Industrialization & Factory Workers Film By General Motors

Valley Town is a social documentary directed by Willard Van Dyke and was commissioned by the Alfred P. Sloane foundation during Sloane’s management of General Motors. It explores the effect of industrialization on American towns. A great piece of documentary filmmaking, Valley Town is the fictionalized boomtown that is created by machines, but is then destroyed by newer machines that make its workers obsolete. The effects of industrialization on population are devastating. An extremely sensitive and well made film, Valley Town portrays the shattered lives of the factory workers and their wives and children through haunting images of industrialization in America. Meditative shots of the demolished factory and its crestfallen workers is overlaid with beautiful songs sung by the workers' wives. Because of its message – the irresponsibility of large corporations was largely to blame for catastrophes of this nature – Sloane pulled it from post-production and had it edited to cast corporations in a better light and promote a new message of educating workers in order to keep them from becoming unemployable. This is an important moment in the history of General Motors. Still, the film retains the better part of its criticism of evil corporate America and captures the average lifestyle during industrialization in America.