6

THE CAMERAMAN HAS VISITED YOUR TOWN

The Local Film and the Politics of Recognition

IN FEBRUARY 2005, LOCAL FILMS shot by H. Lee Waters, a North Carolina–based itinerant filmmaker who was active between 1936 and 1942, were screened once again in Kannapolis, North Carolina, a former mill town located just north of Charlotte. This showing was particularly significant because Waters’s films of Kannapolis had just been named to the National Film Registry, an honor reserved for motion pictures of historical or aesthetic significance. For almost three hours, 16mm preservation prints of reels originally shot in 1936, 1938, and 1941 were projected before a mixed-age crowd at the 960-seat Gem Theater. Many of those in the audience were Kannapolis natives, a city that had experienced a number of recent hardships, most notably the 2003 closing of the clothing manufacturer Cannon Mills, which had built the town nearly a century earlier and once employed most of its inhabitants.¹

For much of the screening there was a familiar murmur in the crowd, with a rotating set of narrators identifying who was on the screen as others in the audience carried on their own conversations about the memories spurred by pictures of their hometown in more prosperous years. But when Corine Cannon, the first African American woman to work a production job at Cannon Mills in 1962, was handed the microphone to narrate the section of the film taken in the African American community, a silence fell over the mostly white crowd. As Cannon described the footage, recalling names and places that were unknown to those at the Gem, it became clear that segregation, both then and now, marked how Waters’s films were received by audiences. Waters advertised his own itinerant film practice, which he called Movies of Local People, in democratic language, asking audiences to “See Yourselves as Others See You,” a turn of phrase that assumes a reflexive, and equal, public. But in practice, this act of recognition, whether of oneself or others, schools or factories, neighborhoods or business districts, was shaped by a social geography of difference that existed in Kannapolis and many other towns visited by itinerant filmmakers in the first half of the twentieth century, and continues to resonate today. Even if some itinerants attempted to impose their idealized, and commercially suitable, view of a community on itself, or encouraged the film’s sponsors to do the same, most local films represented social, racial, and economic differences, providing views that often served at odds with the stated intentions of the filmmaker.

In this chapter, I consider the role recognition played in the production and reception of local films. Rather than speculate more broadly about the encounter between the filmed subject and the movie camera, I am interested here in how assumptions about the form and function of the local film are built into the mode’s aesthetic and social operations. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the oeuvre of H. Lee Waters, whose work is uniquely situated for this kind of analysis.² First, the vast majority of Waters’s films are extant, making it possible to consider his representational strategies across different geographic locations and time periods. Second, Waters shot in a non-narrative, nonfiction style that allowed him to develop his own approach to filming local communities. Third, Waters made repeat visits to most of the communities he filmed, which meant that over time, he became familiar with the nuances of particular places. He filmed 118 communities in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee, almost all of which were small towns. Many of these towns were, or were bordered by, mill villages, so-called because their economic, social, and political life revolved around a mill or factory. In most cases, the factory owners, in some cases a single individual, financed the construction of the villages as well, and workers lived in company-owned housing, shopped in company stores, and relied on their employer for municipal services. While, of course, no town is alike, the geographic limitations Waters placed on his work makes it possible to consider the relationship between his ordinary, and iterative, strategies of representation and his efforts to convince audiences that they were seeing something different from what they saw in Hollywood films, namely themselves.

In contrast to representation, recognition has been an undertheorized phenomenon in film studies, perhaps because the experience of seeing oneself in the movies was assumed to be more unusual than was actually the case. Even though Walter Benjamin notes that “any man today can lay claim to being filmed” in his classic essay on art in the age of mechanical reproducibility, his brief analysis on the subject considers being in the movies as a form of aspirational labor, rather than a social experience. For Benjamin, seeing oneself on screen is an experience that produces a false sense of accomplishment, like a writer who considers herself an author after the publication of a letter to the editor.³ Psychoanalytic theory assumes that recognition is an act of misrecognition, in which the subject identifies with the characters on screen, thus suturing the gap between the individual viewer and the universal subject position. These approaches to the question of recognition assume a priori that recognition of the self does not take place in the cinema, making these theories of limited value when applied to the local film. Instead, I turn to the work by social and political theorists, including Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, and particularly Paul Ricouer, on the philosophical and political valences associated with the act of recognition. Although the contemporary version of these debates was inaugurated in the early 1990s, with Taylor’s 1994 essay on “The Politics of Recognition” focusing on the tensions between multiculturalism and late capitalism, the term “recognition” has since been adapted by a number of disciplines, including film studies, to describe the struggle for minority groups to gain political, civil, and social rights through visual media.⁴ As Paula Rabinowitz has argued about documentary film, its purpose is “to remand, if not actively remake, the subject into a historical agent,” and thus is a form of politics “overlaid with a gloss of objectivity.”⁵ Although local films were rarely so pointed in their critique, I argue that Waters’s Movies of Local People actively challenged stable notions of self and other by depicting all people as equals before the camera. In this way, Movies of Local People can be seen as an effort to produce a community capable of recognizing itself not as it sees itself but as others, including minority groups, see it. After all, what is most interesting about the 2005 screening of the Kannapolis films is not that members of the audience could recognize their community but that they could also fail to recognize many of its members.

TO SEE YOURSELF AS OTHERS SEE YOU: RECOGNITION AND THE MEDIATED SUBJECT

Although I have argued in previous chapters for the specificity of local film practices in particular historical moments and contexts, the assumed pleasure of recognizing oneself on the screen appears to transcend geographic boundaries and historical time periods. For example, a sign produced by the British itinerants Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon in 1907 advised audiences to “See Yourself as Other People See You,” a phrase used by many itinerants over the next half century, including Waters.⁶ The call was likely a reworking of a line from the well-known Robert Burns 1785 poem “To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church,” deployed for an age in which self-awareness comes at the hands of a camera rather than an insect.⁷ While Mitchell and Kenyon’s advertisement can be read as a plain statement for a show in which what is on the screen is nothing more than local views, it is the very call to an individual viewer—“see yourself”—that underscores the local film’s peculiar alchemy of display and perception.

Figure 6.1. H. Lee Waters with camera. Courtesy of Davidson County Historical Museum, Lexington, N.C.

But the local film is not a mirror, a point that is emphasized by the second half of the phrase, “as other people see you.” Instead of the chain of looks that aligns the classical cinema spectator with the ideologies of movie characters, local films assume a socialized and embodied viewer, one who is already familiar with the other people on screen, who may in fact be in the very same audience with those people, who are also viewing themselves. When Stephen Bottomore defines the local film as a motion picture in which there is a “significant overlap” between the members of the audience in the theater and those individuals pictured on screen, he is calling attention to the fact that the mode relies on a particular form of recognition in which seeing oneself, seeing others, and seeing oneself as if one was seen by others are bound together in a mediated form.⁸

This question of recognition has been addressed most substantially by scholars who have researched local films made during the first two decades of cinema. As Mary Ann Doane observes of early cinema more generally, such films are suffused with what she calls the contingent, “that which is beyond or resistant to meaning.” She observes that cinema has the capacity to “perfectly represent” the contingent, but this attribute has long been suppressed by classical cinema, which places the mechanical recording of reality in service of fictionalized narratives.⁹ Recognition, in this context, might be seen as the act of recovering elements of what was thought to be contingent within the film frame, identifying and signifying people, places, and objects that go undescribed by the title cards that take the place of narrative cues in early cinema.

In fact, local views, even more so than companion genres, such as nonlocal “actualities,” assume that their purpose is to produce moments of recognition that are illegible to a film’s producer and exhibitor. When we look back at these films, we correctly place the emphasis on their localness, but in so doing miss the very specific appeals these films had for audiences. As Doane notes of the early moving images made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, the wealth of information offered within these films includes “the different types of clothing of various workers, the use of bicycles, the direction of gazes,” but this material is ignored because of these films’ status as the first projected moving images.¹⁰ Local films offer similar information, but their depiction of what might be thought of as pure contingency effaces their value as texts. The Lumière films, Doane suggests, function as both a “record and performance” of what they depict, implying the presence of both archival and spectacular impulses.¹¹ Even after these archival and spectacular impulses began to separate from the conventions of mainstream classical cinema, local films retained this dual functionality. They were events when they were first exhibited and historical artifacts the day after.

Local films foreground the problem of the contingent precisely because their definition rests on a temporally and spatially situated encounter between an audience and a film that in most cases is preceded by an equally complex encounter between an individual and a motion picture camera.¹² For the local film, the threat of contingency is quelled by the act of recognition, but as soon as the last reel runs through the projector, the contingent looms again, as the audience that gives the film meaning quickly dissipates. The German film scholar Uli Jung makes a similar observation when he describes two films made in Cologne, Germany, the first produced by Lumière in 1896 for sale to audiences worldwide, and the second shot by Peter Marzen, a theater operator in Trier, Germany, in 1904. Jung argues that the two films are “generic” and “typical” of the period as they both “depict large masses of individuals moving about, . . . use major Catholic churches as backdrops, and . . . utilize the end of high mass to make sure a large number of people will fill the space in front of the camera.” Jung argues that the popularity of scenics in the early cinema period (1895–1907) makes it difficult to tell local films apart from motion pictures made for global audiences without additional contextual evidence, creating what he calls a “blind spot in film historiography,” referring, evidently, to a historiography that is built on analysis of extant prints.¹³ To press Jung’s point from another direction, one could argue that almost any motion picture is a local film at some moment—from Lumière’s workers viewing their own exit from the company factory to an actor watching the daily rushes of a Hollywood feature. The presence of the contingent alone, and its temporary disappearance, which occurs when a viewer recognizes all that is contained within the frame, is not sufficient to mark a film as local.

