"Neutrality-Humanity": The Humanitarian Mission and the Films of the American Red Cross

Jennifer Horne

In 1921 the American Red Cross in the east-central Ohio county of Muskingum took up motion picture exhibition, putting on an ambitious monthly film series to be shown at various community sites across the region. Announcements of the summer-long event promised viewers films of high quality made by the Red Cross, with each evening opened by guest lecturers on topics tied to the films and closed with rounds of community singing. The outreach film programming purported to offer discussion and illumination in areas of continuing education relevant to the immediate farming community: agriculture, health, schools, good roads, and child welfare. The Ohio Red Cross chapters mounted these screenings with portable projection equipment loaned to the organisation by a local enterprise hoping to draw sales interest from audiencemembers – just the type of private-public partnership celebrated by pro-business advocates of visual education, who stood to gain from such tacit displays of public betterment.

While the touring films were touted as educational, individual film titles' relationship to each theme reveals a more relaxed curriculum. We might ask what the travelogue reel, Venice (1920), was doing in the "Schools" program? Or how Father Knickerbocker's Children (1920) supported the goal of "Good Roads"? Topical but residual in its conception of film reception, the entire summer program consisted of films released as many as three years earlier. These film programs confirm film historians' current conception of the nontheatrical distribution network as remedial and repertory-by-default, sustaining and sustained by an unfiltered and uneven flow of older and cheaper films.

Sponsored film exhibitions tied to charity fundraising and community education, simultaneously goodwill gestures and good publicity, offer us further evidence of the dynamic interplay between the varied publics of moviegoing. Mobile, makeshift, and enthusiastically civic-spirited screenings of motion pictures in public halls, schools, libraries, churches, lodges, and peripheral cinemas in urban locations were not only well-established by 1915, but they were a continuation of the screen practices of traveling showmen, lanternists, and lecturers before them. The circulation of Red Cross films and filmmaking by the Red Cross is a short-lived film example that would ordinarily be considered outside of the networks of entertainment but which is more properly understood as having taken place on the fringes of this sphere. What makes the example of the in-house production of films by the American Red Cross all the more notable as a nontheatrical endeavour is the agency's late entrance and sudden exit from film production, at the same time as production, distribution, and exhibition outlets for educational and instructional film in North America entered a period of relative stability and modest profitability. And the American Red Cross's filmmaking division addressed its audience with all of the authority of a semi-governmental agency, lending to any screening of its films an automatic public legitimacy.

Whether that summer screening in 1921 was a success or not – or whether it demonstrates a national but fragmentary cinema of civic happenstance – it is clear that this type of charity organisation film gathering has not yet been properly accounted for by film historians. That the American Red Cross produced short films during these years is a fact that still goes relatively unrecognised by scholars. Regular but cursory mention is made by historians of the Red Cross photography units as willing purveyors of war propaganda, always in connection with its cooptation by the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) and George Creel's Committee on Public Information (CPI). Similarly, it is well-known that Pathé and other studios regularly purchased Red Cross footage of the European conflict for use in weekly newsreel and screen magazine programs. This kind of trafficking in footage might have been widespread during this period, but is not well documented (and so, not very often pursued as a meaningful topic for analysis). Several well-known documentary filmmakers (such as Ernest Schoedsack and Merl LaVoy) and photographers (Lewis Hine, for example)were given an officer's rank and uniform and sent to the field to make films for the unit or shoot stills for Red Cross publications and film publicity. Hamid Naficy has recognised the significance of the Red Cross to the career of Schoedsack and written about his fieldwork as cameraman for the Bureau. Gerry Veeder, meanwhile, has published a detailed overview of the Red Cross's years in film production in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. The most authoritative analysis of the Bureau's moving image work to date, her article raises a series of important questions about institutional filmmaking, educational film culture (broadly construed), and archival discovery that have yet to be fully responded to. In what follows, I consider the ways that specific generic categories – beyond the familiar codes of objectivity and dispassionate enunciation usually applied to works of nonfiction – help us frame the agency's film work as specific to its humanitarian mission and quasi-governmental status. In the Red Cross's employment of motion pictures, neutrality, it appears, was both a filmic device and an ideological rationale.

The Red Cross Motion Picture Bureau was established in late 1916 primarily for the purpose of satisfying a publicity mission. Starting in 1917, the Bureau sent camera operators into war relief areas. Closing finally in 1922, it had produced motion pictures in the years after the war as part of its civilian public health campaigns. Due to its governmental status, the Red Cross's film unit was able to attract talented photographers and camera operators who had been called into military service. The unit produced over one hundred titles in all. Only seven titles are held in the collections of film archives today.

