Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
CHARLES R. ACLAND
One hundred-and-ten years after the ﬁrst cinema showmen presented
actualities in fairgrounds, eighty years after the 16 mm gauge helped ﬁlm
burst free of the darkened movie house, and sixty years after regularized
television broadcasts began to animate living rooms, we continue to hear
the plaintive cry of the cinema-mourner, railing against the degradation
of the magic of ﬁlms and cinemagoing that has resulted from the ubiquity
of moving images. Theatrical celluloid projections tenaciously reside in
the scholarly imagination as part of a foundational deﬁnition of cinema,
making extra-theatrical screens always appear to be second-best options
or curiosity venues. Senior ﬁlm theorists can still be found making
perplexed observations about the presence of moving images on buses, in
subways and on handheld devices. Such bewilderment only reveals the
primacy of the motion picture theatrical situation in their
conceptualization of cinema – a powerful site of formative movie
memories, certainly, but a reiﬁed, select and privileged location for the
moving image experience all the same. Cinephilia can be a beautiful
afﬂiction, yet that admission seems to have blinded us to the variety of
forms of moving image culture that have been with us for so long.
Contemporary life is awash with moving images. They may not be
exactly ubiquitous, for there are plenty of places in which they do not
appear, but moving images are most certainly ordinary and banal.
Formats range from outdoor advertising loops lasting just seconds, to
standard commercial feature ﬁlms, to monumental endless real-time
video feeds. The integration of audiovisual screen formats – including
television, cinema, mobile phones and massive outdoor screens – with
an array of everyday and aesthetic practices has multiplied the conditions
148 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009
&The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/screen/hjn071
Part4
and occasions for encountering moving images. The situation has, in
many ways, cheapened the artefact of the moving image, though the very
fact of miniature dramas in the palm of one’s hand and gigantic
electronic billboards on the exterior of ofﬁce blocks can still elicit
wonderment or disorientation. In this environment, various screen
theories and screen studies, including work on cultural practice, policy
and exhibition, are working to expand ﬁlm scholarship, thankfully
rescuing it from becoming the limited subﬁeld of ‘celluloid studies’ and
invigorating research activity shared by ﬁlm, media and cultural studies.
Screen images arrive, occupy a portion of our sensory ﬁeld with sound
and vision, and then leave. In this way screens designate circuits as much
as display formats. They represent links between dispersed spectatorial
conditions, and are best seen as a network built to move texts around.
Moreover, screen venues and occasions can compel people to move and
gather together, for instance at gallery installations or archival
screenings; or they can move with people, as do laptop and vehicular
screens. Viewing circumstances can facilitate isolated individuality or
spark practices of congregation. These features not only push us to
address the conditions of screen presentation but also make us aware of
the ways in which such conditions structure and regularize relations and
trafﬁc between people and screens. These relations are temporal and
spatial, varying across time and location, and they prompt us to consider
who is part of any networked screen practice, who is not, and what,
exactly, is circulating. The alternation, replacement and ﬂow of texts
give screens the appearance of elasticity and variability. Accordingly,
many critics have seen these impermanent views, and the appearance
before one’s eyes of something that is ‘not truly there’, as having a deep
association with the virtual. Yet although there has been plenty of
productive work in this vein, it is impossible to shake the obvious, gutlevel
observation that screens, and the cultural practices that surround
and accompany them, are material.1
Screens are things: they are the
products of industry and labour; they take up space; they are made of
solid substance; they change people’s bodily orientation; and they send
light into our eyes and, with the audio component of most screens,
soundwaves into our ears. There is nothing immaterial about any of this.
And anyone who remains unconvinced need only consider the
outrageous environmental impact of the metals and toxins that constitute
our screen world.2
Mobility is perhaps the most frequently deployed descriptor of
contemporary screen culture, though it is worth reminding ourselves that
it has long been a feature of modern media. The printing press prompted
the mobility of books. The telegraph so mobilized language that it was
seen as an annihilation of space. Even Walter Benjamin’s famous
artwork essay was, in part, about the circulation of art in the age of ﬁlm
and photography.3
If we look closely at contemporary talk about mobile
technology, without fail we see that it is not just about the situational
variability of exhibition and the movement of screens, texts and people.
1 Two exemplary works that
navigate both the material and the
virtual dimensions of screen
culture are Anne Friedberg, The
Virtual Window: from Alberti to
Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2006); and Janine
Marchessault and Susan Lord
(eds), Fluid Screens, Expanded
Cinema (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2007).
2 For an itemization of the
environmental hazards of the
computer industry, see Elizabeth
Grossman, High Tech Trash:
Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics and
Human Health (Washington, DC:
Island Press, 2006); for a mapping
of environmental issues for media
studies, see Richard Maxwell and
Toby Miller, ‘Ecological ethics and
media technology’, International
Journal of Communication, vol. 2,
(2008), pp. 331–53.