Jung argues that it is within histories of exhibition that local films become more discernable, if not always discrete, objects. While I agree with this turn to exhibition, I also find within the films themselves looks of recognition, the very quality many itinerants, particularly Mitchell and Kenyon, emphasized. In Vanessa Toulmin’s extensive research on this collection, which consists of several hundred reels produced between 1899 and 1913, she has uncovered an astonishing amount of contextual information about the celebrations, sporting events, modes of transportation, and spaces of work and leisure that are visible in these films.¹⁴ And yet, Toulmin notes that Mitchell and Kenyon themselves saw their local movies as “a simple marketing venture to film as many faces as possible, thus providing a ready made paying audience, desiring to see themselves reproduced on screen.”¹⁵ In a coauthored essay, Toulmin and Martin Loiperdinger argue that the twin pleasures of self-recognition—seeing oneself and seeing oneself with the awareness that others are watching—were present in theatrical settings before cinema, with the reflective “Looking Glass Curtain” debuting at the Royal Coburg Theatre in London in 1821, and quickly crossed over to both photography and cinema. As Toulmin and Loiperdinger note, “Audiences attending the projection of local films were clearly aware that they were both the subject and object of the show.”¹⁶ As they observe, the local film is a “simple” motion picture genre, one whose appeal is, to borrow a phrase from David Bordwell, “excessively obvious.”¹⁷

Although Toulmin and Loiperdinger, writing in 2005, were aware of just a handful of itinerant producers of local films, they correctly assumed that itinerant filmmakers, unfamiliar with the intricate cultures of the communities they visited, resorted to using a shooting script of sorts—factory gates, downtown business districts, schools, churches—in order to find the crowds of people they needed to fill their theaters. But the central appeal built into local films—self-recognition—also initiates a complex mode of moving image production, one negotiated by the filmmaker, the sponsor, the filmed subject, and the social group in which the subject is located. When seen in this light, true contingency is not the things that can be seen but remain unidentified in the frame, but rather the complex social formations that are reduced to a series of personal and group shots of people made by an outsider with remuneration in mind. It is the recognition of the self as seen by others that gives local films their currency as a distinct mode of moving image production and exhibition.

THE LOOK AWAY: TOWARD A THEORY OF MEDIATED MUTUAL RECOGNITION

In his inquiry into what he calls the “course of recognition,” Paul Ricouer considers how recognition has been an essential, yet neglected, component of the Western philosophical tradition. Bringing together phenomenological and ethical approaches to the subject, Ricouer is primarily interested in the “transfer from the positive act of recognition to the demand to be recognized” that marks much of the contemporary discussion about the subject.¹⁸ Just as Burns’s poem noted that by recognizing another’s foibles—seeing a louse on an upper-class woman’s bonnet—one also has the opportunity to reflect on their own, the act of recognition generates awareness of social difference and, with it, empathy. Although local films were not intended to generate such thoughts, I argue that Waters’s films of mutual recognition privileged such experiences.

As Ricouer reminds us, recognition has a long history in Western philosophy. For example, Immanuel Kant emphasized the role judgment plays in our ability to synthesize objects and their appearances with our prior knowledge about them. Building on Kant’s theory of judgment and perception, Ricouer argues that change, particularly changes in time, “give rise to operations of recognition,” which then push up against their limits, misrecognition and nonrecognition.¹⁹ When we see an object, we register certain perceptions of it so that when we see it again, we are able to recognize it as the same object. But if we do not recognize an object, our failings are of little consequence, as a Kantian perspective assumes that time itself is objective, giving the object a priori definition.

But mis- and nonrecognition of people and certain familiar objects have very different implications, Ricouer suggests, as they bring about a recognition that what we perceive is governed by changes within ourselves, rather than the exterior world. In other words, when we fail to recognize someone or something that we have encountered before, we look within ourselves to discover the cause of this misrecognition. As Ricouer observes, this process of self-recognition draws on a dialectical relationship between “sameness and ipseity,” the former being an “immutable identity” that does not change with time, the latter referring to the self, which develops ethically over time. The tensions in this dialectic are heightened in two acts, Ricouer argues, memory and promises. While both cases are “moments of actualization” in which the self becomes recognizable, the latter relies on an assertion of sameness—I remember myself in the past—while the other asserts ipseity—in the future, I will commit to this action.²⁰ Although these two capacities push against different aspects of the self, when paired together they make visible the stakes for self-recognition. If one fails to recognize the past, one has forgotten an essential aspect of oneself, and if one does not make good on a promise, one is committing a betrayal of the self. Self-recognition, then, is the act of identifying oneself as an ethical being who has constancy in a changing world.

This act of self-recognition takes on new dimensions, Ricouer claims, when one considers the relationship between “individual forms of human capacities and their social forms,” the latter of which initiate what he calls “mutual recognition,” quite simply, the awareness the self-recognition is dependent on the awareness, and presence, of others. Drawing on the work of Bernard Lepetit, who was associated with the Annales school of French historiography, Ricouer suggests that collective representations shape social practice by acting as “symbolic mediations contributing to the instituting of the social bond,” which in turn makes mutual recognition possible.²¹ As William H. Sewell, Jr., notes, this cultural turn in French historiography inverts the economic and sociological determinism of earlier Annales scholarship and instead asserts the historical importance of the “formation, mutation, and disappearance” of the social order that is produced by individuals within a society and often reflected culturally.²² In other words, societies create the conditions for mutual recognition to occur through the production of social and cultural formations, from the newspapers and broadsides that, according to Jürgen Habermas, constitute the “public sphere” of the eighteenth century to the rise of the novel in the nineteenth.²³ By emphasizing the sociality of recognition, Ricouer links these earlier discussions of the subject with more recent debates on the privileges associated with, and demanded for, particular identities, including those of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

While aesthetic and analytic philosophers have associated recognition with problems of identification and perception, Paul Ricouer notes that political and economic philosophers have instead focused on the struggle for participation in the civic sphere. In this context, the threat of misrecognition is outweighed by what he calls a “refusal of recognition” by others who do not see themselves as belonging to the same social and political order. Drawing on Axel Honneth’s work, Ricouer observes that “recognition intends two things: the other person and the norm,” which offers an approach to this problem that is at once specific—one either recognizes another person or does not—and extensive, as a “norm” can be delimited in any number of ways. As a result, Ricouer argues that struggles for recognition have largely taken place on two planes: one that proposes “an enumeration of personal rights defined by their content” and one that allows for the “attribution of these rights to new categories of individuals or groups.”²⁴ While the first category of rights belong to a familiar framework—borrowing from T. H. Marshall’s division of rights into civil, legal, and social classes—the second category challenges longstanding divisions between and within societies.²⁵ As Ricouer comments, the politics of recognition has largely played out as a conflict between those who advocate for rights specified in the first plane, such as the redistribution of wealth, and those who advocate for rights specified in the second plane, such as legal protections for minority groups.

Without choosing a side in this longstanding argument, Ricouer expresses concern that the debate might be interminable and proposes that we instead look toward “peaceful experiences of mutual recognition, based on symbolic mediations as exempt from the juridical as from the commercial order of exchange.” Recalling the anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s work on the gift, Ricouer argues for the value of gratitude, as it “lightens the weight of obligation to give in return.”²⁶ By seeing recognition as a kind of social esteem, one in which mutuality, not struggle, is central, Ricouer allows for a definition of social recognition that is dependent on mediation.²⁷ This argument echoes that of the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, who imagines the common good as a “‘vanishing point,’ something to which we must constantly refer when we are acting as citizens, but that can never be reached,” or, crucially, defined.²⁸ But, unlike Mouffe, Ricouer emphasizes the role self-recognition plays in the mutual recognition he calls for. As he closes his book, he argues that “reception” is the “pivotal term between giving and giving in return.”²⁹ In other words, it is the act of seeing oneself as others might see you that gives recognition its political, social, and ethical potency.

FROM SEEING YOURSELF AS OTHERS SEE YOU TO SEEING YOURSELF IN THE MOVIES

In previous chapters I have suggested that the local view was augmented, and quickly replaced, by local films that sought to do more than just allow people to see themselves in the movies. Here, I suggest that what I call “films of mutual recognition” deployed the techniques of perception and display used in local views for an era in which the cinema was associated with sociality and commercialism, which in the United States was often subsumed under the Hollywood sign. Film historians have long argued that the medium has a unique capacity to reflect society, including individuals and groups at the margins who are not represented in other spheres of public life, particularly politics and business.³⁰ Although local views possessed this reflective quality in early cinema, the possibilities for mutual recognition were limited, as neither the local film nor the cinema was durable enough to sustain social critique. City booster films purposefully excluded many people from appearing in the pictures, and home talent and Hollywood local movies also sought to control how townspeople were depicted. But the 16mm itinerant filmmakers of the 1930s embraced an expansive and inclusive recognition as a core principle and developed business models that relied on the appeal self-recognition had for many in the communities they visited. Broader trends in visual culture, such as the increased use of documentary photography in popular magazines, gave credence to candid, unadorned images that were intended to tell a larger story. As a result, the local films of the 1930s came to serve as a social imaginary, a site where individuals could reflect on how they presented themselves to their communities and how others might perceive them.

