(Pare Lorentz, US 1936, 29 min. / Jean Renoir, France 1936/1946, 39 min; 35mm nitrate prints)
The Plow that Broke the Plains (US 1936)
Director: Pare Lorentz
Writer: Pare Lorentz
Music: Virgil Thomson
Cinematographers: Leo Hurwitz, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand
Narrator: Thomas Chalmers
Production company: Resettlement Administration Film Unit
Sound, b/w, 29 min.
English language
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Between 1934 and 1935 alone, an estimated 1.2 billion tons of soil were blown from the dry,
windy expanse of the US Great Plains. Droughts were chiefly to blame, but years of rampant
misuse by profit-driven landowners had robbed topsoil of nutrients and destroyed the region’s
protective grasses. The land had been indeed “broken” by overgrazing cattle and the farmer’s
plow. Wind erosion soon turned the desiccated Great Plains into a deadly Dust Bowl—an
enduring symbol of the Great Depression.
As part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Resettlement Administration (RA) planned to
relocate some 650,000 Dust Bowl casualties, and knew it needed an effective public relations
campaign to sell voters on what might been seen as a “socialistic” program. In 1935, the RA
hired Pare Lorentz, a film critic with no filmmaking experience, to oversee production of a film
about the Dust Bowl. A distaste for radical filmmaking notwithstanding, Lorentz recruited Leo
Hurwitz and Ralph Steiner—both of whom had recently left the Film & Photo League to form
the provocatively Soviet-sounding NYKino—and the photographer Paul Strand. The trio
traveled to Montana to begin filming, but according to Hurwitz, they couldn’t make sense of
Lorentz’s bizarre script, leaving Strand to declare in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz that “the man we
are working under is an imbecile.” After pleading for a revision that never came, Hurwitz and
Strand wrote their own, which enraged Lorentz when he finally joined them in Texas. Lorentz
worked with the more amenable Steiner while Hurwitz and Strand were sent off to film dust
storms. Lorentz then returned to New York to begin editing footage according to the rhythms of
Virgil Thomson’s original score. Though Hurwitz, Steiner, and Strand are credited only as
cameramen, their overall influence is obvious. NYKino’s embrace of dramatization and creative
cinematography is on full display, as are Strand’s powerfully stark imagery and famous sharp
focus.
The Eastman Museum has two prints of this film: one from the year of its release (1936), the
other a slightly reedited version dated 1937, when the RA became the Farm Security
Administration. As both prints have reels with edge damage and decomposition, the only way to
make the film projectable was to combine reels one and two from the 1937 version with reel
three from the 1936 version. Shrinkage is 0.95%–1.35%.
Ken Fox
Partie de campagne [A Day in the Country, Country Excursion] (France 1936)
Director: Jean Renoir
Writer: Jean Renoir, based on the story by Guy de Maupassant
Producer: Pierre Braunberger
Cinematographer: Claude Renoir
Set designer: Robert Gys
Music: Joseph Kosma
Cast: Sylvia Bataille, George Saint-Saëns [George Darnoux], Jeanne Marken, André Gabriello,
Jacques Borel [Jacques Brunius], Paul Temps, Gabrielle Fontan, Jean Renoir, Marguerite Renoir,
Pierre Lestringuez, Georges Bataille
Production company: Panthéon-Production
Sound, b/w, 39 min.
French language, English subtitles
Print source: British Film Institute, London, UK
A Day in the Country came together because Jean Renoir was interested in making “a short film
that would [...] have the style of a full-length film.” Another factor was Sylvia Bataille, a familiar
face in the bohemian circles of Montparnasse; the muse of Surrealists, philosophers, and
psychoanalysts; and an actress with the agitprop theater. Renoir was interested in doing a film
with Bataille, while his friend, the producer Pierre Braunberger, happened to be infatuated with
her. Renoir considered the second half of the nineteenth century to be the perfect “cinematic
period.” Bataille, he thought, called for a costume film, and Guy de Maupassant’s dialogue
perfectly suited her voice.
Braunberger put together a modest budget, and Renoir intended to shoot the film in ten days.
Rainy weather stretched that schedule, and Renoir had to abandon the project for The Lower
Depths (1936). Further films kept him distracted, the war followed, and A Day in the Country
was forgotten for a decade. When Braunberger watched the material in 1946 he realized that the
film was nearly complete; editing tweaks and two new intertitles did the trick. Renoir was in
Hollywood at the time, and he only got to see his picture in 1950.
It was in many ways a friends-and-family affair. Claude Renoir, the director’s nephew, was
responsible for the cinematography. The editor was Renoir’s life companion Marguerite Renoir,
who also plays the maid. Writers Georges Bataille and Pierre Lestringuez acted in the film, and
Surrealist Jacques Brunius was cast in one of the main parts. The director himself appears on
screen as the innkeeper. And for the first time in Renoir’s film career, one can find many
references to his father’s paintings (Pierre-Auguste Renoir being as evocative of that “cinematic
period” as his friend de Maupassant).
This eclectic team does not always deliver a perfectly balanced performance, yet they accentuate
the essentials: the purity of Sylvia Bataille’s character, the grass, the river. A sudden turn of the
head and a desperate gaze just before a passionate embrace, followed by thickening raindrops
filmed from a swiftly receding boat, are enough to transform a piquant anecdote of seduction into
a great tragic love story. As André Bazin wrote, “maybe history will consider Renoir’s A Day in
the Country superior to de Maupassant’s original.”
This original UK release print has a shrinkage range of 0.6%-1.0% and many scratches, which is
compensated for by excellent photographic quality.
Peter Bagrov