Radical Filmmaking, 1930s

RADICAL FILMMAKING, 1930s. One of the imperatives of the Communist movement as it began to address the problems of the 1930s was to create mass media that would faithfully render its views and experiences. The first major step in this direction was the formation of the Workers’ Film and Photo League (FPL) on 11 December 1930. The FPL, an affiliate of the Communist-linked Workers International Relief, absorbed a number of media-oriented groups previously organized by the Communist Party (CP). Its primary agenda was to create motion pictures and still photographs that would advance the cause of the American working class. An adjunct to this mandate was the distribution of radical films made abroad and activities that carried out a radical critique of the Hollywood system.

A score of FPL personalities would remain at the core of radical filmmaking, distribution, and criticism for decades. Among them were Leo Seltzer, David Platt, Leo Hurwitz, and Tom Brandon. The FPL alumni have never been forthcoming about the relationship of their organization to the CP proper, but no one could have been involved with the FPL without realizing the CP was its guardian angel.

The focus of FPL film production was the creation of newsreels. Low production cost and the ability to convey a feeling of immediacy made newsreels an ideal tool for a movement entering its most dynamic decade. FPL members used hand-held cameras with great daring and often plunged into the midst of mass demonstrations to develop a visual style that was a kind of proletarian cinéma vérité. The most renowned cameraperson was Leo Seltzer, who had a canny way of infiltrating police lines and other adversaries to catch demonstrators approaching class enemies head-on. The work was so all-consuming that the FPL core had virtually no other social, political, or artistic life. Cadre like Seltzer often took up residence in FPL offices.

A point of pride with the FPL was that its newsreels were far more honest in presenting events than were those of its commercial rivals. One problem with this claim was that some scenes were staged for FPL cameras and some sequences appear in more than one film, so that a demonstration in city X may be shown as having occurred in city Y. Such “cheating” was mainly a matter of economics and in large measure the FPL did, in fact, capture the tenor of the Communist-led class movements of the era.

The FPL had some two dozen branches with a peak membership of nearly one hundred, but only the Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York units made films. New York, the creative hub where most of the films were edited and released, also dispatched units to areas of the nation that did not have FPL branches. The scope of FPL interest was wide. Some representative titles are: National Hunger March, Harlem Sketches, The Ford Massacre, Chicago May Day, Sheriffed, Workers on the Waterfront, Hillsboro Relief Scandal. About a dozen newsreels still exist in part or in whole and are available in major film archives.

The photographic component of the organization mainly sold still photos to the radical press. In addition to full-time photographers, a number of filmmakers were active in the unit. After the film division dissolved in the mid-1930s, the Photo League would continue to function and lasted until 1951, when it fell victim to McCarthyism. Among its distinguished members was Lewis Hine, who joined late in his career.

The FPL was enthralled by the film theories of Soviet filmmakers. Film Front, the FPL Bulletin, and Experimental Cinema, journals issued by the FPL or to which its members contributed, published translations of and commentary on the writings of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. The screening of Soviet films such as Battleship Potemkin often led to spirited theoretical debates. The dominant FPL view was that the montage theory of Eisenstein was as revolutionary as Marx’s dialectic. Among the most innovative FPL initiatives was the establishment of the Harry Alan Potamkin Film School in 1933. This was named after a radical film critic who had died the previous year from a stroke at the age of thirty-one. The school had an enrollment of fifty and there was considerable interaction with the New Dance League and the New Theater League. Such appreciation of film as a major art form was farsighted in a time when film was not so viewed by universities and museums.

Direct action against Hollywood films was as important to the FPL as theory. Boycotts were organized against Black Fury, a Warner Brothers film about corrupt unions, and against No Greater Glory, a Columbia film glorifying the military. FPL’s own screenings took issue with the Hollywood vision of America by frequently pairing a newsreel about the hardships of working-class America with a feature film celebrating social advances in the Soviet Union.

Except for screenings (1932–1933) at New York City’s Acme Theater, the FPL was never able to regularize commercial sales. Distribution was primarily through a political circuit controlled by the CP. This network included CP meetings, front groups, labor unions, and outdoor screenings in neighborhoods. Two FPL films had the distinction of being used to win court cases involving demonstrations against the police. The FPL deficit had to be covered with funds from Workers International Relief, rental income from foreign films, and donations.

Tensions had always existed within the FPL between individuals like Seltzer, who prized the newsreel form, and those like Hurwitz, who wanted to make fiction films and more complex documentaries. As the CP line shifted to the Popular Front concept, Party publications took FPL films to task for being too humorless, too confrontational, and too crude.

The New Film Alliance was created to take over the distribution of foreign films and other activities previously entrusted to the FPL. The schism within FPL ranks led to the formation of Nykino by members who wanted to go beyond the newsreel form. A final blow came with the demise of the German-based Workers’ International Relief. Although some films released in 1936 and 1937 had begun as FPL projects, by late 1935 the organization had ceased to exist.

