Planet Vintage presents
Documentary film was written to be heard. Capra’s orientation pictures were arguments spoken aloud; Lorentz commissioned scores from Virgil Thomson and wrote his commentary in verse; the combat units came back with sound nobody could stage. What plays here is the soundtrack of each film and nothing else — no picture, no player to learn. Everything in this wing is either a work of the United States government, which carries no copyright anywhere, or a film in the public domain.
496
Recordings
32
Titles held
45h
Listening
1932–1969
Years covered
The War Department argues with itself
Seven orientation films made to explain a war to the men being sent to it, plus the two companion pictures on an enemy and an ally. Heard without picture they are what they always half were: editorials of enormous confidence, scored like features.
1942 · Frank Capra · US War Department, Special Services Division
The opening film of the War Department's orientation series: two worlds, free and slave, argued out over captured enemy footage and a narration written to be heard by men who had just been drafted.
1 track
1943 · Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak · US War Department, Special Services Division
The second orientation film: the annexations, the Polish campaign, and the doctrine of lightning war explained to men who would shortly meet it.
1 track
1943 · Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak · US War Department, Special Services Division
The third orientation film, on the conquest of western Europe: the fifth column, the sweep through the Ardennes, and the armistice carriage at Compiègne.
4 tracks
1943 · Frank Capra and Anthony Veiller · US War Department, Special Services Division
The fourth orientation film: Fighter Command, the Blitz, and the civilian endurance that the War Department wanted its own conscripts to understand.
1 track
1943 · Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak · US War Department, Special Services Division
The longest of the seven: seven centuries of invasion, then Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, assembled largely from Soviet combat footage.
1 track
1944 · Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak · US War Department, Special Services Division
The sixth orientation film: the invasion of 1937, Nanking, the Burma Road, and a Chinese ally the American public knew almost nothing about.
1 track
1945 · Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak · US War Department, Special Services Division
The closing orientation film: who Americans were, what they had believed about staying out, and how opinion turned between 1939 and Pearl Harbor.
1 track
1945 · Frank Capra and Joris Ivens · US War Department, Army Pictorial Service
The companion orientation film on Japan: years in production, repeatedly rewritten, released on 9 August 1945 and pulled from circulation within weeks.
1 track
1944 · Frank Capra · US War Department, Special Services Division
An orientation film made for troops shipping to the United Kingdom: the country, the rationing, the class system, and the instruction not to mention any of it.
1 track
Men with cameras, under fire
Ford at Midway, Wyler over Wilhelmshaven, Huston at San Pietro and afterwards at Mason General. Several of these were suppressed by the services that commissioned them; all of them are free to use now.
1942 · John Ford · US Navy Field Photographic Branch
Ford filmed the Japanese attack on Midway from an exposed position on the island and was hit by shrapnel; the resulting short went to American cinemas and won the Academy Award.
1 track
1944 · William Wyler · US Army Air Forces, First Motion Picture Unit
Wyler flew combat missions to make it, in colour, with hand-held cameras in the waist and nose of B-17s; one of his cameramen was killed on another aircraft.
1 track
1945 · John Huston · US Army Pictorial Service
Huston's account of the battle for a village in the Liri valley, filmed with the 143rd Infantry, and for years the most argued-about film the Signal Corps ever produced.
1 track
1946 · John Huston · US Army Signal Corps
Huston filmed psychiatric treatment of returning soldiers at Mason General Hospital on Long Island; the Army blocked its release until 1980.
1 track
1944 · Stuart Heisler, produced by Frank Capra · US War Department
Written by Carlton Moss, who also appears as the preacher whose sermon frames it; made compulsory viewing for all US troops and later released to civilian cinemas.
1 track
1944 · Louis Hayward, officer in charge · US Marine Corps photographic units
Nineteen minutes from the Betio beachhead, November 1943, shot by Marine cameramen, several of whom were casualties.
1 track
1944 · Edward Steichen, photographic unit · US Navy, with Twentieth Century-Fox
The wartime record of an Essex-class carrier — unnamed in the film for security — through strikes across the Pacific; Academy Award for documentary feature.
1 track
1943 · John Ford and Gregg Toland · US Navy Field Photographic Branch
Toland's original hour-long treatment was rejected as too critical; the thirty-four-minute cut won the 1943 Academy Award. Both survive and both are here.
2 tracks
The New Deal documentary
The films the government made for cinemas in the thirties, and the scores it paid Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland to write for them. The most purely musical listening in the archive.
1936 · Pare Lorentz · US Resettlement Administration
The first film the United States government made for commercial cinemas: the ploughing of the southern plains, the drought, and the migration out.
1 track
1938 · Pare Lorentz · US Farm Security Administration
Lorentz's second film for the government: the watershed, a century of cutting and ploughing, the floods that followed, and the TVA's answer.
1 track
1939 · Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke · American Institute of Planners, for the New York World's Fair
A planners' argument in four movements: the New England village, the mill town, the choked metropolis, and the green town that was supposed to replace both.
1 track
1940 · Joris Ivens · US Rural Electrification Administration
Ivens, the Dutch documentarian, filmed the Parkinson family of St Clairsville working without electricity, then with it; Douglas Moore scored it and Stephen Vincent Benét wrote the commentary.
1 track
Twice weekly, 1929 to 1967
Universal gave its entire newsreel library to the American people in 1974, so this is public domain outright rather than by lapse. A dated spine of the century, in the voice it was announced in.
1929–1939 · twice weekly · Universal Newsreel
Universal's twice-weekly reel through the nineteen-thirties: inaugurations, floods, disasters, sport and stunts, in the order the country received them.
107 tracks
1940–1949 · twice weekly · Universal Newsreel
The wartime and immediate postwar reels: mobilisation, the fronts, the homecoming, and the first years of the atomic peace.
214 tracks
1950–1959 · twice weekly · Universal Newsreel
The fifties reels, made while the audience that watched them was moving to the living room.
142 tracks
The state explains itself
Civil defence, the atom, and the agency film — including the one that argued a tidy house would survive a nuclear blast. Instruction as a genre, and an involuntary record of what was being feared.
1951 · Anthony Rizzo, Archer Productions · US Federal Civil Defense Administration
The civil defence film shown in American schools from 1952: what to do, as a child, at the flash.
1 track
1951 · Anthony Rizzo · US Federal Civil Defense Administration and the National Security Resources Board
The companion film to the twenty-million-copy civil defence booklet of the same name: what a householder was told to do, and what to keep.
1 track
1951 · No director credited · Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, for civil defence use
A schools film on radiation, contamination and what a child should do between the flash and the all-clear.
1 track
1954 · No director credited · National Clean Up – Paint Up – Fix Up Bureau, with the Federal Civil Defense Administration
Nevada test footage of three model houses at the moment of detonation, used to make a case for household maintenance.
1 track
1957 · Harry Rasky · CBS Television, with the Federal Civil Defense Administration
A dramatised civil defence exercise using the real city and its real officials, playing out the hour between warning and departure.
1 track
1945 · No director credited · US Army Signal Corps
Signal Corps assessment footage of blast damage, with testimony from a Jesuit priest who was in Hiroshima at the moment of detonation.
1 track
1964 · No director credited · US Department of Defense
A Defense Department training film on the approach, the compromise and the hook, staged as short dramatic scenes.
1 track
1969 · NASA film unit · National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NASA's own documentary account of Apollo 11, built from onboard film, ground footage and the mission air-to-ground loop.
1 track
