Pare Lorentz Film Center

Projects, Films of Pare Lorentz

Film Critic

  • Judge magazine, 1926–34
  • New York Evening Journal, 1931–32
  • Vanity Fair magazine, 1932–33
  • Town and Country magazine, 1933–41
  • McCall’s magazine, 1935–41

Books

Censored: The Private Life of the Movies

Co-authored with Morris L. Ernst
Published by Cape & Smith, 1930

The Roosevelt Year

Published by Funk & Wagnalls, 1934

The River

Published by Stackpole & Son, 1938

Lorentz on Film: Movies 1927-1941

Published by Hopkinson and Blake, 1975
Reissued by University of Oklahoma Press, 1988

FDR’s Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts

Published by University of Nevada Press, 1992

Films

The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936)youtube_icon

Written and directed for the U.S. Resettlement Administration

The River (1938)youtube_icon

Written and directed for the USDA Farm Security Administration
Released by Paramount Pictures; won Best Documentary at the Venice International Film Festival; narration nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry

The Fight for the Life (1940)youtube_icon

Written and directed for the U.S. Film Service
Released by Columbia Pictures; won Best Documentary Film Award from the National Board of Review; script included in Twenty Best Film Plays, a book by Prof. John Gassner and Dudley Nichols (Crown Publishers, 1943)

The City

and

The Land

Supervised and written by Pare Lorentz

Ecce Homo!

A radio drama, written and directed by Pare Lorentz

Rural Co-op

Written and directed by Pare Lorentz, set in Rockingham County, VA

Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today

Directed by Pare Lorentz and shown for two years post WWII to packed houses in American-occupied Germany and other European nations; not released in the U.S. until 1979