Conquer by the Clock
Conquer by the Clock is a short film from 1943 released on 16mm. It is held in the Prelinger Archives collection.
Encourages American wartime workers to "keep their sleeves rolled up." Describes the volume of industrial and agricultural production that can be accomplished in a single day: enough rifles for a battalion, 1000 acres of corn converted to 30,000 bushels of food."
| Conquer by the Clock | |
|---|---|
| Produced by | RKO-Pathe |
Production company | RKO-Pathe |
| Distributed by | RKO-Pathe |
Release date | 1943 |
Running time | 10:40 |
| Language | English |
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Calls tired workers, in effect, "saboteurs". Narration admonishes workers for the death of soldiers through inadequate equipment or supplies. Utterly melodramatic. Urges workers to move production forward relentlessly. Says that "the clock" is what will win the war.
"The clock on the wall -- on the 7th day of December, 1941, it struck the eleventh hour. Every hour after that has been, will be, zero hour." Patriotic discourse today tends to speak in generalities. It asks the public for its mind, rather than its commitment. But the world of Conquer by the Clock is a world at war. Patriotism requires universal, compulsory mobilization of bodies and time. Here allegiance means work rather than words. In this world time and distance have collapsed. Clocks and long-distance communication networks regulate the world according to a single beat. This is a globalist film, an uncanny precursor both of postwar one-worlder consciousness and the international workplace of the Nineties. "Sunrise over Republic Steel. High noon at Willow Run. Sunfall on the Electric Boat Company. Midnight at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Dawn to dusk, and back to dawn again. Three eight-hour shifts. One day. So much can be done in a day if Americans will keep their sleeves rolled up." Time, the elusive fourth dimension, is also a commodity: "Every American has his job to do, and the will to do it, and the tools to do it with. Pray God, he also has the time. Time -- the most vital natural resource of a country at war. Every tick of a clock is time won or lost. Every 60-minute sweep, every 12-hour tour of those relentless hands are turning out carload lots of time for us to use ourselves or to give away to the enemy." There are shots of workers running to their jobs, hands picking up hammers, pitchforks, rifles. "Our hands must be as relentless as the hands of our clocks. They cannot afford to be less." To a strident narration and the beat of pendulums and metronomes, the theme is hammered home. As the advertisements in the supplement entitled "Production: Front-Line Trench" show, this theme filled the wartime media, illustrated by images of clocks and self-sacrificing war workers. In this vision, there's little difference between the actions of patriotic but thoughtless Americans and Axis saboteurs. The film s flavor is shown by a partial synopsis, written by a wartime reviewer expressing the racism of the time: a girl inspecting rifle cartridges in a war plant a patriotic American takes time for an extra smoke, neglects to fill her place on the inspection line, and thus allows several boxes of uninspected cartridges to pass as O.K. One of these cartridges, a dud, later finds its way into the rifle of an American soldier somewhere in the South Pacific. On scouting patrol, he sights a Jap, aims, presses the trigger and fires harmlessly. He is killed by a Jap bullet. PM, New York's leftwing daily, in its review (on this disc) tried to set the record straight by citing cases of timewasting by corporate management, but ended up by praising the film as "remarkably well conceived, almost like a mechanical symphony, with swift cross-shots of machinery in action, rhythmically and even catchily in time to a musical score." Similar to many other World War II-era films, Conquer by the Clock equates patriotism with productivity, and reframed the New Deal-era ethic of collective action into a wartime context. Two parables about carelessness and recreation on the homefront are followed by a chorus singing inspirational doggerel in the style of From Dawn to Sunset (see the Capitalist Realism disc).
Steel, might and skill are welded To win liberty for all. Let's keep the flame of freedom Blazing whatever may befall.
Fill every burning moment Until conquered is the foe In every time We fight for time For we must ever onward go.
You in the field and farmland and you in the factory Will help to make men free Until the victory -- The victory!
And the hands of a rapidly spinning clock slow down to form a "V."
Director Person:Slavko Vorkapich (1895 1976), was the acknowledged master of "montage sequences" -- image combination and superimposition techniques that infused often quite ordinary movies with moments of abstraction. With Robert Florey and Gregg Toland, he made the early American experimental film The Life and Death of a Hollywood Extra (1928); later, he made his famous contribution to Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's Crime Without Passion (1934). Besides Conquer by the Clock, he made six other This Is America short subjects for RKO-Path , including Private Smith, U.S.A., Women in Arms, Lieutenant Smith and New Americans. For many years, he wrote and lectured on cinematic form and structure, and taught advanced film students. Since Conquer by the Clock isn't available through current distribution channels, few have seen this example of his work, one of the few films that was all his own. But given Vorkapich's strong opinions about the relationship of art and entertainment, it's worth a look. As he told Thomas M. Pryor of The New York Times (November 26, 1944): "There are moments in every picture but no one picture is completely art. Cutters don't notice the beauty of movement. If a producer were striving for this art he would say to his writers...read only the picture story and not the dialogue. If the images express the ideas it would be art."