The Horse's Head

#749) Modesta (1956)

OR “Speak Spanish and Carry a Big Stick”

Directed by Benjamin Doniger

Written by Doniger, Luis A. Maisonet, and René Marqués. Story by Domingo Silas Ortiz.

Class of 1998

Other notes

• I can’t get into the rich and complex history of Puerto Rico in this write-up, but for our purposes here we’ll begin in 1898 when Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory following the Spanish-American War (Puerto Rico had been part of the Spanish Empire up to that point). Recognition of Puerto Rico as part of America has been slow-going; Puerto Ricans weren’t recognized as U.S. citizens until 1917 and didn’t officially become a self-governed territory until the early 1950s. Although Puerto Rico has a Governor and other elected officials, it does not have statehood or representatives in the House or Senate, and Puerto Ricans cannot vote in federal elections (such as the U.S. Presidential elections). On the plus side, very few Puerto Ricans are subject to federal taxes. Anything else I know about Puerto Rico comes from “Progress Island, U.S.A.” Progress!
• Although Puerto Rico had been producing films since the 1910s, almost all their early efforts have been lost to time. Following the election of Luis Muñoz Marín in 1949 (Puerto Rico’s first elected governor), the Division of Community Education was established to promote social reform through radio, books, and yes, film. Between 1950 and 1975, 65 shorts and two features were produced by the Division of Community Education, all filmed in Puerto Rico using locals as actors.
• “Modesta” was filmed in Sonadora, a barrio in Guaynabo. To the best of my knowledge, both Antonia Hidalgo and Juan Ortiz Jiménez were locals, and while this is Hidalgo’s only film credit, Jiménez had a few others over the years. Outside of our two leads, the only other acting credit goes to the catch-all credit for the “los vecinos del barrio Sonadora de Guaynado” (roughly translated to “the Barrio Sonadora community”). I could not find any credit for the narrator, who does a good job of establishing the film’s fable sensibility; he even says “habia una vez” (“Once upon a time”).
• Obviously, “Modesta” is entirely in Spanish, so once again I resorted to an auto-translate of YouTube’s Spanish subtitles. It wasn’t perfect, but it did the job. It helped that everyone in this movie speaks deliberately and a little stilted, which makes the dialogue clearer and therefore gives me a better chance at an accurate translation.
• As pointed out in the NFR write-up, the cinematography highlights the natural beauty of Puerto Rico, while simultaneously glossing over its poverty. Of course, the film isn’t here to address the territory’s poverty issues, but its optimistic message gives you hope that conditions will improve (and they have). Incidentally, the cinematographer for “Modesta” was the film’s co-writer Luis A. Maisonet, a native Puerto Rican.
• Something I never expected to see in an NFR short: cockfighting! Nothing too graphic, thank goodness, but it still feels illegal to be watching this footage.
• The husband is pretty dickish from the start, so I very much enjoyed watching Modesta finally hit him with that stick. Right on, woman!
• This is followed by what I call the “Pick-a-little talk-a-little” section, where all the local housewives spread the word of Modesta’s defiant act against her husband. It’s a fun sequence, but please movie, no more close-ups of people’s mouths as they’re talking.
• The film’s second half is mostly the newly formed League of Liberated Women meeting and discussing their agenda with the men of the neighborhood. It’s a lot like the local access broadcast of your city council meeting; a whole lot of talking about taking action without actually taking action. It’s a bit of a chore to get through, but the point of the movie is an emphasis on these ideals and not necessarily the entertainment factor.

Legacy

• While their film production slowed down in the 1970s, the Division of Community Education continued commissioning other forms of art until its closure in 1989.
• In recent years, more efforts have been made to grant Puerto Rico statehood. A majority of Puerto Rican citizens support statehood, as does their recently elected Governor Jenniffer González-Colón. Unfortunately, statehood is granted by the U.S. Congress, which, as previously mentioned, has no representatives from Puerto Rico and therefore no urgent reason to consider statehood.
• Outside of its initial release in 1956 and its NFR designation in 1998, “Modesta” has more or less disappeared from the public film forum, though thankfully its spot on the Registry guarantees the film a write-up from dweebs like me every couple of years. Puerto Rico wouldn’t get a visible spot in pop culture until a certain Broadway musical made by very White creatives came into being.

