If there is a model Marshall Plan film, then Village Without Words could well be it. Kurland’s film surprisingly takes on the form of a hymn, a celebration of the aid program and the economic boom. Many of the methods and techniques which ERP propaganda so likes to use are not used in Village Without Words. Instead, the film completely breaks away from documentary style. Its pictures are built in such a way that each shot forms a part of the whole. Kurland does without characterization within the story, and there are no identifiable individual figures. He doesn’t focus on concrete projects, which it would be possible to document cinematically, or on decent stories which could set an example, and which could be re-told in the film accordingly. Rather, he aims to create a film which can then act as a symbol – not for this or that project, but rather for the whole idea of the Marshall Plan.

Village Without Words is a true success story. All the scenery which appears in so many Marshall Plan films, in order to depict the success of a particular ERP project tied to a particular place, time, or person, is already here. And in its purest form: some sort of factory, workers who could come from anywhere, streets and shop windows of an anonymous town, an unmoving carousel – all this is the film’s raw material.

Rainer Rother