This transition from the local view to the film of mutual recognition can be observed by considering the intersection between two phrases, both of which were used by Waters and others to promote their practice. The first was the aforementioned “See Yourself as Others See You”; the second was “See Yourself in the Movies.” I have already discussed some of the implications of the first phrase for how these films constructed the experience of recognition. In what follows, I extend this analysis, and compare it with the sets of promises made by its companion phrase, “See Yourself in the Movies.” When paired together, these phrases imply a theory of mutual recognition that underlines how local films both reflected and recreated communities.

As I have already suggested, the first phase, “See Yourself as Others See You,” likely originated in a Burns poem from the late eighteenth century, a historical moment now associated with the French and American Revolutions, both of which sought to place individual rights—as opposed to the state—at the center of political and social systems. One can read the phrase, particularly in the context of the Burns poem, as implying a certain kind of shame that comes from an awareness of the political, social, and economic systems in which we participate. In this way, the phrase can be thought as a form of calling, asking the subject to participate as a member in a community that is already defined by others. This is a peculiar form of recognition, as one is asked to see oneself as a certain kind of actor—a citizen, perhaps, or maybe just someone who functions primarily in a certain social or economic role, such as a schoolchild, a mill worker, or a housewife.

This phrase is further complicated when the person who is seen is ordinarily invisible, often not by choice. As Ricouer notes, much of the “politics” in the politics of recognition comes out of a desire by members of excluded minority groups to seek rights granted to those who are in the majority group. In other words, seeking recognition is also a search for the rights and privileges granted to those who are recognized. At the same time, because one’s quest for recognition may be denied or even punished, such a push for visibility carries with it considerable risk. For example, members of a minority group who are seeking rights granted to the majority might find, as a result of their push for recognition, that they are instead made targets for retaliation. As the Martinique writer Édouard Glissant has argued, the right not to be seen, which he calls “opacity,” might be just as critical as recognition itself.³¹ By remaining in the shadows, one can retain a certain degree of independence from a society that refuses to recognize its members in the manner they prefer. From this perspective, the call to see yourself is a threat, rather than an opportunity.

But this view of recognition is tempered by Waters’s other clarion call—“see yourself in the movies”—which locates his practice in a particular medium, the cinema, and an historical moment, the mid-1930s, in which the “movies” is understood to be indistinguishable from Hollywood. The “see yourself” here is a less complicated one, more akin to earlier ideas of recognition as simply a form of identification. The viewer that is implied here is expected to see him- or herself, and those people, places, and objects that are an extension of one’s identity—“that’s me,” “that’s my school,” “that’s my workplace,” “that’s my town.” Also implicit in this statement is the assumption that the movies will contain things that are not oneself, and in fact might belong to others.

The “movies,” on the other hand, imply a narrowly defined cinema, that of Hollywood in the middle of the studio era. This moment was significant because of the studio system’s dominance and the weakness of the nontheatrical sector, as 16mm film exhibition did not pick up until World War II. The “movies” also imply what we could call the fiction of fictional cinema, the idea that cinema is predominantly a medium for telling stories, usually couched within a particular genre, and delivering stars. Waters played up both notions—first, suggesting that the camera has the capacity to identify a movie star merely by filming them, and second, by suggesting that his films represented a kind of genre picture, the Movies of Local People that has its own logics of display, continuity, and narrative. And, of course, the “movies” suggest a larger representational system, one that is not limited to a particular community but instead carries with it much larger assumptions about the cinema’s role in society, and its preeminent status as a medium that captures and documents everyday life, most often in newsreels.

CREATING MOVIES OF LOCAL PEOPLE

In Waters’s oeuvre one finds a particularly sharp expression of the local film as a privileged form of mutual recognition. While many local films possess this quality, Waters was uniquely positioned to produce movies of mutual recognition. Like many of his film subjects, he grew up in a mill village and worked in the small town of Lexington, North Carolina. Waters also trained as a portrait photographer and possessed the entrepreneurial zest and bonhomie such a position required. He had a strong sense for how to elicit a response out of the subjects he approached in just a few feet of film, which meant that his films were well composed and intricately structured. Even if recognition in his early films rested on claims of identification, he very quickly moved to claiming the possibilities for mutual recognition and, soon, recognition of oneself and others as they were, rather than as they are. In this way, Waters self-consciously created a film style that revealed a community to itself.

Born in Caroleen, North Carolina, in 1902, Waters moved often as a child, as his parents chased factory work in mill towns in the Carolinas before settling in Lexington, North Carolina, a town of five thousand in the middle of the state. At the Erlanger Cotton Mills, located on the outskirts of town, Waters worked alongside his parents and lived with them in Erlanger Mills Village, a new community that was built and owned by his employer. By 1925, Waters had decided against a life as a millworker and began pursuing other opportunities. He was a musician and projectionist for Young’s Theater, one of the two movie theaters in Lexington; a reporter for The Dispatch, the town’s twice-weekly newspaper; and an apprentice at J. J. Hitchcock’s Studio, a photography studio.³² In May 1926, he graduated from Lexington High School. His father, Thomas Butler Waters, died the next month at the age of fifty-five from complications after major dental work. Waters and his mother were forced to move out of family housing and into a “hotel” the company kept for single workers. Shortly after his father died, Waters, with the help of his mother, purchased the photography studio and renamed it the H. Lee Waters Studio, beginning what would be a seventy-year career as a commercial studio photographer.

Perhaps because of his familiarity with small-town life, Waters made modest—yet more radical—claims for his movies. Unlike his predecessors, he did not promise townspeople that he would represent their community as a site of investment, an untapped reserve of acting talent, or even a place that has its own stories to tell. Instead, he took on the hometown as its own distinct topoi, something he could easily do because so many of the towns he visited were places just like Lexington, small towns experiencing an influx of population as the Carolinas became home to the nation’s textile industry. Of the locations Waters visited, most owed their recent population growth, or even existence, to the mill villages that sprouted up in the North Carolina Piedmont and upstate South Carolina at the turn of the century. In just a few decades, local entrepreneurs created these sizeable industrial communities with the singular aim of producing textiles for the world market. Entire factories employing hundreds of people were constructed to make towels or hosiery or yarn, and their employees were housed by the company nearby so as to make it possible for one’s entire life to be bound up in the mill. Waters likely sought out these communities because he knew that he could accomplish his goal of filming as many people as possible due to the systemic and totalizing ordering of space in the mill village.³³

In addition to his experience as a millworker, Waters’s training as a commercial photographer made him well suited for itinerant filmmaking. Soon after starting his studio, Waters attended a summer course at the Winona Lake School of Photography in Indiana, which focused on technical training, and continued to keep up with the field by subscribing to trade publications. Like many photographers in the period, Waters supplemented his portraiture work with commercial projects, shooting for businesses and, on occasion, the local newspaper.³⁴ In the early 1930s, Waters purchased a home movie camera, which allowed him to learn the craft of filmmaking before he set out on the road.³⁵ His training and experience as a studio photographer provided him with the business and personal skills he needed for success on the road.

By most accounts, Waters became an itinerant filmmaker for pecuniary reasons. His studio business in Lexington was slow, as portrait photography was considered a luxury that few families, even in the relatively prosperous mill villages, could afford in the 1930s. In one of many newspaper interviews he gave later in life, he recalled that the idea for Movies of Local People came out of conversations he had with other studio photographers.³⁶ Although he had considered projecting still photographs of local people with lantern slides, another localizing tactic used by theater managers at the time, he decided to make movies instead because he thought it would be more profitable.³⁷ Waters worked on spec, shooting 16mm film of people and places as soon as he reached an agreement with the manager of the local movie theater to give him a cut of the box-office proceeds after his films were shown.

Like many itinerants, Waters ran his business largely by himself, creating the demand for the product he offered in every town he visited. Although his early films were black and white, he soon turned to color, shooting a few hundred feet in each community. In order to live up to his own advertising, Waters filmed as many people as possible when he visited a town and selected his shooting locations accordingly. He visited schools, where he filmed every grade and often the teachers as well. If the town had mills, he went to the gates when the shift changed in order to film people who were surprised to see a camera after a hard day’s work. He went downtown, where young mothers and businessmen congregated in largely empty streets. While there, he also shot footage of local businesses who had paid for the privilege of parading their products and employees before his camera. He went into neighborhoods where he found children playing and elderly people sitting on their front porch. After finishing his rounds, which rarely lasted more than a day, he returned to Lexington and sent his film to Kodak for processing. He assembled the developed footage into several reels and went back to the town to show his movies for a several-day engagement.

Figure 6.2. The car used by H. Lee Waters when he made his Movies of Local People. Courtesy of Davidson County Historical Museum, Lexington, N.C.

Waters, more than most itinerants, created the demand for his films by using every trick out of the showman’s book—banners, flyers, posters, and other forms of ballyhoo, much of which he documented in photographs. For example, one photograph depicts the car he drove through town, a late-model, four-door Pontiac—a long, Dachshund-like car with gentle curves over the wheel wells, protruding headlights, and a toothy grill for a face, with two large, bell-shaped loudspeakers attached to the front and rear of the car, connected to the inside by long, thick speaker wire. A large banner, emblazoned with the name of his enterprise, “Movies of Local People,” hangs over the side of the car, covering up the two rear side windows and extending past the back of the car. Waters also printed round, mirror-backed buttons—underscoring the reflective nature of his film practice—to hand out so that people could pin an advertisement for his practice on their shirts. The buttons read, simply, “I’m in the Movies.”

