Introduction: Nontheatrical Film

This issue devoted to nontheatrical and small-gauge film was conceived in part as a continuation of research published in Film History 15.2 (2003), 'Small-gauge and Amateur Film', edited by Melinda Stone and Dan Streible. Interest in the subject has continued to grow internationally, with the added category of 'nontheatrical' widening the focus. Save for the two endpieces, the essays here examine local and national case histories from across Europe. The European focus emerged as we received manuscripts from members of the academic and archival professions -from the Czech Republic, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, as well as the United States. So, too, this issue's combination of amateur and professional nontheatrical cinema derived from the interest in small-gauge film, the common denominator among family films, sponsored work, classroom movies and others.

Nontheatrical film, long ignored or even dismissed, is receiving increasing scholarly and archival attention, even a sort of championing. In The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006), Rick Prelinger calls for researchers to team with archives to identify, collect, and preserve the hundreds of thousands of 'industrials' and sponsored productions that poured out of multiple sources during the twentieth century. Now such work is underway. Scholars have been revising the conventional film history of features and auteurs for more than a generation, but this turn toward the nontheatrical setting and its diverse forms of film practice is new: what does the 'nontheatricality' of these films and their modes of presentation reveal? Historically, what characterized nontheatrical film experiences from theatrical ones?

Although the term nontheatrical is now appearing in the historiography of cinema, it was a well-known and commonly-used term (as adjective and noun) in the North American and British movie industries from the 1920s on. The word does not translate readily. In fact, writing about cinema in other languages sometimes uses the English expression, which as a trade term has no equivalent. In German, Dutch or Italian, for example, one might use a term that translates as 'non-commercial film', thus losing the other connotations about the particular mode of exhibition, and of production and distribution. In recent scholarship, designations such as the German 'Gebrauchsfilm' (useful film) have become a common way to refer to the many types of industrial and sponsored films. The phrase 'useful cinema' has only just emerged in English-language publications on the subject.

To underscore how important the nontheatrical aspect of the film experience was throughout most of the past century, consider only the following historical instances, in which the trade term was invoked.

By the 1910s, the YMCA had its own Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits to bring movies to venues in underserved communities. By 1922 the bureau's director could say, in addition to religious, civic and educational screenings, 'Hundreds of industrial motion picture exhibitions are occurring daily in the non-theatrical field'.¹ A decade later 'the Y' was the largest distributor of its kind in the North America, serving millions of spectators.

The business-friendly, nonprofit Bureau of Commercial Economics (BCE), began international exhibition and distribution of sponsored films in 1914. Its American founder started the venture in Germany in 1912 with official backing from the Kaiser, but it did not sustain public interest. As Sean Savage's important research describes, the BCE is best understood as 'a quasi-federal organization', disseminating what it called 'industrial and vocational information by the graphic method of motion pictures'. Over the course of two decades the bureau formed partnerships with government agencies, trade associations, manufacturers, churches, and a network of universities. In addition to having a distribution library of several hundred titles (in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish), the BCE conducted distinctive exhibitions, sending trucks out on tour equipped with projectors to show free films in outdoor public spaces.²

Fig. 1.

Perhaps the earliest use of the orphan film metaphor, which archivists and historians now invoke, this photograph and its caption suggest that 16mm industrial films were ephemeral items. From Industrial Marketing magazine, October 1950. [Courtesy...