3 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art
in the age of its technological
reproducibility’, in Howard Eiland
and Michael W. Jennings (eds),
Selected Writings, Volume III,
1935–1938 (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 2002), pp. 101–33.
149 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
Part4
It includes reproducibility, with multiple copies available in multiple
locations at once, and miniaturization, with comparative lightness and
compactness facilitating portability. Media mobility subsumes
discourses of instantaneity, at least as this appears related to the speed
and the range of consumer choice (‘I want to watch Juno, now’); it also
subsumes discourses of personalization and individual localization of
consumer choice, best represented by a language of clips on demand
(‘No, I want to see the David Letterman interview with Diablo Cody
from a few years ago’). Textual variability – or versioning – is another
characteristic linked to mobile culture. It refers to textual transfer
between media formats and to successive and multiple editions,
including directors’ cuts, soundtrack changes for different releases and
fan-based textual play.
Together, situational variability, reproducibility, miniaturization,
instantaneity, personalization and versioning have crucially marked our
mobile media era with informality, where easy and abundant adaptability
to a variety of formats has increased the ordinary, quotidian aspect of
moving images, as well as the relative disposability of any given
incarnation. Motion pictures once had a precious status, needed care and
skill in handling, and required special venues for exhibition. The formats
that typify today’s moving images – such as e-mail links to web-based
clips, DVD recordings and episodes of serialized narratives speciﬁcally
for mobile phones – are closer to the crude ephemera of newspapers and
brochures, so unremarkable have they become.
Signiﬁcantly, this rising informality does not operate in isolation but
requires its corollary, in that it is accompanied by efforts to instal formal
practices. Sharing family snapshots on a dinky mobile phone screen is
informal next to the history of studio portraiture. Viewing part of Pirates
of the Caribbean: at World’s End (Gore Verbinski, 2007) on a
PlayStation Portable while waiting for a train is a casual use when
compared with attending the opening night of Kung Fu Panda (Mark
Osborne and John Stevenson, 2008) in IMAX. In other words, the
depreciating value of the artefact of moving images comes with an
intensiﬁed discussion of the quality and appropriateness of various
formats and spectatorial situations. This can be seen in the scholarly
prognostications about ‘the death of cinema’, in the technologicallyfocused
cinephilia of home theatres, and in the everyday cinemagoing
decisions about whether a ﬁlm is a big-screen movie or a ‘renter’ to be
seen later when released on DVD. David Denby has claimed that the
expansion of exhibition possibilities has produced ‘platform
agnosticism’, such that people no longer care in which format ﬁlms are
seen.4
However, I would maintain that exactly the opposite has occurred:
the versioning of ﬁlm has produced a heightened platform consciousness
with more talk and more decision-making concerning screen formats
than ever before.
Connected to platform consciousness, the cheapening of moving
image material is one of the factors that have provoked concerns about
4 David Denby, ‘Big pictures’, The
New Yorker, vol. 82, no. 44 (2007),
pp. 54–63.
150 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
Part4
preservation, as well as appreciation, of ‘true’ or ‘classic’ cinematic
forms and environments. Embedded in such distinctions between an
informal and a more rigorously serious appreciation of moving images is
a hierarchy of taste. This hierarchy includes all the special restorations,
architectures and museological treatments designed precisely to help set
up procedures for consecrating ‘the good’ in moving image culture.
Developing alongside this is a class of experts and entrepreneurs able to
identify and evaluate the artfulness of screen images, poised against the
barbaric, ordinary disregard of their value. Indeed, to revise the
Bourdieuian formulation: as moving image culture becomes more
informal, additional status accrues to a specialized class able to rescue
the art from the disposable.
The hierarchy of taste evident in bourgeois ﬁlm culture, and the classbound
experts who legitimize it, are an inseparable part of the
organization of formal and informal encounters with mobile media – that
is, of the conditions, practices and material manifestation of all ﬁve
aforementioned facets. In this respect, materialist historical research is an
essential component in the study of screen culture. And for this reason a
full encounter with the social, political and economic dimensions of
screen culture beneﬁts from a serious engagement with the approaches
and concepts of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. Their work
helps us see the deep structural organization of social relations in
everyday life, which is essential to understanding the political import of
moving image culture. Williams draws us towards the ordinary, seeing
cultural patterns as typifying period, place and generation. Following his
form of cultural materialism, we might ask about the structures of feeling
of screen culture as they reveal distinctive and intelligible senses of our
media world.5
What forms of ‘practical consciousness’ develop so that
we may live with, negotiate and make sense of media culture?
