Archival Spaces

341: Most Expensive Industrial Film Ever

Archival Spaces 341

Most Expensive Industrial Film Ever

Uploaded 23 February 2024

In 1948, the Apex Film Co., a company founded by former MGM executive Jack Chertok to produce educational, industrial, and other sponsored films, was hired by E.I. Du Pont de Nemours to produce a feature-length color industrial on the history of the DuPont Company for its 85,000 employees: The Du Pont Story (1950) was the most expensive sponsored film ever made with an unheard of budget of $250,000 ($3,200,000/2024). Under the working title, “This Work Goes On,” it was based on a non-fiction book by William F. Dutton, Du Pont – 140 Years, published by Scribners in 1942. The film featured more than 225 actors, including Sigrid Gurie, Stanley Ridges, Lyle Talbot, Stacy Keach, Sr., Donald Woods, and Whit Bissell, along with hundreds of extras. It was shot in a Hollywood rental studio on as many as ninety-one sets, which replicated many original sites in Wilmington, Delaware. According to an Apex spokesperson, “It will not play down munitions or anything else, but will be a straight history which will include company faults and mistakes and how they were overcome.” The DuPont Company, on the other hand, hoped the film would instill in younger employees “the same pride in the background and traditions of DuPont as the old-timers have.”

In point of fact, DuPont had learned that public relations through mass media was an essential element of modern business administration, but only shortly after the Depression hit when DuPont started getting extremely bad press because there had been persistent rumors about the company reaping vast profits during World War I by supplying half the world with gun powder and explosives. “The Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry”, aka Nye Committee, under the chairmanship of Gerald Nye (Republican, N.D.) confirmed rumors of price fixing, war profiteering, and conspiring with the banks to stoke war fever in Senate Hearings, beginning in September 1934. In fact, the production of explosives had increased from 8.4 million lbs. in 1914 to 544 million lbs in April 1917. While Nye, an outright Fascist, and Adolf Hitler sympathizer, hoped to smear the American banking system with antisemitic slurs, the attacks stung DuPont. Added to the negative ledger was the fact that the DuPont family also controlled General Motors which was subject to a major labor strike in 1936 that was settled in favor of the United Auto Workers and had broad public support. To counteract negative public images, DuPont began sponsorship on 10 October 1935 on NBC Radio Network of a weekly radio program, “The Cavalcade of America.” Indeed, the radio show, which presented important moments from American history and always began with the Company’s slogan, “Better Living through Chemistry,” contributed substantially to the largely positive image of DuPont by the end of World War II.

*The Du Pont Story* (1950, William Thiele)

**DuPont Chemical Plant, Parkersburg, WV**

The Du Pont Story (1950) was copyrighted on 15 December 1950 and was shown in Wilmington, DE, and at over 100 DuPont plants and sales offices across the country in Spring 1951. Theatrical screenings soon began, running twice daily over three weeks in Philadelphia‘s WRVA. Not only was admission free, DuPont paid cinema owners for each customer attending. It was listed in the Educational Film Guide (1953), available for free loan on 16mm, and is today available on YouTube.

*The Du Pont Story* (1950) with Eduard Franz, Sigrid Gurie

The film opens at a DuPont chemical plant in Waynesboro, VA., where the night shift is leaving and the day shift is going to work, the narrator explaining that the company operates 72 plants in 25 States, producing hundreds of products. The color film then flashes back to the company’s founding in 1803 on the banks of the Brandywine, where the recent French immigrant, Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, who had made gunpowder in France, is convinced that there is a huge market for quality gunpowder in America. The company expanded rapidly, thanks to the lower cost of American powder, now equal to European products, but an explosion in 1818 destroyed 85,000 lbs. of powder, costing forty men their lives. Under the founder’s son, Alfred du Pont, the company expands, then brother Henry du Pont, “the General,” takes over the company, while his nephew, Lamont duPont invents dynamite before blowing himself up.

*The Du Pont Story* with Lyle Tallbot (Eugene du Pont), David Bruce

*The Du Pont Story* with Whit Bissel (Wallace Carruthers)

After Henry du Pont’s death, Eugene du Pont modernized the company’s administration before he died in 1902. Coleman du Pont becomes President, Pierre du Pont CFO, and Alfred du Pont head of production. Coleman pushed for expansion into new product lines and in 1903 organized an experimental laboratory to do basic research on new products like solvents, fabrics, plastics, and dyes because the “sound way to success is fulfilling a need.” DuPont also surveys the public about its needs for synthetic fabrics, like cellophane, rayon, and nylon. In 1940, Walter S. Carpenter became the first President who was not a family member, followed in 1948 by Crawford Greenewalt. Both Carpenter and Greenewalt play themselves in the film’s final reel.