The first Motion Picture Bureau chiefs envisioned Red Cross membership as the principal, if not exclusive, audience for its films. In 1917, the agency restricted exhibition of the films it produced to Red Cross chapters and special fundraising engagements. But this exclusivity of address quickly evaporated as the agency's financial needs shifted and exhibitors exercised practical patriotism. The Historic Fourth of July in Paris (1918), featuring parades of Red Cross nurses, became the agency's inaugural public screening in August 1918. Its premier was held at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City and the film was subsequently booked into over two thousand vaudeville houses. To determine the full range of locations and spaces in which the

Red Cross films were shown would require research at the level of regional chapters. What is potentially most interesting about the Red Cross's film exhibition initiative is its close connection to community-based organisations that the burgeoning nontheatrical circuits sought to outfit with projection equipment and screens: Rotary halls, Kiwanis clubs, churches, schools, theatres, social clubs, and the like. The address to the audience must have been somewhat pluralising, seeking out among spectators the immediate Red Cross public and an aspirational sympathetic public as well.

Confusion about the intended audience for these films can be found both within the organisation's internal communication and in announcements for Red Cross films in trade papers of the day. One of the thornier issues of rhetoric circumscribing the visual campaigns of the Red Cross, however, was the professed ideal of political neutrality that bound the organisation to its humanitarian mission. Prior to 6 April 1917, the stated mission of the American Red Cross was to adhere to a notion of political neutrality in aid and humanitarian service; even its letterhead proclaimed "Neutrality-Humanity". When the organisation became an auxiliary to the armed forces, however, offering civilian relief and applying the "merciful hand" in neutral fashion was impossible. To further complicate matters, under the US Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 it was unlawful to speak against the Red Cross or its war work. Other American relief and volunteer agencies – the YMCA, the Knights of Columbus, and the American Library Association, to name a few – provided educational and recreational services, including a steady stream of motion pictures, to soldiers in war camps. But the assistance given by the Red Cross was different in that it was specifically commissioned to perform patriotic duty.

The subject matter and stylistic range of the one- and two-reel agency films prove vexing for anyone seeking to dismiss the organisation's filmic output as shallow instruments of persuasion. Judging by the extant films, available stills, and catalogue descriptions, the films produced by the agency during its years of in-house operation had a remarkable consistency of voice and message. Generically and visually, the films balanced the foreign with the familiar. Film catalogues and printed brochures dispatched to regional chapters advertised the pictures using the most commonly used descriptors for topical film: "war picture", "action picture", "travel films", "scenic films", and "industrial films". Encouraging well-balanced film programs, the agency suggested themed programs such as "travel and science", or "the rehabilitation of veterans", or "health films", without regard for the specific needs of a region or chapter. Film titles were either poetic or emotionally-laden, in an attempt to draw attention away from graphic depictions of human suffering or destruction: Of No Use to Germany (1918) featured French and German civilian war refugees; Your Boy (1918) was composed of footage of wounded American soldiers under the care of Red Cross workers in France; The Train at Havre (1918; alternate title, The Train of Horror) contained graphic images of Russian war wounded returning from the front lines of the war; and New Faces for Old (1918) showed the reconstruction of mutilated soldiers by French doctors. Come Clean (1918?), a dental hygiene film in two reels produced by the US Army but distributed by the Red Cross, found wider circulation, as did the home hygiene and public health nursing pictures, Every Woman's Problem (1921) and Winning Her Way (1921).

Lines between intellectual and popular audiences were blurred, as were the lines between information and spectacle. Reportage in the war pitched charity: information was combined with sentiment in order to soothe, comfort, and reassure the viewer that something good was coming of their benevolence and humanitarianism. In its final years of operation, the Bureau turned out nursing films and educational titles more germane to a sense of American neediness. Didactic films displaying domestic household hygiene addressed public health issues, advertised the teaching of first aid and water safety, and dramatized the history of Red Cross workers. Another series of shorts, produced for Junior Red Cross audiences, featured pen-pal narratives with war orphans abroad.

