This research was originally paired with Bradley E. Reeves (Appalachian Media Archives) and his new compilation video, TVA: “Built for and Owned by the People” (2020).
Harnessing Excess: Water in American Infrastructural Cinema of the 1930s
by Joni Hayward Marcum
In 1942 Educational Screen described the government-operated Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as “harnessing the water and reclaiming the land” of the region. Founded in 1933 as part of the New Deal policies, the TVA was founded as a public corporation. Shortly after the start of the great depression, there was little trust in private companies. Thus, the public utilities run through the TVA was a politically restorative gesture; a reclamation of equality and hope for the people, not just the reclamation of the land. Covering area in seven states including Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, the TVA was also designed to bring economic prosperity to one of the regions hit hardest by the economic downturn of the great depression. The Tennessee Valley Authority act sought to stimulate the economic prosperity of the American South by controlling the flooding that not only cost lives but which also destroyed arable land and swept away topsoil (Callahan 80-81). Though electricity was part of urban life beginning in the early twentieth century, in the 1930s most rural areas were still without it. Hydroelectric power from the dams in the Tennessee Valley changed rural life and agricultural practices significantly with the arrival of electricity on farms and homesteads. TVA efforts all strived to do as Educational Screen described; harness the abundance of waterpower for human use, controlling the negative impacts of issues like flooding while capitalizing on the positive impacts it could have when managed with new technologies like dams. By controlling the flow of water through rivers by damming and resuscitating land previously unusable after flooding, dams became one of the most crucial infrastructural projects of the depression era.
The proliferation of TVA activity in the 1930s marks an increased focus on infrastructural projects as well as resource management in nonfiction film. With the national focus on increasing prosperity came a political necessity to record the progress of the projects, and to teach the public about resource management practices to increase the efficient use of available resources. Documentary films from the 1930s that focus on harnessing waterpower have a slightly different sensibility, however. The main concern surrounding water in New Deal era documentary films was the necessity for humans to develop adequate technologies to properly benefit from this abundant source of energy already present in the natural world. A river flowing or a waterfall cascading that is not also capturing this motion and turning it into electricity was seen as a waste in the context of the 1930s. Water is a particularly cinematic resource, with powerful and dynamic movement ideal for visual interest on film. Thus, harnessing water by filmic and infrastructural means in New Deal era films of the 1930s resulted in dynamic films that established new technological control over the resource, and that emphasized the need to manage an abundant energy source, rather than to conserve a scarce one.
Flowing water and the control of waterpower readily connects to wider infrastructural projects important during the New Deal era like expanding the electrical grid to get electricity to rural areas, and documentaries focusing on the abundant energy source of flowing water in the context of the 1930s exist at the confluence of a few different factors. First, the time period was marked by the dichotomy between excess and scarcity. The economic excess of the 1920s gave way to the financial scarcity of the 1930s during the Great Depression. This logic also extends to natural resources. The depression era is marked by the scarcity of arable land in the west during the dust bowl and the simultaneous abundance of water to the point of river flooding at regular intervals in the southeast during the first three decades of the 20th century.
Finally, the discourse surrounding hydroelectric power serves as an intriguing counterexample to the energy rhetoric of oil and gas which has dominated academic discussions of energy history and energy media in the humanities. The energy humanities propose that “the key element left out of our understanding of the modern” (Szeman & Boyer 2) has been energy. Documentary films such as these then offer contributions to both discussions within the energy humanities and the environmental humanities as they document the ways in which hydroelectricity in the 1930s offered an alternative to oil and gas in certain geographic regions. Framing waterpower’s abundance as energy source also reflects the ideological stance of New Deal era politics centered on public ownership and the collective benefit of the resource. These documentary films simultaneously challenge and reinforce discourse about scarcity and excess in the New Deal era. The aesthetic and cultural focus on water in these films speaks to the desire to harness a visible and readily available resource. This is in contrast to the “invisible fuel apparatus” (Szeman & Boyer 9) that are fossil fuels, and even in the transformation of hydropower into electricity. Electricity is “a carrier of energy, meaning that another source of power must be employed” to generate it (Jones 162). Water is the ideal aesthetic subject for documentaries in the 1930s because it is an abundant, direct energy source with strong visual appeal, and was already at the center of the infrastructural projects of the TVA.
