 

He: It's a great night, isn't it?
She: Wonderful. Did you ever see such a moon?
He: Isn't that what they call a Harvest Moon, or is it the Hunters' Moon?
She: Hunters' Moon? That sounds interesting. Do you hunt?

 

Though both boy and girl interrogate, Duvall’s comment suggests she conceives the audience for her advice to be primarily female: “There you are from the weather to his pet hobby in four little steps, simply by adding a question to every answer.” A “conversation” on a date, Duvall seems to be suggesting, is not intended to be a “dialogue.”

 

8. See www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/0915book-century.htm for the September 15, 1996, review.

 

9. An anecdote that Handy recalls in his 1961 TV interview suggests that distracting clothing was perhaps improper, at least between men, though close friends were just barely able to touch upon the subject. He recalls one of the incidents which taught him to dress with an appropriate modesty when speaking with upper-level executives: “‘Jam’–I was on a first-name acquaintance with him (well, I think I may say it was none other than Tom Watson, Jr., of IBM)–he said: ‘Jam, would you mind starting all over again? I have been so interested in that beautiful tie that you’re wearing that I haven’t heard a word you said.'” It is not exactly clear whether the full import of this anecdote can be quickly exhausted; at its basis it is attesting that image distracts from meaning, that the “beautiful tie” overwhelms actual discourse.

 

10. Or at least I think he appears to wear a satisfied smile. The quality of reproduction is such that one cannot be sure. And here is perhaps the place to mention that some viewers of films on CD-ROM are dismayed by the look of films operating under the QuickTime program. Hine for one complained of the indistinct images and said he’d “much rather be watching these on a videocassette recorder, with the comments and supporting documents in a book.” I can’t agree. The disadvantage of the QuickTime program is that images do seem to be jerky, their tonal values broken into Seurat-like pointillistic ensembles. But the advantage is the arrangement of the screen allows one to freeze a film in mid-frame, back up or move ahead a set of frames at a time, and easily replay narrative; by dragging a bar, it is possible to fast forward or fast backward. These positives outweigh the negatives, for me. Prelinger distinguishes between the movie on CD-ROM and the movie in a theater this way: “It’s not an immersive experience like going to a theater and being wowed by a powerful movie. But these are not immersive movies. You know, immersive means evasive, and QuickTime allows you as an individual, maybe with one other person, to look not at a movie, but at a picture or rendering of a movie. It’s much easier to look at a movie critically on your computer, to see it as a document with a context” (qtd. in Richard Gehr, “Rick Prelinger’s Ephemeral Films,” an interview dated April 24, 1995).