Reviewer:
Jilly9 -
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April 25, 2011
Subject:
Silent film shows off the deco / streamline design
This short approx. 3 1/2 minute film of the Ford Motor Company's Ford Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan doesn't have sound.
The film begins with aerial shots of the Ford Rotunda, with an odd snow effect. Maybe it was real snow.
Shown are the streamline / art deco entrances to the Ford Rotunda, with shot of vintage bus.
Men and women are issued tour tickets, and are filmed inside bus, which passes a train full of tank parts (?).
The crowd then files past a vat of molten metal, and a red hot fountain of metal.
There are closeups of Ford workers assembling cars, further down the line. The tour group (men in suits, women in fur-trimmed coats) is standing in the background, watching the workers assemble car bodies.
The tour group gets back on the bus and is driven back to the Rotunda.
...The Ford Rotunda was designed by Albert Kahn & built for the 1933 World's Fair. It wa designed to look like a series of sprockets, with a geodesic dome in the center.
It was a popular tourist attraction in the Detroit area, until it burned down in 1962.