Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent black-and-white clip shows some of the steps in the manufacture of shoes in an early Australian factory. The clip opens with scenes of a worker demonstrating how leather soles are cut out in a template press. The next scenes show various close-ups of channels being created in leather soles and a heel being built up and glued. In the last sequence a skilled worker is seen shaping the upper sections of a shoe to a 'last’ (a block shaped like a human foot) and attaching the sole. Intertitles are used to explain the various stages of production.

Educational value points

• The scenes in this clip are typical of the silent industrial documentary film genre in which the intertitles briefly introduce a particular manufacturing process but the images carry the weight of description. In one sequence, for example, close-up and extreme close-up shots are used to show the channelling of the sole. In another, one of the workers holds up the template, the sole and the piece of leather to ensure that viewers are quite clear how the template press works.

• All the basic elements of mass production of footwear in the 1920s are illustrated in the clip – the use of shoe- and boot-making machinery, the labour-intensive assembly line and the high level of skill of the 'lasting’ workers. Except for the scene of heel-building, the clip also shows another feature of mass production – the production run. All the machines are set for a run of shoes of the same size and design.

• Although this promotional film, made for the Made in Australia Council, celebrated Australian achievement in footwear manufacture, at least one of the techniques shown – the turnshoe method – was quite old-fashioned and no longer commonly used, even for women’s pumps (heeled shoes with low-cut fronts). Dating from the medieval period, the turnshoe method of shoe construction involves the shoe being made inside out and then reversed or turned.

• As seen here, the processes of 'pulling over’ the shoe on the last and attaching and trimming the sole required high levels of skill. In 'pulling over’, the leather is pulled, stretched, shaped and temporarily nailed to fit precisely to the last. Attaching the sole to the upper is known as 'bottoming’ and it largely determined the shoe’s price, quality and performance. Here it appears to be of high quality, with the sole chain-stitched to the upper and the insole along the channel.

• The style of women’s pump seen in the middle of the clip was largely dictated by 1920s dress fashions in which straight, low-waisted and short-skirted dresses focused attention on the foot and shoe. Popular dances such as the Charleston did the same. The Charleston demanded a highly decorative but secure pump with a closed and pointed toe and a medium heel.

• The clip shows part of an Australian shoe-manufacturing factory in a period when secondary industries were developing and the shoe industry was experiencing growth. In 1924 national tariff protection for Australian manufacturing industries was in place and the fashion was for pumps in place of boots. The period of growth was cut short by unemployment in the late 1920s and then by the Great Depression.