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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841502861 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 434 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Terry Bolas was active in the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT) during the 1960s and early 1970s. He was SEFT's Secretary and a editor of its journal Screen. He has also been a teacher advisor in the Education Department of the British Film Institute.
Terry Bolas was active in the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT) during the 1960s and early 1970s. He was SEFT's Secretary and a editor of its journal Screen. He has also been a teacher advisor in the Education Department of the British Film Institute.
Read an Excerpt
Screen Education
From Film Appreciation to Media Studies
By Terry Bolas
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2009 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-286-1
CHAPTER 1
Cinema under Scrutiny
It is a paradox to realize the great power of the commercial cinema and then to introduce the cinema into the schools bereft of its essential characteristics.
E Francis Mills, Demonstrator, London School of Economics 1936
During the 1930s mass entertainment for the working class provided in the cinemas is widely perceived as having the potential to do harm. Children in particular are identified as vulnerable and civil society is roused on their behalf. The concerned voices are not those of the teachers in the state elementary schools who are generally silent, while others in more socially prestigious employment make the running. Teachers in the private sector however start to investigate the educational potential of what films have to offer. The British Film Institute through Sight and Sound provides space for the writing-up of their experiments and then offers some holiday time teacher training.
The aim of this investigation is, put simply, to trace the part played by a small-scale teachers' organisation in the evolution of media education in Britain, where, given the separate national identities it embraces, 'Britain' has to be a flexible concept. The Society of Film Teachers was founded in October 1950, but this particular date is not the appropriate starting point for this account. The momentum for such an organisation was developing in the 1930s and, had a war not intervened, SFT might have started sooner. Subsequently prewar pioneers were able to continue their work, albeit at more influential levels, in the post-war period. They were then joined by ex-service personnel whose wartime introduction to the power of film had been very immediate. However recognition of the potential for education in media or, more accurately for the period, the case for film appreciation had been established with the coming of the talking pictures and of the dream palaces which showed them.
The Film in National Life
Although the term 'film appreciation' acquired only passing importance in the history of film and media studies, its gradual introduction during the 1930s and 1940s was an important feature of the coming to terms with film that preoccupied influential elements in British society and some educationists. During the 1930s children, education, film, the institution of cinema and their interrelationships were repeatedly described and interpreted. When the decade began, 'film appreciation' was absent from the work of those who wrote about the cinema. That there was an interest in the cinema and its programmes and in the wider use of film is indicated by a number of events and publications, the most significant and influential of which was the Commission on Educational and Cultural Films and its 1933 report The Film in National Life which led to the formation of the British Film Institute and the attendant quarterly Sight and Sound. The Commission, funded by the Carnegie Institute, was an unofficial grouping of educationists from the British Institute of Adult Education and its creation was part of their campaign
... to encourage the use of film as a visual aid in formal education as well as to raise the general standard of film appreciation among the public.
In fact the specific term 'film appreciation' is absent from the text of the Report. When not directly considering the visual aid use of film, the Commission is concerned about the 'public appreciation of film' and the shaping of 'taste'. It seems possible that the spread of sound cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s became the catalyst for increased interest in the cinema as a social phenomenon. However, there persisted a lasting and unhelpful legacy of attitudes that persisted from the era of 'silent' films.
The terms of the relationship between the cinema and society in the United Kingdom had been set out in stark detail in The Cinema: Its present position and future possibilities published in 1917 by the National Council of Public Morals, described in the Introduction by its own Director and Secretary, James Marchant as 'one of those unofficial organisations which are the pride of English endeavour'. Essentially setting out to investigate the cinema as an institution, the Commission also delved into the world of education and the role that the film might play there. On the basis that 'the lure of the pictures is universal', the Commission considered nothing to be off-limits so that its report could state in the opening paragraph that
... we leave our labours with a deep conviction that no social problem of the day demands more earnest attention. The cinema, under wise guidance, may be made a powerful influence for good; if neglected, if its abuse is unchecked, its potentialities for evil are manifold.
The cinema's potential for doing harm was to persist as a notion that successive generations would have to address. Fear of this potential would be manifested in a variety of ways. The cinema as a venue would be seen as presenting problems by its very nature: it would be perceived as harbouring disease, providing the cover of darkness for illicit activity and as keeping children from their beds while harming their eyesight. The films shown in the cinemas would be denounced as requiring censorship, lest they entice the young into delinquency or inflict psychological damage on them by terrorising them with horrific sights. Furthermore, films, and in particular sound films, in the classroom might usurp the role of the teacher by undermining control. Probably the most lasting legacy of the Commission was that it became a model for the many separate inquiries that would be set in train by public bodies, which would each individually seek to investigate certain aspects of cinema. Perhaps for politicians, involvement in such an inquiry would provide a convincing demonstration of their integrity in the face of these presumed threats to society. Undoubtedly these extracurricular activities presented early film educationists with the additional problem – beyond that of identifying their object of study – of also having to try to retrieve film from its many dubious associations.
