This film is a topicality (what today we would call a piece of documentary newsreel footage). As I have said elsewhere, there is no point at all in watching such topicalities, unless one makes some effort to understand the context in which they are made.
Why did people go on making such films? Why do they still make them today? Because people were interested in knowing what was going on in the world around them. Newsreel (what the French call actualités) remained an enormously important and popular aspect of film-making right up until the fifties (since when it has simply become of the repertoire of the television) but of course such film is still with us, is still important and is watched by millions everyday.
One cannot compare such topical films with fictional films (photoplays) or even with artistic views. They served a quite different (basically informative) purpose. What exactly that purpose was could vary greatly according to the subject or the interest of a particular audience (or particular viewer). To give two fictional examples that relate to the viewing of topicalities, in Louis Feuillade's classic thriller serial Les Vampires, Guérande and Mazamette lose track at one point of their prey (the Vampire gang) but go to see the news in the cinema and, as it happens, see their enemies on the screen - which sets them back in pursuit. More gravely, in a charming wartime Mikio Naruse short (Natsukashi no kao/A Face from the Past 1942), a mother travels to the town from a remote village because a neighbour has spotted her husband (fighting at the front) in newsreel footage of the war.
This film is part of a whole series shot by cinematographer A. E. Weed, illustrating the work of the Missouri Commission in Kansas and St. Joseph, Missouri. Of course such topicalities would have a strongly local appeal (where topicalities were concerned, film-makers and film-distributors had to consider this aspect just as television channels do today). Another pragmatic reason for making such films was commercial kickback; in the US particularly film-making frequently involved commercial tie-ins (with railway companies, with the coal industry, with tourist resorts and so on) and this could include commissioned work that had a "public service" value.
The early years cinema coincide very precisely with the height of the "physical education" movement and many of the very earliest film-makers (Georges Demeny for instance) had first developed an interest in film because of its value in sowing the human body in movement. Many Lumière films are similarly devoted to scenes of gymnastic and physical culture. How important this was became apparent when the First World War broke out and led to general conscription; conscription boards were profoundly shocked to discover that a surprisingly large percentage of the working population, debilitated by rapid urbanisation, were actually unfit to serve.
Of course, as well as serving an informational purpose, such films, like any others, could be more or less artistic in their mise en scène and more or less interesting in their approach to the subject. Here in general the French (whose cinematic tradition was to some extent premised on its photographic expertise) produced far superior films; the more amateurish US photographers made little effort to give shape and form to their topical films (or for that matter to their early views and fiction films.
The potential for such subjects to be of enormous interest (from both an artistic and documentary point of view) was best realised by the Germans during the 1920s and 1930s. Wege su Kraft und Schönheit/Ways to Strength and Beauty (1925)is an excellent documentary on the subject and Leni Riefensstahl's filming of the 1936 Olympics remains unsurpassed.
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