Films in the Archive: Hollywood in Detroit

Films in the Archive

The Prelinger Archives, a collection of over 60,000 so-called ephemeral films, approximately 6,500 of which are freely available online for viewing and public download, is an amazing resource for research and teaching in the history of technology.¹ Collector, archivist, writer, and filmmaker Rick Prelinger began assembling his collection in the early 1980s. Over the next decades, his collection of 35 mm and 16 mm films grew into the tens of thousands. Films designed as educational, industrial, vocational, or advertising (overlapping categories often subsumed under the term sponsored), along with amateur and 8 mm home movies, were gathered from far and wide.² Films from any of these genres are often referred to as ephemeral, a term applied based on the idea that such a film’s period usefulness, in the sense of actual time being shown for the purpose for which it was created, is limited. The term’s appropriateness becomes questionable once the lifespan of these films has been extended through the development of new contexts in which they are useful (for example, for scholarly research or nostalgic film series programming)³ (fig. 1).

Fig 1.

Film reel canisters and reels. Industrial films produced for General Motors’ Chevrolet division, by the Detroit-based Jam Handy Organization. Efforts by archivists and collectors such as Rick Prelinger in both preservation and digitization have made what otherwise might be hidden artifacts easily accessible to historians and available via archive.org for use by scholars, students, and the general public.

(Source: Image courtesy of the AACA Library and Research Center, Hershey, Pennsylvania.)

Hollywood in Motor City

Out of the thousands of films from the Prelinger Archives available through archive.org, I want to highlight two, from a Prelinger sub-collection whose films have special relevance to the site of the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Dearborn. Both are sponsored films from the same year, 1936, commissioned by a single operation (the Chevrolet division of General Motors) and produced by the same company (the Jam Handy Organization [JHO]); however, they present very different views of an industry.

Detroit-based producer extraordinaire, Jam Handy made thousands of sponsored films between the 1920s and 1960s, including hundreds for the local auto industry; the 1930s was a decade of rapid growth for his company. Industrial filmmaking was taking on an important role for all of the major players in Motor City; 1936 in particular brought a difficult year of labor strikes and failed negotiations and an American consumer public short on cash during the Depression. Handy produced films for clients ranging from the City of Detroit to Dow Chemical to General Electric. But in these years, his company’s next-door neighbor, General Motors, was its best customer; before the decade was out, Handy oversaw the production of dozens of films for GM subsidiary Chevrolet.⁴ The animated short A Coach for Cinderella and the half-hour symphonic film Master Hands exemplify the power and sophistication of sponsored filmmaking as a technology of intermediation among various constituencies, in this case owners, workers, and consumers.

Coach and Master Hands appeared in 1936, the year of the first sit-down strikes in the auto industry, which would eventually lead to the solidifying of the UAW, and with it the long-term labor organization of the auto industry in Dearborn and Flint, as well as Detroit. Coach is a nine-minute animated film, shot in Technicolor and directed by Max Fleischer, who had made his name in the previous decade as the animator responsible for bringing the characters of Betty Boop and Popeye to cinematic life.⁵ Coach marked the beginning of a long collaboration between Fleischer and JHO and introduced a new kind of character to the public: an automobile with powers of salvation. Visual and conceptual devices center on an industrious animated gnome’s use of a “modernizer” to transform raw materials and forest animals into a luxury vehicle to whisk Cinderella away from her evil step-relatives. Striking...