Film Notes
Clean Waters (1945)
Sponsor: General Electric Co. Production Co.: Raphael G. Wolff Studios. Transfer Note: Scanned from a 16mm print held by the Library of Congress. Running Time: 23 minutes.
Film advocating electrically powered waste-treatment facilities. Produced as part of General Electric’s “More Power to America” campaign encouraging infrastructure investment, Clean Waters demonstrates the health and safety dangers of water pollution and presents electric-powered sewage treatment as a way to clean up America’s waterways. The film includes footage shot in 28 states and the Alaska territory.
Note: Clean Waters was selected “the world’s best commercially sponsored motion picture” at the 1947 Films of the World Festival in Chicago. Revised in 1954.
Resources
“14 Festival Awards to Sponsored Pictures,” Business Screen 8, no. 8 (1947): 25; Educational Film Guide (New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1948), 382; Film Forum Review staff, “Clean Waters,” in Ideas on Film, ed. Cecile Starr (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1951), 182–83; “1954 Edition of GE’s Clean Waters,” Business Screen 15, no. 1 (1954): 124.