From the 1930s to the 1960s film educationists were few while others who wished to promulgate their views on the cinema were plentiful. Not only were members of the clergy, politicians and journalists eager to comment but their vigilance was endorsed by numerous voluntary societies that existed to represent specific interest groups and attitudes, particularly among the middle classes. Such bodies were to continue over the next two decades, persistent in their involvement, striking attitudes and taking positions about popular culture and the media. Nowhere would the survival of such groups be better demonstrated than by the organisations represented in the attendance list of the 1960 National Union of Teachers' Conference on 'Popular Culture and Personal Responsibility'. At that conference, as in so many of the debates before then, the voice of the teacher would barely be heard.
For a screen educationist in the 1930s, not only was there a need to be heard among the clamour of voices that wanted to pronounce on the cinema but there was also a need to distinguish clearly the ways in which film and education interrelated. The debates in the 1930s began to be considered separately. There was the relationship between children and the cinema; there was the use of film in classrooms and then there was the study of film for itself. The first of these was the one which was most conspicuous to everyone: huge numbers of children were going frequently to the cinema, as was adult society. Consequently, even in depression hit Britain, cinemas were a growth area.
Children and the Cinema
The mid-1930s in the United Kingdom saw a great expansion of cinemas. During the decade the number of cinema-goers attending on a regular basis increased as more accommodation became available in new cinemas. A significant proportion of this expanded audience was young. Oscar Deutsch went from owning one cinema in 1933 to having 220 under the Odeon brand in 1937 with a further 35 under construction. As a consequence, by 1939, Deutsch was one of the first exhibitors to offer a cinema club for children: the Odeon's Mickey Mouse Club. Most children were educated in elementary schools, which they left at age 14 and potentially then were wage earners. In the literature of the time those still at elementary school were usually referred to as children, those at work and under 21 as adolescents. The two categories were distinguished in the minds of the cinema operators so that the groups attending children's matinées or Saturday morning pictures were essentially those that would now be regarded as of primary school age. Though references were regularly made to the relationship between adolescents and the cinema, in practice in the 1930s when conferences met or groups convened to investigate 'children and the cinema', it was generally to the issues around the attendance of the younger group that they addressed themselves. In post-war Britain, with the raising of the school leaving age and consequent enlargement of the school population, the perceived issue of adolescents and the cinema would be addressed more directly.
In November 1936 the British Film Institute, held a two-day conference on 'Films for Children'. To judge from the Foreword to the Conference Report, published in January 1937, the event had been organised to counter an earlier conference in summer 1936, organised by the Cinema Christian Council and the Public Morality Council. The BFI's event was 'to summon a further and fuller conference representative of all shades of opinion', with the clear implication that the nature of the organizers of the previous event had perhaps guaranteed a predictable, if unhelpful, outcome. The shades of opinion deemed by the BFI as appropriate to speak formally were: the Home Office, a film renter, a child psychiatrist, two exhibitors, the Mothers' Union, a Director of Education and a member of the National Union of Teachers' Executive.
The positions taken were generally unsurprising, though the Home Office speaker (S W Harris, later to become Chairman of the British Board of Film Censors) introduced proceedings and advanced the idea that the young should be introduced to the 'art of film appreciation' since the films of the future 'would largely depend on the tastes of the children of today'. The film trade representatives drew attention to the limited potential of children's matinées as generators of income; the child psychiatrist was reassuring as to the child's imperviousness to suggestibility by films and the educational input was to argue for more local control of what was shown. A separate case was made for the BFI to take an initiative in editing down longer adult films so that they might be shown to children in the condensed version.
The final, rather bland, motion urging co-operation with the BFI reveals that 95 organisations were represented at the conference. Thus given the predictable composition of the audience some familiar themes emerge in the comments reported from the discussions that followed each speaker:
• presumed links between juvenile delinquency and films
• the adolescent as a problem
• cinemas were warm and dark with all that implied
• fresh air was preferable
• films were degrading the English language and replacing it with American.
Whether teachers were in the audience is unclear. However one 'ex-teacher' is reported as stating that the cinema trade had a better understanding of children than teachers had. The most direct outcome was the publication and extensive distribution by the BFI of its first list of eighty entertainment films recommended for children's programmes. Additionally short films were listed in categories devised by the Children's Film Society based at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead.
