Pare Lorentz
2 credits on HibingeTV
American filmmaker who made the two great New Deal documentaries for the U.S. government: The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) about the Dust Bowl, and The River (1938) about the Mississippi, both with scores by Virgil Thomson. He headed the short-lived U.S. Film Service.
Directed
Documentary, Short
The first major documentary produced by the U.S. government, made by Pare Lorentz for the Resettlement Administration to explain the Dust Bowl. It traces how homesteaders broke the Great Plains' grass for wheat, how wartime demand and mechanized plowing stripped the land bare, and how drought turned the topsoil into black blizzards that buried farms. Virgil Thomson's score, built from American folk tunes, set a template for documentary music. Congress promptly killed the agency's film program, but the film proved government could make real cinema. As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain.
Documentary · Short
The Plow That Broke the Plains
1936 - Documentary
Documentary, Short
Pare Lorentz's companion piece to The Plow That Broke the Plains follows the Mississippi from its headwaters to the Gulf, indicting a century of logging, cotton farming, and flood-plain development that turned the river against the people who lived along it — and ending with the TVA's dams as the New Deal's answer. It was Oscar-nominated and, famously, beat Triumph of the Will at the Venice Film Festival. Virgil Thomson again supplied the score. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.
Documentary · Short
The River
1938 - Documentary