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The Plow That Broke the Plains & The River / Gil-Ordonez, Post-Classical Ensemble ( Naxos )
Release Date: 2007-01-30
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Description
Pare Lorentz's The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937) are landmark American documentary films. Aesthetically, they break new ground in seamlessly marrying pictorial imagery, symphonic music, and poetic free verse, all realized with supreme artistry. Ideologically, they indelibly encapsulate the strivings of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's `New Deal'. Virgil Thomson's scores for both films are among the most famous ever composed for the movies. Aaron Copland praised the music of The Plow for its `frankness and openness of feeling', calling it `fresher, more simple, and more personal' than the Hollywood norm. He called the music for The River `a lesson in how to treat Americana'. Special Features include: George Stoney on The Plow and The River * Stoney on The New Deal, The River, and Race * Charles Fussell on Virgil Thomson * Virgil Thomson on Virgil Thomson (audio only) * Original beginning and ending of The Plow * Option to view The Plow and The River with original sound track and narration
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Amazon.com
Art and propaganda meet to powerful effect in these two documentaries from the 1930s. Written and directed by Pare Lorentz, both The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River were made (in black & white) by the U.S government and clearly intended to promote President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, a series of initiatives designed to help the country recover from the Great Depression. Yet that fact detracts not at all from their artistry, as the combination of Lorentz's visuals and words and composer Virgil Thomson's music (the voice-over narration and the scores for both films were "re-created" in 2005 for this release) is often quite genuinely transcendent. Released in 1936 and sponsored by the U.S. Resettlement Administration, The Plow focuses on the Great Plains, those millions of grassy acres sprawled between Texas and Canada--"a high, treeless continent," the narration tells us, "without rivers or streams, a country of high winds and sun, and of little rain"--and how, after settlers wiped out the Indians and buffalo who once inhabited the area, the great prosperity and progress that followed eventually left the land over-grazed and over-farmed, turning it into a parched, cracked Dust Bowl, its people impoverished and desperately in need of food, care, jobs, and another chance. The River, from the following year, details the remarkable growth of trade and travel along the Mississippi River, where the booming farming, lumber, iron, coal, and steel industries stripped the surrounding land of its soil and roots, leading to the weakening of the river's levees and disastrous flooding (shades of New Orleans 2005), with government agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Farm Security Administration offering the best chance to escape this ruinous cycle. The films are filled with striking images and poetry, but in the end, it's Thomson's music that makes the greatest impression; truly cinematic in scope, it draws on well known tunes ("There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight"), hymns ("The Doxology") and the composer's own brilliance to create a thoroughly American sound whose moods perfectly match and enhance what we see on the screen. An hour or so of bonus features includes discussion of all the films' elements (Thomson himself weighs in during an old audio interview), as well as the original beginning and ending of The Plow. --Sam Graham
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The Day After ( bbphilley )
I got this cd because there was no soundtrack available for the 1983 movie "The Day After". The score from the 1937 documentary "The River" is the same music.
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The Plow That Broke the Plains & The River
This complemented "The worst of hard Times Book" which helped me under stand how I was raised In Nebraska,
the reason for Social Security and the Path Our country has followed. Our parents and ancestors had it rough but perseved.
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 Apocalypse Then
These stark and dark films are accounts of the land misuse which led to two of the nation's greatest environmental disasters. I found "The Plow That Broke the Plains" especially riveting. The black and white presentation further lends barrenness to these accounts and focuses the viewer more closely on the mechanized devastation. The films demonstrate to what extent the federal government involved itself in national environmental crises in the 1930's, an involvement which may not be possible to repeat today in spite of a much higher environmental awareness across the population. Conservationists, environmentalists, and political historians should enjoy and learn from these documentary films.
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Two American Classics ( imrhodes )
Film Schools regard these Lorentz documentaries right up there with Flaherty. Must see! Must hear! The score is fantastic!
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Two Masterpieces of Documentary Film Restored with Newly Recorded Musical Scores by Virgil Thomson ( middleburian )
Pare Lorentz's two groundbreaking 1930s documentaries, paid for by the US government and making no apologies for their propagandist intentions, are here presented with the evocative scores by composer Virgil Thomson played in modern sound by the Post-Classical Ensemble with Angel Gil-Ordóñez conducting. There are unnerving modern resonances in these two films, one about the plow's partial destruction of the great plains that led to the Dust Bowl (reminding us of the modern near-depletion of the Ogalalla aquifer in that same area), and the other about upstream flood control containment by dikes and levees of the Mississipi for 1000 miles of its length, touted as a great marvel of man's taming of Nature but as we now know contributing to such things as the awful destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
The black-and-white films themselves are visually beautiful. The cameramen sent to photograph scenes used in the film included such luminaries as Paul Strand. The narration, written by Lorentz, is poetic.
Thomson's music is simple-sounding and triadic in the extreme, making use as it does of such tunes as the Doxology ('Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow', scored differently and aptly at different points in 'The Plow') and 'Go Tell Aunt Rhody.' And it is both esthetically and emotionally satisfying. The DVD makes use of a modern re-recording of Thomson's scores, and the new recording of the original voice-over narration is nicely done by Floyd King. There is, however, the option to play both films with the original scores' 1930s soundtrack music conducted by Alexander Smallens. We also get a couple of interviews with George Stoney, later himself a distinguished documentarian but in the 1930s a PR person for the government; he showed the films to groups of citizens in the Southeast and recalls many details about the films' origins and their initial reception. Joseph Horowitz talks with composer Charles Fussell, a student of Thomson's, about the scores. (It might be noted that there has been a recent CD on the Albany label that presents both Thomson's and Fussell's cello concertos, and very nicely done, too.) There is a 1979 audio-only interview with the late Virgil Thomson in which he talks about the two films and about film-scoring in general.
I had been familiar with the scores of these two films for many years. As I grew up in the Dust Bowl area, I remember many stories of that awful period and had been particularly interested to see 'The Plow'. (As a small bit of irony, I now live in the Vermont town where the inventor of that plow, John Deere, learned the blacksmithing trade.) I must say that I was thrilled with both films. These are important documents restored to their original luster.
Enthusiastically recommended.
Scott Morrison
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