Monday Night 04.23.07 — The Film and Photo League — Martin Lucas, Sherry Millner, and Ernest Larsen
Comments Off on Monday Night 04.23.07 — The Film and Photo League — Martin Lucas, Sherry Millner, and Ernest LarsenMonday Night 04.23.07 — The Film and Photo League — Martin Lucas, Sherry Millner, and Ernest Larsen
1. About this Monday
2. About the Film and Photo League
3. About Martin Lucas
4. About Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen
5. Film and Photo League: Radical Cinema in the 30s — Russell Campbell
6. Links
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1. About this Monday 04.23.07
What: Screening with commentary/discussion
When: Monday 04.23.07 @ 7:30
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
Who: Free and open to all
We are very excited to present a screening of 16mm radical newsreels by the Workers Film and Photo League (later known as the Film and Photo League). This material was shot on 35mm black and white film in the 1930s. The two-reel compilation we are screening was assembled in the late 1970s and arrives to us via the Donnell Media Center at the NY Public Library. It is known historically but rarely viewed today. We hope this screening might introduce the material to new audiences. Total running time of the films is 67 minutes.
We are very happy to have Martin Lucas, Sherry Millner, and Ernest Larsen to introduce and lead a discussion about the films. Marty Lucas will share his recent research and thinking regarding the historical significance of the production and distribution efforts of the (W)FPL. Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen first lectured about the Workers Film and Photo League at Mills College in 1975, as part of a course on political film-making taught with the Jump Cut group, and will speak about a renewed interest in the material at that time. We hope all three will help us discuss the (W)FPL in relationship to other moments of socially-engaged group media practices.
We welcome the opportunity to examine a period of New York City-based radical activity in light of the city’s increasing disregard in the present for the non-affluent.
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2. About the Film and Photo League
from Wikipedia.org:
The Workers Film and Photo League was an organization of cultural workers in the United States affiliated with the Friends of Soviet Russia and thereby to the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe or Workers International Relief. The WIR was led by the German Willi Muenzenberg.
In the 1920’s and 1930’s the WFPL produced documentaries of workers’ strikes and political activities, including the Passaic Textile Strike, the Gastonia Textile Strike and the National Miners Union strike of 1931 – 1932. As a cultural organization of the Communist Party USA, these newsreels were generally not distributed to theaters, but shown at party or Trade Union Unity League events.
In 1933 “workers” was dropped from the title and the organization became the Film and Photo League. The Soviet section of the WIR was abolished in 1935. The FPL survived for another year, but was finally converted into a private production company.
Members of the WFPL included Sam Brody, Robert Del Duca, Leo T. Hurwitz, Lewis Jacobs, Vic Kandel, Irving Lerner, Jay Leyda, David Platt, Julian Roffman, Leo Seltzer, and Ralph Steiner.
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3. About Martin Lucas
Martin Lucas is a videomaker, artist and media activist with a 20-year background in documentary and media art. His first film, Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet, made with Jon Miller and James Gaff-ney, a populist look at New York City’s fiscal crisis, screened at the 1980 New York Film Festival. Other works include Camino Triste: The Hard Road of the Guatemalan Refugees, in the permanent collection of the Museum of the American Indian, and the more recent Great Writers, Great Cities series, co-produced with Fred Barney Taylor for the Discovery Network. TV news stories include “The Price of AIDS” a 6 min. exposé of AIDS drugs’ pricing scandal for ZDF German TV top-ranking investigative news program “Frontal”. A turning point in Martin’s career was The Gulf Crisis TV Project – a multi-part series by Pa-per Tiger TV that used satellites, 200 producers and a variety of networking strategies to develop the only serious critique of the first Gulf War on US and British television. The GCTVP was screened at the ’93 Whitney Biennial.
