Lorentz, Pare 1905-

American filmmaker.

Leonard MacTaggart Lorentz was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, in 1905. "Pare," the traditional family name, had already been taken by his father, a cousin, and an uncle. One more, his mother thought, would be one too many. But, after Lorentz came to New York City in 1925 to make a career as a journalist, he assumed his father's name and used it for his byline. Working freelance, he began reviewing movies for several magazines, including Judge, Vanity Fair, and McCall's. Lorentz also contributed essays and fiction to Harper's, Scribner's, and The New Yorker. Immediately recognized as an important critic, he was 25 years old when he published his first book, Censored: The Private Life of the Movies. He received his advance money -- six hundred dollars -- on the day of the stock-market crash.

During the early years of the Depression, when nearly one-quarter of the American workforce was unemployed, Lorentz blithely got himself hired and fired from a succession of magazine positions. He further alienated some employers with his enthusiasm for the New Deal. His second book, The Roosevelt Year: 1933, was a pictorial record of the President's first twelve months in office. A laudatory profile of Henry Wallace, the progressive Secretary of Agriculture, cost him yet another job -- this time he was fired by William Randolph Hearst. But, the piece also helped bring him to the attention of policy-makers in the Resettlement Administration, an agriculture relief bureau that promoted its efforts through the work of such photographers as Evans and Lange. "Our job," one agency artist recalled, "was to educate the city dweller to the needs of the rural population." A film could spread the message even more effectively, and Lorentz was given the assignment.

Choosing the Dust Bowl as his subject, he traveled from Montana to Texas, filming the unprecedented erosion that was destroying billions of tons of fertile land. With a $6,000 budget, he was forced to shoot real people on location, as opposed to using actors in a studio lot. Money concerns proscribed the use of sound-film; he instead employed voice-over narration and a classical score. These became the hallmarks of the Lorentz style, but their origins rested as much with necessity as with preference. The Plow That Broke the Plains -- which was half an hour long and had cost less than $20,000 to produce -- premiered in the spring of 1936.

Next, he directed a masterpiece. In The River, he documented the devastating seasonal inundations in the Mississippi valley. During January 1937, after months of shooting, the crew was crating up its equipment when news arrived of an approaching flood. Lorentz flew to the set and remained at the disaster site for weeks, capturing the most remarkable footage of his career. Throughout 1938, The River played before audiences in the United States and Europe, screening in commercial theaters -- often as part of a twin-bill with Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The film was awarded the prize for Best Documentary at the Venice Film Festival.

In August 1938, Lorentz was named director of the latest New Deal agency, the United States Film Service, which operated under the National Emergency Council, and drew funds from the Works Progress Administration. Intended "to coordinate the activities of the several departments and agencies which relate to the production or distribution of motion picture films," the Service potentially could have economized Washington's propagandistic and educational efforts.

So far, Lorentz had completed short documentaries on soil erosion and flooding. For his next project, he chose a feature-length fiction film about the subject of unemployment. To dramatize a national crisis affecting millions, Ecce Homo! would focus on the odyssey of one single character, an out-of-work man referred to only as Worker #7790. The nameless protagonist was merely a prism through which to focus on the nation's vast productive capacities. In 1939, Lorentz and his crew set to work. Film crews gathered footage of mass-production at Ford's River Rouge facility, and captured shots showing the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. But, despite these efforts, funding problems grew insuperable and the project was abandoned. Later, in 1941, Lorentz attempted to revive the picture, with the new title, Name, Age and Occupation, as an RKO production, but again work had to stop. The film was never finished.

When Roosevelt prepared to launch a series of health-care initiatives in 1939, he called on Lorentz and ordered him to turn his attention toward medicine. The director decided to start at the beginning, with childbirth. The Fight For Life focused on the Chicago Maternity Center, an under-funded clinic that cared for poor mothers, and yet produced a better record than many local hospitals. For the first time in his career, Lorentz used professional actors -- but only for a few key roles. Most of his dramatis personae were, as always, the American people. It premiered in the spring of 1940 to excellent reviews, and followed its predecessors in a wide commercial release.

That same year, however, Congress voted to stop financing the United States Film Service. Lorentz was too busy to pause over the demise of his bureau. The New Deal decade was over, anyway. The 1940s had arrived, and Roosevelt's attention was turning away from domestic reform to focus on the international situation. The war decade had begun, and Lorentz -- as always -- would be there for his Commander-in-Chief.

In 1943, he received the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and the assignment to lead a specialized flying force, the Overseas Technical Unit, which was tasked to produce briefing films informing pilots of key landmarks along important routes.

Upon completing his work with the Overseas Technical Unit and returning to civilian life, Lorentz spliced together millions of feet of historical footage depicting the Nazi regime -- from the earliest putsches to the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg -- into a feature-length documentary called Nuremberg -- Its Lesson for Today. Released in West Berlin in 1948, it received the usual applause. But, two years later the government removed its support-- Germany was now an ally, after all.

In his later years, Lorentz grew increasingly dissatisfied with the nation's progress. He was also critical of the medium he had helped pioneer, complaining about "the familiar disease of 'talking heads.''' Other directors, in his view, had confused unsightliness for naturalism. Lorentz himself continued to envision radical projects, factual films that would explain unpleasant truths to skeptical audiences. "If I were making documentaries now," he said when he was in his 80s, "I'd like to see how bad the sludge in New York harbor is, see where the radiation is coming from."

Pare Lorentz died in March 1992; he was 86 years old.