Closer examination of the Red Cross's catalogues in which these series were described and promoted can help us further refine our understanding of the morphology of educational genres in this period. If we take, for instance, those films presented to the public as travelogue pictures, we can usefully locate their imaginative power and manner of address as expressive modes that lay somewhere between the two key tendencies of early factual film: a cosmopolitan and globe-trotting cinema, dispatching camera operators to exoticised, far-flung regions with the intent to broaden spectatorial horizons, and a cinema that delighted in depicting the world just outside the theatre doors. The latter tendency would constitute what Tom Gunning refers to as "a cinema of locality", typified by an audience's amazement in seeing the recognisable and the familiar on screen. In the hands of Red Cross photographers, that sense of familiarity might have been produced by the display of a procedure or a vocation as a humanising debut: the selling of wares in an outdoor market, for instance, in The Fall of Kiev (1919). Cinematic treatment of an everyday life during wartime found the familiar in the foreign by couching its documentary tourism in terms of a humanitarian mission. With conflict somewhere off-frame, but also operating in this mode of displaying everydayness, the organisation would be able to link its mission – as promoted to its supporters – to the magical immediacy of the cinema without trafficking in the spectacles of war photography. Indeed, the years of film production at the Red Cross coincide and track perfectly with the emergence of the paradoxical phenomenon of the "exotic mundane" in nonfiction films as described by William Urrichio. As the more spectacular novelties of early cinema gave way to serious subjects, the demand to capture and hold the audience's attention in a state of wonderment was tempered by more prosaic and familiar scenes. In the years leading up to the war, Urrichio explains, "[T]he motion picture's intimate visual access to remote cultures, famous persons, and historical events managed simultaneously to enhance its subjects' aura (putting them in the news, making them 'bigger than life') while transforming the exotic or exalted into a repeatable commodity – an ordinary, even trivial, encounter". After the war, a more subdued approach dominated, one that Urrichio attributes to "a new cultural immune system". It is no surprise, then, that at the stylistic core of the American Red Cross's filmmaking venture (a venture not isolated from the agency's other communications aims and divisions) we find a transitional enunciation, one that toggles between spectatorial distance and familiarity.

Looking at the catalogue descriptions, the lobby cards, and the publicity stills that remain from these films, one also sees evidence of the common generic strategy of asserting an Americanism that treats the rest of the world as its subordinate, its past, and its object of consumption. The Red Cross Travel Series (1920–21) most likely used highly conventional strategies to depict the geographically distant and culturally different. As Jennifer Peterson has observed, the early travel film's primary mode of address performs the "acting out of attraction and repulsion". From this perspective, it makes sense that in the North African film, Children of the Sahara (1921), a title which is no longer extant, many of the scenes seem to have been composed to display rituals and beliefs that underscore stereotypes about the uncivilised and mystical ways of the Other. However, if the films in this series likely also conformed to standard expedition and scenic film conventions, using the most commercially successful and exploitative techniques to depict far-off places and peoples, it is also true that these were not simply travel films but a hybridised version of the genre that would hardly encourage leisure travel, tourism, or unselfconsciously embody a tourist's subjectivity. In fact, it is more likely that titles such as In Picturesque Romania (1921), Prague, City of a Hundred Towers (1921), Apple Blossom Time in Normandy (1921), and Beside the Zuider Zee (1921) would have been presented to audiences as typical voyage-oriented views of the world when their humanitarian aid message unsettled the idea of venturing there; more likely, an excess of appeals pushed these films out of their conventional generic location entirely. If, as Peterson argues, a dynamic of fascination and ambivalence became the commercial travel genre's most characteristic quality, then in the Red Cross travel series especially, the underlying purpose of salvation and rescue would alter both the landscape and the gaze. After all, these films were meant to illustrate a charitable commitment to aid from afar for those living in the wake of conflict, with travel to these lands inadvisable and even dangerous.

Through its graphic association of action and participation through charity and aid, the Red Cross multiplied the burden of representation already contained in films from the front. As Gerry Veeder argues, spectators were promised that in these films they would see their kindness writ large: viewers were shown "the tangible results of their donations, medical supplies, bandages, kit bags, clothing, and food. Human drama, shown in the faces of the participants, was combined with the maternal image of the Red Cross, personified in posters as 'the Greatest Mother'". Films that were not premised upon the actual circumstances of a refugee population, returning soldiers, or human catastrophe would employ sentimental devices of narration to associate patriotism with humanism. Films that were, were more sensational; The Land without Mirth (1920), a depiction of war refugees in Belgium, adopted picturesque strategies of displacement in order to shift attention from referential documentary content to the hypertrophic heroic support network of the agency. The Red Cross film brochure promised viewers that Land Without Mirth would take them "into a land so dreary that the children have only cemeteries for playgrounds, into once comfortable homes now masses of ruins".