1930MAKING WHEELS FOR AUTOMOBILES

COMMENT

The most telling detail here is the subtitle "Ford Educational Weekly". These short documentaries were beautifully produced with exemplary clarity by the company's Education Department. One purpose of the films was to explain simple jobs to the intake of 'farm boys' whom Henry Ford needed to employ to feed his burgeoning car plants in Michigan.

Most of the intake of new workers could not read and many had no skills. With great foresight Ford's managers realized they could turn these educational negatives to commercial advantage through film storytelling. The films were projected to groups to persuade them they could master the simple repetitive actions needed to (in this case) make a wheel. The company's new 'single function machine tools' (featured in this film) had been specifically designed to require no instructions and almost no operational skills - except speed and stamina. The men who were fed into the maw of mass-production simply had to watch and learn. The title cards between the scenes were carefully written (for those who could read) using the terminology adhered to within the plant so that everyone could agree on what the job was, what to do and how to do it.

'Making Wheels for Automobiles' is pure documentary. It has no function other than to inform. But when the Italian Futurists saw films like this, they claimed a new aesthetic had been born. We can see their point. There is something mesmerizing, modern and choreographed in the repetitive mechanical actions of these men. They seem to dance to a new tune (In Charlie Chaplin's 1936 feature film 'Modern Times' he parodies this when, during a break, his worker-hero cannot stop jerking, bending and twirling to the rhythm of the production line he has just left).

Mass production had by no means reached its peak at the time this film was produced and the romance of its revolutionary approach to work was still fresh and optimistic. Part of the reason was mass-production's price-slashing effect on the ticket price of the Model T Ford ($825 in 1908 down to $360 in 1916). It undercut all competitors, and brought motorized haulage and travel to within reach of America's tradesmen, to ordinary women, and to the men who built them. As a result, during the 1920's, Ford's single-function system spread not just to Fiat in Italy: but to Citroen in France, Austin in the UK and most famously to the massive Volks-Wagen Werke in Nazi Germany.

But by 1932 worries about this type of dehumanizing labour were beginning to emerge. Aldous Huxley in his dystopian novel 'Brave New World' had Ford displace God and the crucifix replaced by a letter 'T'. Huxley projected the perfectly identical actions and outcomes of these mass production workers into a new biological mass-production where the workers themselves became - robot-like - the perfect products.

The film is also a superb historical record of change. Despite Ford's remarkable deconstruction of an ancient skilled craft into a modern machine-like routine, the wheels in this film remain recognizably a 19thCentury cartwheel construction built using the same seasoned wood, tapered joints, steel rims and hubs in the way previously hand-made pre-automobile wheels had been. All-metal, three-piece, pressed-steel automobile wheels were just appearing when this film was shot. Within a few months even these grim tasks would be consigned to the dustbin of history.

It is also worth bearing in mind the men in this film were doing sought after jobs. In fact the apparently enslaved workers were extremely well paid. At the time Ford was famous for his high wages (The "five-dollar-day") and forty-hour week until new competition and the Great Depression slashed his profits and ushered in an era of industrial turmoil.

Finally, the film is also interesting because it is not edited to a mechanistic rhythm as might be expected. The rhythm is within the action, not enhanced in the way later documentary makers would do to impart their message of repetitive mass-production. 'Making Wheels for Automobiles' is the real thing.

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