This roll illustrates a shift change at the Dodge assembly plant in Detroit in 1938. This film, shot by Academy Award winning documentary film director Pare Lorentz and Academy award winning cinematographer Floyd Crosby, was part of an uncompleted feature length docu-fiction film on unemployment produced for the short-lived “U.S. Film Agency”. The film, based on a radio documentary, was originally titled “Ecce Homo” was later named more prosaically as “Name, Age and Occupation”. The filmmakers wanted to emphasize that the unparalleled productivity of U.S. industry should make unemployment a thing of the past.
The film is un-described at the roll level in the National Archives Catalog and therefore inaccessible to all but those prepared for a “deep dive” into the film collections at the National Archives at College Park. I was able to identify the location based on advertising on one of the commuter buses and street signs. I was able to pinpoint the site as a street corner across from the Dodge plant (later the site of GM’s Hamtramck Assembly Plant) using Google Maps. Also depicted is a nearby suburb of Detroit.
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