Bourdieu’s methodologies map the correlations between hierarchies of
class and of culture.6
For Bourdieu, social spaces embody systems of
dispositions, which in turn produce senses of class appropriateness,
entitlement and inaccessibility. Both provide ways of elucidating the
forces and conditions that organize the lived experience of capitalist
culture, which is foundational to an analysis of class formation and
differential distribution of social power. Thinking about our culture of
screens, Williams’s and Bourdieu’s writings clarify that media culture
consists of a legible set of experiences about a shared contemporary
moment, advanced and legitimized by a related class stratum of experts
and connoisseurs – lay and professional – in the realm of technology,
design, use, advocacy and critique of that same media environment.
Just as Williams and Bourdieu offer us a way of examining how power
operates in the realm of culture, so too do issues of historical continuity
and disjunction ﬁgure in their analyses. Accordingly, in order to evince
the dynamics of contemporary conditions of screen informality and
formality, we need to engage fully with the entire history of screen
mobility. Of particular interest is the fact that motion pictures have long
5 Cf. Raymond Williams, Marxism
and Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977).
6 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of
Cultural Production, ed. and trans.
Randal Johnson (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 1993).
151 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
Part4
circulated for instructional, scientiﬁc, promotional, community and
religious purposes, though ﬁlm studies and theory have conventionally
ignored or devalued these non-art and non-feature texts and venues. This
‘useful cinema’ of institutionally functional deployments of moving
image materials exploited the relative mobility of the cinematic
apparatus, and with it the conversion of sundry locations into screening
sites.7
In some notable instances, the episteme of ‘useful cinema’ and its
special relationship with new pedagogical and information dissemination
strategies linked education through ﬁlm to education about ﬁlm. This
observation is especially ﬁtting for the ﬁftieth anniversary of a journal
whose origins lie in the irregular publication The Film Teacher, then the
regularized appearance of Screen Education, the forerunner of Screen.
Regarding the parallel historical development of the ﬁlm education and
the ﬁlm society movements, Peter Harcourt, then with the British Film
Institute Education Department, wrote in 1964 that ‘Screen education
began in schools and youth clubs’.8
What follows, albeit in condensed form, is one branch on a materialist
history of institutional screens, with special focus on post-World War II
USA and Canada, using the discursive activity of organizational
formation, policy debates, trade publications and advertising images as
sites of evidence and illustration. The need for such a history exists
because in research on extra-theatrical viewing contexts there is more
media studies and ﬁlm studies work on the arrival of moving images in
domestic space than in other locations. Taking a cue from Lynn Spigel’s
invaluable book Make Room for TV, the work proposed here can be seen
as a kind of ‘make room for AV’.9
These media of still and moving image
projection and of audio recording and playback are so familiar to
teachers and students as to be easily ignored or forgotten. Yet they are
direct precursors of today’s reigning common sense about wired
classrooms and communities. Interestingly, the initials ‘AV’ often carry
connotations of school, despite their use in any number of industrial and
technical settings. Let us bear in mind, too, that this is a living and
continuous history, with the clunkiness of earlier audiovisual playback
devices, whether in use or in storage, still amply evident in institutions.
The postwar historical moment speaks directly to the challenges
currently faced by ﬁlm and media scholars and teachers, especially those
concerning our role in both constructing and critiquing a contemporary,
technologically invested elite.
The mobilization of moving images and of the associated spectators and
publics opened up new occasions for learning and instruction.
Accordingly, with a myriad of potentially wily, even subversive,
educational applications, concerns about the conduct and utilization of
provisional exhibition venues arose among cultural authorities. A
dynamic relationship between pedagogical reform and pedagogical
alarm is evident in non-theatrical ﬁlm organizations, including ﬁlm
societies and councils, in Canada and the USA between 1920 and 1960.10
7 See Charles Acland and Haidee
Wasson (eds), Useful Cinema
(Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, in preparation).
8 Peter Harcourt, ‘Towards higher
education’, Screen Education (ﬁrst
series), no. 26 (1964), p. 20.
9 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV:
Television and the Family Ideal in
Postwar America (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1992).
10 For some of the research I have
conducted in this area, see
Charles Acland, ‘Classrooms,
clubs, and community circuits:
reconstructing cultural authority
and the Film Council movement,
1946–1957’, in Lee Grieveson
and Haidee Wasson (eds),
Inventing Film Studies (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2008),
pp. 149–81; ‘Patterns of cultural
authority: the National Film
Society of Canada and the
institutionalization of ﬁlm
education, 1938–41’, Canadian
Journal of Film Studies, vol. 10,
no. 1 (2001), pp. 2–27; ‘Mapping
the serious and the dangerous:
ﬁlm and the National Council of
Education, 1920–1939’, Cine´ma,
vol. 6, no.1 (1995), pp. 101–18.
