Films You Saw in School: A Critical Review of 1,153 Classroom Educational Films (1958–1985) in 74 Subject Categories by Geoff Alexander (review)

Putting together jigsaw puzzles affords a particular pleasure: that of finding a piece that fits the hole in the middle of an almost fully assembled section of the picture. Even if there is still a long way to go on the rest of the puzzle, one feels an undeniable satisfaction as those discrete chunks at the edges and corners begin to cohere. Geoff Alexander’s new book, Films You Saw in School: A Critical Review of 1,153 Classroom Educational Films (1958–1985) in 74 Subject Categories, performs just such a function for an emerging cluster of scholarly publications on nontheatrical media, interlocking but not overlapping with these other works and filling in a blank space in the critical examination of twentieth-century commercial film production.

As director and founder of the Academic Film Archive of North America (AFANA), and as a former special education instructor, Geoff Alexander has personally viewed more than ten thousand educational films and screened many hundreds of them in schools and for general audiences. His 2010 book Academic Films for the Classroom¹ conveys how tirelessly Alexander has sought to collect and preserve not just the films themselves but the stories of their creation and those of their creators, too. For that earlier project, Alexander profiled some three dozen educational filmmakers and illuminated, through personal interviews, archival research, and meticulous historiography, “the companies that made the films and the people behind them” (62). He likely knows more than anyone living about many (once influential, now long defunct) film-producing entities, not to mention a growing number of extraordinary filmmakers who are no longer with us, and thus has an exceptionally well-supported take on each of the movies they made during their professional heydays.

The program notes Alexander wrote for more than four hundred public screenings of educational films in the late 1990s and early 2000s form the foundation of his new book, which presents more than fifteen hundred widely distributed 16mm titles with “the goal of introducing the reader to these films, putting them into an educational context, and offering comparative, albeit critical, opinions” (8). His evaluative criteria, clearly described in the preface, include “compelling content, effective storytelling, overall cinematic technique, and content verisimilitude” (6–7), and his content-based organizational principles are echoed by the book’s overall structure, with successive chapters devoted to films on social science and geography, history, science and math, arts and crafts, literature and language arts, sociodrama, and foreign language instruction. While Alexander largely avoids the pitfalls of being ahistorical or too narrowly focused on individual texts, he also largely leaves to other authors the task of placing educational films in a social and cultural continuum of exhibition and reception practices. For instance, the light of his attention occasionally flickers upon phenomena such as “the ubiquitous Saturday evening television travel programs” (16); here, as well as in the chapters on social science and geography and foreign language instruction, Films You Saw in School forms an interesting complement to Jennifer Lynn Peterson’s richly illustrated examination of early travelogues, Education in the School of Dreams.² Alexander also connects classroom films’ history and aesthetics to those of vaudeville, theatrical variety shows, and the nineteenth-century lecture circuit, tying this book neatly to two other recent books, the essay collections Learning with the Lights Off ³ and Useful Cinema.⁴

But in this book, just as at one of Alexander’s backyard 16mm screenings, the brightest light centers on the screen. Alexander focuses on the films themselves, and most particularly on examples from 1965 to 1985, the twenty-year period when academic film peaked in terms of both visual and narrative quality and ubiquitous distribution, although each subsection includes references to the earliest or definitive examples, often reaching back as far as the 1920s or 1930s. Films You Saw in School is an eminently...