CAPITALIST REALISM
Saturday, January 8 at 4:00 p.m.
 
During the Great Depression, Chevrolet attempted to humanize 
the face of mass production by producing homages to free 
enterprise that surprisingly resemble Soviet films of the 
time. This industrial-strength program shows how American 
corporate and institutional films portrayed the mobilization 
of the masses, but as consumers rather than as a working 
class. By contrast, the effects of innovation are shown in 
Valley Town, a Brechtian social documentary on unemployment 
caused by technological progress. 
 
MASTER HANDS
Produced by Jam Handy Organization for Chevrolet Motor 
Company, 1936. 40 min., 35mm. Completed February 5, 1936. 
Filmed at the Chevrolet plants in Flint, Michigan.
	1936, the year that Chaplin's Modern Times and 
Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will were produced, was also 
the year of Master Hands, one of the most impressive records 
of mass production ever made. Produced ostensibly as a 
tribute to the "master hands" of the Chevrolet craftsmen, 
Master Hands looks much more like management's own tribute 
to the system of mass production. Embodying a genre which 
might be called "capitalist realism," this featurette film 
uses the representational methods of the Soviet and German 
cinemas to strengthen its vision of American enterprise. But 
its producers were documentarians enough to show something 
of the Flint factory's actual nature. While the machines and 
assembly lines are all presented heroically, the Rhuman 
elementS appears guarded, fatigued and vulnerable to 
accident. 
	In the Central States, automobile production had 
recovered from its Depression slump by the mid-Thirties, and 
a long accumulation of grievances led auto workers to form a 
solid (and secret) organization. Late in 1936, Chevrolet 
workers, first in Flint and later throughout Michigan and 
the United States, "sat down" on the job, stopping 
production, sequestering key tools and dies, and occupying 
factories to enforce their demands for union recognition. 
This legendary strike forced the company to recognize and 
bargain with the United Auto Workers, which resulted in 
better wages, benefits and greater dignity for the workers 
of America's key industry. Master Hands is a glimpse of that 
last year when management ran the plant according to its own 
rules. Among industrial films, it is a rare example of 
documentary verity, an unusual instance in which truth 
resides in the image itself, regardless of its maker's 
intentions.
	Later in the Thirties, it was revealed in congressional 
hearings that one out of every ten workers in the Flint 
Chevrolet plant had served G.M. as a confidential informer 
about union activities. It may then be fair to assume that 
one out of every ten people shown in Master Hands was 
receiving secret payouts from the company...and who is to 
say how many others were secret UAW organizers?
 
FROM DAWN TO SUNSET
Jam Handy Organization for Chevrolet Motor Company, 1937. 24 
min., 35mm.
	In 1937, just after the successful sitdown strike at 
Chevrolet, the company made this film about a typical "day 
in the life" of a composite Chevrolet worker. This film, 
which has a new resonance now as parent company General 
Motors continues to close plants and eliminates thousands of 
jobs, positions workers as consumers, placing them in a 
relationship of symbiosis with the company for which they 
work and avoiding any mention of unions, class differences, 
or disharmony. It's even richer as a document because it 
employs images that might be found in the Soviet cinema of 
the time; in Roland Marchand's terms, this film might be 
called an example of "capitalist realism."
	The film, which seems to have been drawn in part from 
preexisting footage, presents Chevrolet's "spin" on labor 
relations. Throughout, it's a picture of harmony -- 
affectionate and loving family relations, fraternal 
affection between workers (some even march to work arm in 
arm), cordial relations between paymasters and workers, and 
friendly shopkeepers selling goods to those who enjoy the 
fruits of the full pay envelope. With an enthusiasm unusual 
in the United States during peacetime, an offscreen chorus 
even sings a song about the pleasures of going to work:
 
	"Dawn is breaking in the sky,
	Men to their work are marching.
	Hear the tramp of feet
	That swing along and sing a song of happiness, of peace!
	In the east, a rising sun -- 
	Tells of a new day coming.
	Men of skill and might to work are going, are going
	The wheels of industry are rolling.
	Here they come! Hear the song! Everyone!
	Hallelujah, night is gone,
	Hail to the bright new morning.
	Eager souls are there...to start the morning,
	With a song in the heart, joy in the soul,
	Marching in the morning sun!" 
 
	From Dawn to Sunset shows workers arising, their morning 
ablutions, an epic treatment of the journey to work, crowds 
assembling and filing into factories and people on the job. 
In parallel, we see payday after payday, shopping at stores 
and markets; and later, evening recreation at bowling 
alleys, dancehalls and at the card table, and "turning in" 
for a night's sleep. To the tune of music bearing regional 
connotations, we see downtown skylines, landmarks, and food 
markets in each of these cities: Tarrytown and Buffalo, 
N.Y.; St. Louis and Kansas City, Mo.; Detroit and Flint, 
Mich.; Baltimore, Md.; Norwood (Cincinnati), Ohio; Atlanta, 
Ga.; Oakland, Calif. and Janesville, Wis.
 
VALLEY TOWN
Produced by the Educational Film Institute of New York 
University and Documentary Film Producers, Inc. for the 
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 1940, 24 min. 16mm. Director: 
Willard Van Dyke. Script: Spencer Pollard, Willard Van Dyke. 
Commentator: Spencer Pollard. Narrator: Ray Collins. Music: 
Marc Blitzstein. Orchestra conducted by Alexander Smallens. 
Cinematography: Roger Barlow and Bob Churchill. Editor: 
Irving Lerner.
	Produced one year after Van Dyke and Steiner's landmark 
film The City, this film once again pleads for audiences 
(and makers of public policy) to reconsider our familiar 
landscape not as a given but as a space reflecting 
conflicting social, economic and cultural interests. Funded 
by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Sloan was Chairman of 
General Motors Corporation) in an attempt to counter the 
negative effects of industrialization and automation, Valley 
Town shows the devastation visited on an unnamed city when 
its industrial base shrinks.
	In a contemporary description, Valley Town is described 
as the story of "how machines made a 'boom' town with 
factories running at top speed, stores crowded with 
shoppers, money flowing freely -- and how machines broke it. 
It considers the problem of capable men thrown out of jobs 
because of high-speed machinery. It gives an idea of what it 
does to the spirit of a man and of the effect on a family. 
Finally, it offers as one solution the constant training of 
adults to keep them abreast of new developments ready for 
new and better jobs." Although the film suggests job 
training as a solution, it presents a strong picture of 
unemployment, showing few ways to alleviate it. 
	Temple University anthropologist Jay Ruby has called 
Valley Town "possibly the first postmodern film," and in 
fact its mix of genres goes well against the stream of 
American social documentary. The film even includes a 
sequence directly influenced by the work of playwright and 
poet Bertolt Brecht, a kind of sequence rarely found in 
American films -- a Brechtian song by a woman who wonders how 
she will continue to feed her family. There's also a kind of 
prefiguring of Italian neorealism in the way Valley Town 
mobilizes actors to reconstruct sequences that read 
somewhere between documentary and fiction. The almost-final 
scene in which workers watch the demolition of smokestacks 
at the factory in which they once worked puts the boosterism 
and bluster of From Dawn to Sunset definitively to rest.
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