Since Waters kept detailed financial records, it is easy to determine his business model. From the beginning, his two streams of revenue were a percentage of ticket sales, in most cases ranging from a 30- to 50-percent take of the box-office gross, and advertising that was sold to local businesses on a per-foot basis. In fact, advertising often made up the majority of his revenue and, because it was collected in advance, allowed Waters to pay for fixed costs, including film stock, before he sold the first ticket. While the advertisements may have been sold to businesses as purely promotional segments, an opportunity for a store to display its wares and employees, Waters rarely held to the format, filming whatever appeared of interest at the time, from small children wandering through a shop to someone who decided to mug for the camera.³⁸

The connection between Movies of Local People and Hollywood came up frequently in the newspaper advertising and articles printed in advance of Waters’s visit, particularly in the initial two years of his operation when he was most likely to be visiting a town for the first time. For a visit to Siler City, North Carolina, one newspaper observed that its residents “will have the opportunity to determine whether or not our little metropolis is withholding from the screen world a Gable, Harlow, or a Zasu [sic] Pitts, by going to the Gem Theatre Monday and Tuesday and seeing moving pictures of many local citizens.”³⁹ A newspaper account of a film made a month earlier, in Albemarle, North Carolina, revealed some of the same tensions and emphasized the novelty of Waters’s equipment. In August 1936, the Stanly News and Press noted that while still images of the town’s people had been projected by the manager a few months earlier, Waters’s films will be “the first time that moving pictures of local citizens have been shown, and the unique feature is expected to draw large crowds to the theatre. The pictures were made several days ago, the regular paraphernalia of the picture studios being used.”⁴⁰

Other newspaper accounts of Waters’s filmmaking emphasized their ordinariness, not their connection to Hollywood, particularly those that were published after his second, third, or fourth visit to town. While few itinerants sought to discredit associations others made between the movie industry and their own artisanal practices, Waters was particularly successful in producing movies that audiences read as being both engaging and distinct from what the movie industry had to offer. In Concord, North Carolina, the local paper noted that Waters had been making “motion pictures of Concordians as they went about their work, hobby or recreation as the case might be.”⁴¹ Instead of screen tests, Waters appeared to be making moving image equivalents of the kind of candid photography that one saw in magazines such as Life and Time. The people who appeared in the movies were not caught up in the camera; rather, it was the camera that had caught them. For Waters’s return trip to Siler City, the paper observed that Waters’s familiar presence was part of his style, as “he will catch folks just as they appear in everyday life.”⁴² As the Henderson Daily Dispatch reported, Waters’s filmmaking presence was so ordinary that “you may see yourself on the screen as many people were photographed unaware.”⁴³

The possibility of being filmed without one’s knowledge appeared to be new for Waters’s audiences. Local filmmakers working in 35mm carefully staged their shots, so it was highly unlikely that a camera would appear as a surprise. Even so, Waters’s visits to town were announced in advance, and relatively few people in the films appear to be surprised by his camera. Perhaps his discussion of people being caught unawares meant merely that they were filmed without being warned beforehand that a cameraman was on his way. One review of Waters’s films noted that the “cameraman ‘caught’ many of our citizens on the streets—some comical, others dignified and self-conscious.”⁴⁴ After what might have been a somewhat hostile reception in Forest City, North Carolina, the local theater placed a newspaper advertisement to reassure would-be film subjects that “Cameraman Waters has not been sent to Forest City by the US Department of Justice to obtain evidence against any citizens suspected of crime: he has not been sent to photograph the lay of the land for any government for use in war time.”⁴⁵ There were a few occasions when Waters’s filmmaking activities were announced in the paper, such as a call placed in the Roxboro Courier for “mothers with children under school age” to appear at the Dolly Madison Theater so that Waters can make a group picture of them, though his tight shooting schedules seemed to limit such notices.⁴⁶ It is also clear from viewing the films that many of the pictures, especially ones taken at schools, were clearly choreographed, if not posed, and thus distinct from Waters’s street scenes. This distinction between “aware” and “unaware” shots might also be similar to that made between studio and candid photography which preoccupied still photographers in magazines like Popular Photography.⁴⁷ The lines between the two were not as clear as they first seemed, and in effect worked to enlist local people in the production of images that appeared to be spontaneously filmed.

Even if Waters was able to film people unawares on his first visit to a town, he was unlikely to find the same success on return visits. He visited many towns several times, either to make more movies or to show old ones to meet demand. Although Waters had limited competition, mostly from locals who tried their hand at filmmaking, his use of semi-professional filmmaking equipment and his skill as a cinematographer meant that he could return to a town again and again and know that he would draw a crowd of paying customers. As a result, he was able to create films of mutual recognition that explored the social dimensions of local places.

THE MEDIATED RECOGNITION OF MOVIES OF LOCAL PEOPLE

So far, I have established that Waters carried out his film practice in a systematic manner and worked in places that were similar to one another in terms of their demographics, economies, and social organizations. Not surprisingly, these towns also had very similar media infrastructures. Almost all of the towns Waters visited had a movie theater, and most also had a local newspaper that reported community and national news and would have been able to receive local and regional radio signals. Of these three media, however, newspapers were the most local, in part because they could rely on economies of scale—such as printing at another facility—to reduce costs and sustain a lower rate of publication, once or twice weekly in many cases, in order to serve its community. As Benedict Anderson has famously argued, newspapers helped to produce an “imagined community” by sustaining a belief that a publication both represented and reproduced the world of its readers.⁴⁸ Local newspapers in small communities had a particularly intimate relationship with the people they covered in the 1930s and 1940s. Many printed not just the news of the town’s officials but also the events of everyday life, with something as slight as a vacation or a visit from an old friend being reported in full. In many cases, the proof of one’s membership in a community could be delivered by a person’s appearance in the local newspaper.⁴⁹

Newspapers were particularly important for movie theaters and, by extension, Waters’s film practice, as they dedicated considerable advertising and editorial space to the coverage of all things related to the cinema. While this outsized presence of Hollywood news items, movie star photographs, and gossip columns in local papers could be written off as just further evidence of the industry’s successful publicity efforts, to do so ignores the impact of seeing such material in a paper that identifies itself with a local community. Many small theaters were independently owned and managed, and thus had a greater stake in how Hollywood was covered locally, as untimely or negative coverage could hurt interest in the theater’s own programs. In many cases, theater managers were personally credited with bringing particular film programs to town, even if they had relatively little sway over what they screened on a given week.

By covering movie stars as well as their own community, local newspapers helped collapse the distance between their small town and Hollywood. A cinematic language even permeated the language of the newspaper. One column that appeared under a number of names in assorted newspapers sought to write about the events of the town as if it were a moving portrait of the people in town. For example, the Davie Record, in Mocksville, North Carolina, ran a column called “Seen along Main Street,” written pseudonymously by “The Street Rambler,” who once caught Waters’s own activities in the midst of a busy day:

Old maid and old bachelor talking things over—Miss Ruby Angell drinking coffee and eating doughnuts—Miss Mary Foster shopping in Mocksville Cash Store—Phillip Johnson raising a dust on Main street—J. T. Angell cleaning sidewalk after heavy wind storm—Albert Boger telling about how hard the wind blew—Mrs. Ralph Morris and little daughter on their way to school—Three C boys going to the movies—School children watching snowflakes—Policeman and wife walking up street—Jim Burgess having his picture made for the movies—Sheriff Bowden on his way to ball game—Dr. Garland Greene leaving court house—C.F. Merouev, Jr, walking around bareheaded on cold morning—Miss Helen Page getting mail—Drug clerks busy delivering cold drinks to Johnstone building—Two girls falling out about boy friend—Fellow drinking bottle of beer, bottle of wine and glass of water—Mrs Frank Fowler selling theatre tickets—Miss Mary Alice Binkley on way to telephone office—Bill Merrell going south with bunch of rugs.⁵⁰

The brevity and vividness of these descriptions, and the action implied, makes them read not only as images but as moving images, with the em-dash serving to splice each scene so that they may be read not as one continuous action but rather dozens of individual actions, some related—a dust is raised, cleaned up, then discussed—and others not at all. In contrast to the local news gathering of an earlier generation, in which a dutiful reporter went from house to house collecting news—a mode of reporting deftly captured in Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 short story collection Wines-burg, Ohio—this new form of news writing could have been prepared by a reporter looking out his or her window, or perhaps walking up and down Main Street. This dominance of the visual collection of information, and of cinematic language as a way of ordering this information, emerged in these “snap shots” columns, and within new expectations for how one participated in mediated culture. Because no one would report their news, they had to make themselves be seen as to be included in the newspaper.