Other related work includes Eric
Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra:
Audience, Celebrity and
American Film Studies, 1930–
1960 (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004); Anne
Morey, Hollywood Outsiders: the
Adaptation of the Film Industry,
1913–1934 (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press,
2003); Nicholas Sammond, Babes
in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney
and the Making of the American
Child (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005); Ronald
Walter Greene, ‘Y movies: ﬁlm
and the modernization of
pastoral power’, Communication
and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol.
2, no. 1 (2005), pp. 20–36; Dana
Polan, Scenes of Instruction: the
Beginnings of the US Study of
Film (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2007).
152 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
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Among the activities of organizations such as the highly visible Film
Council of America (FCA) was the functional deployment of ﬁlm – that
is, the use of the medium for speciﬁc and narrowly deﬁned instructional
purposes, an engagement that frequently dovetailed with issues of ﬁlm
aesthetics and appreciation. The FCA’s operations involved the
establishment of procedures of ﬁlm evaluation and modes of group
discussion about ﬁlms and issues, as well as the advancement of a
production industry and of distribution channels both parallel with and
connected to the mainstream commercial sector. The media
educationalists who spearheaded these enterprises formed a compact of
concerned citizens who, through their efforts to advance an idea of
progress and modernization through media participation and availability,
were helping to stabilize the class divisions of this new phase of mass
democratic society. These educationalists might be seen as the ﬁrst
generation of media experts. Their efforts, in which the language of
liberal pluralism and public access dominated, helped to introduce ways
of seeing, knowing and managing the expanded citizen–audience as its
encounters with media forms, as consumers and producers, became an
increasingly central part of school, work and leisure. In this way, the
media educational activists, some voluntary and some salaried, were
organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense, not because they were
ideologically progressive – they were not unproblematically so – but
inasmuch as they participated in, and beneﬁted from, the refortiﬁcation
of class boundaries.
The mobility of functional ﬁlm did not stand as evidence of the
singular technological advantage of motion pictures, but was appended
to a series of other media innovations designed speciﬁcally for the
classroom and community context. Film was part of an expanded media
environment that included opaque and overhead projectors,
tachistoscopes, ﬁlm strips, slide shows, television, sound materials
(record players, recording devices and radio) and, in the 1960s, the
programmed instruction of teaching machines (ﬁgures 1, 2 and 3). For
example, at a 1946 conference on audiovisual methods for international
understanding sponsored by the American Council on Education (ACE)
and the FCA, participants made a point of explaining that when people
talked about ﬁlm or motion pictures, which they did throughout, they
were in fact referring to all audiovisual materials.11
Throughout the postWorld
War II period, the various forms of social scientiﬁc or
psychological monitoring of academic performance associated with
educational media operated with an eye to ‘a package of multi-media
instructional segments’, or what was sometimes called a ‘total systems
approach’.12
The rise of audiovisual education was neither automatic nor sudden.
Compared with the way new media training for a world of technology is
now taken for granted, the levels of scepticism were astronomical, and
indeed prompted some ironic commentary by these technologized
educationalists. A 1949 issue of Educational Screen covered a mock trial
11 Helen Seaton Preston (ed.),
Audio-Visual Materials Toward
International Understanding
(Washington, DC: American
Council on Education, 1946), p. 2.
12 Leslie J. Briggs, Peggie L.
Campeau, Robert M. Gagne´ and
Mark A. May, Instructional Media:
a Procedure for the Design of
Multi-Media Instruction, a Critical
Review of Research, and
Suggestions for Future Research,
ﬁnal report prepared by the
Instructional Methods Program of
the Center for Research and
Evaluation in Applications of
Technology in Education
(CREATE), submitted to US
Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare, Ofﬁce of Education
(Pittsburgh, PA: American
Institutes for Research, 1967),
p. 4.
153 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
Part4
of instructional media. Written in a hardboiled, court reporting style,
‘Mr AVA vs the State of NJ’ had audiovisual aids charged with the
student and teacher time it ‘did abstract, ﬁlch, waste, fritter, consume,
destroy and otherwise dispose of ’.13
Irene Cypher, of the NYU
Department of Communication, and a leading researcher and advocate
for technology in the classroom, is shown testifying with ‘her jaw set
against blandishments’ of the prosecutor.14
The jury, not surprisingly,
found Mr AVA not guilty as charged.
Although the instructional genre had been evident in the ﬁrst decade of
cinema, and safe 16 mm ﬁlm was available from the 1920s onwards, as
Robert Filep and Wilbur Schramm observed: ‘Instructional ﬁlms . . .
have been available for many decades but their use was negligible until
Fig. 2. Classroom audiovisual
scene, EDL Tachistoscope
advertisement, Educational
Screen, December 1953, p. 429.