Since the early 1990’s Martin’s work has included art and installation work such as Unnecessary Suffer-ing, an installation on laser blinding weapons and their legality under the Geneva Convention shown at the Ik & de Andere Exhibition, Amsterdam, 1994 and at the Human Rights Watch International Film and Video Festival, 1997. In the Fields of Flanders, a photo-based performance-installation piece contem-plating the origins of modern industrial war was shown at the Centrum Beeldinge Kunst Rotterdam, and the Knitting Factory in New York. Cold War in 24 Frames was performed in an abandoned fortress on the Rhine as part of the “Nederlandse Waterlinie” exhibition, with a parallel web presence. Subway Outside, produced for Artists Space was a collaboration with Dutch Conceptual artist, and Dutch representative to the most recent Venice Biennale, Jeanne van Heeswijk. The work included three cable programs, live discussions with film subjects and experts on the relationship of culture and space in New York backed by a series of newspapers, stickers, and a video installation. With the Paper Tiger TV Collective Martin worked on Target Audience, an installation about television war news at the “Krieg” show in the Neue Gallerie, Linz, as well as Checkpoint ’95, a satellite-based look at the evolving information age pro-duced for the Ars Electronica with the Linz Stedtwerkstett involving discussants in Moscow, New York and Austria linked via satellite, and a bridge over the Danube where US and Soviet vets met using VR and tele-presence technologies.
Martin has taught film and video production as well as new media at Fordham University, where he was the initiating teacher in the new media program, as well as Brooklyn College, and at The Educational Video Center, where work with students included Webstories, an effort at remote shared production using the internet. He has developed media programs in Armenia and, working with the Downtown Commu-nity TV Center, in Siberia. He currently teaches in the Film & Media Studies program at Hunter College. Martin is a graduate of the New York University film program.
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4. About Sherrie Milner and Ernest Larsen
Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen are anarchist artists who produce and curate STATE OF EMERGENCY, an interventionist series of video projections in the windows of a loft on 23 St. They began collaborating in the mid-seventies with a performance about the Weather Underground and then made the two-screen situationist Super-8 Disaster (1976), recently restored on DVD. They produced two 16 mm anti-documentaries on crime, and then a series of satiric semi-autobiographical videos focusing on the nuclear family as the originary site for the the reproduction of the authoritarian structures that support the public sphere. Millner’s multimedia installlations have explored domestic space as a battleground, first with the theory and practice of camouflage as the controlling aesthetic and then re-creating the designs and plans in U.S. army manuals on how to boobytrap the home. Larsen is also a novelist (Not a Through Street) and a media critic. Their conceptual video, 41 Shots, based on the NYPD murder of immigrant street peddler, Amadou Diallo, examines the implicitly racist ‘broken windows’ theory of criminology. They are currently editing the installation and single-channel versions of Sight Gags which depicts patriotism as a collective outbreak of hysterical blindness. Millner is a professor at College of Staten Island, CUNY.
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5. Film and Photo League — Radical Cinema in the 30s — Introduction — Russell Campbell
From Jump Cut, no. 14, 1977, pp. 23-25
Read online at:
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/FilmPhotoIntro.html
Film and Photo League: Radical cinema in the 30s
by Russell Campbell
The Workers Film and Photo League in the United States (known as the Film and Photo League after 1933) was part of an extensive cultural movement sponsored by the Communist International and its affiliated national parties in the interwar period. Specifically, it was a section of the Comintern-control led Internationale Arbeiterhilfe or Workers International Relief (WIR), founded at Lenin’s Instigation in Berlin in 1921.
The WIR’s initial function was famine relief in the Soviet Union. After the crisis had passed, the organization—with branches established in most countries of the world—became an international support force for strikers and their families. In the U.S., for example, it provided food, clothing and shelter during the Communist-led textile and cotton workers’ strikes at Passaic, New Bedford, and Gastonia in 1926-29, and the miners’ strikes of 1931-32.
But the WIR’s activities extended also into the mass media and many cultural fields. In Germany, under the leadership of the remarkable Communist entrepreneur and propagandist Willi Muenzenberg, the WIR built up a flourishing publishing empire encompassing daily and weekly newspapers, illustrated periodicals, and books, all with a leftwing perspective. Elsewhere, with the exception of the Soviet Union, the WIR concentrated on ventures requiring little or no capitalization. Thus in the United States the WIR organized, during the early thirties, revolutionary drama groups (the Workers Laboratory Theatre), dance groups (the Red Dancers), symphony and mandolin orchestras, bands, choirs, art workshops, etc.