Figure 6.3. Flyer for H. Lee Waters’s Movies of Local People, Graham, North Carolina. H. Lee Waters Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

It is not surprising, then, that Waters’s films were often advertised in the form of lists of scenes closely resembling these snapshot columns, which might have encouraged audiences to read the films as a series of short scenes. Before Waters had even shot the film of Siler City, the paper, or perhaps Waters himself, felt confident enough in his intentions to film “local people, industry, athletic teams and other organizations” to include them in print.⁵¹ After the film had already been made, the descriptions became more exact, particularly in Waters’s own flyers, which he handed out to help bring people to the movie theater. For a 1942 showing in Graham, North Carolina, Waters’s flyers let his audience know that they could see: “Rotary Club members, Grabar Silk Mill Employees, Belmont Mill Employees, Virginia Mill Employees, Graham Fire Chief, Dr. Will Long and fire company, Chief of Police Moore, Scott Hosiery Mill Employees, Travora Mill Employees, Mrs. Cook’s Kindergarten, Boy Scouts and Cubs, Scenes at Elon College Fire, Camera Tricks in Photography, Candid Shots of People on Street, Tour of Moon’s Fashion Shop, Graham Soda Shop and Graham Hotel.”⁵²

All of this and “pictures of children and teachers in Graham City Schools, Pine Top School and Alexander Wilson School” were promised by Waters in this list of scenes. It also included the various government, civic, and education groups that made up most of the news in a local newspaper. A community that could be captured in snapshots in print could also be captured in “cinema shots,” as the Valdese News described them, making a film practice like Movies of Local People possible.⁵³ The presence of these cinematic newspaper columns in the papers of the towns Waters visited suggests that seeing oneself as if one were in the movies was something that could easily be imagined by the people in the communities he visited, even if those movies had not been made before Waters came to their town.

Like these anonymous newspaper columnists, Waters used a systematic approach to filmmaking that allowed him to meet his objective of capturing as many faces as possible without foreclosing the opportunity to shoot whatever captivated him. As the sociologist and film theorist Daniel O’Connor observes of cinema more generally, Waters used his camera as a “social apparatus,” which, as O’Connor notes, “evokes a power relation between an anonymous viewership and those made into its image.” Like other scholars, O’Connor invokes the work of Michel Foucault to cast the cinema as “an extension of disciplinary vigilance,” but instead of focusing on the disciplining of bodies in the theater, O’Connor instead argues that “disciplinary cinema structures the visual field so as to produce and reproduce the opposition of viewer and image.”⁵⁴ For him, the disciplinary cinema, which we could also term a cinema of surveillance, both monitors social relations and transforms them through the use of montage, putting disparate images of society in relationship to one another, producing what he calls a “mobile social interface.” Filmmakers like Waters embraced the disciplinary potential of the cinema to produce an image of the local that is imbricated in what O’Conner terms a “relatively closed, fixed, and territorially bounded space for idiosyncratic events and activities that are particular to its inhabitants.”⁵⁵ Even though O’Connor suggests that disciplinary cinema makes local culture “largely obsolete,” filmmakers like Waters simultaneously embraced a sociological definition of the local and the broader moving image culture that made his work legible to movie audiences.

Seen in this light, Waters’s films can be read as a disciplinary cinema that aims to produce mutual recognition through montage. In a 1990 NBC television news segment, Waters demonstrated his filmmaking style for television audiences.⁵⁶ In the three-minute piece, he can be seen calling out to his film subjects, asking them to engage with him and his camera. Unlike classical cinema, in which looking at the camera is a threat to the “fourth wall” that separates spectators from the world on screen, almost all of the people seen in Waters’s films are looking directly at the camera. In many cases, Waters filmed subjects standing still, as if posing for the camera, before he was able to persuade them to respond to the camera in some way. In other cases, Waters filmed people walking by the camera, giving them either an opportunity to stop and pose or cover their face so they can avoid being seen or, in some cases, avert their eyes while straining to appear as if they do not notice the camera at all. Camera avoidance, part of what Sarah Keller has termed “cinephobia,” appears to be gendered in Waters’s films—with women hiding from the camera perhaps ten times as frequently as men.⁵⁷ While one might imagine that such responses to the camera are situational—with factory exit scenes, taken after a long day’s work, being one site where men and women would prefer not to be filmed—such looks—and looks away—can be seen in almost every environment.

The production of these scenes occur as if they were scripted in advance. For school shots, which made up the largest part of almost any film Waters made, he would often film entire classes that were lined up for his film as if he was going to take a still photograph of them. Holding the camera, he would pan over the faces of the students, often moving the camera across the crowd several times to make sure he included everyone. He would also film school activities, most often children’s games or sporting events, and again would hold the camera so as to give himself the most flexibility. While he would occasionally film close-up shots of particular students, he used the medium-length shot most often so that several students were in the frame at the same time.

For shots of the mill, almost always taken at shift change, Waters used a different approach. He placed his camera on a tripod, which meant that people would approach the camera and then walk off screen. As older people were more reluctant to be filmed by Waters than schoolchildren were, the use of a tripod gave his film subjects the option of not appearing on film because they knew they could easily escape the camera’s view. In these shots it was common for people, especially women, to cover their faces while exiting the mill, suggesting that they were not interested in being filmed, which, as I explore below, has interesting implications for how we read recognition in these films. Waters also used a tripod for scenes taken downtown, and he would often speed up the film, accomplished by winding the hand-cranked camera more slowly than usual, to produce the effect of a busy street.

For other street scenes and for advertisements, Waters used a mixture of approaches. He occasionally used a tripod but would also hold the camera to give himself more leeway in his filming. While the length of his shots taken at the school tended to be brief, as the motion of the children there tended to be frantic, he could use longer shots downtown, taking the time to capture a toddler walking down the street or a business owner demonstrating a product. The shot lengths were also longer in African American neighborhoods, which Waters filmed often, most likely because he could not film African Americans in other places. In both his black-and-white and color films Waters was able to consistently produce sharp, high-contrast work, particularly remarkable because he made manual adjustments to his camera on the fly. Waters used one-hundred-foot rolls, roughly four minutes in length, and edited his films in camera, which meant that whatever he filmed next would appear next when he showed his film a few weeks later. Although there was not necessarily any relation between one shot and the next, Waters’s films almost always started with a reel shot at the school, followed by several reels of advertisements and other downtown shots, before he returned to the second reel shot at the school. Even though it would have been possible to make his films into narratives by using title cards to separate certain scenes from others, or by structuring the film so it progressed from one part of town to the next, Waters did not do so. Instead, his films have an organic logic in which the town is made out of disparate scenes held together by their location in a shared social space.

By making Movies of Local People, Waters not only inverted Hollywood’s construction of the movie theater as a nonlocal, nondifferentiated space where one sees but is not seen but also challenged a community’s conception of itself, where its primary gathering spaces—the school, places of work, the home—are segregated along age, gender, economic, and racial lines. As folklorists Beverly J. Stoeltje and Richard Bauman note in an article on a community festival in Luling, Texas, the presentation of place through a demarcated event allows for what they call a “centralization in reverse” that presents the community to itself for contemplation by itself. As Stoeltje and Bauman observe, the presentation of community in a festival “set[s] things off in special contexts, marking them with special intensity as being on view, available for examination, contemplation, reflection, whether the object is woman, flag, agricultural product, or association.”⁵⁸ The function of the festival, then, is to make the town visible to itself, so it may be subject to analysis, which allows for, in the words of Stoeltje, a “regeneration through the rearrangement of structures, thus creating new frames and processes.”⁵⁹ Waters’s films had the potential to challenge and regenerate how a community saw itself because he could, unlike almost anyone else in town, visit the factory, the schoolyard, downtown, African American neighborhoods, and even fly in an airplane to take aerial views in the course of a day’s visit. The underpinning promise of his film enterprise—seeing yourself as others see you—is one that implies a community of “others” and the inability for any one person in that community to see how he or she is perceived by these “others.” Just as festivals can challenge the social order while remaining pleasurable events, Waters’s films contain latent critiques of the communities he depicted even when they were entertaining. One witnesses scenes of poverty, humiliation, and prejudice in these films, and yet, they still appear celebratory, as if all aspects of the community are worth seeing on the big screen.

Waters’s films, like festivals, work in part by inverting the normal order, making the familiar exotic and the exotic familiar. The community that is being filmed is allowed to see itself in the movies, as if their town was a subject worthy of a Hollywood film. Likewise, by filming the community, Waters made the once very unusual experience of being in a film an ordinary one for his audience. As the Journal-Patriot in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, noted of a repeat visit by Waters to their town in 1941, “Mr. Waters, who travels throughout this and surrounding states, with a carload of expensive movie equipment, has helped many in making their first appearance on the silver screen. He has appeared in this city before and movie fans know the type of entertainment he offers.”⁶⁰ While Waters began by offering something that was very unusual for his audiences, his enterprise became something familiar for the people in the towns he visited.

Figure 6.4. Movies of Local People showing at an unidentified theater. Courtesy of Davidson County Historical Museum, Lexington, N.C.

THE MUTUAL RECOGNITION OF DIFFERENCE AND THE COLOR LINE

Even if Waters made the local film a routine experience in the towns he visited, the mutual recognition that his films advanced was far more challenging than appears to be the case from a cursory reading of the films. As Ricouer reminds us, mutual recognition asks us to be cognizant of both the other, the person who is asking to be recognized, and the norm, the figure against which we measure our capacity to recognize someone. Working in a medium that was by the 1930s strongly encoded with normative ideas of social difference, Waters asked the people who saw his films to simultaneously compare people to these norms and to recognize those depicted as themselves and their neighbors.

