Documenting the Depression : FDR’S MOVIEMAKER: Memoir and Scripts, <i> By Pare Lorentz (University of Nevada Press: $29.95; 233 pp.)</i>

The social ferment and artistic idealism attending Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal produced, with much else, the WPA Theatre Project, some excellent guidebooks, the photography of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, and the pioneering documentaries of a feisty young West Virginian named Pare Lorentz.

Lorentz, who died a few weeks ago at the age of 86, had come to New York to seek his fortune as a writer. He co-authored, with the well-known civil-liberties attorney Morris Ernst, a book indicting censorship of the movies. Lorentz was himself an early film critic, for the original Vanity Fair and then for the Hearst papers, losing both posts for speaking his mind too candidly.

As the Depression deepened, he tried unsuccessfully to raise money for a newsreel, as he called it, about conditions in the country. He wrote briefly for Newsweek and moved to Washington as a columnist’s investigative legman. There at last he got to make his newsreels, initially under the aegis of the Resettlement Administration (at $25 a day).

His first two documentaries are, not least, landmarks in ecological concern. “The Plow That Broke the Plains” recorded the Dust Bowl on film as Evans and Lange had captured it in still photographs. His second film, “The River,” was a tone poem, at once thrilling and angry, about the Mississippi--and the tons of precious topsoil it was washing away to the Gulf of Mexico. It was also a celebration of the remedial work of the Tennessee Valley Authority, an early use of film as an instrument of advocacy. F.D.R. told a friend, “Lorentz is my shooter.”

Despite bureaucratic indifference and opposition (the Hollywood studios cried unfair competition and refused to show the documentaries), Lorentz made more films, among them “The Fight for Life” about infant mortality among the poor, and “Ecce Homo,” a portrait of four symbolic workingmen struggling to find and keep jobs.

Lorentz finished working on “FDR’s Moviemaker” not long before his death. His brief memoir is as lively and outspoken as his reviews were. Old foes, like Will Hays, Hollywood’s first czar, remain unforgiven. (“One assumes he is busy stuffing ballot boxes in hell.”) Recounting his struggles to get his films made, he provides sardonic proof that documentary makers have never had it easy.

“FDR’s Moviemaker” also invaluably collects the narratives Lorentz wrote for his films. They are moving evocations of a troubled country, written in an impressionistic free verse that recalls both the drum-beat rhetoric of Vachel Lindsay and the poetic imagery of Carl Sandburg. His words, six decades later, seem both historic and timeless. Lorentz was looking at a nation stunned by the Depression, yet he conveyed a longer view, resolute optimism that today evokes a different kind of melancholic nostalgia. His pioneering approach to the documentary and the angry compassion that characterized his vision are carried forward in such contemporary works as Barbara Koppel’s Oscar-winning “American Dream.”