A Gray Zone of Noncompromise: Sponsored Film, the American Film Center, and One Tenth of Our Nation

Abstract

ABSTRACT:During the 1940s, the American Film Center was established to coordinate documentary film production and its distribution in the United States. With one of its first projects, One Tenth of Our Nation (1940), differences developed between the funding agency and filmmaker. This essay introduces the conflicts among socially conscious documentarists, black and white educators, and Northern philanthropists during the making of One Tenth of Our Nation and its revision, As Our Boyhood Is (1943), and examines the struggles for social agency in sponsored film and the tensions between sponsors and filmmakers in the field of nontheatrical film.