Fig. 1. Classroom ﬁlm scene, from
Kodak Pageant Projector
advertisement, Educational
Screen, April 1954, p. 135.
13 Evelyn Oelen, ‘Mr AVA vs the
State of NJ’, Educational Screen,
February 1949, p. 61.
14 Ibid., p. 62.
154 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
Part4
the launching of Sputnik sparked an unprecedented concern and
dissatisfaction with the learning devices and practices of the time’.15
While ‘negligible’ is not an entirely accurate assessment, there was a
sense, at least from the 1930s on, that institutional media, in particular
ﬁlm, were under-utilized as a consequence of teacher and community
leader confusion, lack of training, and lack of coordination between users
and producers. What was called visual education at the turn of the last
century, and then audiovisual instruction in the 1940s, was a long, slow
reformation of pedagogical and technological practice.
Fig. 3. Mobile media, from
‘Television goes to school’,
Educational Screen, November
1948, p. 439.
15 Robert Filep and Wilbur
Schramm, A Study of the Impact
of Research on Utilization of
Media for Educational Purposes,
sponsored by NDEA Title VII
1958–1968 (Washington, DC: US
Department of Health, Education
and Welfare, Ofﬁce of Education,
1970), p. 6.
155 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
Part4
This reformation of pedagogical practice, and its usage for massmediated
education, was not some ideologically neutral enterprise aimed
simply at doing things better. It harboured an ideal of liberal,
technocratic society; it redrew class boundaries around professions and
expertise that served this vision; and it constituted an unprecedented
redeﬁnition of learning contexts as markets to be exploited. Indeed, the
history of the educational market is tightly bound up with the history of
audiovisual instructional technologies. There existed trade publications
for and about these technologies, including Educational Screen, Business
Screen, Film News, Educational Technology and Audiovisual
Instruction. In these sources one ﬁnds that the watchwords of the day
were democratization, community orientation, speed, low skill
requirement, simplicity of use, mobility, adaptability and informality. In
fact, ‘informal education’ described the kind of media learning that
occurred almost by accident during the course of daily life, as well as the
experiments in the less rigidly structured pedagogy of the 1960s and
1970s, such as open classrooms.
World War II gave an enormous boost to mass mobilization and mass
education efforts, which included experiments in how these programmes
could best be mounted through ﬁlm and other media.16
An alternately
chaotic and well-coordinated campaign to sell the promises of massmediated
education to public institutions continued through the postwar
decades. The problems impeding the widespread acceptance of
electronically accessorized courses included a sort of consumer fatigue
from too many materials available or, more damaging to the
presumptions of the rising technocracy, a reluctance to change
pedagogical practices due to an inability to see any advantages in doing
so. Recommendations continued to stress testing and experimentation of
the media in question, to demonstrate and discern the most effective
media choices for different pedagogical goals. The Yale University
Motion Picture Research Project, for example, used controlled
experimental situations to determine the best types of teaching ﬁlms,
with differing versions of ﬁlms tested on school children. Funding for
this came from the MPAA and from Teaching Film Custodians, a
distributor and promoter of educational ﬁlm noted especially for its
handling of Hollywood shorts and excerpted features.17
Since the beneﬁts were not equally evident to everyone, they had to be
demonstrated and sold. The collective resources devoted to this
enterprise were remarkable. But the questions addressed were largely not
about the long-term consequences of creating a citizenry for a
technologized world through technologized means. They focused on how
fast, how efﬁciently, how expansively, through what procedures and
through what mechanisms different instructional tasks could be
accomplished. In the USA, a number of organizations sponsored this new
world. For example, the National Education Association (NEA), a
leading agenda-setting organization for educational policy established in
1848, launched its Department of Visual Instruction in 1923, changing its
16 For a valuable summary of this
work, see Charles F. Hoban, Jr
and Edward B. Van Ormer,
Instructional Film Research
1918–1950 (New York, NY: Arno
Press, 1970), originally a report
from the Instructional Film
Research Program at
Pennsylvania State College,
1951.
17 See Mark A. May and Arthur A.
Lumsdaine, Learning From Films
(New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1958).
156 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
Part4
name to Department of Audio-Visual Instruction (DAVI) in 1947; in
1971, this department became a separate organization, the Association
for Educational Communications and Technology. DAVI and others
produced and circulated audiovisual catalogues, policy documents and
scholarly research, all with the intention of advancing the beneﬁcial use
of audiovisual materials in instructional situations. In addition to
explicitly educational enterprises such as DAVI and FCA, there were a
number of industry lobbies including the National Association of Visual
Education Dealers (renamed the National Audio Visual Association after
World War II) and the Visual Equipment Manufacturers Council.
