Source: Some information on this page may have been sourced as part of the 2023 Wikimedia Australia Partnership Projects grant, with the purpose of improving and expanding the use of Wikidata on our website. Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Read more about this project here.
Documentary about modernist photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976), one of the seminal figures in the history of photography. Strand broke with the romantic pictorialist tradition to create a direct, dynamic photographic aesthetic. He was one of the first American artists to fully understand cubism, translating its vocabulary to the medium of photography. From 1914 onwards, Strand’s groundbreaking work encompassed abstract compositions, candid portraits, extreme close-ups of nature and documentation of social conditions. He was also a filmmaker and in 1921 he made America’s first avant-garde film, “Manhatta”, with painter Charles Sheeler. His growing political commitment, especially during and after the Great Depression, led him to embrace filmmaking as a means of political expression. In 1934 he became involved with a group of radical New York filmmakers, collaborating with Pare Lorentz on “The Plow that broke the plains” in 1936 and with Leo Hurwitz on “Native land”, a visually remarkable indictment of American civil rights abuses in 1941. The documentary contains interviews with Georgia O’Keefe, Milton Brown, Fred Zinnemann, Leo Hurwitz, Virginia Stevens, Hazel Strand, Cesare Zavattini, Blanche Brown and Walter Rosenblum. The titles “Native land” and “The plow that broke the plains” available on VHS.
Content notification
Our collection comprises over 40,000 moving image works, acquired and catalogued between the 1940s and early 2000s. As a result, some items may reflect outdated, offensive and possibly harmful views and opinions. ACMI is working to identify and redress such usages.
Learn more about our collection and our collection policy here. If you come across harmful content on our website that you would like to report, let us know.
How to watch
Collection
In ACMI's collection
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
317928
Language
English
Subject categories
Advertising, Film, Journalism, Mass Media & TV → Motion pictures - History
Crafts & Visual Arts → Documentary photography
Crafts & Visual Arts → Modernism (Art)
Crafts & Visual Arts → Photographers
Crafts & Visual Arts → Photographers - Biography
Crafts & Visual Arts → Photographers - United States
Crafts & Visual Arts → Photography
Crafts & Visual Arts → Photography - History
Crafts & Visual Arts → Photography - Social aspects
Crafts & Visual Arts → Photography - Themes, motives
Crafts & Visual Arts → Photography, Artistic
Documentary → Documentary films - Canada
Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Religion & Sociology → Photography - Social aspects
Feature films → Feature films - Canada
Sound/audio
Sound
Colour
Black and White and Colour
Holdings
VHS; Access Print (Section 1)