“Visions of Gold” is a short color film on “Gold! The thread from which we weave our dreams! The key to stability!” Produced by South African film maker Emil Nofal in the mid-1960s, the film opens with rows of gold bars as the narrator Joe Stewardson explains how (in1885) itinerant prospectors George Walker, along with George Harrison, stumbled on surface outcrops of gold-rich conglomerate on an old farm near the Witwatersrand basin —land that is now near the center of Johannesburg. (Both men quickly sold their claims for the equivalent of a few hundred dollars. Today, the gold fields in the region are worth billions.) From across the world, prospectors descended on South Africa in search of gold, as we see throngs of prospectors and opportunists starting at mark 02:45. Spurred on by visions of wealth, the fortune hunters eventually thought they had taken all the gold that was there, we are told. But at mark 06:10, Stewardson explains that more inventive prospectors at the turn of the 20th century found ways to dig deeper into the Earth in search of gold. The worldwide economic depression of the 1930s, we learn at mark 07:00, unraveled the fabric of prosperity. “The spinners of dreams all over the world now wore the dark cloth of despair.” Only the fantasy of gold remained, with South African workers eventually mining more than two miles into the ground in search of gold, as the camera plummets down a mine shaft. By mark 09:20, we see men maneuvering through tunnels and drilling into the Earth in search of deposits, and later watch as men turn the fruits of those labors into glistening gold bars.