Nowhere was this difficulty more apparent than in Waters’s films of African American residents. Although African Americans were excluded from many of the sites Waters filmed, particularly mill villages, they were nonetheless part of the larger community, and white audiences would have recognized many of their African American neighbors, even if they were in places that whites rarely visited. African American residents would have likely recognized many whites but would have also been particularly aware of the dangers posed by the movie camera. As Shawn Michelle Smith notes, W. E. B. Du Bois defined “double consciousness” as the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” thus arguing for the importance of visual culture in understanding the history of blackness in the United States.⁶¹ Applying Henry Louis Gates’s concept of “signifying,” in which African Americans manipulate signs to convey a doubled meaning, to visual culture, Smith suggests that African American photography has the capacity to “denaturaliz[e] both images and viewing positions” by repeating the tropes of white photography. For example, she suggests that Du Bois’s contribution to the Paris Exhibition of 1900, a photographic series titled “Types of American Negroes,” played with the “color” lines that separated the “criminal mugshot” from the “middle-class portrait.” She argues that the photographs selected by Du Bois, some of which appeared to be signifying both criminality and middle-classness simultaneously, worked to “disrupt the authority of white observers by collapsing the distance between viewers and objects under view that is held traditionally to empower observers.”⁶² Because of photography’s association with objectivity and neutrality, that is, both depicting reality without manipulation and operating in much the same way regardless of who is front of or behind the camera, Smith suggests African Americans are heavily invested in the medium as a mode of representation.

For obvious reasons, the cinema does not offer the same opportunity for this kind of manipulation, which makes Waters’s films a particularly important site where African Americans encountered the movies. Unlike classical Hollywood cinema, which so distorted views of African American life that it gave rise to an alternative cinema practice that operated at a near complete remove from the industry in Los Angeles, Waters depicted African Americans in a largely neutral and objective fashion.⁶³ As a result, Waters was often more apt to capture looks of racial difference and racial recognition than other filmmakers, as he was seeking to film a community as it was rather than produce a carefully constructed image of it.

Even after the first wave of the Great Migration, North Carolina still had a significant African American population, with the 1940 census reporting that 27.5 percent of its residents were African American, the sixth highest percentage in the country. Segregation ensured that whites and African Americans participated in markedly distinct economic, social, and political spheres, which had the effect of creating two parallel worlds within many of the towns in the state. For example, while textile mills employed 19 percent of the white labor force in the state, they only employed 1.5 percent of the African American labor force. In contrast, just 1 percent of whites worked in “domestic service” while 17 percent of African Americans did.⁶⁴ With the 1898 Wilmington insurrection, in which white supremacists forcibly overturned a democratically elected local government, still within living memory, many African Americans operated with the awareness that racial violence was a very real threat.⁶⁵

Not surprisingly, African Americans were also less likely than whites to be able to attend the movies at all. In 1937, one exhibitor publication counted just 14 African American theaters in North Carolina, with a total of 5,600 seats, or one seat for approximately every 175 African American residents of the state.⁶⁶ This compared unfavorably with the nation on the whole, with the Motion Picture Herald, who ran the article, noting that there was one seat for every eighty-nine African Americans in African American theaters, compared to one seat for every twelve whites. While many theaters were spatially or temporally segregated—balcony seating in larger towns and Sunday night shows in smaller ones—and thus were more open to African Americans than these numbers suggest, segregation limited African American participation in film culture. Other exhibition sites, such as churches, may have made cinema available to African American audiences in nontheatrical settings, but this did not change the fact that many African Americans in the state had limited access to the most recent films screened in movie theaters.

Given these financial and logistical challenges, it is somewhat surprising that Waters filmed African American communities at all. And yet, of the 118 communities he visited, Waters screened films to African American audiences in 32 of them, or just over one-quarter of the total. While a few of these screenings were either in nontheatrical settings, such as an African American school in Hillsborough, North Carolina, or African American theaters, such at the Hollywood Theater in Chapel Hill and the Palace Theater in Kannapolis, most were in theaters with a balcony. As a result, most scenes of African Americans in Waters films were made with the expectation that they would have been shown to either white audiences alone, or white and African American audiences in a segregated theater. In what follows, I consider films from three North Carolina communities—Henderson, Chapel Hill, and Kannapolis.

Waters first visited Henderson, a township of 16,137, in December 1936, not long after he began making Movies of Local People, and returned to the town twice, first in September 1938 and then again in October 1939.⁶⁷ Even though the Stevenson Theater, which opened in 1927 and sat eight hundred, had a balcony, Waters’s first screening at the theater appeared to take place without the presence of a African American audience.⁶⁸ For the two later screenings, African Americans were in the audience, although Waters recorded receiving just a handful of dollars from African American audiences, $20.05 from the 1938 visit and just $4.65 from the 1939 visit. While Waters did not provide attendance records as he did for white audiences in Henderson, the balcony revenue made up just 3.5 percent of the $716.35 box office received during these two visits. This poor showing came despite the fact that two-fifths of Henderson’s population in 1940 was African American, meaning that a substantial portion of the town was missing from the theater the nights Waters’s films were screened. S. S. Stevenson, who ran a small theater chain from his home in Henderson, including his eponymous theater, appears to have not been interested in the African American movie audience, as the closest African American theater was in Raleigh, forty miles to the south. When Waters came to Henderson, it seemed clear that he was to make a film for its white residents only.

The 1939 film of Henderson opens with a typical scene of students exiting a school building. In fact, the entire film is fairly ordinary, with Waters filming schools, downtown businesses, and sites of employment, in this case scenes at a tobacco packhouse. Rather than focus on these rather ordinary scenes, I want to call attention to the moments where African Americans, who, again, were not considered to be the audience for this film, appear. In fact, the opening two shots of the film, in which schoolchildren parade in front of the camera, depict a middle-aged African American man sitting in the background, suggesting he occupies some unidentified role with the school. Children play baseball and other school-yard games, all without the presence of African Americans, underscoring how segregated social life was during this period. Even when Waters showed large crowd scenes, such as those taken at the high school, only white faces appear, producing the illusion that Henderson was a white community.

When African Americans do appear, such as a young man depicted in one of Waters’s portrait shots, the look returned to Waters is skeptical; in one case, an African American man runs away from the camera. While the footage of workplaces includes African American employees, they are often in the background and do not smile like their white coworkers. In this film, Waters presents African Americans as laborers attending to the upkeep of white life. In one of the film’s more poignant scenes, we see African American men and women assisting white children at the playground, helping them go down slides and pushing them on swings.

Waters also filmed African Americans in downtown Henderson, though here again it is clear that visibility was a threat for many African Americans. For example, in one shot a young heavyset boy is walking confidently in the center of a downtown sidewalk when he passes by an older African American woman, who stops and turns to watch him. In the next shot, we see the boy continue to walk while the woman stands off to one side, witnessing the film’s production as if she is concerned that some harm would come to him as a result of being on camera.

The Henderson film ends with a series of trick shots for which Waters was well known. In one, he slow cranks the camera to produce the illusion of an extremely busy downtown, and then fast cranks the camera and holds it upside down to produce the illusion of reverse motion. In both cases, the town becomes automated, as if it is running of its own accord rather than as the product of individuals walking the streets, driving cars, and otherwise acting on the physical landscape. Waters follows this special effect shot with a long panning shot of downtown, as if to remind audiences of the surveillance qualities of his practice. The next shot returns to the sidewalk, only this time Waters has split the screen horizontally, with the intended effect of matching the torsos of passersby to the legs of others. But one African American, standing still on the right side of the frame, looks away from the camera, as if to observe people’s reaction to Waters as he films. When he turns toward the camera, the shot ends, and soon after, so does Waters’s movie of Henderson. (See Moving Image 6.1.)

If Waters’s films of Henderson largely ignored African American life, the single picture he made in Chapel Hill, home to the University of North Carolina, instead imagined a community where African Americans were the most important members of society. While the university did not admit its first African American student until 1951, African Americans had long played an important part in the community, living near campus and performing many service-related roles, such as building maintenance and preparing food in the cafeterias. If Waters had instead made a film at the university, it might have looked much like the Henderson film, depicting an entirely white campus in which African Americans appear only at the margins of the frame.

Instead, Waters produced a picture of the African American community from within, depicting inhabitants as individuals who lived in the segregated neighborhoods that bordered the university. With a township population of 8,903, Chapel Hill’s economy centered around the university. Like Henderson, a significant portion of Chapel Hill’s population, 32.8 percent, was African American, and the town’s African American community was prosperous enough to support its own movie theater, which opened in 1939. Waters visited the theater twice, first in October 1939 and then again in April 1941, though he only recorded the revenue from the first visit, $64.94 in three screenings, which was significantly lower than Waters would receive on a typical visit to a white theater.

Almost all of the footage in the two films is taken outside people’s homes, with the characters in the center of the frame, suggesting that Waters asked permission to film people and had them pose for the camera. The people smile before the camera, and there are few instances of either men or women hiding from the camera. If African Americans were portrayed as caretakers in Waters’s film of Henderson, in Chapel Hill whites are not visible at all. While we see scenes of African American businesses and institutions, such as schools and churches, the white world is rendered invisible in these films. Instead of displaying the availability of consumer goods in stores, here African American businesses demonstrate their services, such as taxi cabs and automotive repair shops.

In Kannapolis, Waters made the rare decision for his 1941 visit to film white and African American communities and screen his films in both white-only and black-only theaters, the Dixie and the Palace, respectively. Not surprisingly, this segregation was reproduced in the film itself, with the “white” reels featuring the city’s white residents and the single “black” reel featuring its African American inhabitants, who made up 15 percent of the township’s population.⁶⁹ Waters’s footage of the African American community is very similar to that taken in Chapel Hill, filming schoolchildren and some businesses but mostly the everyday lives of African Americans. Because the film was presented alongside films of Kannapolis’s white communities, however, economic disparities became visible to all of the town’s population, an important development even if, unlike documentaries of the period, there was no associated call to action.

