From "The Book of the Dead" to "Gauley Bridge": Muriel Rukeyser's Documentary Poetics and Film at the Crossroads of the Popular Front

This essay treats Rukeyser's attempt to adapt "The Book of the Dead" for documentary film. Between 1938 and 1940, Rukeyser worked on a film titled "Gauley Bridge," which incorporated the documentary materials used in "The Book of the Dead." Although Rukeyser never completed a full script for the film, her published and unpublished film sketches show how her treatment of the industrial tragedy responded to developments both within American documentary aesthetics and the changing national and international political climate during the Popular Front period. This essay argues that the unexplored formal and political differences between "The Book of the Dead" and "Gauley Bridge" not only demonstrate an important shift in Rukeyser's aesthetics and politics, but also inform her subsequent graphics work for the Office of War Information in the early 1940s.