Pedagogy and Cinema

By exploring the use of film in mid-twentieth-century institutions, including libraries, museums, classrooms, and professional organizations, the essays in Useful Cinema show how moving images became an ordinary feature of American life. In venues such as factories and community halls, people encountered industrial, educational, training, advertising, and other types of “useful cinema.” Screening these films transformed unlikely spaces, conveyed ideas, and produced subjects in the service of public and private aims. Such functional motion pictures helped to shape common sense about cinema’s place in contemporary life. Whether measured in terms of the number of films shown, the size of audiences, or the economic activity generated, the “non-theatrical sector” was a substantial and enduring parallel to the more spectacular realm of commercial film. In Useful Cinema, scholars examine organizations such as UNESCO, the YMCA, the Amateur Cinema League, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They also consider film exhibition sites in schools, businesses, and industries. As they expand understanding of this other American cinema, the contributors challenge preconceived notions about what cinema is.

The visionaries of early motion pictures thought that movies could do more than just entertain. They imagined the medium had the potential to educate and motivate the audience. In national and local contexts from Europe, North America, and around the world, early filmmakers entered the domains of science and health education, social and religious uplift, labor organizing and political campaigning. Beyond the Screen captures this pioneering vision of the future of cinema.

The visionaries of early motion pictures thought that movies could do more than just entertain. They imagined the medium had the potential to educate and motivate the audience. In national and local contexts from Europe, North America, and around the world, early filmmakers entered the domains of science and health education, social and religious uplift, labor organizing and political campaigning. Beyond the Screen captures this pioneering vision of the future of cinema.

Describes a farmer training program developed in Peru using videotape recorders and audiovisual trainees. Courses are produced and given to rural people on topics such as dairy cattle husbandry, irrigation, potato growing, citrus production, and reclamation of saline soils.

Guidelines for judging training films should include: is the film entertaining (the audience needs to believe); will the audience identify with the character or message (the audience must care what happens); and will the production be first rate (this includes writing, production, filming, acting, editing, and special effects) regardless of the budget. Moreover, the film must not include any informational mistakes.

Mediating the Mill: Steel Production in Film counters opinions by film scholars and critics who often see films that represent steel production and its spaces as failed aesthetic projects or as dull propaganda or educational films, and who undervalue the importance of the specificity of the steel mills and the industry represented in them. It argues that such films are aesthetically and historically rich texts for film and history, but that they can only be interpreted as such when their historical and industrial specificity is returned to or brought alongside the film texts. Using the work of Siegfried Kracauer and film and history scholars, it argues that such films can be read as artifacts of collectively held understandings, imaginings, and affects. In particular, it argues that films representing steel production provide unique insight into collectively held responses to macroeconomic events in the 20th century–from monopoly capital’s consolidation and the introduction of Fordism and Taylorism, to the Keynesian compromise, to the Cold War “consensus,” to the breakdown of Fordism and introduction of global overproduction, and finally to neoliberalism. Using the work of Frederic Jameson, it interprets these films as cognitive maps of steel production from subjective position within antagonisms of class and economic control. Indeed, it argues that 20th century steel production was a subject uniquely able to bring forth cognitive maps, due to the difficulty of representing it as a coherent industrial process. When filmmakers “mapped” the process, they created cognitive (and affective) maps that tell us more about the provisional acts of representation, and what drives and informs them, than about what or who is represented. Finally, it argues that this cognitive and affective work can only be grasped by close attention to the films’ aesthetics, which always also allows for `suggestive indeterminacy’ and polyvalent readings, especially due to the striking material world made spectacular on film.

This examination of steel production in film also expands the category of industrial film to include documentaries, animated educational films, experimental films, and popular fiction films. As such, this dissertation is made up of case studies of four sets of films of steel production and its spaces. The first set, state-sponsored social documentaries of the 1930s, includes films by Joris Ivens, Dziga Vertov, John Grierson, and Willard Van Dyke and considers how these filmmakers differently imagined the state’s role in steel production in this period. The second, mid-twentieth-century sponsored films, includes films made for US Steel and other steel firms from the 1930s through 1960s, and places these films into the context of public relations as an attempt to shape how workers and the public viewed corporate interests. The third, experimental films of the 1970s, focuses on films by Hollis Frampton and Richard Serra that consider the difficulties of connecting the film artist’s perspective with that of the steel worker as the western steel industry began to draw down its workforce and as economic change split the middle class. The concluding chapter examines popular dystopian Hollywood films of the late twentieth century as part of a broader shift in the US to a neoliberal economy that left little room for workers. Despite the breadth of my chapters, this dissertation draws on the work of Walter Benjamin in understanding catastrophe as the line connecting the chapters, but also in following the potential when a mass art turned its attention to the massed workers and mass spectacles of steel production.

