Presenter Charles Musser shares his slide talk that preceded the Orphans Online screening of The Case of the Fishermen on May 26, 2020. The film is embedded below and can be viewed directly at vimeo.com/413840816. Digital access to this newly preserved film comes from the National Museum of African American History and Culture and its Pearl Bowser Collection. Thanks to NMAAHC archivist Blake McDowell.
Charles Musser
Rediscovering Another Lost Union Films Production:
The Case of the Fishermen (1947)
What might be called the Carl Marzani-Paul Robeson-Union Films Project has been underway for more than 20 years. It began when I stumbled across a campaign film, People’s Congressman, made for Vito Marcantonio who was running for re-election to Congress in 1948––and won. Narrated by Robeson, who also made a cameo appearance, the film was screened for a Paul Robeson retrospective I co-curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 1999.
It was a Union Films Production but the filmmakers themselves were uncredited and unknown. My mentor Jay Leyda knew who made the film, but he was dead. In 2008 we screened the film at the Orphan Film Symposium [a new 16mm print made for the occasion by Cineric lab] and in a desperate effort to have something new to report, I did a last-minute internet search and found a reference that opened the research flood gates. The leading force behind Union Films was Carl Marzani, whose widow gave me access to all kinds of materials including Marzani’s five-volume memoirs. [The Marzani papers are housed at NYU Libraries.]
Two articles and four more Orphan screenings of Union Films productions followed: The Investigators (1948)—in 2010, People’s Convention (1948)—in 2012, Industry’s Disinherited (1949)—in 2014, and Count Us In (1948) –in 2016.[1]
This project has gradually become a collective endeavor involving head orphanista Dan Streible, master archival sleuth Walter Forsberg, Milestone Films’ Amy Heller, who wrote her MA thesis on Marzani’s principal backer, the United Electrical Workers–– and Dennis Doros, who at one point tentatively agreed to create a definitive DVD collection of Union Film productions. Here shown gathering at a New York City restaurant in 2015 when social distancing was unnecessary.
So Case of the Fishermen is our sixth installment, adding to our sense that these Union Films productions demonstrate a diverse range of inventive styles and approaches to progressive nonfiction filmmaking in the post-World War II era. Indeed, this film can only reinforce the sense that Union Films represents a significant force in the history of radical documentary filmmaking in the United States.
Made for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its union––the International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America, The Case of the Fishermen defended and publicized the circumstances of San Pedro, California fishermen, who stood accused of monopolistic practices and price fixing.[2] Released in February 1947, was this a film worth waiting for? If so, what is its import –above and beyond the fact that it fulfills all three of Dan’s criteria for inclusion in this year’s symposium? This question can be addressed using several different matrices.
Better Understanding Left-wing Filmmaking in the Post-WW II Era
First, let us remember what has propelled this project forward. According to all the histories of documentary and radical filmmaking, left-wing documentary filmmaking in the United States pretty much folded with the onset of World War II—Native Land (1942) being seen as its last hurrah—and did not reemerge until the second half of the 1960s. Union Film productions with it two dozen or so documentaries and campaign films proved otherwise. Although talented, prolific and persistent, the Union Films collective was by no means alone. In fact, left-wing filmmaking had been taken up by unions, even before World War II came to a close. The United Auto Workers, a CIO union, had committed $50,000 for film production at its 1944 national convention. When its members went on strike for 113 days between November 1945 and March 1946, it had people filming the strike—picket lines, soup kitchens, and so forth. A February 1946 article in the Daily Worker discussed the union’s commitment to film and other forms of audio-visual communication:
Today in Detroit, movie cameras are filming and recording the great strike of 172,000 GM workers. The film is being shot right on the picket lines, union halls and soup kitchens under the supervision of the United Automobile Workers Union, CIO. It is part of a well-planned union film program. For several years the UAW, whose 1,250,000 members make up the largest and most powerful union in the nation, has played a leading role in the use of films by labor organizations. As a result of the long-time interest of the union in movies, 200 projectors are now available through the UAW for showing 16mm films. The local make their selections from 450 prints in the UAW film library. Some of these are U.S. Army and Navy, OWI, British Information and Inter-American Affairs films. The UAW owns 210 of its own. No less than 375 local unions use them regularly for meetings. Last year more than five and a half million people saw films presented under UAW auspices. Not all of these people were union members. Fire Departments, Community Centres, Consumer groups, fraternal and political groups went to the movies with the UAW..[3]
The alliance between the United Electrical Workers and Marzani, became the most successful extension of this kind of union-sponsored productions. Their first film together, Deadline for Action, released in September 1946, was an attack on big corporations (particularly General Electric) and designed to have an impact the 1946 off-year elections.
