Watch: Darkening Days (Orphans Online 4b of 10)

Streaming now:  the second hour of the morning session on “Climate Wednesday,” May 27, 2020, Orphans Online. 71 min.

Two films from the early 1960s — one British, one American — about the “darkening days” when air pollution was identified as a cause of major health problems. 

11:00 am Darkening Days
Sarah Eilers (US National Library of Medicine) US Public Health Service Films on Air Pollution, 1960-1969  
Oliver Gaycken (University of Maryland) “The Darkening Day” National Library of Medicine Exhibition of 1970 
           • Sources of Air Pollution (1962) 5 min. 
          • excerpt, Countdown to Collision (Airlie Productions, 1972) 
Jennifer Peterson
(Medicine on Screen) 
Angela Saward (Wellcome Collection, London) Dr. Mary Catterall and her medical community response to air pollution deaths in the UK
          • It Takes Your Breath Away (1964)  13 min. 

Click to enlarge, or go to vimeo.com/430561049


Angela Saward’s abstract about Dr. Catterall’s film appears in this earlier Orphans Online post.  

Sarah Eilers proposed the following for our planned symposium gathering in Amsterdam in May 2020. As it happened, two of the collaborating scholars on NLM’s Medicine on Screen web project, Jennifer Peterson and Oliver Gaycken, were also involved with the Orphan Film Symposium. They assembled the team presentation recorded during Orphans Online. 

I’d like to present four 1960s-era films on environmental health and air pollution. Three were produced by the US Public Health Service (PHS) and one by the National Tuberculosis Association (NTA). The tone of the films is by turns emphatic, threatening, pleading, and in one case, edgily humorous. The images are of filth, illness, and boundless consumption of resources. The message is “People, act now. Government, act now.” Less was known then, yet these titles suggest that the collective acceptance of evidence and need for response was clearer and seemingly less controversial than today.

In 1970, NLM staged an exhibit tilted The Darkening Day, which drew from contemporary media accounts of an environmental crisis in the making. The focus was chiefly on pollution from fossil fuels, well-understood today as a contributor to climate change. In September 2020, NLM will open an exhibit acknowledging the 50th anniversary of Darkening Day and focusing on the efforts of the PHS to bring attention to threats to air quality and health in the decade leading up to 1970, the year the Environmental Protection Agency was organized under President Richard M. Nixon.

Though moving images weren’t part of the original exhibit, they will be incorporated into the 50th anniversary event. The PHS was working throughout the 1960s to capture and present on film the urgent need to clean up a polluted world. Research suggests that NLM likely holds the only copies of these films, which also will be the subject of a Medicine on Screen essay by Dr. Jennifer Peterson, Woodbury University. 

Films (all in 16mm)
Public Enemy, 28 min. (PHS and Westinghouse, 1960)
“The story of man’s suffering from the byproduct of his own progress.” Opens with a disgusted housewife writing PUBLIC ENEMY in a thick coating of dirt on a coffee table. Talk of urgent need for collective effort to fight pollution. US Surgeon General Leroy Burney appears, along with pollution-fighting government and civic leaders in cities across the country.

Sources of Air Pollution, 5 min. (PHS, 1962)
Footage of factories, refineries, autos. As we exploit resources, we generate potentially dangerous gases, particulates, and other pollutants. What shall we do with them? “Throw them into the air. Throw them now and breathe them later.”

Don’t Leave it All to the Experts, 16 min. (PHS, 1969)
Opens with sounds of labored breathing. Ordinary people explain why pollution is not their problem. Voiceover: “We have raped our land, fouled our waters…” The public is urged to take responsibility for helping to implement the Federal Clean Air Act of 1967, to change its own behavior while also exerting pressure on government “experts.” Film shifts back and forth between images of environmental degradation and people in hospital beds struggling to breathe.

The Run Around, 18 min. (NTA, 1969)
Animated feature by Antony Lee, who worked on several productions for Rankin-Bass, including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. A coughing man, Mr. Hack, rails against pollutants. He storms into a local factory and confronts an unctuous CEO. Another figure has the voice and mannerisms of a confrontational southern legislator, who argues environmentalists are also to blame. Tacked onto the end, remarks by a solemn Senator Edmund Muskie (D-ME).

Bio
Sarah Eilers oversees the Historical Audiovisuals (HAV) collection at NLM. It includes about 10,000 cataloged medical and scientific films and videos and another 4,000 unprocessed titles. She works with project consultant Dr. Oliver Gaycken (University of Maryland) and other contributors to present rare moving image content from NLM, with accompanying essays, on the website Medicine on Screen.


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