Editors’ Introduction

The December 1931 issue of International Review of Educational Technology—a monthly publication sponsored by the League of Nations’ International Educational Cinematographic Institute—begins with an editorial by the institute’s director on the values that women bring to cinema.1 The author cites censorship, education, and international peace as areas where women’s unique “level heads” make them especially well-suited for influencing film production. Premised on predictably gendered notions of women as mothers, teachers, and caregivers, the piece insists on recognizing women’s “right to a profoundly human double function, to educate and to assist.”2 However reductive and stereotypical the author’s rationale, it anticipates—and perhaps even unwittingly predicts—the abundance of women’s contributions to educational media, and other related sectors, in the decades ahead.Indeed, many areas for which educational films were traditionally produced and disseminated throughout the twentieth century were spaces long seen as the purview of women: classrooms, private homes, churches, clubs, and neighborhood associations. As Liz Czach observes in this issue, ideological factors about gender (including those expressed in International Review of Educational Technology) as well as material factors—such as lower production costs—historically made nontheatrical film production comparatively more open to women filmmakers than the commercial mainstream. Put simply, women working outside commercial feature filmmaking possessed remarkable leeway when executing their presumptive “double function.”In recent decades scholars and archivists have increasingly turned their attention to the long history of so-called nontheatrical modes of media production and exhibition. This is a capacious field covering a heterogeneous range of “other cinemas,” including those made for industrial or corporate use, classroom use, and scientific and medical study. State-sponsored and propaganda films, ethnographic films, home movies, amateur media, and other “orphaned” modes are all commonly placed within this categorization. Such films are often defined by their use for means distinct from entertainment—being made to instruct, educate, inform, persuade, and indoctrinate.3 Nontheatrical filmmaking was fostered, in no small part, by the advent and availability of moving image technologies (such as 16 mm and 8 mm film, and various later formats of analog video and digital) more affordable and portable than the professional and commercial theatrical standards of their respective times (such as 35 mm or 70 mm). While publications within the nontheatrical field tend to focus on analog technologies, it is a mistake to limit these practices to any one media format, as modes of address and uses typical of mid-twentieth-century nontheatrical film and video live on in today’s digital how-to videos and sponsored content that circulates on social media. Together, attention to such works—as well as the contexts within which they were, and continue to be, made and seen—has diversified and reoriented media history by bringing attention to widespread practices that have formerly been dismissed as marginal and unworthy of study.4The sheer diversity of spaces where nontheatrical media was historically produced and screened, as well as the diversity of topics addressed by filmmakers themselves, prompts the question of how these quotidian spaces and subjects have been differently gendered. The domestic and classroom spheres tend to be marked as feminine, whereas industrial sites and science labs were and are often considered masculine. Thus, in some settings, women were afforded access and measures of agency more limited in other contexts. How nontheatrical media is generally perceived also tends to align with broad cultural distinctions that are gendered differently, such as divisions between films that are considered high art versus low art, professional versus nonprofessional, expert versus amateur, or significant versus disposable. Jasmyn Castro’s essay in this issue on African American women projectionists touches on some of these distinctions vis-à-vis moving image technology.Film and media scholars have only belatedly recognized nontheatrical media in large part because of its perceived lower status. This problem is compounded by nontheatrical media’s diffuse archival traces, which can make them exceptionally difficult to study. Such artifacts—when they survive at all—may be found online, within government or institutional archives, in specialized or classified collections (such as those of various laboratories or military branches), or in boxes stashed in private storage lockers, attics, and garages. There is thus both a glut of information at one’s fingertips and a conspicuous lacuna insofar as individual pieces are lost or can be difficult to track down.5This special issue also grapples with the manifold ways that nontheatrical media interact with different culturally constructed gender norms and the ways that different audiences have experienced them in the past and the present. Studying a heterogeneous field such as this calls for equally heterogeneous methods. Understanding the social reproduction of gender and sexuality requires an adaptable framework—one that can draw from feminist traditions of historical research and