Word: plowing
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...neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives is equipped for sound cinema, partly because of Republican opposition. Nevertheless the film the President saw went to Congress as an official Federal document, is the first motion picture ever placed in Congressional archives. By last week this film, called The Plow That Broke the Plains, was making exciting news in & out of the cinema industry...
Lorentz and his crew filmed grass, cattle, dust in half a dozen western States, wound up in California. Farmers performed easily before the camera, found nothing odd in re-enacting their personal tragedy. At one point Photographers Steiner, Strand and Hurwitz grew fretful because The Plow That Broke the Plains was not forceful enough. When they saw the finished job. however, they withdrew objections. By that time two more notable names were on the film's credit list, on the Federal payroll: Composer Virgil Thomson (Four Saints in Three Acts), who provided a musical score, and Alexander Smallens...
Picture. By last week The Plow That Broke the Plains had been privately previewed by Hollywood directors, by Interior Department and Resettlement Administration officials and by a group of Congressmen, diplomats, Supreme Court Justices and New Dealers at Washington's Hotel Mayflower. What they all saw was 2,700 ft. of handsome photography detailing a so-year history of how Man has made deserts of the Great Plains...
Containing no dialog, with only 700 words of exposition by an unseen commentator, The Plow That Broke the Plains begins with lush, billowy grass, ends with the hulk of a dead tree surrounded by sun-baked desert. What happens between is shown in the arrival of the cattle on the great 400,000,000-acre pasture of the Plains, the inrush of speculators in the wake of the railroads. A homesteader's plow bites into soil held together by the deep roots of prairie grass. Warns a voice: ''Settler, plough at your peril!" A grizzled farmer observes...
...Documentary Films" are what the modern cinema calls non-fiction pictures, exclusive of newsreels, travelogs and similar shorts. When made by governments, as most documentary films are, they are usually interlarded with propaganda. Typical were the pictures shown along with The Plow That Broke the Plains in Washington's Mayflower last fortnight: an excerpt from The Triumph of the Will, directed for Adolf Hitler by Leni Riefenstahl (TIME, Feb. 7); an institutional reel called Midi dealing with the French railways; a Russian Harvest Festival which depicts the Ukraine as a merry place; Color Box and The Face of Britain...