*The Dupont Stroy:* Donald Wooids (Irénée duPont), **Stacy Keach (Pierre S. duPont)**

**The Dupont Story: Walter S. Carpenter**, **Crawford Greenewalt**

As a sponsored film from the largest chemical company in the United States, The Du Pont Story sought to project the image of a modern capitalist enterprise that took its civic responsibility seriously, creating products that improved the lives of Americans, while offering employment to tens of thousands. Given DuPont’s negative reputation for war profiteering during World War I, the film’s narrative of the 20^th century deemphasized the production of explosives in favor of research and development of new products that cater to American consumers. Technological innovations are characterized as altruistic. In 1915, for example, the Company began spending millions on the creation of new dyes, since America was cut off from high-quality European dyes, due to World War I. In the 1920s, they invested millions in creating fast-drying lacquer for automobiles, but the film fails to mention the company’s financial stake in the auto industry. The development of nylon for parachutes and other products is characterized by decades-long research into polymers by Dr. Wallace Carothers, while the company did its patriotic duty to the nation in World War II by supporting American defense, however without mentioning its involvement in the Manhattan Project to create a nuclear bomb.

William Thiele, the subject of my new book, directed and contributed to the script. He structures the narrative as a series of dialogues between company leaders of various generations, illustrating significant moments in the company’s history. Despite major gaps in that history, Thiele avoids the pitfall of a boring parade of waxworks by focusing on technological development and the company’s investment in products known to the public, while coaxing pithy performances from his cast of cameos. Soon after, Thiele would direct thirty-six episodes of the TV version of The Cavalcade of America, sponsored by DuPont.

*The Dupont Story:* Dupont motion picture film at the front in World War II

340: Zone of Interest

Archival Spaces 340

The Zone of Interest

Uploaded 9 February 2024

**The infamous selection ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau today**

In June 1990, I flew to Katowice, Poland to work on a traveling exhibit of American film, developed by the now-defunct U.S. Information Agency. While there I took a day trip to Oświęcim, better known by its German name, Auschwitz. In Auschwitz I, the work camp, visitors first viewed a short film, made by the Russians in 1945 that barely mentioned the word Jews, shockingly, and included only a Catholic funeral; the signage in the onsite exhibits mentioned the number of Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, etc. killed, but failed to identify them as Jews. I then asked my driver to take me to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death camp, but there were no signs to direct us, so we had trouble finding it. Once there, I noticed that there were ordinary Poles living in what had been the villa of Camp Commandant Rudolf Höß – again no signage anywhere – and apartment buildings and wash hanging on clotheslines within a hundred feet of the gas chambers. This was literally months after the Communist government of Poland had fallen, so it was not surprising that anti-Semitism still informed the presentation; on the other hand, today it is a crime in Poland to say the Poles participated in the Holocaust.

**Aerial view of Auschwitz Birkenau with Höß Villa top left**

I remembered that trip watching Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) recently, an extremely disturbing film, possibly because it eschews any visual depiction of violence. The film begins with the title appearing in grey on white on screen, switching to white on black, then slowly fading to black, the darkness continuing over atonal music for seemingly minutes, both an elegy and an overture. Halfway through the film, Glazer fades from a close-up of a rose to a completely red screen and holds the shot, one of Glazer’s experimental techniques. He later uses a thermal imaging camera to film two black and white scenes of a young Polish girl hiding food in places where inmates will find it, while the film ends with cinema verité shots of Polish charwomen today cleaning the gas chamber, the crematoria, the exhibits of hair and shoes in Auschwitz I, which heightens the everyday banality of what we have witnessed.

*Zone of Interest* (2023, Jonathan Glazer)

The action begins with a long shot of a German family in bathing suits, swimming, picking berries, then returning home, where Rudolf Höß and his family celebrate the Commandant’s birthday. While he is in SS uniform, there is little indication here or anywhere else in the film that we are in Auschwitz. For the family, it is a privileged, happy life with a large house, numerous servants, and free food and clothing. Only the soundtrack with its non-stop din of dogs barking, gunshots, screams beyond the high wall, and the chimneys constantly belching smoke and fire reveals where we actually are, while the stench of burning bodies is inscribed in the faces of newcomers, like Höß’s mother-in-law.

**Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höß** in *Zone of Interest*

It takes a focused eye to see the horror of genocide, e.g. when Hedwig Höß tries on a full-length fur coat brought to her by an inmate, when dad chases the kids out of a creek after finding something, presumably human remains, when the oldest boy in his Hitler Youth uniform inspects a pouch of gold teeth, later locking his brother in the greenhouse and making a hissing sound, or when an inmate spreads ashes in the garden for fertilizer. Yet, when Frau Höß tends her garden or hosts pool parties for friends, the family steadfastly looks away, just like the majority of good German citizens looked away when their Jewish neighbors were deported. Hedwig quickly burns her mother’s note, after she flees without a word. The first family crisis occurs only when Höß is transferred to KZ Oranienburg, the wife insists on staying in her paradise, because country life is good for the children. She is apparently ok with her husband being almost pathologically detached, getting sex from inmates in his office, or showing more tenderness to his horse than to her.

**Christian Friedel as Höß with Topf & Sons, builders of the crematoria**

Other than the title, there is virtually no connection to the Martin Amis novel, on which the film is ostensibly based. The novel concerns the Commandant’s jealousy, when he thinks his wife is having an affair with another SS Officer. The never consummated affair is barely hinted at in a greenhouse scene in The Zone of Interest, where Frau Höß gives a cigarette to an SS officer and quietly smokes with him.

**The real Höß** (**right) with SS Buddies**

*Aus einem deutschen Leben* (1977) with Elisabeth Schwarz, **Götz** **Georg**

*Aus einen deutschen Leben* (1977, Theodor Kotulla)

Not mentioned in any contemporary reviews of The Zone of Interest is that Glazer was probably conceptually inspired by another source: Theodor Kottula’s 1977 German feature, Aus einem deutschen Leben (translated: A German Life, but released as Death is My Trade), based on Rudolf Höß’s published autobiography. While Kotulla’s film covers Höß’s career from World War I to Auschwitz, we see no violence, no selection ramp, no killings, although we and two inmates hear them. Both films treat the happy bourgeois family similarly, ignoring the horror, Höß consciously shielding them from the specifics of his job. Kotulla and Glazer keep their actors at a distance, their performances cold, unemotional, with rare exceptions zombie-like. In both films the Commandant reviews architectural drawings for new more efficient crematoria, but, as was with all Nazi terminology, language obfuscates, speaking of units processed rather than human beings.

It was that level of dehumanization that allowed ordinary Germans after the war to turn themselves from a nation of perpetrators into a nation of victims, steadfastly repressing their crimes for more than a generation.

Coda: After discussions with my colleague Raye Farr (formerly of the Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.), it seems clear, the film’s geography is ambiguous. Höß’s villa was outside Auschwitz I, the work camp, not Birkenau, as I have assumed all these years, but the proximity of the large crematoria, seen belching smoke and fire from the villa, suggest Auschwitz II, which would have been behind and west of the villa. The infamous ramp at Birkenau only became operational in 1944 with the arrival of the Hungarian Jews, the old ramp lying between Auschwitz I and II.

*Zone of Interest* (2023) pool party in the shadow of industrialized death

339: Kinemathek Update

Archival Spaces 339

Deutsche Kinemathek Update

Uploaded 26 January 2024

The news took a little longer to arrive than initially indicated in my Archival Spaces 319 blog (https://archivalspaces.com/2023/04/14/319-deutsche-kinemathek/)), but it is good, indeed. As reported in April 2023, the Deutsche Kinemathek and Museum für Film und Fernsehen on Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz had lost its lease and was seemingly going to become homeless since ground had yet to be broken next to Berlin’s Martin Gropius Building, the envisioned (and still planned) new permanent home of the German film archive. While the Arsenal Cinema and the German Film and TV Academy, the Kinemathek’s co-tenants in the building, had found new spaces, the Kinemathek as of April had not. Now, the Deutsche Kinemathek has sent out a press release, stating they will be moving to a new temporary facility in January 2025, after the Film Museum is shuttered at the end of October 2024.

