The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences

5 Cinema as Universal Language of Health Education

121 In 1909, John D. Rockefeller dedicated a small fortune from his Standard Oil Company profits to the establishment of a new philanthropic entity, the Rockefeller Foundation, whose mandate was “to promote the wellbeing and to advance the civilization of the peoples of the United States and its territories and possessions and of foreign lands in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, in the prevention and relief of suffering, and in the promotion of any and all of the elements of human progress.”1 Within a few months, the Foundation established the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease in the U.S. South, the first of many national and international projects in public health sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. As historians of the Rockefeller Foundation have observed, “Before the founding of the who in 1948, [the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division] was arguably the world’s most important agency of public health work.”2 In an era when chapterfive CinemaasUniversalLanguage ofHealthEducation Translating Science in Unhooking the Hookworm (1920) KirstenOstherr In my opinion nothing will surpass in effectiveness a “movie” in demonstrating public health conditions. —Letter from Arkansas State Board of Health to Rockefeller Foundation, January 5, 1918 If you insist upon the extreme smallness of the plasmodium, the countryman will regard it as imaginary and of no importance. —Letter from H. R. Carter to Dr. Ferrell, ihb, January 9, 1922 122 • TheEducatedEye departments of public health only existed in the major urban centers of the United States and Western Europe, the Rockefeller Foundation was at the forefront of disease eradication and health promotion worldwide. In 1920 the Foundation released a film to aid in these endeavors, titled Unhooking the Hookworm, produced in association with Coronet Films of Providence, Rhode Island.3 Convinced by widespread enthusiasm for the motion picture as the ideal medium of visual education in this period, Rockefeller Foundation researchers also produced films on malaria in the 1920s and polio in the 1930s, followed by a series of films produced in association with Walt Disney in the early 1940s to teach literacy and basic health principles to viewers in Latin America.4 Although the Rockefeller Foundation scientists were intimately involved in the production of Unhooking the Hookworm, by the 1940s they essentially had contracted out to Disney, participating minimally in the development of the screenplay, camerawork, and editing.5 Why this shift in production philosophy? As articulated by Fred Gates, Rockefeller’s principal philanthropic aide in this period, the members of the Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation believed that “disease is the supreme ill of human life, and it is the main source of almost all other human ills—poverty, crime, ignorance, vice, inefficiency, hereditary traits, and many other evils.”6 But when it came time for the Rockefeller Foundation scientists to implement their biomedical approach to public health, they found that these supposed secondary effects of disease played a primary role in obstructing their ability to communicate with the target populations for the film. Although these researchers continued to believe in the power of moving images to persuade and instruct, they also had to acknowledge that the motion picture was not the transparently legible instrument of universal communication that they had hoped. This essay will examine what happened between Hookworm and the Disney pictures when the Rockefeller Foundation was convinced to (1) contract out the production of its films, (2) replace the original mixture of live action, cinemicroscopy, and stop-motion animation with 100 percent cel animation, and (3) target illiterate audiences with simple messages that did not include any scientific information and only conveyed the most basic of ideas. As we will see, contemporary theories of visual pedagogy assumed that animation held an intrinsic appeal for “simple-minded” audiences, in part because animation minimizes the amount of visual information that the image conveys and is therefore deemed easier to comprehend, and consequently more “entertaining” as well. However, as a non-indexical Cinema as Universal Language • 123 mode of representation, animation introduces a problem for scientific representation.7 Unlike documentary film, which is popularly conceived as possessing a privileged relation to reality, animation operates at a remove from the real, and thus lacks the immediacy so often associated with the unique powers that made motion pictures ideal pedagogical instruments . The obvious intervention of the animator’s hand in the otherwise scientifically sound mechanical reproduction of images raised a tension between...