Useful cinema / Charles R. Acland & Haidee Wasson, editors.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Acland, Charles R., 1963-

Wasson, Haidee, 1970-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nonfiction films--United States--History and criticism.

Nonfiction films.

Documentary films--United States--History and criticism.

Documentary films.

United States.

Physical Description:

x, 386 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press, 2011.

Summary:

Useful Cinema explores how mid-twentieth-century institutions, including libraries, museums, classrooms, and professional organizations, helped to make moving images an ordinary feature of American life. In venues such as factories and community halls, people encountered industrial, educational, training, advertising, and other types of "useful cinema." Screening these films transformed unlikely spaces, conveyed ideas, and produced subjects in the service of public and private aims. Such functional motion pictures helped to shape common sense about cinema's place in contemporary life. Whether measured in terms of the number of films shown, the size of audiences, or the economic activity generated, the non-theatrical sector was a substantial and enduring parallel to the more spectacular realm of commercial film. In Useful Cinema, scholars examine organizations such as UNESCO, the YMCA, the Amateur Cinema League, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They also consider film exhibition sites in schools, businesses, and industries. As they expand understanding of this other American cinema, the contributors challenge preconceived notions about what cinema is. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: utility and cinema / Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland

"What a power for education!" : the cinema and sites of learning in the 1930s / Eric Smoodin

"We can see ourselves as others see us" : women workers and western union's training films in the 1920s / Stephen Groening

Hollywood's educators : Mark May and teaching film custodians / Charles R. Acland

Unesco, film, and education : mediating postwar paradigms of communication / Zoë Druick

Health films, cold war, and the production of patriotic audiences : the body fights bacteria (1948) / Kirsten Ostherr

Projecting the promise of 16mm, 1935-45 / Gregory A. Waller

A history long overdue : the public library and motion pictures / Jennifer Horne

Big, fast museums/small, slow movies : film, scale, and the art museum / Haidee Wasson

Pastoral exhibition : the YMCA motion picture bureau and the transition to 16mm, 1928-39 / Ronald Walter Greene

"A moving picture of the heavens" : the planetarium space show as useful cinema / Alison Griffiths

Double vision : World War II, racial uplift, and the all-American newsreel's pedagogical address / Joseph Clark

Mechanical craftsmanship : amateurs making practical films / Charles Tepperman

Experimental film as useless cinema / Michael Zryd.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822349976

0822349973

9780822350095

0822350092

OCLC:

700145922