The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River

These two classic American film titles, produced by the Farm Securities Administration, have become synonymous with the New Deal. Director Pare Lorentz credited Dorothea Lange and some of her photo captions of migrants when he wrote, “Blown out, baked out and broke. No place to go and no place to stop” in the script for his first film, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, 16mm to digital, 28 minutes), a portrait of desperation in the dustbowl of the Great Plains during the Great Depression. Lorentz’s The River chronicles the exploration and exploitation of the Mississippi River from the Civil War through the 1920s (1938, 16mm to digital, 31 minutes).