#748) Bush Mama (1979)

OR “Didn’t Need No Welfare State”

Directed & Written by Haile Gerima

Class of 2022

Other notes

• We’re off to a promising start with a cacophony of social workers asking the same standard questions over and over, mixed with Dorothy walking through Watts, culminating with footage of a Black man receiving a “stop and search” from the LAPD. This opening is even more interesting when you learn that the man being searched is director Haile Gerima, who was actually stopped by the LAPD when they declared the film shoot “suspicious”. Not exactly a Hitchcock cameo.

• As with many other NFR films by the L.A. Rebellion, different members supported each other’s productions. In this case, the legendary Charles Burnett served as cinematographer for “Bush Mama”.
• Longtime readers may remember Barbara O. Jones (later known professionally as Barbara-O) as part of the “Daughters of the Dust” ensemble. As Dorothy, Jones grounds the film, and does a great job of looking forlornly off into the distance, something her character seems to do every five minutes. Fellow “Daughters” cast member Cora Lee Day also makes a strong impression in this film as Molly the social worker.
• There were a lot of things I enjoyed visually about “Bush Mama”, from its semi-improvised one take scenes (a hallmark of any low-budget production), to its photo negative transitions. In a film that could easily have been people sitting around and talking, Gerima (and cinematographers Charles Burnett and Roderick Young) keeps things visually engaging. Also keeping things interesting is the film’s non-linear (or is it?) story structure.
• The film features a very ‘70s score from Onaje Kareem Kenyatta, their only credited film as a composer (and their only credited film, period.) My one gripe is the very on-the-nose lyrics to a sequence of Dorothy walking the streets alone: “woman walking the streets alone”, etc. They even sing the name of the movie! “Welfare sister, hey Bush Mama”. It reminded me of the Randy Newman bit on “Family Guy” (“Left foot, right foot…”).
• The second half of “Bush Mama” definitely takes a turn. As the film starts to focus more on Dorothy’s pregnancy and whether or not she should have the baby, its visual language shifts from its established neorealism to something more experimental and theatrical (I guess that was inevitable from a former theater major and the son of a famous Ethiopian playwright). Side note: The close-up shots of Dorothy’s pregnant belly gave me “All My Babies” flashbacks, and I was convinced I was going to see another live birth.
• Technically this movie has an uplifting ending, but it’s presented in the bleakest way possible. No spoilers, but Dorothy is ultimately broken by the system, which completes her radicalization and motivates her to fight back. While I got the gist of it, a lot of the details went over my head and the ending didn’t deliver the way I think Gerima intended. Still, the last few minutes of this movie have stuck with me in a way not a lot of other NFR movie endings have, so “Bush Mama” is doing something right.

Legacy

• Fully aware that his options in Hollywood were practically nonexistent, Haile Gerima and his wife Shirikiana Aina focused on financing their own films outside of the studio system with money from teaching jobs (Gerima taught film at Howard University for many years). Gerima’s filmography is limited, but in 1993 he made what is widely considered his masterpiece, “Sankofa”, about a Black model who travels back in time and experiences the horrors of the African Slave Trade. Sankofa is also the name of the bookstore and café the Gerima’s own in Washington D.C., which is still around, by the way.

