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Art photographer Paul Strand (USA, 1890) entered the world of cinema with
his first documentary, a collaboration with painter Charles Sheeler, Manhatta (1921), a poem of New York City.
He worked in Mexico for the Mexican government, realizing
Redes/ The Wave (1936), a scathing indictment of
the labor conditions of fishermen, pioneering techniques that predate Italian neorealism.
Back in New York, he
was the cinematographer of Pare Lorentz's documentary
The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), but
his strong political convictions led to disagreements with Lorentz and in 1936 to the
founding of
Frontier Films, a documentary cooperative based in New York, the epicenter of
the so-called
New York school of documentary, which gathered both young and old documentarians.
Strand advocated a cinema that portrays the reality of the poor and the oppressed in a non-intellectual manner that could appeal to ordinary people.
The cooperative was annihilated by McCarthy's anti-communist crusade.
He also directed Native Land (1942).
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