Even before those elections, on August 23, 1946, a federal grand jury indicted Local 36 of the CIO’s International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America for conspiring “to fix prices of fresh fish brought into Southern California ports.”[4] With the CIO headquarters in Washington (the United Mine Workers of America building at 900 Fifteenth St. NW), the DC-based Marzani was well located to build relations with the CIO. If the CIO unions wanted to go into filmmaking in a serious way, working with an Oscar-nominated producer who shared their politics and worked in the same city was obviously attractive. [While in the Office of Strategic Services, Marzani received the lone producer credit for War Department Report (1943), nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary Feature.]
The Case of the Fishermen involved important legal issues. It was the first time since 1941 the government had used the Sherman Antitrust Act against a union. Its implication extended beyond this particular case and was of deep concern to Lee Pressman, General Counsel of the CIO, based in Washington.
The resulting documentary offers a set of compelling arguments for the defendants. It argues against the state’s asserted truth—that these fishermen are businessmen who conspired to set the price of fresh fish. In trying to demonstrate that this is false, the documentary offers another truth instead: Using a rich interplay of sound and image, Marzani’s documentary argues that fishermen are workers not businessmen, and that the price of fish is not set by them but by many factors, notably the comparable price of beef. Their union, moreover, had also benefited Americans by generating a healthier, more stable fishing industry.
In this respect, The Case of the Fishermen acts as a legal brief for the defense. Whether it was shown to jury members during the eleven-week trial as its makers had hoped, or only reached the larger if less determinative court of public opinion, Fishermen is concerned with a legal film truth and operates within the same genre as Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988). [See also Emile de Antonio’s Rush to Judgment (1966), in which attorney Mark Lane acts as defense counsel for the late Lee Harvey Oswald.]
Production Personnel
Second there are the more limited, internal questions involving production personnel. Carl Marzani claimed that Union Films was a kind of collective: Who was involved and how stable was its core membership? Unlike most Union Film pictures, The Case of the Fishermen provides production credits. Carl Marzani is listed as the producer and Max Glandbard as editor. Glandbard would subsequently become the director for Union Films but it has been unclear when he joined Marzani’s group. Since he edited The Case of the Fishermen, he may have also been the editor on Deadline for Action in 1946. In any case, he was a member of the Union Films collective from very early on.
In contrast, the cinematographer and sound man on The Case of the Fishermen would not continue to work with Marzani when he moved to New York in early 1948. Cameraman Dan Rocklin had worked for the US Signal Corps during World War II and that is likely how Marzani got to know him.[5] His little documented film career is obscure, although the UCLA Film and Television Archive houses a Dan Rocklin Collection of 25 home movies (ca. 1943-1962), which includes 16mm footage he shot in the wartime Pacific and one reel catalogued as Fisherman’s Fiesta in San Pedro, California (1948). Like Marzani, soundman Harold Lassiter was based in Washington, DC, but chose to remain there with his own small production company, Colonial Films, to make TV films and newsreels into the early 1950s.[6]
Much of the production and post-production work on Fishermen was still based in Washington. A key if uncredited member of the team was Donal McLaughlin, who provided—or at least supervised—the many graphics that appear in The Case of the Fishermen. [He had recently designed the flag of the United Nations and worked with Marzani in the Office of Strategic Services during WWII.] Marzani’s key collaborator on The Case of the Fisherman was H. Arthur Klein, who is listed as associate producer. Marzani and Herbert Arthur Klein had remarkably parallel histories––to be discussed on another occasion. Late in the war Klein was based in Los Angeles where he worked for the Los Angeles Daily News (until July 1945), was a correspondent for PM newspaper and the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, and was associated with several newspapers of a trade union nature.[7] When Marzani started filming in the San Pedro area of Los Angeles, he needed a local facilitator or fixer. Klein was perfect. Was this Klein’s first involvement in motion picture production? Quite possibly. But it was not the last.