The set of films I consider in the context of their time period create an example of the ways in which energy discourse was framed by educational documentary in the 1930s. These films also allow for a chance to re-frame how most environmental ethics approach natural resources, which is through conservation. Rather, in these films, we are presented with the ethical problem of excess (Bataille Accursed 27). In this scenario, rather than conserve the resource, the infrastructural task of both cinema and energy technologies such a dam is to manage or harness the resource to prevent wasted energy. Ultimately, New Deal era film focusing on natural resource management mediates the threat of the “unproductive expenditures” of natural phenomena such as the flow, and potential flood of a river. These educational films can be described as infrastructural cinema—a grouping of films that work as an extension of material infrastructure to develop ideas about how emergent systems like dams control energy.
An evaluation of films about New Deal public works projects is apt in our moment of re-emerging financial instability and degrading infrastructure, especially surrounding natural resource use. In the 1930s, documentary film was used to inform the public about government programs designed to improve the lives of people affected by the Great Depression. Jeffrey Geiger argues that The River, commissioned by the U.S. Farm Security Administration in 1937 “imagined national management solutions forged out of land, water and celluloid” (112). I extend his provocation by discussing Lorentz’s The River; Conservation of Natural Resources, a film produced by Erpi Picture Consultants (later Encyclopedia Britannica Films); and The TVA at Work produced by the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Department of the Interior.
The River (1938)
FDR Library channel
A downloadable copy of the Museum of Modern Art’s preserved version is available from the Library of Congress.
The River was directed by Pare Lorentz for the Farm Security Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is one of the most well-known government documentaries from the 1930s. Lorentz began his career making government films with The Plow that Broke the Plains, a controversial film about the misuse of agricultural land leading to the dust bowl in the American West, was released in 1936. The film sparked new interest in the previously ignored government film (Barnouw 118). Unlike government films containing simple demonstrations or making land announcements (Barnouw 117), which illustrates the general extent of the first two decades of these films, Lorentz’s goal was for his work to compete with Hollywood, even if on a small scale, by getting widespread distribution. The Plow that Broke the Plains ultimately showed in approximately 3000 theaters, despite not being affiliated with a studio (Barnouw 118). Lorentz was about to leave government filmmaking behind after the financial issues he experienced while making Plow when he pitched the idea for another film, this time about the Mississippi river. This idea aligned closely with “numerous issues of concern to the New Deal: flood control, hydroelectric power, soil conservation, rural electrification” (Barnouw 118) and was given a significantly larger budget of $50,000. The River ended up a major success and was offered distribution by Paramount (Barnouw 120).
Long praised for its artistry, The River tells a story about the rise and fall of American ingenuity in and around the Mississippi River delta. The film develops a primordial aura around the natural world through the opening shots of mountains, hills, rivers, and sky appearing unfettered by human life. The seeming timelessness of these scenes gives way to a setting in the mid 19th century, which is depicted as a time of prosperity in the south as the river “became a highway” for steamboats to carry cotton and wheat away to be sold both in the U.S. and abroad. Thus, the river becomes a tool for commerce on multiple fronts, from travel to irrigation to the fast transport of unwieldy commodities like lumber. The successful use of the river is the first era of the Mississippi in the film. Next, it becomes a menace. In Part two, once forests were cut down, erosion became a problem that lead to massive flooding. The dramatic and devastating footage of these floods is accompanied by the narrator reading a list of years in which major floods occurred: “1903, 1907, 1913, 1916, 1922, 1937. We built a hundred cities and a thousand towns. But at what a cost” The reading is almost elegiac in tone, mourning the loss of life, land, and industry, and inevitably the loss of control over the landscape as well. Part 3 begins by talking about the loss of natural resources like topsoil and the poor living conditions of farmers but changes tone drastically for the last six minutes of the film. The film ends on a triumphant note, showing the reclamation of control now exercised over the river and the region as a whole through the creation of the TVA and its subsequent damming and hydroelectric projects.
The River is an example of infrastructural cinema in addition to being one of the more well-known and artistic government documentaries of the depression era. By showing the story of successful TVA intervention in the deadly and wasteful problem of flooding, The River “imagined national management solutions forged out of land, water and celluloid” (Geiger). In other words, the film put the practice of filmmaking at the center of public communication about resource management when it was released. It also became a part of resource management infrastructure by way of communicating about the infrastructural interventions for issues like flooding and the subsequent harnessing of waterpower for electricity to the public. With its broad historical scope and Lorentz’s goal to make the film a theatrical hit, The River provides an excellent example of how government intervention prevented the unproductive expenditures that threatened the livelihood of American industry.