In 1938, the League of Nations Advisory Committee on Social Questions produced a report The Recreational Cinema and the Young, based on information collected from the governments of some 46 countries. That it should have had a strong Anglo-American focus, rather than an international perspective, is probably the result of the presence of A C Cameron and Oliver Bell both representing the British Film Institute, together with Edgar Dale, representing the United States Payne Fund investigations. However, perhaps most significantly, the report was prepared by S W Harris, who had represented the Home Office at the 1936 conference. Whilst dismissing some of the more extravagant claims as to the harm done by cinema attendance, the familiar health hazards of eye strain and sleep deprivation from late-night viewing are repeated.
There is, however, a section headed 'Teaching of Film Appreciation' which shifts away from giving children special films to view toward preparing them for visits to the commercial cinema – which they were attending in any case.
The answer to this question would appear to be found in some method of encouraging the young to discriminate between what is good and what is bad.
Harris had of course hinted at this in his introduction to the 1936 conference. Here he is more specific in identifying the task as one of shaping 'taste' to influence commercial film-making:
The young people of today are the future patrons of the cinema, and if their taste can be formed so as to encourage the production of films of good quality, there could be no better way of bringing about a general raising of the standard.
He continued to demonstrate where a start had been made. In the United Kingdom, the Monthly Film Bulletin, recently introduced by the BFI, added to the censors' categories four of its own in order better to define which films were suitable for what audiences. The refined categories were:
A: adults only
B: adults and adolescents (over 16 only)
C: family audiences
D: films for children
Such refinement, however, was only a first step. It was the use which was subsequently made of the films that mattered:
... in several countries, efforts are being made in the schools to cultivate an intelligent appreciation of films amongst the children and to teach them to discriminate between the good and the bad.
Seven of the states of the USA had by this stage included the teaching of film discrimination in the school curriculum. The BFI is credited with having kick started a similar activity in the United Kingdom, though no specific instances are mentioned. The opening sentence of the Conclusions section of this League of Nations publication is revealing. 'The present inquiry would have been justified if it only serves to draw attention to a problem, which is common to the whole world.' Quite how far the classroom teacher would have been complicit in this conclusion is questionable. For many, having concerns about the influence of the cinema would have seemed to be an issue of lesser importance than attempting to understand the opportunities/threats that the introduction of educational films into schools would bring.
Connecting Film and Education
In the 1930s significant attempts were made in both the United Kingdom and the United States of America to establish the nature of the relationship which might exist between film and education. In both countries, a variety of books was produced examining the implications of the relationship. The clarity of the two most distinct links between films and education emerged only slowly: film was a visual aid, contributing to the better understanding of a wide range of areas of knowledge, and then there were the beginnings of the acceptance of film itself as the object of study. Curiously, the name that might be given to the second of these became established long before there was any consensus as to what the study itself might involve. This area of inquiry became known as motion picture appreciation in the USA and film appreciation in the United Kingdom. As a term in general use in the UK, film appreciation persisted into the 1960s. If there was a significant moment for its discontinuation, it may have been in 1958/9, when the BFI's Film Appreciation Department was redesignated as the Education Department.
The term 'film appreciation' (as distinct from references to 'the appreciation of the film' first appears in Sight and Sound in 1934 when an article about 'The School Film Society' by A Maxwell Lewis identifies one of the aims of such a society as 'a means of training the child in film appreciation'. Coincidentally, in the same issue, Paul Rotha reviews How to Appreciate Motion Pictures, which had been published in the USA in 1933 as 'a manual of motion picture criticism for high school students'. Since the term 'motion picture appreciation' seems to have had earlier currency in the United States, it may be that – with suitable trans-Atlantic modification – it became 'film appreciation' in the United Kingdom. Both Lewis in his article and Rotha in his review make it clear that film appreciation is in effect a shorthand way of making reference to the training of film taste, and that by such training – as The Film in National Life had proposed – a better informed audience 'with higher standards of taste' would be for the good of cinema in the longer term.
However, in 1933 The Film in National Life does make specific reference to the relationship between the school, the child and the cinema.
The taste of the next generation is largely formed at school; therefore the school cannot afford to neglect so important a factor as the film in the education of a generation which goes regularly and naturally to the cinema.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Screen Education by Terry Bolas. Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Foreword,
Prologue,
1 Cinema under Scrutiny,
2 Film Appreciation,
3 Searching for Room at the Top,
4 Discrimination and Popular Culture,
5 Film in Education – The Back of Beyond,
6 The University in Old Compton Street,
7 The Felt Intervention of Screen,
8 Screen Saviours,
9 SEFT Limited,
10 A Moral Panic Averted,
11 Comedia delves arbitrarily,
Epilogue,
Screen education: a timeline 1930–1993,
Expansion of media studies – the statistics,
Bibliography,
Index,