After its opening credits, Elia Kazan’s Wild River from 1960 begins with black-and-white newsreel images of flooding and drowned buildings and streets, probably historical documentary footage, but reformatted to Cinemascope ratio. A testimony from a victim, a middle-aged man looking directly into the camera (presumably staged for the 1960 production) talks about the unexpected flood and the loss of his small children.
The introductory scenes have sometimes mistakenly been attributed to Pare Lorentz’ The River from 1938. The Housing Problem-style first-person testimony is, however, not part of the cinematic grammar of Lorentz’ poetic masterpiece. It is also almost unavoidable to place Kazan’s film from 1960 in dialogue with the short documentary People of the Cumberland (Sidney Meyers, Jay Leyda, 1937), for which he worked as assistant director. Similar first-person testimonies, albeit clearly scripted, are found in that film, where a group of young workers in a field, one by one, list the benefits of labor unions.
In Wild River, a voice-over, emulating the Voice-of-God narration of the kind of 1930s documentaries mentioned above, describes how the Tennessee Valley Authority, or the TVA, was established by Congress in 1933 and authorized to build a series of dams to stop the devastation and loss of life caused by the flooding of the Tennessee river.
In the two films from 1937 and 1938, the TVA is presented right towards the end, as a solution to the problems of the region, “a good beginning but only the beginning”, the narrator of People of the Cumberland calls its program. The TVA will bring “life to the dark valley” by making the soil fertile, by controlling the wild water of the river, and harnessing its immense and dangerous power for electricity. The River and People of the Cumberland are forward-looking films, offering the promise of the New Deal and a more sustainable control of nature, driven by modern technology.
The 1930s-style narration of Kazan’s 1960 film continues from the newsreel sequence (a hybrid of staged and historical footage, and of 1930s stylistics in scope format) into Ellsworth Frederick’s color footage of a single-engine airplane above a river and valley in Tennessee, soon shown to carry TVA agent Chuck Glover (played by Montgomery Clift), looking down at the landscape. The continuing anachronistic narration, which is brief and never appears again, adds information that remained unmentioned in the earlier documentaries – that the TVA “had to buy up all the land along the shore of the river and all the islands in the course of the river”. And adding what becomes a central conflict of the drama: “There were some people who had lived on this land for generations. There were some people who refused to sell under any persuasion whatsoever”. The reason Chuck is visiting a small town in Tennessee is precisely because of someone refusing to sell her land: the old woman Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), occupying an island in the middle of the river, soon to be flooded as a result of the building of a dam for control of the river and a source of electricity.
In People of the Cumberland, people are broken down by capitalist greed and exploitation, but also strong, filled with power and capabilities. The impoverished farmers are “tough, clear-headed, brave”, being of the “stock of the first pioneers”. Wild River demonstrates a highly ambiguous attitude toward this kind of “American spirit”. Ella, the old woman “who won’t budge an inch”, represents a type of stubborn individualism that is both admirable and highly problematic. She is clearly of the “pioneer stock” highlighted in the Cumberland documentary. Chuck, representing the government, expresses his mixed feelings when describing her opposition: “That is the American way of life. Rugged individualism is our heritage. [—] We applaud that spirit. We admire it. We believe in it. But we’ve got to get her the hell out of there”.
Individualism is not compatible with common interest, he proclaims to her: “You don’t love the land. You love your land”. Reactionary love of land or nation is usually linked to protecting one’s own interests, symbolically presented as standing for principles or values of broader importance. For, isn’t the ambition to harness the Tennessee River, known continually to have destroyed property and land and killing people, “plain common sense”, as Chuck puts it? In addition to providing electricity to the 98% of people who currently have no access to it? It is not a matter of “transplanting people’s souls for electricity”, as Ella claims, but rather “giving the people a chance to have a soul”.
Ella asserts that she likes “things running wild”. If they need her to leave her home, she must be removed by force (“not much, but some”), because she will neither go against nature nor crawl for any government. But when she later presents the graveyard on the top of the island where her husband is buried (and her stone is already planted, only missing the year of death but otherwise ready for use), it is obvious that the “pioneer spirit” she admires in her husband never was about entirely following nature or letting it run wild. Her husband was looking for an island, found one, and took it; she describes his hard work clearing and draining the fields, which were either forests or swamps, altogether transforming the natural landscape. Ella’s connection is not entirely to a natural world but to nature fundamentally changed by human intervention.
The aforementioned The River is remarkably similar to Kazan’s 1960 film in its complex attitude towards the human intervention of nature; it is a film that essentially presents a history of the ravaging of natural landscapes. The film criticizes the American history of exploitation of soil and deforestation, being the main source of extreme flooding, homelessness, and hunger: “We planted and ploughed with no regard for the future”. After the soil was destroyed and no longer fertile from overexploitation, farmers simply moved to unspoiled farmlands. Both films contain an admiration of American “pioneer spirit”, combined with acknowledging its destructiveness. The narrator in The River asks: “We built a hundred cities and a thousand towns but at what cost?”
The dams, and hydroelectric power that Chuck and the TVA claim are the solution, also proved to entail their own ecological challenges – altering the flow of rivers, flooding vast areas of land, the disruption of existing ecosystems, displacing both humans and wildlife, both agricultural areas and wild forests. Chuck tells Ella that sometimes it is impossible to be true to one’s beliefs without hurting people. In Kazan’s moral universe, no one is entirely innocent. According to J. Hoberman, Kazan’s strongest movies (after his testimony before the House Committee of Un-American Activities) feature “some form of betrayal”, with Wild River being the most complex and confessional. In his autobiography, Kazan also described how his sympathies gradually shifted toward Ella during the development of the film: “While my man from Washington had the social right on his side, the picture I made was in sympathy with the old woman obstructing progress”.
Chuck’s attempt to maintain Ella’s life outside the island is futile, initiating searches for a house that resembles the one she has to leave, instructing that it needs to have a porch, knowing this is an empty, symbolic gesture, producing only a simulation of something that is forever lost. As she is about to be picked up to leave her house and the island, Ella is sweeping the front porch, just like the old woman early on in People of the Cumberland – but dressed in a black coat and hat, almost as if she is going to a funeral. Afterwards, she is sitting in a chair on the front porch, with a suitcase on her knee, waiting for her own evicition. Trees on her property are cut down immediately as she leaves the house, before she is off the island. The displacement of Ella and the destruction of her home echo the images of people losing their homes to the floods early in the film. Ella’s quiet protest is first and foremost of a self-destructive nature, withering slowly away after she is upended from the soil of the island to which she has a connection. She is buried in the graveyard, first seen in close shots, then seen from afar, revealing that only the top of the hill where the cemetery is placed, is above the waterline of the river. The island has turned into a tiny islet, a cemetery sticking out of the water.
As Chuck leaves the town by airplane, now with a wife and two adopted children (Ella’s widowed granddaughter Carol, played by Lee Remick, and her children – the complexities and ambiguities of this relationship have been examined closely in several analyses of the film), they look down at the river and the floating cemetery. The river is seen from far above, with the dam in the middle. An old-fashioned iris effect closes in on the dam, circling it, making space for and accompanying the film’s end titles. In his biography on Kazan, Thomas H. Pauly points out that both People of the Cumberland and Wild River end with similar images of a hydroelectric dam. Over two decades after the first film, Kazan’s view of this symbol of progress had changed drastically. The enthusiasm and conviction of the 1930s have been replaced by mixed emotions and doubt.
Eirik Frisvold Hanssen