Muenzenberg was especially interested in film. In a 1925 article he decried the fact that “in the main the labor organizations and even Communist Parties and groups have left this most effective means of propaganda and agitation in the hands of their enemy,” and called for “the conquest of this supremely important propaganda weapon, until now the monopoly of the ruling class.” “We must wrest it from them,” he concluded, “and turn it against them.”(1)
The WIR’s first motion picture activity was in Russia, where in 1922 it began distributing German films. In 1924 it formed the production company Mezhrabpom-Russ (later Mezhrabpomfilm, “Mezhrabpom” being the abbreviation for the Russian name of the WIR). This company was to be responsible for many of the more significant Soviet features of the period, including Pudovkin’s MOTHER, END OF ST. PETERSBURG, STORM OVER ASIA and DESERTER, Vertov’s THREE SONGS ABOUT LENIN, and the first Soviet sound film, Ekk’s ROAD TO LIFE. Muenzenberg was to claim credit for the WIR for the international perspective of many of Mezhrabpom’s productions, such as STORM OVER ASIA, which he termed “the first film to thrust deeply into the chaos of imperialist politics.”(2)
In Germany the WIR entered production via the Prometheus company, acquired in 1925. Prometheus produced a number of films with a working class point of view, the best known of which are Jutzi’s MOTHER KRAUSE’S JOURNEY TO HAPPINESS (1929) and Dudow’s KUHLE WAMPE (1932). It also pioneered in the distribution of Soviet films in Europe, scoring a notable success with POTEMKIN in 1926. In 1928 Muenzenberg founded Weltfilm to handle nontheatrical distribution of workers’ and Soviet films: this firm first popularized the use of 16mm for such screenings.
The WIR’s next move was clearly to stimulate indigenous production in the other countries in which it operated. Since capital was not available for studio production, emphasis inevitably came to be placed on low cost documentary and especially newsreel forms. There were also good political reasons for this choice. To undertake such production the WIR had an instrument ready at hand. Workers’ photo leagues had already been widely established to provide visual coverage of working class subjects for the leftwing press. Where feasible, existing leagues were charged with movie production, and others were formed. By 1930 or a little later film and photo sections of the WIR were operative in Germany, England, France, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Japan and the United States.
In the U.S. the WIR affiliate, at first known as the Friends of Soviet Russia, had been involved with film distribution since its founding in 1922. Throughout the decade it arranged nationwide release of documentaries about the Soviet Union designed to counteract the hostile propaganda emanating from Hollywood. Beginning in 1926 it also handled nontheatrical distribution (and, effectively, exhibition) of Soviet features. This distribution arm of the WIR was to become closely allied with the Workers Film and Photo League.
In 1930 the breakthrough into production was made. On March 6 of that year a Communist-led demonstration of the unemployed had resulted in probably the largest such crowds in U.S. history jamming into New York’s Union Square. However, the capitalist press had minimized the event, and commercial newsreels of the demonstration had been suppressed at the behest of New York police chief Grover Whalen—no doubt partly because they exposed the brutality of his officers in action. As the economic situation worsened, protest marches, rallies and manifestations became more frequent and the bourgeois media continued to ignore or distort them. It was clear that there was an urgent need for workers’ newsreels.
In May, Daily Worker film critic Samuel Brody wrote
“I want once more to emphasize the newsfilm is the important thing; that the capitalist class knows that there are certain things that it cannot afford to have shown. It is afraid of some pictures ….”
