River of Earth in Context

1. River of Earth in Context Documentary Ethics in the Great Depression

2. Documenting the Depression King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (1934) was a film that drew on the aesthetics of the newsreel to make a case for going “back to the land.” In the film, John, a city dweller moves to the country to start a communal farming operation.

3. Documenting the Depression In 1937, author Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White published You Have Seen Their Faces—a precursor to documentary films as we think of them. The text combines visual images and words to compel readers to recognize the plight of the rural poor and to take action to alleviate the suffering. The suggestion of responsibility implicit in the title, the aesthetic of the photos, and the method of supplying words raise questions about what might be called documentary ethics in the Great Depression.

5. Dorthea Lange, whose photograph titled “Migrant Mother” (1936) is arguably the most recognizable image of the Depression era, approached her subjects quite differently from Bourke-White. For the most part, Lange aimed to capture the dignity of people enduring poverty and deprivation, while Bourke-White tried to capture in an unflinching gaze the grotesque and abject conditions. Both worked at times under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

6. Documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz released The River in 1937. It chronicled the importance of the Mississippi River, as well as the environmental degredation it had suffered. The film also celebrated the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as a “modernizing” force capable of improving people’s lives The TVA was a major initiative under the auspices of the New Deal. It put in place a system of dams designed to control flooding and to help bring electricity to rural areas. By any measure, it initiated a major transformation of the South, which in 1938 would be labled “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem” in a presidential commission report.

7. Caldwell, Tobacco Road (1932) There was no longer any profit in raising cotton under the Captain’s antiquated system, and he abandoned the farm and moved to Augusta. Rather than attempt to show his tenants how to conform to the newer and more economical methods of the modern agriculture, which he thought would have been an impossible task from the start, he sold the stock and implements and moved away. An intelligent employment of his land, stocks, and implements would have enabled Jeeter, and scores of others who had become dependent upon Captain John to raise crops for food, and crops to be sold at a profit. Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all.

8. Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Ma said angrily, “Tom! They’s a whole lot I don’ un’erstan’. But goin’ away ain’tgonna ease us. It’s gonna bear us down . . They was the time when we was on the lan’. They was a boundary to us then. Ol’ folks died off, an’ little fellas come, an’ we was always one thing—we was the fambly—kinda whole and clear. An’ now we ain’t clear no more. Film adaptation, dir. John Ford (1940)

9. (1941) It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need an chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of “honest journalism” . . . James Agee

10. Walker Evans

11. Are we not in Kansas anymore?