Making the case for the audiovisual revolution were educationalists,
psychologists, sociologists and early communication scholars, among
Fig. 4. Ancient vs modern teacher,
Victor ﬁlm projector
advertisement, Educational
Screen, December 1946, p. 548.
157 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
Part4
whose number were communication studies e´minence grise Wilbur
Schramm, Scott Fletcher of Encyclopedia Brittanica Films and the Ford
Foundation’s Fund for Adult Education, Samuel Renshaw, Mark May
and Edgar Dale, the latter three of whom had conducted and published
research in the 1930s as part of the Payne Fund studies on the effects of
ﬁlms on children. Together with many others, they formed a breed of
applied communication specialists and media experts, with links to a new
and increasingly powerful industrial sector. Developing workshops and
Fig. 5. Efﬁcient learning, Spencer
Delineascopes advertisement,
Educational Screen, April 1948,
p. 189.
158 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
Part4
conferences (such as the American Film Assembly) and journals (such as
AV Communication Review) and inventing new job responsibilities and
titles (such as Director of AV Services), here was what Williams called a
cultural formation, which begins as a timely alliance of actors within a
more stable preexisting institutional setting. Importantly, cultural
formations are one way in which classes recalibrate their membership
and assist in a degree of intergenerational continuity.
For this cohort of media enthusiasts, the air of the little schoolhouse
was stale, especially when compared with the ﬂashy media that people
were experiencing in their everyday lives. Instructional methods had to
be brought in line with the media with which people already lived. An
anxiety about relevance crept into the rationales for electric learning, and
the imperative of modernization was prevalent. As portrayed in an
advertisement for Victor ﬁlm projectors, the single student conversing
directly with the teacher was an ancient approach to education. In
contrast, ‘the way in modern pedagogy’ was the motion picture, the
‘modern teacher’ that could bring ancient times to life for enthralled
children (ﬁgure 4). Bound up with this modern way were methods to
instruct quickly and efﬁciently, as represented in the Spencer
Delineascopes advertisement’s assertion that its products help ‘picture in
a minute what you’d say in an hour’ (ﬁgure 5). The processing and the
measurement of the success of the task of teaching were introduced as
objectives, and the cult of performance measures for teachers was
Fig. 6. Dramatic new teaching aid,
American Optical opaque
projector advertisement,
Educational Screen, September
1955, p. 309.
159 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
Part4
growing. In effect, an instrumentalist battle against wasteful learning was
being waged.
For all of the language of democratization and access to media
hardware, AV lent authority to teachers. The media’s newness and ability
to dazzle provided a way to command learning situations. The ‘dramatic
new’ American Optical opaque projector expresses a certain muscularity
and seems to advocate a ‘shock and awe’ mode of instruction (ﬁgure 6).
Contrary to the impression given by the Victor ﬁlm projectors
advertisement, only rarely were ‘teacherless’ classrooms promoted as a
beneﬁt of instructional audiovisual equipment. Instead, the dominant
rhetoric deﬁned new roles for teachers, roles that stressed an expansion in
the numbers of students managed and processed, whether through the
integration of group discussion with instructional media or by teachers
Fig. 7. Self-contained projection
unit with ‘desk top screen’, Bell Boy
portable sound slide ﬁlm projector
advertisement, Educational Screen,
February 1950, p. 87.
160 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
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acting as guides and facilitators for individual learning. The facilitator
role became a leading pedagogical approach in the 1960s.
Portability disseminated a sense of the everywhere-ness of instruction
and supposedly matched a rising mass democratic and participatory
culture. Movie-Mite’s Bell Boy sound slide ﬁlm unit offered a hand-carry
screen and projector from 1945 onwards (ﬁgure 7). The complete
presentational device, though still weighing in at a hefty twenty-nine
pounds, was marketed for use in sales training and Sunday schools, and
boasted an exceptionally early appearance of what was referred to as a
‘desk top screen’. This was a uniﬁed media system, with a combination
of screen, projector and speakers permitting situational ﬂexibility. In the
postwar period, much discussion and many products on the market
emphasized conﬁgurations of media rather than a single medium. A good
deal of the design of programmes and many of the media devices sold
were premissed on the integration of materials: essays and ﬁlms,
recordings and opaque projectors. Organizations like the FCA publicized
not only ﬁlm but certain kinds of reading material, ﬁlm strips and
television, as well as techniques of discussion. The National Film Board
Fig. 8. Widescreen for institutions
and industry, Radiant
advertisement, Business Screen,
November 1954, p. 59.