#747) The City (1939)

OR “The Very Model of a Modern Major Capital”

Directed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke

Written by Pare Lorentz (outline), Henwar Rodakiewicz (scenario), and Lewis Mumford (commentary)

Class of 1998

Other notes

• “The City” was funded largely by a $50,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (about $1.1 million today). How do you get to the Carnegie Corporation? Practice.
• The opening credits are a murderer’s row of liberal ‘30s filmmakers. Steiner, Van Dyke, Pare Lorentz; if you’ve been following the NFR you know exactly what kind of film “The City” will be before it even starts. Side note: Willard Van Dyke should not be confused with Woodbridge “W. S.” Van Dyke, the Hollywood director known for “The Thin Man” and “San Francisco”. To the best of my knowledge, Willard was of no relation to “One-Take Woody”.
• Another big name in the credits: composer Aaron Copland. “The City” was Copland’s first film score, and it’s very…Aaron Copland, I give it that. It has Copland’s trademark Americana sound; you just accept the music for what it represents: quiet farm life, noisy city life, etc. Later in the same year, Copland would compose his first score for a feature-length film: “Of Mice and Men”.
• Our narrator is Morris Carnovsky, a stage actor known for his work with the Group Theater, a New York based theater company that produced many of Clifford Odets’ original plays. Carnovsky perfectly matches the varying tones of each section: calm and reassuring during the farm segments, faster and more intense during the city section, patriotic and persuasive during the Greenbelt finale. Carnovsky can be seen on-camera in three NFR entries: “The Life of Emile Zola”, “Cyrano de Bergerac”, and “Gun Crazy”.
• Part of what elevates this film is its poetic writing. There’s a version of this film that’s a little more matter-of-factly, another run of the mill piece of propaganda, but this script keeps things interesting and engaging, if at times preachy and biased. The script of “The City” was written by Lewis Mumford, who wrote several books about urban planning and the effect of the Industrial age on humanity.
• I keep using words like peaceful and idyllic to describe the film’s first act on the farm because that’s what they’re going for; they really hit you over the head with it. Side Note: I don’t know if I agree with this film’s belief that crafting things by hand wasn’t work but rather art. That just sounds like more work to me.
• I enjoyed the brief town hall meeting scene because it reminded me of the similar scene in “Blazing Saddles”. “Howard Johnson is right!”
• There is nothing subtle about “The City”. Everything increases as we reach the Industrial age, with factories popping up seemingly overnight, and residential neighborhoods becoming dilapidated shanties covered in smoke. There’s no two ways about it according to this movie: this kind of progress is bad for humanity.
• I’m enjoying the cinematography, also credited to directors Steiner and Van Dyke. Not surprising at all that two acclaimed photographers know how to frame a movie for impactful storytelling.
• Add “The City” to the list of NFR movies that feature kids playing in the streets of New York, this time in Queens, I believe. Ralph Steiner is currently the only NFR director with both a “Kids in New York Streets” movie and a “Staring at Water” movie. The man had range.
• I don’t know why, but I was amused by the “Danger Congested Area” sign on the streets of New York. As if you need to warn people that New York is crowded. Coincidentally, “Danger Congested Area” is also how I describe my nose during allergy season.
• As the film begins its extended commercial for cities like Greenbelt, I kept thinking, “Did they invent the suburbs?” Turns out yes and no. While the idea of residential suburbs outside a big city had been around for centuries in Europe, this was the first major attempt at one by the US government. As for our nation’s eventual move to suburbia, see “Legacy”.
• There are a few different versions of “The City” available to view online. Everything I’ve read about the film states the runtime as about 40 minutes, but most online uploads of “The City” run about 30. It seems that most of the cuts between the 30- and 40-minute version are in the back half; You aren’t missing too much, just more examples of how great Greenbelt’s model community is. As always, I recommend the full, uncut version of “The City”, but be warned that the longest version I could find online is missing the opening credits.
• Even the 30-minute version finds time for a little sexism, as this new way of living gives your wife more time away from the laundry room to focus on social activities with the other housewives. “A little gossip or a friendly hand [of cards] is good for the complexion.” Yeesh.
• The final moments of “The City” include the hard sell, where we are told that the choice between our current, awful state of city living and a new, superior life in the country is ours. Unfortunately, history showed that this choice would be made for us by international factions, and the answer was “None of the above”.
• If anyone needs me, I’ll be checking out the smoking robot at the Westinghouse exhibit.

