NFR Project: 'Kannapolis, N.C.' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘Kannapolis, N.C.”

Dir: H. Lee Waters

Premiere: 1941

137 min.

Between 1936 and 1942, the enterprising director H. Lee Waters made a series of films he called Movies of Local People. He went to at least 117 towns in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia and filmed anyone he could get in front of a camera. Then he developed the results and displayed them at the local theater before the feature film, for a cut of the ticket sales.

It was a gimmick. Presumably, if you were captured for all time on film, you and your family would pay to see yourselves on the local silver screen. Curiosity was the motivator. It was a novelty that pretty much all the small-town, middle-class “representative” citizens could enjoy.

Waters was not a documentary filmmaker. The only examination of the underclass in the films was his documentation of some parts of African-American life in these little places, which are now known as “town portrait” or “town documentary” films. The genre existed from the mid-1910s through the early 1950s, when it is arguable that affordable home-movie equipment took over the market. It’s a weird subset of cinema that simply seeks to get as many people posed or captured on the run, shot with a home-movie level of technical competence.

In color and in black and white, silently, Waters films Kannapolis crowds on the streets, marching bands, schoolchildren, babies, soda jerks, cops, mill workers. “When the Daltons Rode” is on at the local movie theater. A man demonstrates a refrigerator. People smile, people wave, people duck out of the way. Some studiously ignore the goings-on. Hundreds are frozen in time for the brief moments in which they pass by the camera. The editor, impatient, keeps cutting, cutting, cutting, moving without let or hinder on from one face to another, desperately thirsty.

It’s inadvertently valuable for capturing the state of vernacular society at that time and in that place. It’s difficult to estimate how many of these director/entrepreneurs there were. Not much of their output survives. Here’s home movies for the masses, a snapshot of days gone by.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Lady Eve.