The factories on film, II — Oliver's picture, and the Bendix negative

1951, and the record searched · the second factory's film, and the third's absence

Oliver's Neighbors of the Land: The Oliver Corporation — whose chilled-plow works on Chapin Street were, with Studebaker's, the founding factories of this city — made its documented film a generation after Studebaker's first, and made it the modern sponsored way: in collaboration with a federal agency, on a public theme, distributed free through government offices. The company's own magazine, the Oliver Mirror, reported the premiere in its April 1951 number: Neighbors of the Land, a colour-sound film produced by the Oliver Corporation in collaboration with the Soil Conservation Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, was shown on 12 March 1951 in the community high school at Vandalia, Illinois, where adverse weather could not dim, the magazine says, the brilliance of the showing, and two thousand people attended. The picture had been filmed in Fayette County, Illinois, and the Seminary Township farmers on whose land it was taken were its principal players; additional prints, the Mirror announced, would be distributed throughout the nation by the Soil Conservation Service's regional offices. The geography is printed exactly as the record gives it, because it is the fact that distinguishes this entry from the one before it: by 1951 the Oliver Corporation published its magazine from Chicago and made its film in Illinois — the picture is the corporation's, whole and documented, and it is not a South Bend production, though the corporation was born in the Chapin Street works.

The Bendix test: For the city's third great factory the film test runs negative, and prints at that size. No Bendix film unit, and no Bendix-sponsored picture made in or about the South Bend works, stands in the record reached: the corporation's documented motion-picture work of the era surfaces in its other divisions — the Bendix-Friez instrument division at Baltimore, whose Lumicon image intensifier made the 1957 kinescope film of the Sputnik 1 rocket body, in a project of the Air Force's Cambridge Research Center, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Westinghouse Broadcasting — and not in the brake and carburetor works here. What the South Bend record does hold is architectural: the Bendix headquarters building on the city's west side was built with, on its second floor, a theatre used at different stages of its life for performances and for motion pictures, its walled-in stage and rectangular projector openings still legible when the city's own #MySouthBend campaign documented the building in 2018. Bendix's South Bend picture palace was its own, and it showed other people's films; that, on the record reached, is the whole of the Bendix film entry, and it is printed whole.

Sources

1. Oliver Mirror, Vol. 3 No. 4, April 1951 (the Oliver Corporation's own magazine, via the Digital Public Library of America / Indiana Memory) — the premiere of Neighbors of the Land, 12 March 1951, Vandalia, Illinois; the production by the Oliver Corporation with the Soil Conservation Service; the Fayette County filming and the farmer players; the announced distribution through SCS regional offices; the magazine's own Chicago publication line.
2. The documented record of the Baltimore Sputnik kinescope (the imaging project's published history) — the Friez Instrument Division of the Bendix Aviation Corporation, Baltimore; the Air Force Cambridge Research Center auspices; the film of 12 October 1957. Carried as the Bendix corporation's film work of record, in its own geography.
3. West.SB, "A Million Ideas — The Bendix Headquarters" (the city's #MySouthBend feature series), 17 August 2018 — the headquarters theatre, its stage and projector openings, its use for performances and motion pictures.