Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States

LEARNING WITH THE LIGHTS OFF: EDUCATIONAL FILM IN THE UNITED STATES Edited by Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 525 pp.Reviewed by Zoe DruickFor readers who attended school sometime between the 1920s and the 1980s, the mention of educational film probably summons up excited memories of the audio-visual cart being rolled in, the room darkened, the whir of the projector and clatter of the unspooling 16mm film, an experience that magically turned everyday spaces into temporary movie theatres. Depending on the context, we might have been shown how to comport ourselves, how to do surgery, how to become better farmers, how to avoid venereal disease, or how to cope with civic unrest, though usually not all at once. There was a time when every school classroom, church basement, library, museum, convention hall, community centre and factory cafeteria possessed such a projector, many decommissioned from the military after the Second World War. The ubiquitous experience of learning with the lights was as often a chance to goof off as it was an opportunity to become edified. Screenings were contextualized in a wide variety of ways, from lectures and discussions to meetings and other community events, and their effectiveness was the object of much attention and concern by educators.Over the past three decades, with the rise of video and then digital platforms, educational have been tossed by the untold thousands into the trash, marking the genre's unceremonious transformation from ubiquity to obscurity. Finally, a major volume has been devoted to returning these to their rightful place within film history, uncovering their aesthetic strategies, the social practices that governed the uncountable hours North Americans have spent with them, and the often-political reasons that they were conceived and produced.What were educational films? The editors define them broadly as films that were used to teach, inform, instruct, or persuade viewers in a variety of ways and contexts. Contributors to this collection show them to run the gamut from industrial, training, and sponsored to so-called exploitation films. They covered every aspect of American life and were made with a wide range of skill levels. Given the major role such played in the 20,h century, it seems strange that so little serious academic attention has been given to this genre, its producers and its audiences (with notable exceptions are scattered in film journals and a few anthologies). Indeed, although film studies arguably began under the rubric of film education, the justification for serious, academic study of film was seemingly won at the cost of numerous exclusions. Educational film, along with industrial, sponsored and other forms of useful was left out of the discussion, even while it accounted for a substantial part of the rhythms of daily life.In part this impressive collection is a result of critical and historical work that has turned academic attention to the nontheatrical forms of circulation that played such a major role in community life. It is the direct offspring of the Orphan Film Symposium, where the majority of these chapters were first presented as papers in 2006 (editor Dan Streible is an organizer of the symposium). Although not every chapter deals with orphaned in the limited archival sense, overall they deal with orphan cinema in the broad and encompassing way it is defined by the Orphan Film Symposium, which includes all manner of ephemeral and neglected films. The interest in these fading forms of communication is surely a product of the Internet age as researchers across media studies are increasingly paying attention to extinct and residual media that were once new. Digital technologies have turned out to be a double-edged sword, often hastening the disappearance of older media, while providing new modes of preservation and distribution (the book is accompanied by a helpful website that allows readers to watch many of the under discussion, some of which are quite hard to come by). …

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