“Films are being used against the workers like police clubs, only more subtly-like the reactionary press. If the capitalist class fears pictures and prevents us from seeing records of events like the March 6 unemployment demonstration and the Sacco-Vanzetti trial we will equip our own cameramen and make our own films.”(3)
Less than two weeks later, again in the Daily Worker, the call for workers’ movie production was reiterated. Radical poet and film critic Harry Alan Potamkin argued:
“The German workers have started well. There is no need to begin big. Documentaries of workers life. Breadlines and picketlines, demonstrations and police-attacks. Outdoor films first. Then interiors, And eventually dramatic films of revolutionary content. Workers’ organizations should support a group to be pioneers on this important front.”(4)
Even as the call was being made, the WIR was mobilizing its cinematic forces. The same month it was able to announce,
“Movies of the unforgettable May Day parade and demonstration in New York City will be one of the features of the mass celebration of the Five Year Plan, to be held at Ulmer Park. Brooklyn, this Saturday, May 31, Defend the Soviet Union Day.”(5)
The film may have been obtained from an independent source, or it may possibly have constituted the first output of a fledgling Workers Film and Photo League, whose exact founding date I have been unable to pin down. In any case, it is fair to assume that within a few months the League was in operation, filming workers’ events and exhibiting the results at workers’ gatherings in precisely the fashion of these 1930 May Day movies.
The key New York WFPL participants at the beginning were, as Leo Seltzer indicates, Sam Brody (practicing what he preached), Lester Balog, Robert Del Duca, and a little later Seltzer himself. Of the group members Del Duca had the most practical experience, having worked as a newsreel cameraman and laboratory technician. Brody was clearly the theoretician and political overseer. Handling the WIR’s film department, and thus intimately involved with arranging distribution and exhibition of, and often finance for, the League’s productions, was Tom Brandon. In Chicago, key FPL members were Maurice Bailen, John Freitag, Gordon Koster, William Kruck, John Masek, C.O. Nelson, and Dr. J. Twig.
This core group was augmented in subsequent years by a larger membership, outstanding among whom we’re the writers and critics Potamkin, Lewis Jacobs, Leo T. Hurwitz, David Platt, Jay Leyda (for a short period prior to his departure for the Soviet Union), and Irving Lerner, and the still photographer and experimental filmmaker Ralph Steiner. For the most part these men were less involved with the League’s production work than with its other activities. Such activities included publications (program notes, contributions to New Theatre, the Daily Worker, and Filmfront) lectures and discussions; film series screenings; photographic exhibitions; anti-censorship agitation; boycott campaigns; film school and photo courses. By 1934 Balog was in California—where, as a member of the San Francisco FPL, he was jailed for showing ROAD TO LIFE and COTTONPICKERS’ STRIKE to agricultural workers. In the fall of that year, Hurwitz, Lerner and Steiner broke away to form Nykino. Soon after, Seltzer secured work as a filmmaker with the WPA. Most of the League’s production in the last year or two of its existence seems to have been handled by Del Duca, Julian Roffman (who, like Brody, Brandon, Hurwitz, Platt and Lamer wrote on film topics for the Daily Worker) and Vic Kandel. Nancy Naumburg and James Guy did pioneering work, with the League’s assistance, on the dramatized political documentary in 16mm.
The nature of the League’s output may be gauged by reference to the filmography. But “output” is perhaps a misleading term. As Seltzer insists, the group was not challenging Hollywood on it own terms, manufacturing motion pictures as merchandise. Rather than individual “films,” it is more correct to speak, for the bulk of (W)FPL production (which is probably much greater than that indicated here) of “footage.” By footage, I mean news film which was processed and printed rapidly and then roughly edited for the quickest possible screening and maximum impact. Once the topical moment had passed, of course, the footage became available for recutting into later compilation documentaries. It is to this class that most of the League’s major productions—NATIONAL HUNGER MARCH, BONUS MARCH, HUNGER 1932—belong.
Though the newsreels did sometimes receive theatrical screenings (particularly during 1932 at New York’s Cameo Theatre), they were mostly exhibited by the (W)FPL members themselves, often along with a Soviet film, in a specifically political context. Taking films to the workers became a potent organizing device, as the following quotation from a Communist Party unit organizer indicates:
“Our shop unit in the Caterpillar plant is only about six months old. And while we are getting new contacts on the job (the plant has been working a few days a week and now closed down indefinitely), we found that shop-gate meetings are a great help in approaching workers on their problems.”
“On March 1st a Party speaker held a meeting at the shop during noon hour. After the meeting the workers discussed a great deal amongst themselves on how to solve the conditions in favor of the workers. During the same time the Workers International Relief was showing a Russian movie to which the workers were invited. And for the next few days the workers in the plant were discussing the lack of unemployment in Russia and the millions of unemployed here. These discussions among the workers gave (the Party members) the opportunity to comment and help them along and thereby find out who is who in the shop.”