For the foreseeable future, the Deutsche Kinemathek will move to the E-Werk building, located less than a mile from Potsdamer Platz, close to the former Checkpoint Charlie and the border between what was East and West Berlin for 45years after World War II. A former electric power substation, Abspannwerk Buchhändlerhof, originally built in 1885, the electrical works were subsequently enlarged and rebuilt over the years, the existing building designed by the architect Hans Heinrich Müller between 1925 and 1928 in a Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetic. In the 1980s, the electric substation was closed, only to reopen after German reunification in 1993 as a techno music night club, whose DJs made it world famous. The techno-club closed in 1997 and the building was renovated as a temporary event space in 2006.

When the Kinemathek moves in a year from now, it will have 4000 square meters (ca. 43,000 feet³) for office, archive, and exhibition space. The Kinemathek’s material culture archive, housing the collections of Marlene Dietrich, Paul Kohner, Werner Herzog, Ken Adam, and Gerhard Lamprecht, among countless others, will become available again to researchers after a brief period of closure for the transfer, as will the institution’s TV-Mediathek, which presently includes more than 12,000 broadcasts, spanning seven decades from broadcasters licensed the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. The Kinemathek’s photo archives, including around 500,000 still and production photos, 100,000 personal photos, and 50,000 photos relevant to cinematic and festival history, will also be housed on-site.

***Marlene Dietrich Collection on display at Museum for Film & Television, Berlin***

While the Museum for Film and Television with its strikingly beautiful permanent exhibitions, will close its doors permanently in October, at least until the move to the Gropius site, – if you are in Berlin before then, it is well worth a visit -, the Kinemathek’s Ewerk site, with its vast main hall on the ground floor, and adjacent service counter hall, will present temporary “pop-up” exhibitions, as well as “experimental forms,” for traveling exhibitions and those developed with outside partners. Finally, the new space will include a small cinema, which will allow for film screenings for the first time in the Kinemathek’s own space (rather than at the Arsenal), although it is as yet unclear, whether the theatre will only be utilized for internal screenings and those of partners, or eventually include a public program.

This development is quite an accomplishment for Director Rainer Rother, who will retire in 2025 after the move to the new facility is completed, and who for more than a decade had sought a new space for the Deutsche Kinemathek, given budgetary restrictions placed on the institution by the Minister of Culture of the Federal Republic, which controls the purse strings.

It should also be noted that the Deutsche Kinemathek’s film archive and film restoration work has continued unabated during this period of instability. The film archive is housed on the outskirts of Berlin, as are its digital restoration facilities. Recent high-profile restorations have included Werner Schroeter’s Palermo oder Wolfsburg (1980), Werner Hochbaum’s Brüder (1929), G.W. Pabst’s The Mistress of Atlantis (1932), and Helke Sander’s Der subjektive Faktor (1981).

Finally, the Deutsche Kinemathek is continuing its longstanding cooperation with the Berlinale, International Film Festival, programming often ground-breaking retrospectives. This year’s retrospective begins in February, “An Alternate Cinema – From the Deutsche Kinemathek Archives,” and will feature “unconventional and idiosyncratic” film productions made in Germany between 1960 and 1980

**Werner Hochbaum’s proletarian classic,** **Brüder** **(1929)**

338: The Kawakita Diaries

Archival Spaces 338

The Kawakita Diaries 1932

Uploaded 15 January 2024

**Nagamasa and Kashiko Kawakita** **Passport Photos**, **1932 Kawakita Memorial Film Institute**

In April 1993, I was invited by my colleague (and now long-time friend), Hisashi Okajima of the Film Center at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, to give the opening lecture for their three-month film program, “American Films – The Little Known.” I had brought with me from the George Eastman Museum a group of silent films by Thomas Ince and Cecil B. DeMille, starring the Japanese actor, Sessue Hayakawa, including The Wrath of the Gods (1914), The Typhoon (1914), The Cheat (1915), and, most importantly, Hayakawa’s own production, The Dragon Painter (1919), none of which had been seen in Japan since their original release. While in Tokyo, we also began negotiating an exchange of these films, which, though made in America, constituted an important element of Japanese national patrimony. I already knew what I hoped to get in trade: unique German silent films, only to be found in the Film Collection, including Lupu Pick’s masterpiece, Sylvester / New Year’s Eve (1924), a film Lotte Eisner discusses extensively in her The Haunted Screen. Unfortunately, I was told the deposit terms to the Museum were that these films could never again leave Japan. I also heard about another large collection of German and European films in Tokyo’s National Film Archive, the Kawakita Memorial Film Collection., and had vague memories of Madame Kawakita attending a FIAF conference.

