Infrastructural Aesthetics, Filmmaking, and Reclamation

The United States Bureau of Reclamation is a federal agency that manages water and irrigation projects in the western contiguous United States.

But beyond its infrastructural projects, the Bureau of Reclamation was also a producer of a certain cultural aesthetic of the American West in the early twentieth century by engaging in vibrant practices of print, photography, and film.

Though the Bureau of Reclamation was involved with a variety of engineering projects, this story will focus on the agency's operation as a bureau of cinema and megadam creation.

91,457 (National Inventory of Dams).

As this data shows, the idea of reclamation, introduced by the Bureau of Reclamation in 1902, became a central practice through which the United States government could continue conquering and transforming the landscapes of the American West by altering nearly every single waterway in the country. Moreover, after World War II, megadam and dam infrastructures became a means of mitigating imagined risks as the United States entered into the postwar period of a paranoid Cold War state.

At the same time that dam-building became a process of risk management in the twentieth century, so too did the creation and dissemination of cinema. In studying films produced through the Bureau of Reclamation alongside its methods of repurposing the lands it deemed wild and wasted (most centrally through damming North American waterways), filmmaking, too, became yet another level of federal reclamation as it harnessed reclaimed landscapes, energies, and populations not just at the physical level, but at the emotional, dramatic, and optic levels as well.

In 2011, environmental theorist Rob Nixon deemed megadam building a "national performance art." Building off of Nixons assessment, I further contend that dam-building and other infrastructures produced through the Bureau of Reclamation are viscerally cinematic objects, signifying that even filmic landscapes and environmental narratives cannot escape the discourses of reclamation, and act as a means pastoral escapism.

Before moving film was widely used or available, still photography and even illustrations were widely utilized and essential to promoting the bureau's ideas and projects.

The early uses of photography and illustration were primarily for practical and educational purposes. But even in these photos, the photographers and artists are paying particular attention to framing, contrast, silhouette, and scale, generating a specific kind of infrastructural landscape photography despite being intended for utilitarian purposes. Moreover, some photography verges into an almost whimsical pastoral genre--in particular, the photo of a cow holding seven children, cheekily captioned with "Her Daily Duty." These examples serve to illustrate how important photographic practices were to the Bureau of Reclamation, as well as provide context to its engagement with moving film and cinematic productions.

The first mention of the Bureau of Reclamation utilizing moving film was in a 1908 publication produced by the bureau called the Monthly Bulletin.

This small segment reads, "In the Photographic Laboratory there were made 800 feet of moving picture films, 1,265 prints, 4 negatives and 32 slides." In 1908, filmic processes and information were important enough to be reported among other reclamation projects in the bureau's monthly publication. Readers may have been interested in this update if they wanted to order any films or had questions about film production practices.

For young men working on reclamation projects, film provided a means of escape and entertainment from hard physical labor. The bureau's monthly magazine, renamed Reclamation Record by 1913, wrote that "a moving picture theater under Government management which pays its own expenses...aids greatly in keeping the men satisfied with camp life." In 1920, this same publication wrote that "no better medium could be desired" than films for educating schoolchildren about the benefits of national reclamation. Moving film was quickly becoming the preferred--and idealized--method of distributing information for the Bureau of Reclamation.

Moving into 1924, the New Reclamation Era (yes, the bureau changed the name of its magazine yet again) reported on production companies utilizing reclamation projects as a film location for their "thrilling" movie. The article takes a tone of pride in informing readers that the motion-picture company hails from Los Angeles, and will be paying the bureau a small sum to shoot scenes at the Black Canyon Dam construction site.

As this article indicates, the 1920s were swiftly becoming a decade of producing silent "Western Melodramas," which consistently utilized dam constructions and breakages as dramatic backdrops behind which romance and comedy would take place. This era signals a shift in the Bureau of Reclamation's approach to film: transitioning from using it purely as an educational tool to appreciating it as an artistic (and money-making) medium.

Then in 1930, the Bureau of Reclamation wrote in New Reclamation Era that another production company was filming an extensive recreation of the Oregon Trail in Yuma Valley, Arizona. This film, The Big Trail, was the first film in which John Wayne played a lead.

The article declares, "Yuma Peculiarly Adapted to Talkies" because of its good weather, expansive landscapes, and its wide variety of rock formations. Furthermore, because Yuma Valley is so far removed from industry and community it is "comparatively free from noise incident," allowing for ease in shooting films because of the lack of noise pollution.

New Reclamation Era casually positions this article in between its other standard features on reclamation projects and updates. The article takes great care to reassure its readers that the film will be sure to generate profit for the local businesses, as well as attract other film companies because of the land's inherent qualities uniquely suited for motion picture creation. In the midst of the Great Depression, this article reads like a glimmer of hope for farmers down on their luck, looking towards cinema as a last resort for making money off the desert's seemingly unprofitable landscapes.

Fusing together the artistic and practical traditions of infrastructural film covered thus far, the Bureau of Reclamation commissioned the director Gunther von Fritsch in 1939 to direct an emotional, yet educational film for the Bonneville Power Administration, an energy agency based in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1937, the BPA was created as a "marketing agency for the world's largest supply of hydroelectric power," as described by the New Reclamation Era. To this end, von Fritsch's thirty-four minute film, Hydro, was intended to advertise the benefits of publicly operated electricity to viewers in order to convince them to support public energy infrastructural projects. Additionally, this film was shown at theaters in New York and Los Angeles not as a government-produced short, but as a piece of dramatic cinema.

However, Hydro received poor reviews from film critics. Daily News wrote that Hydro was "a long repetitious picture that lacked "poetic beauty." Despite this, Hydro was eventually shown internationally in China, Mongolia, and Russia to illustrate the benefits of energy infrastructures to foreign governments . In a sense, the BPA as marketing agency sought to advertise dams not only as producers of energy, but as structures of security, democracy, and national power.

Stephen A. Kahn, the public relations executive of the BPA, was unsatisfied with Hydro's reception, and wanted to make another film that would be a more successful artistic documentary. But his plans were stalled because of World War II, and so his film project would have to wait.

Kahn began thinking about releasing a second BPA film when the devastating Vanport Flood occurred in 1948, completely destroying the city just ten miles from the BPA's headquarters in Portland, Oregon. With heightened fears of natural disaster in the Pacific Northwest due to the unprecedented flood, Kahn capitalized on these feelings and decided to reuse much of the footage from Hydro to create another film which he called The Columbia. By illustrating the benefits of dam-building as public safety measures and national security structures, The Columbia signals how films operate simultaneously to infrastructures as aesthetic objects of managing risk.

Though The Columbia touts the security of dams and dam-building, looking at a map of dams in Washington show that the exact opposite is the case. In fact, the largest dams in Washington, including Grand Coulee Dam, are the most hazardous structures to communities located around the dam.

Not only are the largest dams the most hazardous and at the greatest risk of bursting, but the Grand Coulee Dam was also the central site of plutonium production in World War II, and now millions of tons of nuclear waste from this production persists under the Columbia River.

Though dam-building in the twentieth century portrayed itself as lessening risk in the twentieth century and protecting the nation state, these efforts have only proven to generate more danger in relation to surrounding environmental and human communities and to the safety of the Columbia River's water.

Within this narrative of risk, moving film became another plane through which landscapes could be reclaimed ideologically and fictionally while they became concomitantly reclaimed through physical construction of infrastructure.