A few months after the completion of The Case of the Fishermen, Klein produced and directed “his first independent venture,” the nine-minute short Old Man Atom (July 1947). It featured people’s songster Vern Partlow singing his 1945 folk ballad also known as “Atomic Talking Blues.” The film “has plenty to say about the state of the world today and the problems facing unions.” Partlow was a member of People’s Songs founded by Peter Seeger, Alan Lomax and Lee Hays, and such performers would soon play a prominent role in many Union Films productions.
Klein’s next film, The People’s Program (1947), was made for the CIO and focused on its Labor Day Parade in Los Angeles. While still in the editing room, The Sunday Worker ballyhooed the film:
“In addition to explaining the facts of working life to an ex-GI (played––as a screen first––by an authentic labor organizer), it will show many leading west coast CIO figures in action. They say Philip M. (Slim) Connelly of the Los Angeles CIO lets all of the repressed actor in him come out—but good.…”[8]
The Pictures, Ltd. production was released a few weeks later. As the CIO ousted many of its radical leaders, Klein lost his source of funding and turned to making less political audio-visual material.
The Politics of Representation/The Representation of Politics
Third, Fishermen needs to be analyzed in terms of its system of representation and stylistic choices. The film utilizes three basic types of visual material. First there is silent (MOS) footage shot on the West Coast in the port of San Pedro; on board the fishing boat America II; in Washington, DC; and elsewhere. Second, there are a few newspaper headline inserts as well as extensive graphics and animations provided by Donal McLaughlin. Third there is a sync-sound interview with Lee Pressman, the CIO’s Washington-based General Counsel, shot in his office or a studio-constructed counterpart. The filmmakers deploy two additional sound elements: extensive voiceovers, particularly by an uncredited narrator who represents the voice of the filmmakers. Moreover, a music track runs throughout much of the film. Sound effects, which might have been added to increase the realism of the MOS material, are completely avoided. Utilizing rigorous and sophisticated editing techniques that relied on changing tones of voice and an array of musical motifs, the filmmakers make their argument in counterpoint to the Attorney General’s indictment. They do something more than that as well by offering brief but potent essayistic reflections on the lives of these fishermen.
A close reading of this film and its structure can be rewarding, but there are a few things that can be brief and profitably addressed. Is the boat America II some kind of symbol cooked up by the filmmakers? Found serendipitously perhaps but not created. George Knowlton was one of the officers named in the indictment and America II was his boat.[9]
The voiceover then enumerates the benefits of fish — not only as food but for medicine and as feed for livestock. America II is sometimes shown from another boat as they both move through the water, but most shots are taken with a highly mobile handheld camera onboard the boat as the men go about the work. These are combined with fast-paced editing that works effectively with further voice-over: “Fishing is tough work, back-breaking long work. There are no set hours, day or night. There are no comforts. You’re alone with the sea for days on end. The chances of getting hurt are always good.” The narration calls out to the audience as if to put them in the boat—and to identify with the fishermen and their challenges. The narrator emphasizes that it is “a tough life. But it’s a life chosen by these men and they deserve credit for sticking to it. A lot of credit. But what do they get?”
Three and a half minutes into this 22-minute film, this upbeat portrait is interrupted by announcement of their indictment shown with newspaper headings. These fishermen may deserve credit but instead they get an indictment “from the Attorney General’s Office. ‘Anti-trust,’ he says.” The indictment is then shown and a different voice reads some of its highlights. “Local 36 of International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America and its officers have knowingly and continuously engaged in a wrongful and unlawful conspiracy in restraint of trade and commerce in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.” Quick cuts to close-ups of fishermen. “The fishermen who are members of Local 36 are not employees, workers, or laborers, but are independent businessmen who operate boats for their own account and profit. The conspiracy has consisted of a continuing agreement among the defendants to fix minimum prices.”