Nykino would function for two years before restructuring itself as Frontier Films (FF). During this brief existence Nykino would engender intense theoretical interchanges and produce some interesting films. The filmmakers affiliated with Nykino had particularly close relationships with CP theater groups and hoped to have an impact on cinema comparable to the impact writers like Clifford Odets were having on theater. The most celebrated Nykino work is Pie in the Sky, a fourteen-minute satire starring Elia Kazan and Elman Koolish. What there is of a plot involves two tramps in a junkyard mocking all middle-class values. The film has considerable verve, with the tramps taking on organized religion in a manner not seen since the Industrial Workers of the World assaults on the Salvation Army. The zany irreverence of the film is in the same spirit as that which marked the early films of the Newsreel collective some three decades later. But Pie in the Sky was the exception among Nykino efforts.
More typical of Nykino was The World Today, a left-wing version of The March of Time format. The World Today had its debut on 22 September 1936 in New York City. It was soon packaged with other films and sent to the ten districts of the CP to be used in electoral work. Included in the program was a filmed speech by Earl Browder, a labor cartoon from the Daily Worker, and Millions of Us, a labor film made independently in Hollywood by American Labor Films.

Two other Nykino films that got some distributions were Sunnyside and Black Legion. The former aimed to build the alliance of classes by showing middle-class homeowners fighting evictions while the latter dealt with the Michigan-based secret society that preached and practiced violence against Communists, Jews, blacks, Catholics, and trade unionists. As with most Nykino works, no print of Black Legion has survived.

The incorporation of FF in 1937 launched the most vigorous work of the decade. FF would produce four major documentaries and one fiction film: Heart of Spain (1937, 30 min.), China Strikes Back (1937, 24 min.), Return to Life (1938, 45 min.), People of the Cumberland (1938, 24 min.), and Native Land (1942, 120 min.). The organization also made United Action Means Victory (1940, 40 min.) in cooperation with the film department of the United Auto Workers and two films on transportation and ecology made for hire. The hard core of FF consisted of Leo Hurwitz, Paul Strand, Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Lionel Berman. Among those working on at least one film were Ralph Steiner, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willard Van Dyke, Earl Robinson, Paul Robeson, Marc Blitzstein, Erskine Caldwell, and Elia Kazan. No women played a major role in any of the productions.

Heart of Spain and Return to Life, films about the Spanish Civil War, and China Strikes Back, a film featuring the first footage from Maoist Yenan, reflect the FF policy of subordinating any advocacy of socialism to the needs of the Popular Front. The tone is that of good guys versus bad guys with the Communist-supported side being the good guys. People of the Cumberland likewise places union and community organizing into a nonthreatening context of folk art revival and mountain populism. Patriotic imagery such as the display of American flags is conspicuous. As a liberal film made by radicals, People of the Cumberland fails to express the zest of New Deal films such as Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937).

If FF documentaries did not reflect the ideas of Brecht, Stanislavski, Vertov, and Eisenstein, Native Land did. Its aim was to create a fiction-documentary poetic form never before seen in American film, a cinematic counterpart to the blend being offered by John Dos Passos in U.S.A. The direct inspiration for the film was Leo Huberman’s The Labor Spy Racket (1937) and the revelations of the La Follette Civil Rights Committee (1936–1937). The film involved the cream of FF talent: codirection and editing by Hurwitz; codirection and cinematography by Strand; coscripting by Hurwitz, Maddow, and Strand; music by Blitzstein; singing narration by Robeson; and acting by Howard da Silva.

The tragedy of Native Land was that history would outpace its production process. The film sought to win popular support for workers by presenting them as victims of racism, greed, and police infiltration. These enemies of the working class were also seen as the groups that could become a fascist fifth column in the United States. As the film took shape, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, often using CP cadre as organizers, led millions of workers in often bloody and usually successful strikes for which the victim image was not appropriate. By the time the film was completed, however, the United States was at war and the CP opposed all strike activity in basic industry and any images that weakened patriotic fervor. Having already missed the moment of militant industrial unionism, Native Land was judged by the CP to contain images of oppression and class division that were far too strong for a nation at war.

Intended to have launched FF as a major feature film producer, Native Land became the organization’s swan song. Although it was to earn a measure of fame later, Native Land was a financial and political bust. The FF personnel would continue to have individual careers, but the cooperative movement defined by the FPL, Nykino, and FF had become history. A quarter-century would pass before a new breed of radical filmmakers would attempt to do for their generation what their predecessors had done for the Communist Left of the 1930s.

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Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.

Campbell, Russell Drummond. Radical Cinema in the United States, 1932–1942: The Work of the Film and Photo League, Nykino and Frontier Films. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1981.

Experimental Cinema, 1930–1934. Reprint of complete editions with introduction by Dr. George Amberg. New York: Arno Press, 1969.

Film Front, December 1934–March 1935. Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop Reprint Book, 1977.

Kline, Herbert, ed. New Theatre and Film, 1934–1937. Selections and commentary. Foreword by Arthur Knight. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.