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of Canada, beyond its central commitment to ﬁlm production and
distribution, created and circulated newsletters, teacher manuals,
overhead transparencies, ﬁlm strips and still photographs. In essence, a
medium was not expected to stand on its own, and content was seen as
adaptable, transferable and complementary to material in other formats.
One might think of this as a brand of convergence avant la lettre. As a
starting point for a classroom’s media system, in 1962 University of
Southern California professor James D. Finn listed seven essential
components in contemporary teaching: 16 mm sound ﬁlm projector, ﬁlm
strip projector, overhead projector, radio, record player, tape recorder
and television. He recommended that at least ﬁve of these be made
available to all classrooms.18
Given, then, that a dominant understanding
on the part of educationalists and entrepreneurs highlighted ﬁlm’s
relationship to other media formats, it is a historical miscalculation for
contemporary scholarship to treat ﬁlm as a singular and stable medium,
at least for this extra-theatrical sector (and arguably for other ﬁlm sectors
as well).
Included in this ‘interrelated system of learning resources’19
were all
sorts of materials besides projectors and content, elements that tend to
fall off the map for ﬁlm and media scholars. The ‘system’ consisted
of a variety of screens, from state-of-the-art retractable wide screens
(ﬁgure 8) to portable ﬂoor-level viewing huts (ﬁgure 9). To convert
spaces into suitable screening locations, companies offered various
methods of darkening rooms, as seen with the Flexalum Audio-Visual
blind (ﬁgure 10). To store the various materials, space had to be allocated
either in meeting halls and classrooms themselves or in designated
Fig. 9. Portable, ﬂoor-level,
viewing hut, from ‘Film strips and
primary reading’, The Instructor,
June 1953, p. 86.
18 ‘Schools are held in need of
funds for machine aids’, The
New York Times, 2 October 1962,
p. 33.
19 Filep and Schramm, A Study of
the Impact of Research on
Utilization of Media for
Educational Purposes, p. 7
(emphasis in original).
162 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
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equipment depots. Carts, stands and extension cords were designed to
accommodate an easy and temporary transformation of spaces into
projection rooms (ﬁgure 11). These were not inconsequential elements:
these things were commodities. They were marketed and sold; they were
altered and improved regularly; budgets had to be provided for them and
rationales for budget commitments had to be made; space was needed to
house them. The seemingly trivial materials of cords, carts, curtains and
closets were essential for the temporary spatial and architectural
reorientation and reprioritization of institutions required by the media
revolution. Elaborate plans for specially designed and constructed media
training facilities circulated, and a few such models for the future of
media-assisted instruction were built; but the primary experience was
Fig. 10. Battling daylight, Flexalum
Audio-Visual blind advertisement,
Educational Screen, February
1956, p. 59.
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one of the familiar metal cart being wheeled from one location to another
and of battles with offending daylight.
The representational strategies of these advertisements must be read
alongside the democratic ideal of expanded access to technological
facilities. Women were one important front for the normalization of
media expansion, with new expectations for the training of a female
labour force of teachers. And while ﬁgures of women appear in many of
the advertisements for media products as a primary target market of
users, they also appear as a way to connote ease of use and portability.
Furthermore, advertisements frequently depict instructional media as a
vehicle to bring a palatable image of distant peoples into classrooms
(ﬁgure 12). Along with this quasi-anthropological lesson was a
confrontation between the modern and its racialized other, with the
presumptively uniformly white classroom using its superior
technological systems to open up a portal to the premodern. Versions of
this discourse, reinstating media as a marker between the advanced and
the backward, are just as apparent in trade news, where one ﬁnds that
stories on audiovisual training programmes emphasized extension to
historically disadvantaged populations, whether an Educational Screen
cover story about visual education in Papua–New Guinea or a report on
audiovisual teacher training at the famed African–American school, the
Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.20
With this budding alignment of a dispersed educational market already
in process, the 1958 National Defense Education Act in the USA
institutionalized and solidiﬁed this activity. This Act was President
Eisenhower’s response to the Sputnik crisis. Included in the Act was Title
VII, ‘research and experimentation in more effective utilization of
television, radio, motion pictures, and related media for educational
purposes’. By 1968, six hundred research projects had been funded
through Title VII, to the tune of $40.3 million.21
Meanwhile, Title III of
the Act made new money available to purchase media equipment and to
remodel schools: $280 million in the ﬁrst four years.22
The boom in
audiovisual purchases through the 1960s was astonishing, a direct result
Fig. 11. Modern audiovisual cart,
Educational Screen, January 1954, p. 31.
Fig. 12. View on the premodern, from RCA projector advertisement,
Educational Screen, May 1946, p. 255.