The first voice returns, in highly ironic tone: “’Independent businessmen,’ so that’s what they are.” This and other lines are heard over the fishermen hard at work, with string quartet motifs [from Paderewski’s Minuet in G Major] between each set of characterizations: “Not workers, businessmen.” “Yep. Businessmen.” “Just like filling out an order blank.” “Or checking invoices.” “Or dictating letters.” “Or sitting in a comfortable office.” “Not workers.” “But men of affairs.” “Slicing labor costs.” “Or entertaining customers.” “‘Businessmen,’ says the attorney general.”
The narrator again emphasizes that “George, Bill, and Burt say they are workers; workers by birth, suffering, and psychology; by their skill and their labor. They are considered workers by themselves, their community, and above all by their fellow workers and other unions of the labor movement.”
He then analyzes the basis for the Attorney General’s case. Workers are paid in shares rather than wages––a longstanding tradition that reflects the uncertainty and seasonal nature of the industry, then asks why the government doesn’t pick on some monopoly its own size.
Nine and a half minutes into the Fishermen, the filmmakers finally introduce their interview with Lee Pressman. The CIO attorney dominates the central five minutes of the film in a series of brief clips from his interview. He characterizes the indictment, saying “the attempt to place unions under the anti-trust act is a legalistic maneuver in the campaign to hamstring labor. This attempt if successful would open the unions to suits and legal warfare, from the real monopolies of America. The same reactionary companies that have been raising prices and profiteering at the expense of the American people.” Like a good lawyer, he reads from or cites standard texts on monopolies to demonstrate that the fishermen do not meet such definitions: for instance, that “monopolies try to limit the number of producers.”
https://youtu.be/oZZ9Xhlo0xk
One way to analyze The Case of the Fishermen is to compare it to other films on similar subjects. Perhaps the most obvious is John Grierson’s Granton Trawler, a 1934 process film about the catching of fish using a seine net. It is a remarkable precursor to Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s sensory-ethnography film Leviathan (2012). Known for its experimental use of sound, Granton Trawler has no narration. However, the clatters and muffled voices were recorded in the studio and laid in to suggest the sea environment. Although Grierson maintained that merely showing such working-class people was a radical act, its poetics depoliticizes the film. As Brian Winston has remarked, “Running from social meaning was not just a question of aesthetics. As the decade advanced and the Depression worsened, the Griersonians discovered how to focus and structure their films so that no meaningful analysis would be required, whatever the subject matter.”[10] Case of the Fishermen seems to reference Granton Trawler, starting with similar shots of boats docked in port and ending with a view of the sea from the fishing boat at sunset; but between these bookends, it pursues fundamentally different alternatives. Marzani’s documentary forsakes any effort to add sound effects. Narration interacts with the image by making clear the hard and often dangerous work done by these men on fishing boats. Unlike Granton Trawler, Fishermen de-romanticizes the fishing experience and focuses on the socio-economic and political dimension of the work as well as the court case itself.
Another film about fishermen worth considering is Redes/The Wave (1936) by Paul Strand, Silvestre Revueltas, and Fred Zinnemann––another collective endeavor that started out as a documentary but became a fiction film about exploited fishermen ultimately joining together to fight the established power structures that oppress them. Paul Strand’s striking images often evoke Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico. Viewed in the American context it becomes a moving allegory of working-class resistance and organizing at a time when unionization in the United States was gaining rapid ground (e.g. the formation of both the United Electrical Workers and the International Fishermen and Allied Workers). Although not considered a documentary at the time of its release, Redes does resonate with Ralph Steiner and Leo Hurwitz’s 1935 call for the use of theatrical means in documentary––including the use of actors, which is readily evident in Native Land, which Hurwitz made with Strand six years later.[11] Union Films sometimes deployed theatricalization of this kind—for instance, in Deadline for Action. The Case of the Fishermen avoids it in ways that are consonant with Dziga Vertov’s anti-theatrical prejudice. This rejection was perhaps related to the ways in which Fishermen was meant to function (at least hypothetically) as documentary evidence in a court of law — in its deployment of legal film truth. Broadly speaking, however, Redes is Eisensteinian while Case of the Fishermen is Vertovian.