[Note: Two of the cinematographers for The River are the subjects of other presentations for the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium. Floyd Crosby got his start shooting footage for an underwater research team in 1927, some of which Sonia Epstein screened at the opening session. Crosby also shot exteriors for the government film called simply TVA (1940; “touts the harnessing of waterpower to generate electricity for industry and farmers.”) Willard Van Dyke became one of the acclaimed American documentary directors, but also did much work for hire. Although not in his filmography until recently, he directed New York University (1952) with camera work by Richard Leacock. As archivist Michael Grant described on the symposium’s opening night, NYU Libraries identified footage in its collection as rushes and outtakes for that promotional film. See his blog entry, which includes viewing copies of some of the rushes.]Conservation of Natural Resources (1937) Erpi Classroom Films
Prelinger Archives; A/V Geeks channel
Conservation of Natural Resources emphasizes the imperative to manage resources, though unlike The River is much more specific in its focus on the present moment in 1937. The film opens with a shot of a waterfall flowing freely, as narrator James Brill declares, “The story of conservation is the story of waste and how it can be prevented.” The film is brief with a run time of only ten minutes, and the pace moves quickly. The film begins with a long shot, but quickly transitions to a mid-range shot in which the crashing sound of the waterfall can be heard. Over this sound, the narrator explains, “For example most of our natural waterpower is still going to waste”. Shortly after the first shot, a crossfade shows a dam in place of the waterfall. In this educational short, dams are praised as the solution to flood prevention, and the capture of energy that would otherwise be wasted. According to the film, capturing this energy is crucial because other natural resources like oil are dwindling or limited in supply. The logic of the film implies that waterpower can supplement oil and gas as a way to produce electricity. The film also emphasizes re-routing by-products of production processes that would otherwise be wasted, or “in the wrong place” in the environment.
Conservation of Natural Resources also promotes the idea of human beings and nature working in service of one another; however, within this message, the power dynamics between humans and the natural world are clearly balanced in favor of humans. In an unexpected comparison, beaver dams are compared to man-made dams because they can both “control the flow of water and steams and prevent floods.” It should be addressed, however, that the beavers are first captured and taken to areas in which flooding is a problem. This relocation effort is striking because of its odd reliance on the creature’s natural behavior and the simultaneous control of the animal by relying on them to exhibit their natural behavior in a different, specific location where they are “needed.”
Conservation of Natural Resources is an educational, rather than a technical or industrial film. It is not surprising then that the film focuses on the positive changes happening in light of new deal policies and programs, rather than showing the technical processes of exactly how pollution is re-routed to waste-water treatment facilities and turned into fertilizer, for example. Though they are not mentioned explicitly, it is clear that groups like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) are working in the film, re-planting trees in forests and building small dams in gulleys to stop the erosion of farmland. Though this educational film is not sponsored by a specific industry or government bureau and discusses a variety of resources from water to timber to farmland, the power of each respective industry is still important in the film. Rather than foundering in the wake of the depression, these industries are shown making headway toward a better, more efficient, and productive future. That Erpi films were designed for classroom use, often by advanced educators and researchers themselves, provides context for where a film like this was shown. The consistent voiceover narration in the film is also an indicator that schools were likely the venue for a film like Conservation of Natural Resources. The title screen describes the film as “A Talking Picture for the Classroom” and shows that Erpi collaborated with George T. Renner, PhD at the Teacher’s College at Columbia University to make the film.
The TVA at Work (US Dept of Interior, 1935)
Photography by Sam Orleans
US NARA channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idCwqXju7w0
The TVA at Work is a short film, with a run time of about thirteen minutes. The film is different in its approach from the previous two discussed because unlike The River, this film focuses more closely on the specific dams being built and their positive impacts, with less dramatic flair. The aesthetic differences include the use of title cards, and radically different tone set by the upbeat music in The TVA at Work. Unlike Conservation of Natural Resources, The TVA at Work focuses exclusively on the control of rivers by dams, occupying a narrower perspective on the discourse about natural resources. However, all three films feature similar visual strategies when it comes to filming water. The juxtapositions of shots containing powerful flowing water with the dams used to manage and make them productive. The close-ups of flowing water to the degree of abstraction (Kracauer 48) reiterates the sheer materiality of this natural force and emphasizes the need to control its movement through the landscape.
