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USEFUL CINEMA

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................................11 CELLULOID CLASSROOMS.......................................................................................................................17"What a Power for Education!": The Cinema and Sites of Learning in the 1930s Eric Smoodin...................................................34"We Can See Ourselves as Others See Us": Women Workers and Western Union's Training Films in the 1920s Stephen Groening.....................59Hollywood's Educators: Mark May and Teaching Film Custodians Charles R. Acland..............................................................81UNESCO, Film, and Education: Mediating Postwar Paradigms of Communication Zoë Druick...................................................1032 CIVIC CIRCUITS.............................................................................................................................125Projecting the Promise of 16mm, 1935-45 Gregory A. Waller...................................................................................149A History Long Overdue: The Public Library and Motion Pictures Jennifer Horne...............................................................178Big, Fast Museums / Small, Slow Movies: Film, Scale, and the Art Museum Haidee Wasson.......................................................205Pastoral Exhibition: The YMCa Motion Picture Bureau and the Transition to 16mm, 1928-39 Ronald Walter Greene................................2303 MAKING USEFUL FILMS........................................................................................................................263Double Vision: World War II, Racial Uplift, and the All-American Newsreel's Pedagogical Address Joseph Clark................................289Mechanical Craftsmanship: Amateurs Making Practical Films Charles Tepperman.................................................................315Experimental Film as Useless Cinema Michael Zryd............................................................................................337Filmography..................................................................................................................................343Bibliography.................................................................................................................................365About the Contributors.......................................................................................................................369

Chapter One

THE CINEMA AND SITES OF LEARNING IN THE 1930S

Eric Smoodin

A moment of film viewing first made me aware that film education had an extended history, and that it was, indeed, more common many years ago than I may have thought. I remember watching A Tale of Two Cities on late-night TV with my mother and my sister, and while the movie came out in 1935, the viewing I am talking about took place in the mid-1960s, when I was twelve or thirteen years old. After we had all been properly moved by Sidney Carton's selfless death and heroic last words ("It's a far, far better thing I do ...") my mother mentioned, somewhat offhandedly, that she recalled seeing the film when she was in public high school in Chicago in the mid-1930s, because it had been part of a classroom assignment. She had read the book in her English class, and then her teacher had told the students to go see the movie, so that they could discuss the novel and film together. I cannot remember asking my mother much more about this, but I was struck by this apparently natural link between the movies and the classroom, and by how popular motion pictures had had a place in the curriculum at a time that seemed so distant to me.

In fact, as the work of a number of film scholars over the last fifteen years has shown, the cinema had a central role in various educational settings in the 1930s, and the decade marked something of a golden era in film education in the United States. Hollywood films were studied in grammar school, junior high, and high school classrooms as well as at the university; educational films were produced for classroom use; and other settings became the sites of viewing these films and of studying the cinema generally. Some of these sites beyond the classroom seem perfectly logical to us now—the library, for instance. Some might seem surprising—the prison, and even the department store, as in the case in 1934 when Macy's announced that the entire department store chain would begin showing The Story of a Country Doctor to its customers, with the film documenting the renowned surgical practices of a famous doctor. In these places during the period, we have both the study of Hollywood film as an aesthetic and industrial object, and the study of other subjects through film.

There was, as well, a vast body of literature produced about motion picture pedagogy and film-related educational activities. These materials ranged from textbooks to scholarly essays to an ongoing journal dedicated to the field, Educational Screen. The sheer volume of scholarly articles from the 1930s about film education in grammar and secondary schools, in such journals as the English Journal, the Journal of Educational Sociology, and the Elementary School Journal, demonstrates a broad humanities and social science interest in the subject. The titles of some of these articles, such as "Testing Some Objectives of Motion-Picture Appreciation," "Relative Importance of Placement of Motion Pictures in Class-Room Instruction," and "Can Youth's Appreciation of Motion Pictures Be Improved," show the possibilities of a precise science of film education in which results can be quantified and categorized. Other articles, like Mark A. May's "Educational Possibilities of Motion Pictures," from 1937, hint at the belief in the utopian pedagogy that movies provided.

In an article about film studies at New York University (NYU) published in February 1934, Educational Screen, the monthly journal devoted to film pedagogy, expressed some of the excitement that Depression-era educators felt about motion pictures. Citing Dr. Frederic M. Thrasher, who helped to institute the serious study of film at nYU, the article claimed that "the enormous influence of the popular motion picture [has] forced the public schools and the colleges and universities to recognize the permanence of this great educational instrument and its potentialities in all educational fields." The editorial continued with "education can no longer neglect the motion picture," and then went on with practically an admonition to teachers: "It must be studied." Just a month later, in an editorial, Educational Screen sounded something of an alarm, as if the fast and widespread acceptance of film education in public schools had already produced a crisis. With the place of film education in schools no longer questioned, the editorial said, "we incline to wonder if those concerned really know what it's about," and asked, further, "are they sure in how far the theatre is part of the school's job," and even, "do they know whether they are contributing to or complicating the educational problem?"

Both the enthusiasm for and concern with motion picture pedagogy situate the film education movement in the center of some of the era's significant debates about elementary and secondary schools. Of...