Industrial Education: The Bureau of Mines’ Cinematic History
Reminiscent of Vertov’s early Soviet montages, the Bureau of Mines’ similar propagandistic vein of education aimed to promote the governmental and industrial revolution throughout the twentieth century. Emphasizing and aestheticizing corporate interest under the guise of education, the United States Bureau of Mines, Department of Interior produced hundreds of films on the benefits of mining, fracking, and resource exploitation. Many of these films, forgotten and previously undated, have been salvaged by independent film preservation services and the National Archive. Once used as vital aids in normalizing corporate and governmental agenda, these films exist today as digital and analog relics of a spreading industrial ideology. Below is a portion of the Bureau’s capitalist-driving films that follow the medium’s long history of propaganda.
Archive Lucida
The technological revolution, a by-product of late-stage capitalism, ultimately led art to a Marxist destination — the cinema. Unique in its technological reproducibility and inherent ability to escape the bounds of singularity, early cinema achieved an unprecedented populistic appeal amongst its urban proletariat audiences. Film is a democratizing medium, accessible to the masses through the reorientation of dominant institutional hierarchies and cultural exclusivities. Archive Lucida adopts this same objective as a universalizing platform for digital humanities research, preservation, and publication. Our collections are curated and made public for mass consumption, free from traditional barriers to entry. Our platform draws inspiration from the Early Surrealists, French photographer Eugène Atget, Filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy, and the writings of Walter Benjamin, Anton Kaes, and Gernot Böhme. As a freeform, digital archive, we aim to make underrepresented art, time-based media, and academic materials decentralized and publicly accessible.
