The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s ed. by Marina Dahlquist and Joel Frykholm (review)

The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema, a recent collection of essays edited by Marina Dahlquist and Joel Frykholm, is a crucial contribution to the study of how educational cinema was created, adopted, and disseminated, as well as how it came to serve a range of different political agendas in the early part of the twentieth century. Collectively, this work highlights the historical importance of the institutionalization process that didactic films in the Western world underwent during the 1910s and the 1920s. This process was at times chaotic, according to the authors, a "seeming mishmash of practices, policies, politics, and participants" (5), but, as presented in this anthology, it makes for captivating reading. How the "pedagogical usefulness" (1) of cinema was instrumentalized in order to serve the propaganda needs of Western governments is just one of the questions raised by this important book. Throughout this collection educational films provide concrete historical examples that illustrate how these governments came to an understanding of cinema and its power and began to use the medium to engage with public opinion on a wide variety of issues.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, debates arose among private companies, state actors, and religious institutions on the educational value of film. The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema's analysis of different national frameworks—including those of Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, the United States, and Great Britain—allows for a comparative view of how and when institutions began to use educational cinema, and its often moralizing rhetoric, to intervene in civic life. Examining the ways didactic films were accommodated to the political agendas of various institutions allows for a deeper understanding of the significance of this emerging form of cinema to the social reform movements of the early twentieth century. As becomes evident, the purpose of educational films had much to do with the goal of "creating better citizens," one that many Western countries pursued during the period in question.

This collection consists of an introduction and ten essays. The book's introductory chapter articulates the sheer scope of the research contained within. First, Dahlquist and Frykholm recognize that educational cinema has had a crucial role in cinema history, but that due to the difficulties that come with the categorization of "educational films" and their traits, scholars have only rarely focused on the analysis of these types of visual narrative. In fact, films created for the educational market have different characteristics than what is generally defined as "non-fiction." Second, the authors challenge the canonical categorization of films that has limited cinema studies for much too long, leading to the neglect of many types of film and many different forms of cinematic practice, including didactic films. Re-examining and reassessing the part played by educational films in the history of cinema is therefore a primary aim of this book. Third, the authors stress the importance of an international approach to cinema history, one that allows patterns in the institutionalization of educational cinema to be traced across borders and between continents. Three essays in particular provide a sense of this collection's methods and ambitions.

In the opening essay, "Platforms for Learning," Jan Olsson focuses on early Swedish cinema and the debates that arose around it. As Dahlquist and Frykholm explain in their introduction, the Swedish case is particularly representative, "[matching] the general blueprint" for the institutionalization of educational cinema during this era (6). More specifically, after an initial period of debate on the potential of cinema as an educational tool, Sweden experienced a trend toward the monopolization of educational film production by private companies and governmental departments. Olsson explains that in Sweden, the first debates on educational cinema included those who enthusiastically praised the pedagogical potential of this medium, as well as others who saw it as a dangerous trigger for immoral conduct and therefore called for strict censorship. In particular, critics...