20 ‘Visual education in Papua and
New Guinea’, Educational
Screen, vol. 30, no. 1 (1951),
p. 18; Pearl W. Headd, ‘A basic
AV course’, The Audio-Visual
Magazine: Educational Screen,
vol. 35, no. 6 (1956), pp. 218–19.
21 Filep and Schramm, A Study of
the Impact of Research on
Utilization of Media for
Educational Purposes, p. 1.
22 Theodora E. Carlson, Guide to the
National Defense Education Act
of 1958 (Washington, DC: US
Department of Health, Education
and Welfare, Ofﬁce of Education,
1960), p. 3.
164 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
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of this federal support. For instance, DAVI saw its members grow from
three thousand in 1958 to eleven thousand in 1970.23
The rise of audiovisual technologies after World War II, and the
discursive terms of this expansion, continue to resonate in our own
historical context. The ordinary presence of these objects and practices is
part of the texture of our media culture, and hence merits our scholarly
attention. Moreover, the reigning common sense concerning the
indispensability of new media to contemporary education and training
would not exist were it not for the years of advocacy for, and experiments
with, those drab grey-green instructional aids. As ﬁlm and media
teachers and scholars, we tend to be stalwart supporters of access to
certain kinds of projection and display formats. For this reason, it is
essential that we understand the ways we have beneﬁted from, and are
implicated in, the history of the formation of this common sense about
media use. The practices associated with that earlier era of mobile
screens have had three lasting consequences, each of which involves the
production of what Bourdieu described as distinction between classes in
the realm of culture.
Firstly, building the modern classroom and training site – the
structures of formal and informal instruction – involved systems of
media formats, equipment, catalogues, accessories, spatial
transformation, temporal reorientation, new relations between teachers
and students, and new procedures and modes of evaluation. The terms
of argument and materials were interconnected, signaling the
methodological necessity for ﬁlm scholars today to consider fully things,
practices and ideas that promote different kinds of media use. In other
words, we need to leave behind methods that draw artiﬁcial barriers
around the singularity of a medium in favour of more complete renditions
of the relations between media and practices.
Secondly, the rise of audiovisual technologies and their attendant
priorities put in place the conditions of possibility for the very existence
of the ﬁelds we call ﬁlm, media, communication, screen and visual
cultural studies. The ferment produced by agents and agencies of postWorld
War II media education solidiﬁed a distribution network for the
instructional market, produced catalogues of media materials, argued for
budget lines for ﬁlm and media purchases and rentals, and
institutionalized evaluation committees’ assessments of usage and
effectiveness. Obviously, a full history of disciplinary formation involves
multiple forces and factors. However, the availability of ﬁlm libraries,
16 mm projectors, and installed pulldown screens, not to mention
curtains and carts, allowed us to treat with a scholarly eye what was being
deployed along the corridor for other pedagogical purposes.
Thirdly, the era helped to develop and circulate a brand of media
knowledge – including sets of arguments, evidence, methods and
approaches associated with ﬁlm, television, and the projection and audio
technologies used in institutional settings. At the same time, these ideas
were associated with a cohort of educationalists and scholars whose
23 Michael Molenda, ‘Association
for Educational Communications
and Technology in the 20th
century: a brief history’, 28 June
2005, http://www.aect.org/
About/History/ [accessed 26
June 2008].
165 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Charles R. Acland . Curtains, carts and the mobile screen
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economic and cultural power rose as their ideas took root as essential to
the operations of training venues speciﬁcally, and of mass democratic
society generally. This cohort valorized methods and objectives for the
deployment of media, and thus was born a model for what were seen as
community and educational media experts. This is exactly how Gramsci
described the formation of hegemony: in this instance, the organization
of a class of technologically-invested ﬁgures with their resident organic
intellectuals, a group whose work was to interpret situations, set agendas
and make sense of contexts. Through this group’s activities, class
characteristics and boundaries were delineated and a space opened up in
which an emergent elite found purchase. Through their writings,
speeches, policy briefs, organizations and businesses, this new breed of
experts put in place a hierarchy of cultural authority in which their ideas
mattered, marking out the class and skill expectations that have expanded
in the years since. The ﬁlm reels and extension cords, the storage depots
and projectors, produce an orientation towards textual material, and
towards its multi-institutional availability, as well as an orientation
towards a structure of authority and a vision of the future. The very
process of directing time and energy to this media circuit is the prime
ideological feature – a politics at the level of procedure – constructing a
relation between materials, people and power. Understanding our role in
the wider sea-change in the everyday presence of mobile media unmasks
our own ongoing involvement in the creation and promotion of a
specially trained technocratic elite.
I wish to acknowledge Louis Pelletier’s expert research assistance on this project and the funding support received from the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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