Useful 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. Contributors: Charles R. Acland, Joseph Clark, Zoe Druick, Ronald Walter Greene, Alison Griffiths, Stephen Groening, Jennifer Horne, Kirsten Ostherr, Eric Smoodin, Charles Tepperman, Gregory A. Waller, Haidee Wasson, Michael Zryd

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"Often, in common understanding, education is seen as opposed to entertainment. But this rich and fascinating volume puts the lie to such assumption both by showing how, across the decades, 'useful' cinema was measured in relation to Hollywood entertainment and indeed interacted with it in complex fashion and by doing so through essays that are themselves compelling and captivating, eloquent and enjoyable. It is itself, in other words, a masterful blend of the entertaining and the useful." Dana Polan, New York University "This valuable book reveals how moving images proliferated beyond the spectacular confines of theaters to become deeply embedded in everyday life, cultures and institutions. The publication of this fascinating anthology is a welcome sign that cinema history is starting to forgo its longtime fascination with mass-produced glamour and making peace with its most utilitarian (and numerically dominant) genres." Rick Prelinger, founder of Prelinger Archives

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Acknowledgments Introduction: Utility and Cinema / Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland Part I. Celluloid Classrooms "What a Power for Education!": The Cinema and Sites of Learning in the 1930s / Eric Smoodin; "We Can See Ourselves as Others See Us": Women Workers and Western Union's Training Films in the 1920s / Stephen Groening; Hollywood's Educators: Mark May and Teaching Film Custodians / Charles R. Acland; UNESCO, Film, and Education: Mediating Postwar Paradigms of Communication / Zoe Druick; Health Films, Cold War, and the Production of Patriotic Audiences: The Body Fights Bacteria (1948) / Kirsten Ostherr Part II. Civic Circuits Projecting the Promise of 16mm, 1935-45 / Gregory A. Waller; A History Long Overdue: The Public Library and Motion Pictures / Jennifer Horne; Big, Fast Museums / Small, Slow Movies: Film, Scale, and the Art Museum / Haidee Wasson; Pastoral Exhibition: The YMCA Motion Picture Bureau and the Transition to 16mm, 1928-39 / Ronald Walter Greene; "A Moving Picture of the Heavens": The Planetarium Space Show as Useful Cinema / Alison Griffiths Part III. Making Useful Films Double Vision: World War II, Racial Uplift, and the All-American Newsreel's Pedagogical Address / Joseph Clark; Mechanical Craftsmanship: Amateurs Making Practical Films / Charles Tepperman; Experimental Film as Useless Cinema / Michael Zryd Filmography; Bibliography; About the Contributors; Index

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