Jem Haady
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I am looking for information about these producers of the 1940, GM film "To New Horizons," essentially a film version of the "Futurama" exhibit at 1939 World's Fair. Have googled to no avail. Anyone know of other resources? Many thanks. IP
Insel, this site has come up twice in my search; unfortunately, to me it is just a jumble of meaningless symbols. Perhaps you'll have better luck with it:
http://tomleboss.free.fr/snes/Som.htmlOOH! Just had a thought: PM paulb. Bet HE knows!
Thanks, Jackie, for your confidence; unfortunately I don't know this film which probably didn't circulate in Australia.
The Jam Handy Organisation was a prolific maker of 'industrial' documentaries in the middle years of the last century.
The major film connected with the 1939 World's Fair was 'The City', a famous 44-minute documentary produced for the Fair, directed and photographed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, with music by Aaron Copland and a commentary by Lewis Mumford.
"traces the historic stages in the growth of cities in the U.S. ending in a prescription for the future by the group of city planners who sponsored the film. The filmmakers make imaginative use of a range of techniques from montage to candid camera and bring a sense of poetic rhythm to the depiction of life in Manhattan."
I don't know whether it has surfaced on DVD yet.
Thanks, all.
The Prelinger site is actually where I found the film. They have something like 45,000 interesting, and not so interesting, films in the public domain. 1,900 or so are available free of charge through the internetarchive.org.
The designer of the Futurama model, Norman Bel Geddes is a facinating character in his own right. I was wondering if the production company was affiliated with him, with GM, or what other films they might have produced -- just as a possible lead to...?
Actually, I was going to correct my first post, since I found another production company called "Jam Handy," which produced an industrial about the ubiquity and utility of springs. But it seems I read the titles in "To New Horizons" correctly the first time.
As something of an aside, I wonder what direct influence, if any, Robert Moses had on the projected highway designs. Most of footage of real modern highways seems to be of his Parkways and of the George Washington Bridge, which joins two of them, although it competed with his Mid-Manhattan Bridge. And the elevated sidewalks were more or less his design for the mid-Manhattan transverse, which was also defeated.
Simplisticly: To New Horizons is interesting for its naivete or disregard of the social contexts that its projections would both give rise to and emerge from and the many problems these would cause.