But Kannapolis is significant for another reason. Like many mill towns, Kannapolis was a new community, one whose residents were from elsewhere and had none of the deep ties that bound natives to their hometowns. Furthermore, what identity Kannapolis did have was often tied up with that of the person who owned the mills, making these towns more extensions of a single person’s vision than a collective project. When Waters visited a town, he did not just lay bare the divisions that existed in the town. He also gave townspeople an opportunity to see the various schools, factories, stores, churches, and buildings as belonging to a community they could identify as their own. It was the mutual recognition of place that made the local film such an enduring artifact of the period for many communities.

While Waters did not make his films with the intention of making social inequities visible, seen today it is clear that the problems of difference—from the inequalities in housing and work opportunities to the gender- and race-coded responses to the camera—are continuously addressed in his films. Although the opportunities for recognition that are presented by Waters’s films are not matched with a redistribution of economic, psychic, or legal resources, these movies do allow us to imagine the possibilities for mutual recognition in the local film.

FROM MUTUAL RECOGNITION TO PLACE RECOGNITION

If the emphasis on mutual recognition in Waters’s films destabilized social identities, his films also produced place-based identities. By filming everyone he anticipated might come to the theater, Waters created a moving image record that served as a cognitive map of the community he filmed. Even though his films named particular places, incorporated towns, as their site of production and exhibition, his flyers revealed that such place-names were capacious, containing schools, mills, and small villages far outside of city limits. In this way, place recognition is a constitutive act, one that employs identification in order to inform a mutual recognition of one’s common membership in a community with others. And for Kannapolis and many similar towns, such acts of place recognition resulted in more durable associations of people and the built environments they inhabited with place-names.

This process of place recognition was particularly important for the many Waters films that included mill towns. Because these towns were often plotted on land purchased by their owners, who then proceeded to design and manage their operations, they functioned as distinct “topias,” purpose-built modern economic projects that were uneasily expected to fulfill social and cultural demands by its residents. Like most company towns, Kannapolis had a life, a history, a presence outside the confines of the imagination of its creator and owner. As Edward L. Rankin Jr. notes in the company history, produced for the hundredth anniversary of Cannon in 1987, “Whether it was or is a company town, Kannapolis people love their community and are proud of its history and heritage, its growth and development and its quality of life.”⁷⁰ The rhetorical moves in this statement—putting into question whether it is a company town, asserting that it has history and heritage and that those are linked to growth, development, and quality of life—lay out the terrain for the kinds of questions that are asked about place when it is determinedly modern. Both “history” and “heritage” signal, but do not replicate, a past, one that, in Kannapolis’s case, is particularly fraught, in part because the city was unincorporated for most of its existence, which meant that its residents had little say in what went on in their community. Likewise, “growth” and “development” are bound up in discussions of urban life, and their apparently benign presence runs rampant through many tropes of modernity.

As the geographer J. Nicholas Entrikin notes of place-names, “the meanings given to place range from the personal, relatively subjective understanding of place associated with personal experience to the relatively objective sense of place as location.” He locates between these two endpoints, one bound by its subjectivity and the other by its lack of subjectivity, the “cultural symbols of a place associated with a particular cultural community.” Thus, as Entrikin argues, place-names are “intertexts,” shared cultural symbols that pass among films, novels, and the physical world, allowing for meaning outside of any one context. The intertextual nature of place-names puts them at the center of larger arguments about modernity and meaning.⁷¹

For Kannapolis residents, including those who were present in the Gem Theater on a February afternoon in 2005, H. Lee Waters’s films of the city are now one of the key intertexts that allows for reflection on a place that they called home. Even though these films, shot in 1939, 1941, and 1942, captured just a few hours of life in the community, its cultural status permits, as Michel de Certeau suggests is possible of New York sidewalks, a reading of “footsteps” on the film text, each frame mapping the place.⁷² The emphasis on recognition in the local film calls attention to the gap between collective and individual naming, which is also the difference between the name of a place and a place-name. If a place-name is deeply personal, one that is determined more by the imagination than the name, producing a truly arbitrary system in which a place-name is unrelated to place, it is difficult to imagine the recovery of any place whose name has been lost. But, if one can, as Entrikin suggests, find a place-name that serves as an “intertext” between individuals, one close to de Certeau’s sidewalk of a thousand stories yet also networked or woven, allowing for a collective that can name, it is possible to imagine place-names that are not the product of an author but of a community.

At the same time, this emphasis on place recognition in the local film, which only accelerated after World War II, works against mutual recognition as it demarcates who is worthy of recognition by emphasizing their relationship to the named community. Waters’s films are compelling examples of the possibility of mutual recognition precisely because he depicted people who were excluded from political life and yet intricately connected to the town’s economy and, revealingly, many aspects of its social life. At the same time, the democratic quality that distinguished films of mutual recognition from other local movies was under constant threat of being undermined by sponsors who desired to associate the movies with the places of their choosing. Waters’s autonomy gave him the ability to film where and when he pleased, but many other itinerants worked as clients for civic and business clubs who had a heavy hand in determining the places that would and would not be filmed.

THE HOMETOWN MOVIE IDEA

Itinerants like Waters were everywhere in the 1930s and early 1940s, shooting so frequently that local films like his became what a Valdese, North Carolina, newspaper called the “Home Town Movie Idea,” a mode of moviemaking that “comes right down to everyday life.”⁷³ While these small-gauge pictures were largely free of the genre and narrative impositions placed on local movies in the 1910s and 1920s, they were not without structure, and, in fact, their assumption of mutual recognition meant that they had potentially greater power to challenge how a community thought of itself than their predecessors.

In contrast to these earlier modes of local filmmaking, the decline of these movies of mutual recognition occurred somewhat swiftly, due to a series of large events. First, and most obviously, the US entry into World War II had several direct consequences for itinerant filmmakers. Gas was rationed, making any itinerant practice difficult to sustain. The US military purchased 16mm moving image equipment from amateur moviemakers for wartime use, which encouraged itinerants like Waters to give up on filmmaking altogether. The draft and war-related employment discouraged men and women from continuing their itinerant work, as they could find, or were forced to find, other opportunities.

After the war ended, local film production resumed but not with the same variety as before. Home movie cameras were more widely available in the postwar period, making moving images more commonplace than had been the case just a few year earlier. And the film industry itself was struggling to retain its audience in the face of competition from television. Small-town theaters, who had long fought to stay in business, started to close. Their audiences went either to theaters in larger communities or to drive-in theaters, which drew moviegoers from a wider geographical range.

In the face of these changes, some itinerants found a different way to promote their films. Rather than selling the potential of mutual recognition or of Hollywood stardom, these itinerants instead appealed to the increasingly national sensibilities of small-town residents. Local films could be used to celebrate the civic qualities of postwar life, a universe in which many imagined themselves to be residents of small towns, and those who actually did live in these towns saw an advantage in documenting and commemorating their contributions to civic life. Local films, then, became tools to celebrate the familiar, and it was the nationalization—and the banalization—of everyday life that became their metteur en scène, not movies where seeing yourself was the greatest thrill of them all.

NOTES

1. Rankin, “A Century of Progress,” 6. Built by James Cannon in 1908—its name, from the Greek, means “City of Looms”—the Cannon Mills of Kannapolis became, by 1914, the “largest manufacturer of huck towels in the United States.” An unincorporated town until 1984, meaning that its residents had no local representation, Kannapolis, like so many mill towns, was dominated by its largest employer, who owned 8.8 percent of the land within town boundaries, including 1,600 houses. The company fought, and defeated, multiple efforts by its employees to unionize. After a series of corporate takeovers and mergers, the mill finally closed its doors in July 2003, which was widely covered at the time as a death-knell for mill towns in North Carolina. For one account of Cannon’s anti-labor history, see James Surowiecki, “Strikes, Lies, and Videotape,” Slate, August 29, 1997, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_motley_fool/1997/08/strikes_lies_and_videotape.html.

2. Robert C. Allen first pointed out to me the centrality of recognition, as opposed to identification, in the work of Waters. In Nickelodeon City, Michael Aronson argues that an exhibitor-filmmaker active in the 1910s, Charlie Silveus, created a “cinema of recognition” in which “the gaze is not projected outward toward a disembodied spectator, but inward to a known and very corporeal audience” (229).

3. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 234.

4. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition.” Mette Hjort is one of the few film studies scholars to discuss recognition in what she has termed the “cinema of small nations.” See Hjort, “Danish Cinema and the Politics of Recognition.”

5. Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented, 8.

6. Widdowson, “Mitchell and Kenyon,” 141.

7. The Burns poem reads, in translation, “O would some Power the gift to give us / To see ourselves as others see us!”

8. Bottomore, “From the Factory Gate to the ‘Home Talent’ Drama.”

9. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 10, 22.

10. Ibid., 23. This is a problem for early cinema in general, and could be one for Waters’s films as well. If a genre of film, whether it be local film or early cinema, is seen as important largely because it is representative of that genre, a reading of what is present in the film is often made difficult or deemed unnecessary because the existence of the film, as either the first, only, or rare record of whatever subject, is seen as an end in itself.