*Sylvester / New Year’s Eve* (1924, Lupu Pick)

I had no idea how German films had gotten to Japan or anything more specific about Kawakita. I did come across the name again when I curated a Dr. Arnold Fanck exhibit at the Munich Film Museum since Fanck had directed The Daughter of the Samurai (1937). Now, the Danish film journal, Kosmorama, has published in English an essay by Wayne E. Arnold and Adrian Wood on a unique diary by Kashiko Kawakita of her and her husband’s honeymoon to Germany in 1932, which reveals the extensive relationship the Kawakitas had to the German film industry: https://www.kosmorama.org/artikler/kashiko-kawakita?fbclid=IwAR07esRMb9LZimnnShMO0UtoBVbcQxEhOdau_8O5EpzRw0i7z9NLAmyJq6w

*Daughter of the Samurai* (1937, Dr. Arnold Fanck) with Setsuko Hara

In October 1928, Kawakita Nagamasa (1903–1981) established the Towa Shoji Goshi Kaisha (Towa Trading Partnership Company) to export German films to Japan, since he, like many in the Japanese film industry was worried about the growing dominance of American films and wanted to create a counterbalance by introducing more European films. In 1932, Kawakita, after marrying his secretary, Kawakita Kashiko (1908-1993), traveled to Berlin, in the hopes of negotiating a trade agreement with UFA. It was not Kawakita’s first trip to Germany. Speaking nearly perfect German, which he had learned while studying in Germany in 1923-24, Kawakita returned in 1927, to negotiate distribution deals for German films, while working for other companies. During their 1932 trip to Berlin, the Kawakitas were mostly interested in German sound films and German sound film technology, since until 1935, the great majority of films produced without sound in Japan. Indeed, in 1933, 81% of Japanese films were still silent, even though Heinosuke Gosho had directed the first talkie, The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (1931).

Towa Release *Girls in Uniform* **(1931, Leontine Sagen)** **Kawakita Memorial Film Institute**

*The Congress Dances* (1931, Erik Charell)

Having previously visited Italy and Switzerland, the couple was made aware of considerable anti-Japanese sentiment in Berlin, given Japanese imperialist activity in Manchuria and Shanghai. Nevertheless, with the help of Japanese intermediaries and Hans Fitzke, the German representative of Towa in Berlin, they were able initially to meet the UFA’s head of foreign distribution, Wilhelm Meydam, and tour the Afifa film laboratories, one of the largest in Europe. One of the first films they screened was Leontine Sagan’s Girls in Uniform (1932), which would become a huge hit for Towa in Japan, although Nagamasa was initially unenthusiastic about the film’s prospects in Japan, and had to be convinced by Kashiko to purchase the Japanese rights. The annual UFA convention was taking place in Berlin at the time, allowing the Kawakitas to meet numerous UFA luminaries, including Erich Pommer, Conrad Veidt, Renate Müller, and Will Fritsch, while also attending screenings of UFA’s famous film operettas, Her Grace Commands (1931, Hanns Schwarz) and The Congress Dances (1931, Erik Charell). In total, the Kawakitas viewed an amazing 65 films during their stay in Berlin from 19 July to 23 August, of which 21 were eventually imported to Japan, including the previously mentioned films, as well as Bombs Over Monte Carlo (1931, Hanns Schwarz), Emil and the Detectives (1931, Gerhardt Lamprecht), Niemandsland (1931, Viktor Trivas), L’Atlantide (1932, G.W. Pabst), and Vampyr (1932, Carl Dreyer). That more films were not imported to Japan had to do with the weakness of the Japanese Yen.

As Arnold and Wood also note, Kashiko and Nagamasa were also intensely interested in sound film technology and new dubbing technology, in particular. To that end, they set up a dubbing session into Japanese for Dreyer’s Vampyr, utilizing the Tobis-Polyphon-Film at the Afifa labs. They also met and became friends with Dr. Guido Bagier, a German sound film pioneer at the Tobis Company, responsible for the first German sound films in 1930, but who by 1932 was experimenting with color. Finally, the Kawakitas developed a close personal and professional relationship with the couple, Karl Koch and Lotte Reininger (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, 1926); Koch would direct the German version of the first Japanese talkie to be exported to Europe by Towa, Nippon (1932).

**Karl Koch and Lotte Reininger in Paris in exile, 1930s**

“Kashiko Kawakita and the 1932 Shoji Film Diary,” goes into much more detail than can be related here and makes a fascinating read for anyone interested in the mostly still little-known relationship between the German and Japanese film industries before World War II.