Plot

In 1937, the Eastman Kodak Company took a novel approach and engaged the highly regarded Rochester avant-garde filmmaker, author, and physician Dr. James Sibley Watson Jr. (1894-1982) to produce an industrial film on Kodak's manufacturing process for film and cameras. Watson crafted a dazzling visual ballet that stands on its own as an aesthetically rewarding and educationally inspiring tour of the massive Kodak factories. Utilizing the multiple exposure imagery he had used to such great effect in The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933), Watson makes tool and die drill presses, assembly lines of camera parts, and the film coating process every bit as expressive and interesting as an MGM historic drama. This film captures the repetitive labor of hundreds of Kodak employees as a synchronized ballet, each part carefully crafted to create the whole. It is also a historical record of the inventions that mechanized motion picture and still photographic film production and raised it to an economic level that allowed Kodak to lead the world in photographic imaging.