Foregrounding Public Cinema and Rural Audiences: The USDA Motion Picture Service as Cinematic Modernism, 1908–38

Abstract

There are multiple “modernities” in the context of early cinema in the United States. While there has been a great deal of scholarship on the “modern” commercial film culture of early-twentieth-century urban America, historians have paid less attention to patterns of rural audiences from that period who viewed many noncommercial films by U.S. federal agencies, especially the Department of Agriculture. This article draws on Marx and Engels' German Ideology, which argues that “the rural” and “the urban” are to be understood dialectically, to posit that one way to grasp “modernity” is through an examination of the USDA film agency.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.