Highroads and skyroads: mountain roadbuilding in U.S. government films of the 1920s and ‘30s

ABSTRACT

In the 1920s and ‘30s, the U.S. federal government produced many educational films about national parks and national forests. These films were widely shown in nontheatrical venues such as schools, as well as in commercial movie theaters as shorts before the main feature film. Neglected for decades, these films are of interest now, in the age of global warming, for the way they represent ideas about nature and conservation from a century ago. Significantly, as much as these films depict natural scenery, they also focus on cars, roads, and roadbuilding. This essay focuses on three government films depicting mountains in the interwar years, the first era of roadbuilding in the national parks and forests. These films reveal the state’s role in promoting fossil capitalism and settler colonialism, constructing what was then a new and contradictory idea of ‘wilderness’ in modernity.

KEYWORDS:

• Government films
• national parks
• national forests
• infrastructure
• petrocinema
• wilderness

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the audience at ‘Mediating Mountains’, the 46^th International Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies held at the University of Innsbruck, where I delivered an early version of this piece in November 2019. Thanks in particular to Christian Quendler and Cornelia Klecker.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Sunrise has, of course, been the subject of a great deal of scholarly writing. An extended analysis of the film’s use of landscape can be found in Latsis (2015); see also Keating (2019, 72–74).

2. In contrast to Rentschler, Nicholas Baer argues that the Bergfilm foregrounds some of the ways in which history and nature ‘were being jointly renegotiated during the interwar period’ (2017, 297).

3. The trolley car itself was German and featured German writing on the exterior (not visible in the film), as pictured in Latsis, Figure A247, 387.

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Notes on contributors

Jennifer Lynn Peterson

Jennifer Lynn Peterson is Professor and Chair of the Media Studies program at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. She is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). Her essays have been published in Representations, JCMS, Feminist Media Histories, Camera Obscura, Moving Image, and numerous edited volumes. She is currently writing a book on American film history and the environment from the 1920s-1950s.