While many early educators could see the promise of the motion picture, the lack of quality instructional films provided an additional hurdle. There were few strictly educational films and even fewer that were aligned with school content. Saettler (2004) points out that “the majority of the early films were theatrical in nature” (p. 138) and that “by the early twenties there were many who supported a distinct line of demarcation between the entertainment and the educational motion picture” (p. 139). L.L. Thurstone would have been one of those people and in n her April 1920 article, in Visual Education titled “What is an Educational Motion Picture?” she attempts to define the educational motion picture to set it apart from other films. Thurstone claims that the “fundamental criterion” of an educational film is that it must “correlate with a curriculum” and “with class room or lecture work” (p. 24). Thurston is especially critical of the “commercial interests” whose “unguided attempts” are “ludicrous to professional educators.” Thurstone is especially critical of a certain type of commercial film that she calls the “story-of” picture:
Another kind of film, which is frequently called educational, but which does not satisfy our criterion for educational films, is what I should call the “story-of” picture. Consider, for instance, the “story of paper,” in which the film starts with pictures of a forest, some exciting glimpse of logging, a flash or two from a paper mill and so on until one sees the paper rolling thru a printing press. All this is somehow supposed to be quite instructive, and it is if we start without knowing anything at all about the manufacture of paper, but the main purpose of “story-of” films is evidently entertainment” (Thurstone, 1920, p. 24).
This same type of “story-of” film is still present nine years later when a one-reel industrial film is reviewed in the October 1929 issue of The Educational Screen. The article reviews the one-reel industrial film “Books- from Manuscript to Classroom” produced by the John C. Winston Company. Far from being critical of the film, the article praises the film for good lighting, continuity and a “perfectly justifiable modicum of advertising” (248). The article’s final verdict is that “the educational worth of a film so produced is beyond question” (248). The enthusiastic praise for this industrial film is at odds with one of the largest criticisms of early educational films, namely that these films were inconsistent with the classroom objectives. This problem with the silent film plagues the sound film as well. In a forward thinking article printed in The Educational Screen in 1931. L.B. Tyson attempts to identify “why the silent film particularly in the educational field failed to reach its rightful place” which he attributed to “lack of proper direction and supervision” which meant that there was “no unified control of the type of pictures to be made, nor the type of material to be incorporated into them” (1931, p. 6-7). Tyson calls this a “crazy-quilt of educational silent films” which he hopes to see eradicated in the future. The article, printed just a year and a half after the advent of “talkies” is optimistic that the new technology of sound will provide the opportunity to take the lessons learned from silent film and start fresh with a renewed sense of direction. We know now that this was not to be the case and that the threads of that “crazy-quilt” were deeply sewn into the fabric of the educational film production and distribution systems. Dent is still lamenting this framework in his 1939 Audio Visual Handbook in which he criticised the “educational film producers” which “sprang up in various parts of the country” and produced films which were “of little or no value in the school” (p. 95).
Three takes on the same theme
Below are three takes on the same theme. The first is a link to Thurstone’s 1920 article critical of the “story-of” pictures, the second is a link to an article praising a “story-of” picture in 1929, the third is the same “story-of” picture praised in the second article.
Thurstone, L.L. (1920) “What is an Educational Motion Picture?” Visual Education. Vol 2. p. 24
https://archive.org/stream/visualeducation01soci#page/n73/mode/1up
The Educational Screen, October 1928, Vol. 7, pp248. Positive Review of “Books- from Manuscript to Classroom”
https://archive.org/stream/educationalscree07chicrich#page/248/mode/1up