May 13, 2010
What do you know about Malburg, city of big churches and easy virtue?
Editor’s Note: The UW Audio Visual Services Materials Library has more than 1,200 reels of film from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, documenting life at the University through telecourses, commercial films and original productions. Some of the short films are easily identifiable, but many more remain mysteries. Who shot these films and why? Can you help answer those questions? Faculty and staff can use the comments field at the end of the story to send ideas. Those outside the University can e-mail filmarc@u.washington.edu.
The Lost and Found Film this week takes you to Malburg: city of industry and unemployment, of beautiful homes and mortgaged shacks, of big churches and easy virtue, of poor schools and contempt for law, of befuddled reformers and helpless police — or so the film’s narrator tells us.
The clip is the opening two minutes of a 50-minute film made in 1950 and titled Malburg. First we see the town’s police chief in bed, talking to an off-camera doctor about how he’s become a reformer. Then we see the streets of Malburg and zero in on a police officer who drops all his bullets while trying to unload his gun.
The rest of the 50 minute film (not seen here) goes on to depict Malburg as a corrupt town, a den of iniquity, created by a lack of civic responsibility. The film is full of lurid images of drinking, card playing, drug use, and crime. Malburg appears to be a plea for the virtues of taxation, for without proper funding, the infrastructure of a city can collapse.
Film Archive Specialist Hannah Palin says, “We haven’t been able to track down any information about Malburg or Phil Jacobsen and Associates (the producer). I have run across one other film produced by Phil Jacobsen and I would love to know more about him and his production company. We would like to know why this film was produced at the UW — was it for a class or for a political cause? Where was it shown? Who was its intended audience?”
If you have some information about this film, be sure to log in and tell Palin what you know.
Palin got some good information about last week’s film, Blue Glacier. Informants told her that research there is ongoing and that the footage in the film showed the construction of the tunnel.
