A Distant Local View

This chapter focuses on a narrow band of the documentary films that promoted small‐town politics and culture as the essence of American values. Scholars in a number of disciplines have argued that the American small town was a powerful ideological topos in the mid‐twentieth century, as it allowed the US government to present its cultural and economic imperialism abroad under the guise of local, common‐sense values. The chapter focuses on the Reorientation Branch of the Civil Affairs Division of the United States Army, which, starting in 1947, produced documentaries for exhibition in five countries occupied by the US military, Japan, Germany, Korea, and, for a briefer period, Austria and Italy, many of them set and filmed in small towns in the United States. In an October 1950 report by the Reorientation Branch for its stateside operations supporting the occupation of Japan, the government boasted of its production of “original documentaries” for use overseas.