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