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Frontier Films: Trying the Impossible

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

William Alexander
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Extract

If Frontier Films seemed an impossibility to Paul Strand in the 1930s, it seemed even more so to the cultural imagination of the subsequent decades. As a result, the production company now is scarcely known, even to film historians, and has only begun, like farleft dance and theater, to emerge from obscurity. It is striking that Richard Pells's and William Stott's recent studies of radical art and thought and of documentary form in the 1930s do not mention Frontier Films. Early film histories, with some exceptions, ignored Frontier, and it is only in the last several years that documentary-film historians Erik Barnouw, Richard Barsam, and Lewis Jacobs have given the organization equal time if by no means intensive investigation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 4 , October 1979 , pp. 441 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

NOTES

1. Pells, Richard H., Radical Visions and American Dreams (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)Google Scholar; Stott, William, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (New York: Dutton, 1973)Google Scholar; Jacobs, Lewis, ed., The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1971)Google Scholar. Exceptions are Jacobs, 's The Rise of American Film (1939; rpt. New York: Teachers College Press, 1967)Google Scholar and Rotha, Paul's Documentary Film (3d ed., London: Faber & Faber, 1952).Google Scholar

2. It is worth noting that Frontier-people-to-be and former Frontier people worked on three of these films. Leo Hurwitz, Ralph Steiner, and Paul Strand were the crew for The Plow That Broke the Plains, and Willard Van Dyke was a cameraman on The River.

3. Interviews with Hurwitz plus Leo Hurwitz, “One Man's Voyage: Ideas and Films in the 1930's,” Cinema Journal, 15 (Fall 1975), 1–15Google Scholar, and “Native Land; an Interview with Leo Hurwitz,” Cinéaste, 6 (1974), 3–7.Google Scholar

4. Interview with Steiner plus James Blue's interview with Steiner at the State University of New York at Buffalo, July 12, 1973. Tapes and transcripts of Blue's interview as well as his interview with Van Dyke referred to in note 10 are available from Media Study/Buffalo, 207 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, N.Y. 14202.

5. Author's interview with Lerner and an interview with Lerner by George Bluestone, Eugene Anthony, and Fred Carlisle, n.d.; transcript furnished by Lerner.

6. Interview with Meyers, Edna and Leyda, Jay, “Vision Is My Dwelling Place,” Film Culture, Nos. 58, 59, 60 (1974), 2–36.Google Scholar

7. Interview with Maddow; letter to author from Louise Berman, September 23, 1975; letter to author from Berman's sister, Hortense Socholitsky, August 18, 1976; and Lionel Berman, a booklet published by his wife and friends for private distribution after his death in 1968.

8. Interview with Maddow and letters from Maddow to author, December 24, 1974, June 2, 1975, and August 18, 1976. “Red Decision,” Symposium, 3 (10 1932), 443–53.Google Scholar

9. Interview with Strand and Calvin Tomkins's profile on Strand in The New Yorker, 09 16, 1974, pp. 44–94.Google Scholar

10. Interviews with Van Dyke; James Blue's interview with Van Dyke at SUNY, Buffalo, August 2, 1973 (see note 4); and Harrison Engle's interview with Van Dyke in Film Comment, 3 (Spring 1965), 25.Google Scholar

11. Hurwitz, Leo, New Theatre, 1 (05 1934), 15.Google Scholar

12. Leo Hurwitz, ibid. See also Hurwitz and Steiner, , New Theatre, 2 (09, 1935), 23.Google Scholar

13. Hunvitz, , New Theatre, 1 (05 1934), 15Google Scholar. Hurwitz and Steiner (though signed only by Steiner), New Theatre, 1 (09 1934), 23Google Scholar. Hurwitz, , New Theatre, 1 (10 1934), 27–28Google Scholar. See also Hurwitz, and Steiner, , New Theatre, 2 (09 1935), 22–23.Google Scholar

14. See Freeman, Joseph, “Ivory Towers—White and Red,” New Masses. 12 (09 11, 1934), 20–24Google Scholar; Gold, , “Change the World!,” Daily Worker, 11 5, 1934, p. 7Google Scholar; and Kline, HerbertNew Theatre, 1 (09 1934), 3Google Scholar, New Theatre, 1 (12 1934), 22–23Google Scholar, and New Theatre, 2 (02 1935), 3.Google Scholar

15. Hunvitz, and Steiner, , New Theatre, 1 (09 1934), 23Google Scholar. See Alexander, William, “The March of Time and The World Today.” American Quarterly, 29 (Summer 1977), 182–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Frontier Films brochure, in Frontier Films file at Film Study Center, Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

16. Words at Berman's funeral, in Lionel Berman, a booklet published after his death.

17. Ibid.

18. New York Times, 05 3, 1942Google Scholar, says $60,000; Strand in interview says $75,000.

19. Poetry, 48 (05 1936), 71Google Scholar. Here and in the following citations Maddow uses his pseudonym David Wolff.

20. New Masses, 20 (08 4, 1936), 28, and 23 (April 27, 1937), 23.Google Scholar

21. New Masses, 23 (05 4, 1937), 20.Google Scholar

22. Poetry, 55 (01 1940), 169–75.Google Scholar

23. Himelstein, Morgan Y., Drama Was a Weapon (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1963), p. 206.Google Scholar