Legacy

• “The City” played at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and 1940. After the fair, an edited version was released theatrically by MGM under the title “This Is Tomorrow”, followed by a decade of playing various local schools, churches, and film clubs across America.
• Ralph Steiner took a break from filmmaking in the early 1940s but continued his photography career for the rest of his life, returning to filmmaking in the 1960s. Willard Van Dyke continued working in film and television, and in 1965 became the director of the Department of Film at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Coincidentally, both Steiner and Van Dyke died within six months of each other in 1986.
• While the kind of cooperative communities depicted in “The City” never came to fruition on a nation-wide scale, this film did predict the unrelated suburban boom of the late 1940s/early 1950s, when WWII veterans got great deals on home ownership thanks to the G.I. Bill.
• Greenbelt, Maryland still exists and has expanded beyond its original scope with a current population of about 24,000. The original 1937 section of town is now known as the Greenbelt Historic District and was named a historic landmark in 1997. Thankfully, modern Greenbelt is much more diverse than it was in the 1930s; according to the 2020 census, roughly 80% of Greenbelt’s population identify as an ethnicity or race other than White.

#746) With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain (1938)

Directed by Herbert Kline and Henri Cartier-Bresson

Class of 2017

Other notes

• The XV International Brigade was one of many organized to fight for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, uniquely consisting primarily of English-speaking volunteers from America, England, and Canada. One dominantly American battalion within the brigade was the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, and the name went on to become the widely accepted nickname for the entire brigade.
• In addition to the footage shot by Kline and Cartier-Bresson, “With the Abraham Lincoln…” includes newsreel footage shot by Jacques Lemare and Robert Capa, the latter also serving as the production’s still photographer.
• For those of you with no interest in wartime propaganda, please accept footage of the soldiers using shower equipment supplied by the French Steel Workers Union, complete with rear nudity!
• I appreciate that this movie identifies many of the soldiers featured on screen, typically flashing their name, city, and occupation on a corresponding intertitle. Points deducted, however, for not identifying the one Asian soldier in this whole movie. Come on, you gave him a close-up!
• Among those who visit the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in this film is Congressman John T. Bernard, one of only a handful of US House Representatives to vote against the various Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the 1930s to stay out of any European conflicts (acts that this movie deems “shameful”). Note to Congressman Bernard: If you’re going to support anti-fascist movements, lose the Hitler mustache.
• Despite being a film commissioned by the American Medical Bureau, the AMB only gets one shout-out about halfway through the movie for the ambulances they provided to our overseas soldiers. I don’t know how much input the AMB had on this film, but they did not get enough bang for their buck.
• One sequence that often gets singled out in articles and essays about the film is when our wounded soldiers gather to watch a local game of soccer (Er…football). It’s a nice bit of levity after all this uber-patriotism and shots of war.
• Of the soldier idents, my favorite is Maurice Nickenburg from Brooklyn, described as being “active in the theater”. Is it just me or does that sound like a euphemism?
• A special section towards the end celebrates Robert Raven, a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade who lost his sight during a battle. His name receives the boldest text possible, and he is hailed as “[o]ne of the greatest American heroes of modern times”.
• “With the Abraham Lincoln…” concludes with the hard sell urging viewers to donate to the cause, stating that $125 can bring one wounded American soldier home. That’s about $2700 in today’s money; a tall order for a nation that was still recovering from the Great Depression. In my research I couldn’t find a single write-up confirming if this film helped raise money or not.

