Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States ed. by Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (review)

Recent studies of nonfiction film have moved beyond questions of objectivity and auteur-ship to examine the specific institutional uses and contexts in which such films were made. Learning with the Lights Off brings together film scholars, historians, and archivists to chart the growth of educational films in the United States from the early 1910s through the peak years of the 1950s and '60s. As this volume's twenty-two essays compellingly demonstrate, this hitherto underappreciated genre can yield considerable insights into how educators, foundations, corporations, municipal and state governments, and independent filmmakers articulated a utilitarian role for cinema both as a strategy for social legitimization and a means of revolutionizing pedagogical practices.

Beginning in the early 1910s, progressive educators saw films as potentially powerful tools for teaching academic subjects and for instilling civic values at a time when America was receiving waves of immigrants. Such films also reflected anxieties about establishing a liberalmoral order that was often the subtext of social-hygiene subjects, such as anti-tuberculosis films. While their aspirations were fueled by their belief that motion pictures could better engage students than traditional teaching methods, educators were also frustrated because creating films for noncommercial markets like schools posed significant challenges: studios were reluctant to produce films whose costs were unlikely to be recouped. As Lee Grieveson shows in his essay on the Ford Motor Company and Victoria Cain on the Rockefeller Foundation, it was often private corporations or entities that sponsored educational film production for their own institutional prerogatives or formed joint partnerships, as was the case of the American College of Surgeons, which partnered with Eastman Kodak to sponsor a series of professional training films.

By the early 1930s, with the advent of cheaper 16mm inflammable film, educational cinema attracted the interest of the American Council of Education and local school districts, prompted serious scholarly inquiries into its effects on student viewers, and developed important distribution networks among university and municipal libraries. Yet, efforts to establish film as a viable educational tool were also riven with contradictions and setbacks. Conflicts arose that resulted in many short-lived initiatives, such as the Educational Film Institute at New York University whose few films clashed with the social values of its patron, GM chairman Alfred Sloan. Alison Griffiths's essay on the American Museum of Natural History shows, for example, that the development and maintenance of film libraries also proved to be costly to many sponsoring institutions. Only with the U.S. Army's commissioning of training films during World War II and the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958 would the federal government provide massive funding for school districts to acquire audiovisual equipment (often postwar army surplus), which created a stable enough market for companies like Coronet Films and Encyclopaedia Britannica Films to embark on extensive production.

As one of the first modern interventions into educational cinema's history, Learning with the Lights Off is indispensable for scholars interested in American nonfiction film. Drawing on a rich array of methodological approaches, from social history, art history, science studies, business history, and, of course, film studies, this volume looks at educational films from numerous angles and through multiple lenses. Oliver Gaycken and Jennifer Peterson use diegetic analysis to show how films often contradicted the high-minded intentions of their makers, incorporating spectacle elements within ostensibly pedagogical subjects. The commercial strategies of different producers are also given careful treatment in Heide Solbrig's analysis of Electric Research Products' efforts to organize a national noncommercial film infrastructure in the 1930s, and in Rick Prelinger's nice (albeit short) account of Jam Handy, whose Detroit-based operations remained in business for over sixty years. The editors also provide an excellent historical overview of educational cinema's historical development, while each of the essays contains detailed filmographies that allow readers to...