critical analysis. Across our issue contributors use a range of practices—close textual and archival analysis, interviews and oral histories, and more speculative methodologies in the absence of extant materials—to fill gaps and animate untold stories.Writing in Feminist Media Histories in 2018, Marsha Gordon astutely observes that explicitly feminist scholarship on nontheatrical media has often “taken a back seat to the larger mission of establishing and legitimizing the broader field.” She offers Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2011)—an anthology she coedited—as a case in point, stating that while several essays within the volume take feminist approaches, they are subsumed within the book’s overarching focus on pedagogical films. She refers to other foundational volumes, such as Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (2009) and Useful Cinema (2011), as similarly underdeveloped in their direct attention to feminist approaches.6 While Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film—edited by Gordon and Allyson Nadia Field and released in 2019—made essential strides toward theorizing possible intersectional approaches to nontheatrical media, the only collection of essays to date that specifically prioritizes gender and sexuality as an analytic lens is Laura Isabel Serna’s 2015 special issue of Feminist Media Histories on “useful media.” In her editor’s introduction, she writes that gender is “an extremely useful analytic” for uncovering the labor of women media makers and producers and for analyzing how “gender impacts the shape, content, and trajectories” of such media.7Following Serna’s insight, the current issue of Feminist Media Histories prioritizes gender as a framework of analysis while bringing together contributions that cover a wide range of topics, time periods, and geographies. When organizing this issue, we invited contributors to interrogate the gender and sexual politics undergirding nontheatrical media from past to present. We also took a deliberately capacious and eclectic view of nontheatrical media and encouraged interdisciplinary, intersectional, and international approaches from all periods of media history. This inclusive spirit is reflected in the issue’s contents. Contributions extend from the late silent period to the digital present and cover production and exhibition contexts in Europe, Latin America, North America, and South Asia. They also consider moving images of widely differing subjects and applications.This issue is dedicated to women’s production of nontheatrical films and to circulation and reception. Liz Czach’s “Nontheatrical Films for Women” centers the work of Canadian filmmaker and producer Judith Crawley in the early 1940s. Czach focuses on Judith’s Four New Apple Dishes (1940), a process film about preparing meals using apples, commissioned by the nascent National Film Board of Canada. Crawley often worked with her husband “Budge,” and in her discussion of how the project came to fruition, Czach comments on the “gendered assumptions” that prompted the NFB to directly solicit Judith for the project, presuming that her identity as a woman, wife, and mother meant she would bring personal experience to the project. Through close analysis of the film text, a consideration of the film’s nontheatrical circulation in women’s clubs, and a discussion of Crawley’s long career, Czach effectively demonstrates both the opportunities and challenges for studying women filmmakers working in the nontheatrical sector. She concludes with a call for researchers to “uncover and recuperate more nontheatrical films by and for women and to restore value to these women’s activities.”While Czach’s case study champions the agency of women within the North American nontheatrical sector, Katerina Korola’s “The New Woman as Ethnographer: Lola Kreutzberg in the Dutch East Indies” explores the more pernicious positions that some women occupied within the nontheatrical field. By examining the fragmentary traces of Kreutzberg’s expedition films, Karola considers the director’s media persona as a “New Woman” ethnographer in Weimar Germany alongside her representation of indigenous women in Bali. Here feminist media histories intersect with histories of colonization, as the expanding capacity for white European women to express themselves arrived in the context of colonial oppression. Korola unearths the details of these complexities through archival research and close reading, modeling a robust approach to studying nontheatrical film as a political activity with positive uses for some and negative for others.In “Crossing National Borders and Nontheatrical Boundaries: The Film Work of Rosina Prado,” Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco and Sonia García López extend the focus on women filmmakers while also questioning the category of nontheatrical media in Cuban film history. They take as their subject the Spanish-born, Soviet-educated nonfiction film director Rosina Prado, who was among the first women directors working in postrevolutionary Cuba. In piecing together her untold history and considering the specific conditions of state-sponsored film production and exhibition in 1960s Cuba, they underscore the many ways Prado’s career confounds analytical frameworks traditionally used by media scholars, blurring distinctions