South Bend in Film

Film

South Bend's screen record is short, and almost all of it is distinguished. The production record reached for this history documents two Hollywood feature productions on the ground here, fifty-two years apart, both of them Notre Dame football pictures; one earlier feature set on the campus and shot in a Hollywood studio built to imitate it; a factory film program that runs from a 1921 picture of an automobile being built to a centennial docudrama with Hollywood actors playing the founding brothers; a Peabody-winning documentary, made from Chicago, about the worst day in the city's industrial life; and a working local filmmaking record — a university production company that ran for two decades, a film festival the city founded and then lost to a smaller city, and a student festival older than most of its filmmakers. What the record does not hold is printed at its true size at the end. One fact of the map is stated once, here, and not argued: the campus where most of this happened stands in Notre Dame, Indiana, an unincorporated place of its own immediately north of the South Bend city limits — the films are the region's, the datelines are South Bend's, and the ground is printed as it lies.