This is the third great leftist synthesis from the eve of a world revolution that never came. The German Kuhle Wampe and the French La Vie est à nous (both of them also blending documentary and fiction elements) preceded this American masterpiece. Native Land was likewise a sum of national elements: the synthesis of Frontier Films that housed artists like Herbert Kline, John Howard Lawson and Ben Maddow (two great future scenarists), Jay Leyda and Lewis Jacobs (two noted film historians), and future directors Irving Lerner, Elia Kazan and Sidney Meyers. Plus the working team of Paul Strand (one of the great photographers of the time) and Leo Hurwitz.

The premiere of Native Land had the worst timing possible: only months after US had entered WWII. When Native Land opened in 1942, it became a tough curiosity: a relentless film about class struggle at a time when official policy required seamless national unity. Just how frail and fictitious this unity really was is aptly shown by Hurwitz’ later Strange Victory. We can easily suppose that just two years earlier Native Land could have become a watershed moment in the cinema, even in the eyes of the general public, along with the almost contemporary Citizen Kane. Native Land was an adventure: fiction inside documentary and the other way around, a mastery of the short story form inside an epic tale, small moments in which the physiognomy of the human face is engraved in History. And they were right in the middle of the history. Thinking of Hurwitz’ and Strand’s careers, we could perhaps steal one of D.W. Grif th’s film titles with a small change: Heart of the World.

It’s an episodic film, combining racism, class struggle and the gangster practices of trade unions, “Lehrstücke” about American capitalism, and the brutal everyday elements of racism, fascism, anti-labor gangsterism and the Ku Klux Klan behind its prettified facade. This could easily be a didactic film, a theoretical exercise, but it isn’t. There is a wonderful balance between drama told in a string of well-rounded and savage short stories (mostly re-enactments of events that really took place during the harsh labor realities of the 1930s); precise and sometimes eloquent words; and perhaps above all the sheer beauty of images. In fact, the most shocking element of the film might be Strand’s images of New England, documenting the mighty beauty of nature, the rivers of history, and the tensions of social struggle as an organic, human part of all this. It is a deeply felt patriotic film — as an anonymous writer wrote in Time in 1942, “as vitally American as Carl Sandburg”.

There are no stars except one: the voice of Paul Robeson, the great bass singer, a powerful force in class struggle. The unique echo of Robeson’s interpretation contributes the basic tone for what must be one of the nest soundtracks in film (which gives us a chance to add one glorious name from the credits: the composer Marc Blitzstein, one of Orson Welles’ closest associates).
Peter von Bagh