Consolidating the Educational Film Infrastructure: University Extension and the Federal Government, 1920-1940

• In Event: The Origins of Educational Technology

Abstract

In the years following World War I, driven by the increase in government sponsored film production, motion pictures became an increasingly prominent component of institutional life in schools and universities. During this period, classroom films, higher education, and governmental bureaus increasingly became part of a shared social and cultural experience revolving around the cinema. Many important scholarly works have addressed the ways colleges and the government served as production centers for noncommercial movies. This paper expands this focus to examine the critical role played by universities and the federal government in the flourishing of visual education in the U.S. during the Progressive Era as distributors. Specifically, I examine how these institutions routinized the use of nontheatrical films in the classroom through the creation of media networks to facilitate distribution of films, exhibition equipment, and information about their use to a wide range of civic and educational organizations at the local level.

This paper examines the efforts to establish infrastructures for the dissemination of educational film which facilitated federal, state, and local initiatives and help standardize the burgeoning field. Drawing on primary and archival sources including institutional correspondence, annual reports, local newspapers, and financial records, two case studies will serve to illustrate the collaborative efforts of the federal government and universities in the Progressive Era in this area: the National Film Negative Library and the Bureau of Education’s distribution centers. One of the earliest (if not the first) proposals for a permanent film archive in the US, the idea for a National Film Negative Library originated out of the Bureaus of Visual Instruction at the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University around 1919. The Library would collect and edit prints of educational films, and produce printed supplemental materials, for distribution to university extension departments, which would then circulate them to local communities. Though the National Film Negative Library ultimately failed to materialize and the plan was abandoned, efforts to connect universities and the government at all levels found a successful outlet in the work of the U.S. Bureau of Education. The Bureau set up over forty depositories and distributing centers, primarily at university extension departments. It sought to create an infrastructure which reached down to local schools to provide educational motion pictures at a reasonable cost and ensure that schools had the means and know how to properly exhibit them and incorporate them into lesson plans. These distribution centers were critical in standardizing the educational film field as the U.S. Bureau of Education selected depositories on a contract plan which required a fixed minimum of equipment and personnel, a plan for receiving at least one hundred reels, and an agreement to serve as distributor to its local area.

Motion pictures were central in helping legitimize and redefining the social functions of higher education for the public, particularly through extension programs. Ultimately the distribution centers became an important means of forging a stronger relationship between higher education, the government, and the divergent communities of individual states through educational and nontheatrical film.

Author

• Alex Kupfer, New York University