Review Essay: After Social History

The word 'educational' is here used in a wide sense and does not indicate that these films are intended for school or college use exclusively.They are intended rather for the education of the adult as well as the youth, for the exhibition before miscellaneous audiences, as well as for more restricted use."-George Kleine, Catalogue of Educational Motion Pictures (NY: George Kleine, 1910), 1."[One must think] of education not only as formal pedagogy but as the entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations; [and] to see schools and universities fade into relative insignificance next to other social agencies."-Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 14. "[There is a] need for a more inclusive account of our educational history.[The question that must be raised is] what agencies, formal and informal, have shaped American thought, character, and sensibility over the years, … To ask the question thus is to project our concerns beyond the schools to a host of other institutions that educate."-Lawrence A. Cremin, The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley: An Essay on the Historiography of American Education (NY: Teachers College Press, 1965), 47-48.To put it simply, Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (LWLO) is a path breaking and seminal exploration of a remarkable and remarkably understudied subject.I will go further to say that LWLO is a major contribution to three academic disciplines: history of American cinema, American cultural history more generally, and history and historiography of American education.Before I proceed, an omission, and an explanation, are necessary.LWLO focuses almost exclusively on education film in the United States.The history of educational film in Canada requires its own telling. 2 Learning with the Lights Off is a monumental anthology; 22 chapters in all, almost 500 pages of text, oversized, liberally illustrated, including filmographies, and ranging across more than eight decades.The three co-editors are film studies scholars.Devin Orgeron and Marsha Orgeron teach film studies at North Carolina State University and are the co-editors of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists.Dan Streible teaches film studies at New York University and is the associate director of the university's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program.Streible is also the founder and director of the Orphan Film Project, which preserves, screens, and studies educational film.LWLO opens with an Introduction by the editors followed by "A History of Learning with the Lights Off," a sweeping overview of the history of educational film by the editors covering the period from 1895 and the silent film era to 1980.This chapter is followed by a close historical study of the beginnings of educational film, "The Cinema of the Future: Visions of the Medium as Modern Educator, 1895-1910," by Oliver Gaycken.LWLO is bookended by a select guide to educational film collections in archives and libraries by Elena Rossi-Snook.In between, LWLO contains chapters written by each of the co-editors, as well as by film, media, or communications specialists like Miriam Posner, Lee Grieveson, Alison Griffiths, Jennifer Peterson, Kirsten Ostherr, Eric Schaefer, Anna McCarthy, and Victoria Cain, among others.LWLO explores an extraordinarily eclectic and broad range of topics considered under the rubric of educational film and that functioned in a wide variety of non-school as well as school contexts.To give an idea of the sheer diversity of topics, an abbreviated description of the contents of some of the chapters follows, arranged roughly chronologically from 1895 to 1980: The National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis and Red Cross Seal films; the Ford Motor Company, film, and education for "industrial citizenship"; the American Museum of Natural History, Eastman Kodak, and classroom nature films; the American College of Surgeons, film, and medical education; Bell Telephone, RCA, sound, and educational film; Western Electric, Electrical Research Products, Inc. (ERPI), film and modernizing American

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.