Much industrial film production, whether involving amateur avant-gardists or professionals, remains terra incognita, despite the fact that audiences for industrials at certain times in the twentieth century rivalled and even surpassed those of Hollywood films, whether shown theatrically or non-theatrically. While not all industrials can be read as avant-garde, certain industrials at the very least mimic the kind of formal play that has defined the avant-garde, including James Sibley Watson’s The Eyes of Science (1931) and Highlights and Shadows (1937). This article details the production and reception of these films by drawing on previously unavailable corporate and archival material.

Geology offers a means to study, and make sense of, the earth’s physical processes, structure, and evolution through planetary time. For states and industry, geology is also a key tool for identifying subsurface oil, gas, and mineral reserves. This article examines how popular science and education films about earth science and resource extraction produced by the National Film Board of Canada between 1950 and 1970 contain a colonial impulse reflecting settler logics of Indigenous displacement and white possession. During this period of intensified corporate and government interest in the Northwest Territories (including contemporary Nunavut) and Yukon, science films depicted Arctic and sub-Arctic landscapes as new frontiers for scientific research, southern exploration, and mining projects. By rendering northern landscapes and sub-surfaces into knowable sites for development, Know Your Resources (David A. Smith, 1950), The Face of the High Arctic (Dalton Muir, 1958), Riches of the Earth (Revised) (Colin Low, 1966), The North Has Changed (director uncredited, produced by David Bairstow, 1967), and Search into White Space (James Carney, 1970) re-inscribe these spaces within settler imaginaries, erasing First Nations and Inuit presence on the land or advocating for their assimilation into southern Canadian society. Following Kathryn Yusoff’s theorization of geology as “a racial formation,” as well as critical studies of the discipline, I argue that these films testify to the interlocking logics of scientific praxis, extraction, and imperialism at work within Western models of economic development and progress—and to cinema’s propagation of these structures as a popular educational practice.

Background: Canadian nontheatrical cinema has historically positioned natural resource extraction as intrinsic to the country’s economic development and national identity. During the 1940s and 1950s in particular with the discovery of Alberta’s vast oil reserves, industrial and documentary films about oil extraction associated petroleum with nation-building and modernization.

Analysis: This article examines The Story of Oil (1946, produced by the National Film Board of Canada), A Mile Below the Wheat (1949, sponsored by Imperial Oil), and Underground East (1953, sponsored by Imperial Oil) as examples of such “petro-films” following the oil booms in Turner Valley and Leduc, Alberta.

Conclusion and implications: The author demonstrates how these texts sought to position Western oil development in relation to contemporaneous resource industries, namely wheat agriculture and ranching. These films leveraged such comparisons to other regional “fuels” to situate petroleum within pre-existing national imaginaries about Canada’s twentieth-century resource economy, and normalize the oil industry’s land-use practices and transportation infrastructures like pipelines.

A vastly influential form of filmmaking seen by millions of people, educational films provide a catalog of twentieth century preoccupations and values. As a medium of instruction and guidance, they held a powerful cultural position, producing knowledge both inside and outside the classroom. This is the first collection of essays to address this vital phenomenon. The book provides an ambitious overview of educational film practices, while each essay analyzes a crucial aspect of educational film history, ranging from case studies of films and filmmakers to broader generic and historical assessments. Offering links to many of the films, Learning With the Lights Off provides readers the context and access needed to develop a sophisticated understanding of, and a new appreciation for, a much overlooked film legacy.

This is the first of a two-part article that will discuss the history of the field of instructional design and technology in the United States. A definition of the field is provided and the major features of the definition are identified. A rational for using instructional design and technology as the label for the field is also presented. Events in the history of instructional media, from the early 1900s to the present day, are described. The birth of school museums, the visual and audiovisual instruction movements, the use of media during World War II, and the interest in instructional television, computers, and the Internet are among the topics discussed. The article concludes with a summarization of the effects media have had on instructional practices, and a prediction regarding the effect computers, the Internet, and other digital media will have on such practices over the next decade.

This book collects Thomas Waugh’s work on the politics, history, and aesthetics of documentary film, written between 1974 and 2008. The title, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s and Joris Ivens’s manifestos of “committed” documentary from the 1930s, reflects the book’s theme of the political potential of documentary for representing the democratic performance of citizens and artists. The book analyzes an eclectic international selection of films and issues from the 1920s to the present day. The book provides a transcultural focus, moving from documentaries of the industrialized societies of North America and Europe to those of 1980s India and addressing such canonical directors as Dziga Vertov, Emile de Antonio, Barbara Hammer, Rosa von Praunheim, and Anand Patwardhan. Woven through the volume is the relationship of the documentary with the history of the Left, including discussions of LGBT documentary pioneers and the firebrand collectives that changed the history of documentary, such as Challenge for Change and ACT UP’s Women’s Collective.