The TVA at Work begins with a storm. Lightning strikes in the sky give way to shots of ever-increasing flood waters before displaying news headlines that attempt to quantify the human and environmental cost and waste of the floods: “134 Dead, 200,000 are homeless in floods”; “150,000,000,000 Tons of water fall on the Valley’s 40,600 square miles every year”; “400,000,000 Tons of soil washed from Valley land every year”. The film sets up river flooding as the specific problem which can be solved by the TVA’s interventions. Dams are the solution, as a title card explains, they “store water during rainy months and release it during dry seasons”. The dams themselves are the focus of the first half of The TVA at Work, as the film not only advertises the building of dams, but shows where they are being built and why, and gives viewers a closer look at each of the dams. According to an intertitle in The TVA at Work that also includes a map, “Main river dams maintain a channel for navigation, provide flood storage, and capture energy that otherwise would be wasted”. Free-flowing water is not only a threat to life but is indeed thought of as wasted energy that could have otherwise been put to use. Dam technology is the locus of this reorientation toward flowing water in these films away from mere natural disaster and toward a raw source of energy production ready to be harnessed for human use.
Dam projects in progress and river locks, as well as farmland and rural electrification, are reviewed in the latter half of The TVA at Work. Pickwick Landing, Wilson, and Wheeler Dams are shown as both productive areas of commerce as well as technological marvels that attract tourists (Nye 134-135). The importance of navigation locks and river transportation in The TVA at Work overlaps with The River’s emphasis on rivers as the main routes of commerce in the region during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through flood control and using otherwise wasted material in the energy production process to create fertilizer at sites previously used during wartime like Muscle Shoals, soil— “the Nation’s greatest resource”—is both protected and fortified by chemical fertilizer. Though the benefits of rural electrification tend to get less attention in films about waterpower, electricity production is conveyed as the most important way in which waterpower is harnessed into something beneficial.
Both The TVA at Work and The River end with their focus on the production of electricity, with shots that strategically move from flowing water to dams to electrical generators, thus visually connecting water to the production of electricity by means of dam infrastructure.
The intertitle at the end of The TVA at Work the film reads: “Thus water is brought under control on the land and in the rivers—its destructive forces harnessed to serve mankind”. What happens, however, when infrastructure begins to fail, or itself becomes a force of destruction? An evaluation of films about New Deal era public works projects is apt in our moment of re-emerging financial instability and degrading infrastructure. As such, evaluating the discourse surrounding infrastructure is becoming even more crucial: “Rather than being a singular thing, infrastructure is instead an articulation of materialities with institutional actors, legal regimes, policies, and knowledge practices that is constantly in formation across space and time” (Anand, Gupta & Appel 12). Embedded within infrastructure are internalized cultural practices and ideological stances that, in facing infrastructural decline and climate crisis, need to change in drastic ways. By returning to a moment in history during which new infrastructure was seen as the answer, I seek answers to questions about how film characterizes natural resources and their infrastructures and what impact these characterizations have had on our understanding of how to control and manage them in the present. •
Joni Hayward Marcum is a PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Media Cinema and Digital Studies. Her research interests in the environmental and energy humanities stem from her ongoing dedication to active conversations about climate crisis, energy, and natural resources, and the ways in which the humanities can intervene. She has previously presented on recession-era films, environmental documentary efficacy, and interwar British Gas industry-sponsored films.
This is a short section from the second chapter of Joni’s dissertation. If you have any ideas, resources, or feedback to offer, she is reachable at haywardj @ uwm.edu.
- Works Cited
Anand, Nikhil, Gupta, Akhil, and Appel, Hannah. The Promise of Infrastructure. School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film. Revised ed. Oxford [Oxfordshire]; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Bataille, Georges, and Stoekl, Allan. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Theory and History of Literature; v. 14. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Bataille, Georges, and Hurley, Robert. The Accursed Share: an Essay on General Economy. Zone Books, 1988.
Callahan, North. TVA : Bridge over Troubled Waters. A. S. Barnes, 1980.
The Educational Screen. Jan/Dec 1942. Lantern Media History Digital Library. Digitally Accessed 2019.
Geiger, Jeffrey. American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
Jones, Christopher F. Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America. Harvard University Press, 2014.
Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton Paperbacks. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. MIT Press, 1994.
Szeman, Imre, and Boyer, Dominic. Energy Humanities: an Anthology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.
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