“As a result of the shop-gate meetings outside and our work inside we have now a functioning group of the Metal Trades Industrial League and have recruited seven new members to the Party unit (we started the shop unit with three members).”(6)
As might be expected, the content of (W)FPL newsreels and longer films was conditioned by the particular campaigns being undertaken by the CP. Here it is essential to recall that the period 1929-34 was one of militant class struggle for the world Communist movement. Party strategy in the U.S. (as elsewhere) was to build the strength of the movement by stimulating recruitment into (a) the “revolutionary” unions—those affiliated to the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), (b) the Party’s “mass organizations”—of which the WIR was one, and (c) the Party itself.
Thus the footage devoted to the miners’ strikes of 1931 and 1932 played its part in assisting the drive to organize the coalminers of Western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee—then destitute and disillusioned with John L. Lewis’s leadership of the United Mine Workers—into the TUUL-affiliated National Miners Union (NMU). On the West Coast there was an energetic campaign to build the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, reflected in several of the Los Angeles WFPL productions.
Organization of the unemployed was undertaken via the Unemployed Councils around the demands for immediate relief and a comprehensive program of social insurance. These demands were dramatized by numerous local and two national hunger marches. The national marches, held in December 1931 and December 1932, became occasions for coordinated newsreel coverage by WFPL cameramen around the country—the WIR arranging the filmed record along with food, shelter and medical care for the marchers. A hunger march in Detroit on March 7, 1932, filmed by members of the local League, became a massacre when police opened fire and killed four demonstrators. The film survives.
The Bonus March of 1932 was not Communist-led, but the Party did try to extend its influence among the out-of-work veterans through the participation of its “mass organization,” the Workers Ex-Servicemen’s League (WESL), whose banners are prominent in the powerful League film devoted to the march, camp, and eviction.
The Scottsboro Case was used by the Party to focus attention on lynch law in the South and the oppression of blacks generally. The CP conducted a militant defense through its International Labor Defense organization and held many rallies demanding the release of the accused men. This activity was reinforced by several newsreels and a short film made for the ILD, with assistance from the League, by Leo T. Hurwitz
Other films, as their titles and descriptions indicate, focused on further pressure points in the class struggle and helped fulfill the League’s reported purpose of
“the taking of newsreels of demonstrations, meetings, Party activities and other affairs of immediate, daily concern to the American working-class.”(7)
Cinema-verité has dulled our appreciation of participant camerawork, but in the Thirties the handheld, close range cinematography of street actions which the League footage offered must have struck spectators with great novelty and force. Leo Seltzer stresses the importance of his physical involvement in the events he was shooting in conveying excitement. Writing of his participation in the filming of HUNGER 1932, Brody makes a similar point. Brody, however, lays emphasis—as Seltzer does not—on the political commitment of the filmmakers:
“I was a member of a group of four cameramen sent by the New York section of the Workers Film and Foto League to cover the activities of Column B of the National Hunger March on its way to Washington from New York City.”
“Soon there will be shown to the workers of New York the evidence gathered by the keen eyes of our cameras. This evidence is totally unlike anything shown in newsreels taken by capitalist concerns. Our cameramen were class-conscious workers who understood the historical significance of this epic: March for bread and the right to live. As a matter of fact, we ‘shot’ the March not as ‘disinterested’ news-gatherers but as actual participants in the March itself. Therein lies the importance of our finished film. It is the view point of the marchers themselves.”
“Whereas the capitalist cameramen who followed the marchers all the way down to Washington were constantly on the lookout for sensational material which would distort the character of the March in the eyes of the masses, our worker cameramen, working with small hand-cameras that permit unrestricted mobility, succeeded in recording incidents that show the fiendish brutality of the police towards the marchers…”(8)
It was in camerawork, and not in editing, that the newsreels were distinguished, but in the longer compilation films there are some striking sequences of montage in the Soviet manner. BONUS MARCH, for example, edited by Leo Seltzer and Lester Balog, opens with a prologue which sketches the background to the contemporary situation. This sequence is a model of savage political comment in film. Without detailing the complete editing of the prologue, it is possible to give an indication of the sequence’s content, and its power, by listing the shots and groups of following shots, which appear basically in the order given here. Some of these shots appear several times at key points, adding considerably to the drama and commentary of the prologue.
