'Backed by billions of dollars, by the resources of the biggest corporations, this conspiracy entangled the whole United States but it was kept secret till the Senate Committee turned on the light.' 'Spies. The Senate Committee revealed the spies of a secret war, all over the country, planted in every local, forty-one thousand labor spies, an eighty million dollar payroll.' 'The Senate revealed the existence of private armies, armies of criminals, organised for a secret war in every state of the Union, armed vigilantes, strike-breakers, company police, paid by private corporations.' 'Private arsenals. The Senate revealed private arsenals of tear gas, shotguns, machine guns, for a war against Americans. Millions of rounds of ammunition. Millions of dollars spent in secret.' 'And a system of nationwide propaganda used to attack progressive legislation. Newspapers, lobbyists, the radio, full-page advertisements, extending across the whole country.' 'Propaganda, arsenals, private armies, spies. The Senate exposed the secret connections, the interlocking parts of an immense conspiracy, directed by a handful of fascist-minded corporations.' 'Here was a criminal conspiracy to undermine the Bill of Rights, to weaken the strength of Americans, exposed, exposed to the light of day.' Add Comment The map-as-jigsaw opens and closes Avalon Daggett's documentary on the Navajos in Arizona and New Mexico, accompanied by this commentary: 'America, a jigsaw puzzle of checkered colors and scenes, denoting many things in many places. (…) This golden country of canyons and of sand, one colorful segment of the jigsaw that is America today.' (You can watch the complete film here.) In Herds West (which you can watch here), her film on the movement of cattle along a 'production line', Daggett uses a cinemap as illustration: (The brochure above is from the Iowa Digital Library, Universities of Iowa.)
From the sample of titles I have been able to find it is clear that she understood her educational brief to cover very varied aspects of 'America the Beautiful': Louisiana Gayride (1949), Indian Pow-Wow (1951), Villages in the Sky (1952), Tribe of the Turquoise Waters (1952), Peaceful Ones (1952), Smoki Snake Dance (1952), Warriors at Peace (1952), Mississippi Magic (1954), Tournament of Roses Parade (1954), Arizona Adventure (1954), Weavers of the West (1954), Father of the Southwest (1957), Copper, Steward of the Nation (1959), Marshes of the Mississippi (1961), A Way of Life (1961), Rice, America’s Food For the World (1962), Signs, Signals and Safety (1966), School Bus Driver VIP (1967), Swamp Expressway (1972) Another article in the Prescott Evening Courier gives interesting detail about the camera Daggett used, and about the relation of her work to television: She died in 2002, leaving a bequest to fund three professorships at Louisiana State University, the 'F. Avalon Daggett Professorships in Rice Research', a callback perhaps to her 1962 film Rice, America’s Food For the World. A brief glimpse of the West Coast on a map is an irrelevance in this New York-set film. The real map moments are in Melvin's world travel dance number: This number includes a crime-investigation digression, featuring a different globe: There are two sets of maps, neither of which has the strong connection to plot that the principal maps had in Chinatown (of which The Two Jakes is a sequel). This first view of a map neatly positions it in a receding sequence from comic strip to portrait of Roosevelt. In this public display and explanation of maps, we see them from a variety of angles and distances: By contrast, there are two moments of covert or unsanctioned map-reading, where we are not shown the maps: (See also the BlowUp moment on Chinatown, here.) |