Many of those in the audiences who watched Power and
the Land may not have realized how much reenactment
took place in the film. This was certainly is the case in
the opening scenes involving the family’s use of the
wood stove, kerosene lights, and the tub and scrub board.
Here the Parkinsons were recreating what life had been like
before electricity. This was “reenactment” and
not “reality” in terms of the family’s
life style in late 1939. But such a filming technique was
fairly common during this period. In the early 1920s, even
the great American filmmaker, Robert Flaherty, had made
widespread use of reenactment in his classic Nanook
of the North. This type of approach was fairly common
up through the 1950s. As Brian Winston has demonstrated
in an article (in Kees Bakker, Joris Ivens and the Documentary
Context, 1999) Ivens was not the only documentary filmmaker
to use what some have called “straightforward re-enactment”
or the “staging of reality.”
 At
one point, Ivens did seem to stretch the boundaries of the
“staging of reality.” One of the more pastoral
scenes in Power and the Land shows the Parkinson
boys leading two white horses out of the barn, harnessing
them to a mower, and then going out to cut the hay. In the
final sequences, the hay is pitch forked onto a wagon, which
the boys drive back to the barn, passing Hazel as she is
hanging clothes on the line. The horses are then unhitched.
In reality, the Parkinsons used mules rather than horses.
They did not have any horses on their farm. Ivens, however,
had persuaded the Parkinsons to use horses, apparently believing
that this would make the story more representative of a
typical Ohio farm operation. And if Ivens brought in horses,
he also left out any shots of the family’s tractor
- until the end of the farm. Bill Parkinsons, according
to the recollections of his nephew John W. Parkinson III,
had a gasoline-powered tractor prior to the arrival of the
film crew. But in the film, the tractor is shown only in
the final scenes - after the family has electricity. Hazel,
having cooked a meal on her new electric stove, goes out
on the porch to ring the bell announcing supper. Bill, driving
a steel-wheeled tractor, heads back to the house. Was the
appearance of the tractor in the final moments of the film
an attempt to show that the Parkinsons, foresighted enough
to join a co-op and bring electricity to their farm, were
also progressive enough to use other technological innovations?
Interestingly enough, the Parkinsons had apparently made
only very limited use of this tractor. The real field work
on their farm had been done using the team of mules.
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