Movie Title. Still: Pare Lorentz.
Minneapolis Riverfront, in Pare Lorentz’ “The River”. Movie still: Pare Lorentz.
Pare Lorentz, At What A Cost: The Films of Pare Lorentz, Mill City Museum, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Max Haynes.
Pare Lorentz, At What A Cost: The Films of Pare Lorentz, Mill City Museum, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Max Haynes.
At all-night screenings of Pare Lorentz’ pioneering documentaries, consider environmental change from the historical perspective of the 1930s. The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) highlight the ecological and social catastrophes that culminated in the Dust Bowl and devastating flooding, and promote the New Deal’s solutions to these environmental problems.
Pare Lorentz, a pioneering documentary filmmaker, worked for Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration producing classic documentary films to highlight the environmental consequences of American industry and agriculture and to promote New Deal solutions. The films are considered touchstones for the modern documentary movement, seamlessly combining imagery, poetic free verse, and symphony music.
In The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), his first film and the first US Government-sponsored documentary, Pare Lorentz won praise and wide recognition for using sensitive photography, dramatic editing and a beautiful score by composer Virgil Thomson to illuminate a local problem of national importance—the challenges faced by wheat farmers and cattle ranchers in the Great Plains. The film climaxes in a vivid portrait of the record drought that produced the dust bowl and the plight of the “blown out, baked and broke” people who felt its impact.
In The River (1938), Lorentz deploys powerful images, a poetic Pulitzer Prize-nominated script, and another score by Virgil Thomson to reveal the ways the river has been misused. The film presents a stirring celebration to America’s natural landscape and greatest river. It concludes by promoting the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s dam building to end the annual destruction of homes and crops due to annual flooding.
View photos from At What Cost: The Films of Pare Lorentz on the Northern Spark Flickr here.