1. A title: “1917…”
2. Swinging sign: Go Places with the U.S. Army”
3. Sign: Adventure Over the World” and doughboy
4. Mass parade of troops
5. Battlefield: tanks and troops advance
6. Cannons fire
7. Shell explodes, blows up building
8. Shell explodes on battlefield
9. Tanks, soldiers in battle
10. Battleships (various shots)
11. Interior, ship’s gun barrel
12. Ship’s gun fire
13. Turret rotates
14. Explosion, smoking warship
15. Warplane
16. Soldiers advance
17. Explosion in the trenches
18. Dead on battlefield
19. Injured, maimed vets (one stretcher patient, one legless man) line up to be greeted at a garden party
20. U.S. flag
21. Churches
22. Down-and-out unemployed worker on bench
23. Priest
24. Heroic statuary
25. “Catholic Charities” sign
26. U.S. Eagle sign on Bank of the United States building
27. Unemployed man, close-up; and others
28. Salvation Army signs
29. A waterside Hooverville—shacks, one of the inhabitants
30. Breadline (various shots, coning closer to the men).
Following documentation of WESL agitation, the march to Washington and the encampment, the film begins it sequence of the eviction with a quick reprise of the opening statement. We see a title “1917…” and shots of marching troops, tanks on the battlefield, an explosion, the wounded given a garden party reception—then “1932…”, and the U.S. infantry attacks down Pennsylvania Avenue, backed up by the cavalry, and the armored division.
The montage of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the AMERICA TODAY sequence referred to in the interview by Seltzer offers another example of creative montage used to make a political point forcefully and economically. The CP line at the time was that Roosevelt was preparing for aggressive war and that the New Deal represented incipient fascism. The sequence is cut as follows: troops parade through streets/Mussolini salutes/troops march, give fascist salutes/fascist salute, PAN to reveal arm is Hitler’s/U.S. battleship, TILT UP to following ship/FDR signing document, reaches for blotter, lays it down, makes a fist to blot/ cannons fired on navy cruiser/front view, guns are raised/interior, gun barrel/cannons fired/ FOR looks up and smiles/dark cloud, DISSOLVE to NRA Eagle sign and inscription: “We Do Our Part.”
Seltzer was quite content working strictly within a newsreel/documentary mode. By 1934, however, some dissatisfaction was being felt among other League members with this approach. It was in recognition of this and anticipation of arguments to come that Brody wrote the article, “The Revolutionary Film: Problem of Form,” reproduced in this issue. The riposte came in New Theatre three months later, when Hurwitz described the work being done by an experimental group at the League’s Harry Alan Potamkin Film School, and stated:
”…the plan is to develop this experimental group into a production group within the Film and Photo League for the purpose of making documentary-dramatic revolutionary films—short propaganda films that will serve as flaming film-slogans, satiric films and films exposing the brutalities of capitalist society.”(9)
The plan encountered rough going, and the issue remains a controversial one among former FPL members. There is not space here to develop the ramifications of the dispute, which centered on financial priorities rather than either/or aesthetic commitments. The upshot was that the FPL did not approve Hurwitz’s proposal for a “shock-troupe of full time film workers.” In the fall of 1934 he, Steiner, and Lerner broke away to form the nucleus of a radical filmmaking collective known as “Nykino.” Theoretical statements issued by Steiner and Hurwitz at this time are listed in the bibliography.
Meanwhile, in September, the FPL rededicated itself to the business of unvarnished newsreel production at a National Conference held in Chicago. Reference has so far been made primarily to the New York section of the League, but in fact branches existed in many cities of the country. Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles were the most active in terms of production, but there were strong groups also in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. Local FPL organizations were reported at one time or another in Pittsburgh; Hollywood; New Haven, Connecticut; Perth Amboy, N.J.; Laredo, Texas; and the University of Wisconsin.