[Although not released at the time, another pro-labor film about exploited fishermen is worth recalling. In 1942, Orson Welles directed an unfinished film — Four Men on a Raft aka Jangadeiros — with Brazilian fishermen re-enacting their newsworthy trip of 1941. The four sailed their jangada Sao Pedro from Fortaleza to Rio de Janeiro, where they successfully petitioned the government for increased benefits for fishermen. The film was not seen publicly until the 1993 release of the documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles. — ed.]Despite the best efforts of Lee Pressman and The Case of the Fishermen, after an eleven-week trial, in May 1947 the fishermen and their union lost their case and were fined over $12,000.[12]
Notes
[1] Charles Musser, “Carl Marzani and Union Films: Making Left-wing Documentaries during the Cold War, 1946-53” The Moving Image, 9.1 (Spring 2009): 104-160, doi:10.1353/mov.0.0040; Musser, “Discovering Union Films and Its Archives,” Cinemas: revue d’études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, 24.2-3 (2014): 125-160.
[2] “World’s Greatest Food Producers-CIO,” CIO News, Feb. 17, 1947, 6-7. The H. Arthur Klein Papers, ca. 1928-1991 are at UCLA Library Special Collections.
[3] “GM Strike Filmed by Auto Workers Union,” Daily Worker, Feb. 9, 1946, 11. The previous UAW Annual Convention took place September 11, 1944.
[4] “Coast CIO Fish Union, 15 Officers Indicted on Price-Fixing Charge,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 24, 1946, 2.
[5] Dan Rocklin, ‘Photographed by US Army Signal Corps’, International Photographer, Feb. 1943, 10, in Richard Koszarski, “Subway Commandos: Hollywood Filmmakers at the Signal Corps Photographic Center,” Film History, 14.3-4 (2002): 296-315
[6] “Directory of Television Program Sources,” Television Digest vol. 5 (1949), 44; “TV Film Producers,” Radio Annual (1950), 1121.
[7] Herbert Arthur Klein, testimony, Sep. 18, 1951, Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities in Communist Infiltration of Hollywood Motion-picture Industry …, Part 4 (Washington, D.C. 1951), 1562-1574.
[8] Harold J. Salemson, “The Movies,” Sunday Worker, Nov. 2, 1947, 10. Connelly was head of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild, which was part of the CIO. In the early 1950s Connelly would later spend considerable time in prison. Wolfgang Saxon, “Philip M. Connelly, Labor Militant Jailed by Government, Dies at 77,” New York Times, Jun. 3, 1981, B7.
[9] Verification that the fishing boat seen in the film belonged to one of the indicted fisherman comes from a report of its wreck. “On January 13, 1952, 45 mile-an-hour winds drove the fishing vessel America II aground on the western side of [San Nicolas] island. America II’s master, George Knowlton and his shipmate Charles Winquist had travelled out to the island to fish for rock cod.” JRP Historical Consulting, LLC, Historic Context Study to Develop a Historic Theme forShipwrecks Around San Nicolas Island (2010), 28. https://www.islapedia.com/index.php?title=SHIPWRECKS:_SAN_NICOLAS_ISLAND (accessed 24 May 2020).
[10] Brian Winston, Claiming the Reel II: Documentary, Grierson and Beyond 2nd ed. (1995; London: Palgrave, 2008),46.
[11] Ralph Steiner and Leo T. Hurwitz, “A New Approach to Filmmaking,” New Theatre, Sep. 1935, 22–23, in New Theatre and Film, 1934 to 1937: An Anthology, ed. Herbert Kline (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 305.
[12] “Fishermen to Continue Fight,” CIO News, May 19, 1947, 10; “Fishermen’s Union, 14 Members Fined,” San Pedro News-Pilot, May 22, 1947, 1; “Fishermen Hit Jury Selection,” CIO News, Feb. 23, 1948, 10.