11. Ibid., 24.

12. One obvious exception would be motion pictures that were made with a hidden camera.

13. Jung, “Local Views,” 253–255.

14. Some of these discoveries are her own, while others were made by contributors to a volume she coedited. See Toulmin et al., eds., The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon, as well as Toulmin’s monograph Electric Edwardians.

15. Toulmin, “‘Local Films for Local People,’”118.

16. Toulmin and Loiperdinger, “‘Is It You?’” 9, 16.

17. Bordwell refers to classical Hollywood cinema as having an “excessively obvious” aesthetic, by which he means that all information is communicated to the spectator in a very clear and straightforward manner. See Bordwell, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 3. Likewise, local films have at base a very understandable and accessible appeal.

18. Ricouer, The Course of Recognition, 19.

19. Ibid., 62.

20. Ibid., 101, 102, 110.

21. Ibid., 134, 137.

22. Sewell, Logics of History, 73.

23. See Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. For example, while some have argued that Edgar Allan Poe’s 1840 short story “Man of the Crowd” is a very early example of the effacement of the individual in mass culture, one could instead suggest that it reflects the narrator’s failed attempt to engage the “man of the crowd” in mutual recognition.

24. Ricouer, The Course of Recognition, 161, 199.

25. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Ricouer attributes Marshall’s concept to Robert Alexy, Talcott Parsons, and Honneth.

26. Ricouer, The Course of Recognition, 219, 243.

27. Nancy Fraser, among others, critiques those, like Honneth, who privilege calls for recognition over redistribution, when she suggests that both should be addressed in tandem, as many groups “suffer both maldistribution and misrecognition in forms where neither of these injustices is an indirect effect of the other, but where both are primary and co-original.” Pursuing this debate further would lead us far outside the context of recognition in the local film, which is why I have not addressed it further. However, following Rabinowitz’s work on documentary, I would argue that recognition leads to calls for redistribution. See Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics,” 19.

28. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 85.

29. Ricouer, The Course of Recognition, 263.

30. Robert Sklar makes the claim forcefully in his cultural history of the movies. See Sklar, Movie-Made America.

31. Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 189–194.

32. Miller’s Lexington, N.C. City Directory.

33. See Hall et al., Like a Family, particularly chapter 3, for more on mill life in North Carolina.

34. Surprisingly, there are few scholarly studies of photographers like Waters, as their work tends to attract only local interest, or, in the well-known case of Michael Disfarmer, attention from those who value their photographs as a form of outsider art, rather than as a common cultural practice. In his collection of essays Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, Geoffrey Batchen argues that research on what he terms vernacular photography has been suppressed by historians of photography because “to deal with it directly would be to reveal the shallow artifice of their historical judgment, and of the notion of artwork on which it is based” (58). One rare exception, as Batchen notes, comes from Canada, Mining Photographs and Other Pictures, 1948–1968. In a long essay that appears at the end of the volume, Allan Sekula suggests that small-town commercial photographer Leslie Shedden aspired to be the “model of a photographic craftsman and small entrepreneur,” thus making work that aestheticized, and also reproduced, the social and economic landscape of the community (255).

35. Kodak saw camera stores and photography studios as potential distributors for their amateur movie cameras and likely provided Waters with, at the very least, brochures for their products.

36. Ray Rollins, “Old Movies Appeal to Nostalgia,” Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal, January 12, 1976, 17.

37. Ven Carver, “Playing on People’s Vanity Pays off Big,” High Point (N.C.) Enterprise. April 22, 1973, D1–2. The projection of “lantern slides” produced by the local photography studio might have been common in movie theaters in this time period. Charles Abel’s 1931 book Money Making Ideas for Portrait Studios, which was owned by Waters, suggests that “photographers who are located near neighborhood motion picture houses can get, for comparatively low prices, the privilege of running lantern-slides during the time when reels are being changed, or the audience is moving in or out” (72).

38. Because Waters did not document the costs he incurred in making his films, it is difficult to establish what his profits were, but his business model is relatively clear. For example, Waters recorded a gross of $153.54 in four screenings in early October 1941 at the Center Theater in Mount Airy, North Carolina, taking 30 percent of the box-office gross, $355.40, and recording an additional $50 in advertising revenue. Alan Kattelle, a collector who specializes in amateur technology, estimates that in 1935, Kodachrome film ran $9 for a 100-foot roll. In Waters’s business records he notes that he shot 800 feet of Kodachrome film in Mount Airy, which meant that he would have spent $72 for a twenty-eight-minute film. If this number is correct, roughly 20 percent of his gross from that screening went to film costs alone.

39. “Moving Pictures of Local People to Be Shown at Theatre,” Chatham (N.C.) News, September 11, 1936, 1.

40. “Local Pictures to Be Shown on the Screen at Stanly,” Stanly (N.C.) News and Press, August 18 1936, 5.

41. “Local Movies at Pasttime Today,” Concord (N.C.) Daily Tribune, August 13, 1936, 2.

42. “Movies of Local Residents to Be Taken on Streets,” Chatham (N.C.) News, February 28, 1941, 4.

43. “Local People in Film at Stevenson,” Henderson (N.C.) Daily Dispatch, September 14, 1938, 3.

44. “Local Movies,” Rockingham (N.C.) Post-Dispatch, June 15, 1939, 6.

45. Advertisement, Forest City (N.C.) Courier, June 17, 1937, 11. Of course, this statement could have been printed as a joke to encourage talk about Waters’s visit. But it does seem clear that Waters was not as well-received in Forest City as he was in other towns.

46. “Mothers Invited to Have Pictures Made on Tuesday,” Roxboro (N.C.) Courier, February 22, 1937, 1.

47. In response to a letter inquiring about the use of the word “candid,” the editors of Popular Photography defined it in the August 1941 issue as being “either a picture which is snapped without the subject’s knowledge or one which is carefully planned to make it appear spontaneous and unposed. Some of the best candid pictures that are taken are really rehearsed over and over again before the shutter is clicked” (18). This slippery definition—candid photographs are either unposed or appear unposed—allowed Waters to claim that his movies were “candid” even when they did not appear to be so.

48. Anderson, Imagined Communities.

49. The exception to this would be a town’s African American residents, whose exclusion from public life was often mirrored by an exclusion from the newspaper.

50. “Seen along Main Street,” Davie (N.C.) Record, February 26, 1941, 1.

51. “Movies of Local Residents to Be Taken on Streets.”

52. Flyer, H. Lee Waters Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

53. “To Take Pictures of Local People,” Valdese (N.C.) News, December 11, 1941, 1.

54. O’Connor, Mediated Associations, 7, 8. Lee Grieveson, for example, is more concerned about the cinema as a physical site where bodies are disciplined, and draws connections between the regulation of theater space and the regulation of the movies themselves. See Grieveson, Policing Cinema.

55. O’Connor, Mediated Associations, 19. In some of Waters’s films, this connection between discipline and cinema is made explicit. For example, in the 1941 Granite Falls, South Carolina, color footage, Waters films a police officer pretending to arrest passersby, thereby making literal his oft-used phrase, “many were caught by the movie camera.”

56. “The Movie Man: H. Lee Waters,” Assignment America, NBC Nightly News, January 19, 1990.

57. Keller, “Cinephobia.”

58. Stoeltje and Bauman, “Community Festival and the Enactment of Modernity,” 170.

59. Stoeltje, “Festival,” 270–271.

60. “Local People on Screen at Allen,” Journal-Patriot (North Wilkesboro, N.C.), February 27, 1941, 5.

61. Smith, “‘Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others,’” 581. These ideas are developed further in her book Photography on the Color Line.

62. Smith, “‘Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others,’” 586, 587.

63. While Waters did depict Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, and other racial and ethnic minority groups, individuals from these groups were a distinct minority in his films and in North Carolina, where he shot most of his films. According to the 1940 US Census, North Carolina, with a population of 3.5 million, had just 22,545 residents who were Native Americans (here classified as “Indian”) and a scant 104 residents who were Chinese or Japanese, plus another 40 identified as “other.” Only 9,046 residents were foreign-born. In all, 71.9 percent of the state’s population was classified as “white” while 27.5 percent was classified as “Negro,” leaving just 0.6 percent of the population as “other.” People of Hispanic descent were classified as white, though the census reported very low rates of immigration from Central and South America.

64. US Census. The calculations are my own.

65. See Cecelski and Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed.

66. “232 Negro Theatres 1 ½ % of All Houses,” Motion Picture Herald, April 24, 1937, 78. This number is approximate because I am using the theater data from 1937, while the population data is from 1940. A number of African American theaters opened in the late 1930s, including the Hollywood Theater in Carrboro (1939) and the Palace Theater in Kannapolis (1938).

67. The US Census recorded the populations of townships, sub-county districts that included towns and outlying rural areas. Since North Carolina, even in 1940, was a markedly rural state, I have chosen to use townships to record town populations, as they more accurately reflect the number of people who would have thought of a community, and its theater, as being part of their economic, social, and political life.

68. “New Theaters,” Film Daily, March 14, 1927, 4.

69. Because Kannapolis was an unincorporated place, the US Census classified the township as “Cooks Cross Roads.” Part of the town was in neighboring Rowan County, whose China Grove township boasted another 15,668 people, 860 of whom were African American.

70. Rankin, “A Century of Progress,” 11.

71. Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place, 55, 56, 57.

72. de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life, 97.

73. “To Take Pictures of Local People: Cameraman to Visit Community and Take Informal Movies of Local People,” Valdese (N.C.) News, December 11, 1941, 1.