Legacy

• The good news: the Spanish Civil War ended in April 1939. The bad news: the Nationalists won, with their fascist reign lasting through the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in 1975. Shortly after Franco’s death, Spain transitioned to a constitutional monarchy, which gave their king (Juan Carlos I) less authority than he had prior to the Spanish Civil War. Spain continues to have a constitutional monarchy, and as of this writing, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
• The Abraham Lincoln Brigade went by several names during its short tenure, owing to its conflation with other brigades as they faced growing casualties. The last known surviving member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was Delmer Berg, who also served in the US Army during WWII, and died in 2016 at age 100.
• Both Herbert Kline and Henri Cartier-Bresson continued making films along the lines of “With the Abraham Lincoln…”; documentary shorts and features that supported anti-fascism and/or highlighted underrepresented cultures. Kline died in 1999 at 89 years old, Cartier-Bresson in 2004 at 95.
• “With the Abraham Lincoln…” was not released theatrically in the traditional sense, but rather 16 mm prints were screened in union halls and other meeting spots for pro-Republic groups in America. The film fell into obscurity in the ensuing decades (even the filmmakers forgot they had made it) and was considered lost until one of these 16 mm prints was discovered at the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade office in 2010 by film scholar Juan Salas.

Other notes

• As always, there’s an official playlist for the Class of 2025, courtesy of DIMA, the Digital Media Association.  Available wherever you listen to government curated playlists.
• This is an okay roster of inductees. While there are no recordings I feel are undeserving of recognition, there are also none that I feel were long overdue either. To be fair, none of these are personal favorites of mine, so I don’t have any big emotional attachment to any of these recordings. As far as cultural significance, most of the albums are on here to represent the artists, not necessarily the songs. That being said, it’s nice seeing the likes of Helen Reddy, Tracy Chapman, and Amy Winehouse making the cut.
• According to the NRR press release, “Chicago Transit Authority” received the most nominations from the public for this year’s roster, with “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “My Life” also ranking high among the 2600 nominated recordings. Even more reason to keep submitting your nominations: Your voice matters!
• By my count, 11 of this year’s inductees hail in part or in full from the 1970s, easily making that the most represented decade in this class (second place is the 1990s with four). There’s nothing wrong with having this much ‘70s culture on one list, but doesn’t that seem a bit lopsided? On a related note: the NRR’s write-up on Charley Pride mentions his country music success occurring “[l]ong before Beyonce and others broke the presumed color line of country music”. We get it NRR; Charley Pride’s on here because of “Cowboy Carter”.
• Among the artists this year who are also represented on the National Film Registry are Roy Rogers, Don Rickles, Elton John, and Celine Dion. I’m sure there’s more, especially among the talented creatives that worked behind the scenes of these recordings, but like I said, I had a long day at work so I’m not up to doing my usual amount of research.
• Yes, you read that correctly: There is a collection of folk songs from Virginia singer and activist Nimrod Workman. As best I can tell, that is his real name. Fun Fact: The name Nimrod comes from the Bible, and didn’t catch on as an insult until around the time Mr. Workman was an adult.
• Yes, you read that correctly, too: the Microsoft Windows Reboot Chime is on a list of important American recordings. I don’t know who lobbied for that one, but I salute you. The Windows Chime is to the NRR what “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” is to the NFR: the pick that seems like a random non-entity at first but ultimately expands the definition of a what should be on the Registry.
• Today on “Dear God I’m Old”: music from “Minecraft” and “Hamilton” have been preserved by the Library of Congress. “Hamilton” is just barely hitting its decade mark for eligibility, but I’ll allow it because that show really was a big deal at the time. Take that, “Rent”!
• And finally, a shoutout to Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress. I don’t talk about Carla a lot on this blog, but she is ultimately the one person deciding which films I am devoting my posts to, and the recordings I briefly touch on once a year. As much as I feel the U.S. government deserves to be criticized for some of its most recent decisions, I can’t turn my back on a subsection that has devoted literal centuries to preserving our art and culture. Please send your good thoughts to Carla and all other government employees who are out there helping champion the diverse voices and viewpoints that truly make America great.

Happy Listening,

Tony