between the national and international, theatrical and nontheatrical, and 35 mm and 16 mm. Their research also addresses the recent circulation of Prado’s work online through the efforts of the Filmoteca Española, drawing attention to the digital afterlives of many historical works that have been subject to study by nontheatrical scholars. Responding to Prado’s hybridity, Cavalcanti Tedesco and García López deploy a capacious methodology that prompts self-reflection on how film history itself is (re)written, preserved, and made accessible.The issue also focuses on the screening and reception contexts where women have historically played crucial roles. In “African American Women Doing ‘Men’s Work’ in the US Women’s Army Corps,” Jasmyn Castro turns to the act of film projection itself. Focusing on the experiences of African American women working as projectionists during World War II, Castro demonstrates how—even if only for fleeting moments—the armed forces provided professional opportunities for Black women denied to them as civilians. She contends with both the visual presence and absence of Black servicewomen in still images and training films produced by the US military. Her work, as she writes, “underscores the complicated and binding relationship between race, gender, and access to highly skilled technical film jobs” and calls for an expansion of nontheatrical film history that better attends to “below-the-line” work, such as 16 mm projection, where crucial battles over racial and gender equity were fought.Ankita Deb directs our attention to gendered spectatorship in “Sensationalizing Nontheatrical Cinema: The Feminist and Queer Possibilities of Sex Education Films in Postcolonial India.” Focusing on the circulation and reception of a trio of films originally shot abroad for nontheatrical use, Deb demonstrates how clinical footage was recast as sensational when advertised for screenings in B-circuit contexts. Using advertisements and reports of women-only screenings as her points of departure, Deb speculates on ways women spectators took both educational and libidinal lessons from the act of watching. Deb articulates her own methodological approach, writing that in the absence of more conventional archival materials, “I take rumors, hearsay, and tall claims replete in the B circuit seriously [to] speculate on the potential presence of feminist and queer reception histories in India’s B film sector.”In “Circulating Useful (Feminist) Media: NGOs and Grassroots Feminist Distribution in the UN Decade for Women (1975–85),” Dalila Missero examines distribution activities aligned with conferences that took place during the United Nations’ Decade for Women (1975–85). Here, we see how nontheatrical film was incorporated into the so-called NGOization of feminism, serving as a crucial educational tool for multinational efforts to empower women. This article again highlights aspects of nontheatrical media’s transnational history, this time focusing on the role of distribution and NGOs in fostering production and distribution circuits for feminist works in the 1970s and 1980s.Michael M. Reinhard’s “Multilevel Marketing the American Dream: Home Videos, Entrepreneurial Motherhood, and the Digital Archives of Neoliberalism” analyzes the dual role of viewer-creators in the online world of “mommy blogging.” Bridging the divide between analog and digital nontheatrical and useful medias, Reinhard tracks how the online clothing company LuLaRoe participates in the monetization of home movies and their representation of the nuclear family in the age of social media. Here, women, especially mothers, shift from their previous role as chroniclers of the family with home movies for private consumption to embodying a position of “entrepreneurial motherhood” within today’s increasingly precarious neoliberal economy.The issue concludes with S Topiary Landberg’s video essay and artist statement, “In the Best Interests of the Children: A Case Study of ‘Useful’ Lesbian Film as Propaganda.” An intricately rendered chronicle of one of the first movies made about lesbian motherhood in the early 1970s, Landberg’s project mixes archival material with firsthand interviews to create a textured image of small-gauge nontheatrical film as a distinctly feminist space that continues to speak to present battles over LGBTQ+ rights.Cumulatively, these contributions demonstrate just some of the ways that women shaped nontheatrical media through participation in many aspects of its culture. More broadly, they speak to the value and necessity of using gender and sexuality as a primary focus for understanding nontheatrical media’s social function and diverse potentialities. As we have seen, nontheatrical experiences can simultaneously serve as vehicles of empowerment, desire, and feminist community organizing as well as more repressive sites that reinscribe gender stereotypes and racial and colonial ideologies. We consider these essays generative contributions to the field, while acknowledging that they also only gesture to the abundance of materials that remain underexamined. We thus send this issue to press, hoping its content inspires others to appreciate the complexity and potential of studying gender and sexuality of nontheatrical and useful media, both in the past and the present.

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