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vi PEEFACE
A decade later the groundwork of the 16-mm had been quietly completed. Hollywood was then deep in the throes of providing wide-range and high-fidelity sound ; the question of the sound vs. the silent film had been answered by the public at the box office. The influence of the British documentary movement spearheaded by Grierson had already made itself felt in the United States. "The River" and "The Plow that Broke the Plains" of Pare Lorenz had established themselves as qualified American descendents of Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North," one of our earliest and best documentaries. The theory and practice of the training film had been lucidly and accurately set forth in a U. S. Army "Memorandum to G-3 : Factors in Training Film Production and Use" dated February, 1936; this document had been prepared by Melvin E. Gillette within the Army. Gillette, like his Army associates, Hoorn, Jervey, and Stodter, had been trained in the mechanics of film production through the auspices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ; their study in Hollywood had been the culmination of the efforts of Prosser, Fox, Lewis, and others to make such training possible. Like all documents that live beyond the short life span of their authors, this one is timeless ; it defines the place of the training film and of other films in relation to the national military establishment, and describes in straightforward language the principles that guide their production and use.
During the same period, the U. S. Navy laid the groundwork for the sound slide film; the work of Byron McCandless of the Bureau of Navigation will not be forgotten in Navy records. The names of Reifsnider and Fraser made their appearance a short while later in the Navy roster in the development of sound films for Navy recruiting. The U. S. Air Corps had also been active in training films. Hagemeyer, a civilian at Wright Field, will be remembered for his continued devotion and accomplishments over the same two decades. In 1931, a short series of films on pilot training had been turned out experimentally at Wright Field with the cooperation of RCA Photophone Inc. ; these films were later sent to England to the R. A. F. The Department of Agriculture, through its Extension Service Office of Motion Pictures, had acquired sound equipment in 1930, and soon produced simple, effective, and lowcost factual sound films under the expert guidance of Raymond Evans, its Chief, and his associate, Chester Lindstrom. The films are considered models by which agricultural films are made everywhere today. Meanwhile, the amateur ranks, already large, swelled noticeably because of the