Part one of interview with Jamison "Jam" Handy
If recent research and scholarship are "gentrifying" the ghetto of industrial film, as Rick Prelinger said Thursday night, it’s time to learn more about its history. In a presentation that was as far-reaching as its subject, Prelinger, founder of the Prelinger Archives, took on a case study of Jamison "Jam" Handy, who produced more than 7,000 films in his lifetime. Handy, who was born in 1886 and lived until 1983, is a key figure in the histories of visual education, advertising and sponsored film, workforce training, and, in his early years, swimming (Handy won the bronze in the 1904 Olympics, and is credited with developing new techniques that made it easier to breathe while swimming.)
Rather than run through the rest of the presentation now (which we expect to be able to post shortly), I will hit on a few of the key points Prelinger made about Handy and his relationship to the history of industrial and sponsored film. First, Prelinger argued for the treatment of the film strip as a significant development in visual education that has no parallel in popular entertainment. Handy himself argued that the motion pictures that take place in people’s minds did not necessarily have to be produced by the cinema, and film strips offered similar imaginative possibilities and were more effective. Prelinger argued that Handy’s belief about motion pictures enables us to reorient ourselves toward the field of industrial and sponsored film, including not just motion picture, but film strips, corporate theater and other forms of visual communication.
Handy’s work for the government began in 1914 when he first started working on film strips. By World War II Handy's company was large enough to produce hundreds of films and film strips, including classified material for the government. By that point he had relocated his company to Detroit, where it remained until the end of his life. The post-war boom in the sponsored and industrial film market, encouraged by television and the sales of film projectors, allowed Handy to brag that more film was processed in Detroit, where the sponsored film industry was based, than in Hollywood.
As might be expected, the post-war films are among the most extravagant films Handy produced in his career. The inevitable decline of the company, which was concurrent with the decline of Detroit’s industries, was evident by the late 1960s. By the time Handy died in 1983, the company had been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Prelinger said when he first became aware of Handy he thought that it would be difficult to find archival material. Now, however, there is a surplus of material, with Handy films and research materials at the Library of Congress, The Detroit Public Library, the University of Michigan and in Prelinger’s own collection (some of which is available from the Internet Archive). The gentrification process of industrial film has only begun, and as Prelinger reminded us at the end of his talk, “new careers await” for scholars and archivists of these films, film strips, and other visual education materials produced by Handy and others.
A copy of Rick Prelinger's presentation is available for download here.
Rick Prelinger enjoys Orphans