The Conference resolved,
“The tremendous growth of the working class movement coupled with the increase of strikes and class warfare makes it imperative for the Film and Photo League to concentrate its best film and photo forces on the field of battle, adequately to record the vital events of our time.”
16mm was adopted as the basic stock for local use, 35mm being retained for original photography at the national level. A National Film Exchange was set up, and a National Executive Committee elected—with David Platt as National Secretary and Tom Brandon a member.(10)
Work continued. In 1934-35 Leo Seltzer produced, with Ed Kern, his much-praised MARINE, and Nancy Naumburg, with James Guy, directed two longish political films (with acted sequences): SHERIFFED and TAXI, the latter of which became an official FPL production. All these films are lost, and reviews provide only frustrating hints as to their content and technique.
It was evident that there were weaknesses in the movement. In November 1934 novelist and Daily Worker columnist Michael Gold expressed his disappointment:
“Our Film and Photo League has been in existence for some years, but outside of a few good newsreels, hasn’t done much to bring this great cultural weapon to the working class. As yet, they haven’t produced a single reel of comedy, agitation, satire or working-class drama.”
And invoking THREE SONGS ABOUT LENIN, he concluded:
“I hope somebody in the Film and Photo League learns how to do a film as tenth as good for proletarian America.”(11)
In response, Platt could only admit that the charge was
“very true—no one knows better how true it is than the Film and Photo League itself, which has been struggling for years to produce films on a budget and with forces that would have wrecked a similar bourgeois organization.”
He promised to do better in the future.(12)
The League members no doubt continued to struggle, but history was against them. The WIR, reeling under the annihilation of its German operations in the Third Reich, suffered a second grievous blow in 1935, when the CPSU abolished its Russian section. Muenzenberg, now devoting himself to antifascist propaganda from Paris, was no longer with the organization. It managed to survive in several European countries (amalgamated with the International Red Aid), but in the U.S. its activities seem to have come to a standstill by mid-decade. The League might have kept going as an independent entity—it did continue into 1936. But without the organizational backing, financial support, or political directions its parent body was able to provide, there must have seemed little point in keeping it alive. After editing a feature- length documentary on the Chinese Revolution from commercial newsreel footage as a noble last gesture to the League, filmmakers Julian Roffman, Vic Kandel and veteran Robert Del Duca formed themselves into an independent production company, and an era in U.S. radical cinema was at an end.
Notes
I would like to thank Leo Seltzer, Tom Brandon, and David Platt for assistance with my research into the League.
1. Willi Muenzenberg, “Capture the Film!” Daily Worker, July 23, 1925, p. 3.
2. Willi Muenzenberg, Solidarität: Zehn Jahre Internationale Arbeiterhilfe 1921-1931 (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1931), p. 513.
3. S(amuel) B(rody), “The Movies as a Weapon Against the Working Class,” Daily Worker, May 20, 1930, p. 4.
4. Harry A. Potamkin, ‘Workers Films,” Daily Worker, May 31, 1930,åp. 3.
5. Daily Worker, May 28, 1930, p. 16. Party Organizer, 5, No. 8 (August 1932), 27.
7. S(eymour) S(tern). “A Working-Class Cinema for America,” The Left 1, No. 1 (Spring 1931). 71
8. Samuel Brody, “The Hunger March Film,” Daily Worker, December 29, 1932, p. 4.
9. Leo T. Hurwitz, “The Revolutionary Film—Next Step”, New Theatre 3, No. 6 (May 1934), 15.
10. David Platt, “The Movie Front: National Film Conference,” New Theatre 1, No. 10 (November 1934), 30.
11. Michael Gold, “Change the World,” Daily Worker, November 5, 1934. p. 7.
12. David Platt, “World of the Movies: A Reply to Michael Gold,” Daily Worker, November 16, 1934, p. 5.
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6. Links
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/FilmPhotoIntro.html
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/FPhotoFilogy.html
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/FilmPhBiblio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_Film_and_Photo_League
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/Huffman/Frontier/history.html
http://www.sambrody.com/