Film history survey courses offer ample opportunities for productively bringing “minor cinemas” into the classroom. Integrating eclectic materials—such as newsreels, travelogues, amateur films, and educational films—into required lower-level courses lays the groundwork for critical inquiry that transcends both traditional textual and auteur analysis and an emphasis on narrative features and genres. Drawing attention to film’s many uses beyond entertainment challenges students to rethink their object of study and its historical context. Doing so prepares them for advanced “special topics” courses within our discipline and beyond. Moreover, the ability to access a wealth of nontheatrical materials online—and for free!—makes them especially valuable in the age of online teaching, austere university budgets, and the precarious financial state of many students and contingent instructors in the time of COVID-19 and its continued fallout.

In what follows I reflect on the pedagogical value of integrating nontheatrical and useful cinemas into a standard film history survey course. I take as an example my experiences with a one-semester survey titled, “International Cinema to 1960,” which I have taught several times at a university in the United States[1] It suggests how looking beyond the narrative feature reorients film history in several ways: first, by highlighting alternative film production practices (such as government- and corporate sponsored nonfiction); second, by offering generative context for specific national film movements (such as the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and Italian Neorealism); and third, as a lens to contend with the history of European imperialism and the colonial gaze (i.e., travelogues, colonial film units). Putting nontheatrical and useful cinemas in conversation with classic survey content offers a more dynamic history of cinema and becomes a vehicle for organically sparking important conversations about the Eurocentric, racial, and gendered limitations of the film canon—especially prior to 1960[2]

Course Overview

I structured the course in a conventional and chronological manner—early pioneers, national cinemas, and spotlights on major movements (i.e., German Expressionism, Soviet montage, the interwar avant-garde, Italian Neorealism, the postwar Japanese film boom, etc.). I foregrounded several additional themes to move beyond the national cinema, film movement, and auteur paradigms: cinema as state-building, cinema as travel, and cinema’s relationship to colonial governance and ideology. Framing cinema in these additional ways provided thematic tools to organically integrate lesser-known, but nevertheless important and generative, nontheatrical works into the course. In my call for eclecticism, you will notice slippage in my use of terms and genres below. This itself is by design. I make this transparent to my students in order to illustrate the fluidity and intermingling of forms and uses of moving images. Links to specific recommended films are interspersed throughout the essay and a copy of my specific syllabus can be accessed here.

Nonfiction beyond the Documentary: Newsreels, Industrials, and Educational Films

The easiest place to incorporate useful cinema was the week I devoted to the emergence of documentary. The class featured the usual Griersonian suspects such as Night Mail (1936) and Listen to Britain (1942), as well as Leni Riefenstahl’s odious but necessary Triumph of the Will (1934). The absence of a feature-length film allowed for ample time to survey other prosaic forms of nonfiction filmmaking—many readily accessible online. I included a newsreel from British Pathe’s online digitized collection. If I were to teach the course again, I might select an example of corporate sponsorship from the Shell Oil Film Unit collection, mentioned on the British Film Institute website.[3] Given the context of WWII, showing an excerpt from a “process film” about industrial production[4] to support the war effort or footage from an army training film is a valuable way to show how film was mobilized to instruct enlisted soldiers through nontheatrical channels. The National Film Board of Canada website hosts an extensive amount of digitized government-sponsored content to choose from. Alternatively, 1940s British instructional film How To Improve Immigrants’ English could be fodder for productive discussions about representations of race, education, and immigration. Attention to examples such as these prompts students to think through cinema’s multitude of uses throughout its history, as well as the ideologies reflected within the film texts.

Nonfiction Footage as Context for Introducing National Film Movements

I also used nonfiction footage to animate historical events and contextualize iconic film movements. In introducing Italian Neorealism, I used nonfiction footage of Mussolini shot by Italian film pioneer Luca Comerio (hosted on the Cinteca Milano’s website), and an excerpt from Mussolini Speaks (1933), an American film produced by Columbia Pictures that uncritically lauds Mussolini’s efforts to modernize the country. Seeing the masculine media construction of Il Duce visualized in these films, as well as subsequent excerpts from Italy’s escapist commercial films of the 1930s, illustrates how Italian Neorealism functioned as an aesthetic and ideological rebuke of fascist Italy.

To contextualize the Golden Age of Mexican cinema during the 1930s and40s, I spoke to the country’s strong tradition of nonfiction during the silent period with an excerpt of footage from the Mexican Civil War shown in Memorias de un Mexicano (1950), a compilation of work by the early Mexican filmmaker Salvador Toscano reassembled by the director’s daughter. This nonfiction footage was an engaging way to illustrate my lecture about the political events of the Revolution and a means to integrate silent cinema produced outside Europe[5] The Revolution’s invigoration of national pride would spark a revolution in Mexican art, referred to as mexicanidad, typified by Diego Rivera and José Orozco.I In turn, this cultural movement informed the narratives and distinctive visual style of director Emilio Fernández and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa in works such as María Candelaria (1944), which would garner critical praise at festivals abroad.

Using Travel Cinemas to Discuss the Colonial Gaze

The many silent and sound travelogues and amateur films available online underscore how nonfiction travel cinemas have existed in parallel to the entertainment mainstream throughout film history.[6] Using travel cinemas is an especially productive means to discuss imperialism, Orientalism, and the fragmentary and uneven spread of moving image technology. As many scholars have noted, the global expansion of cinema reflects the colonial project, whereby cameramen from Western Europe and the United States traveled the world collecting views of exotic lands and foreign customs for consumption by First World audiences.[7] Sound-era travelogues preserved the legacy of early “scenics” and are an especially useful way to illustrate how Western films reflected and reinscribed colonial views. For example, in a lecture discussing the colonial gaze, I showed the opening minutes of A Road in India (1938), part of the “World Window Production” series from the UK. The film begins with a close-up on a caravan as the British male narrator marvels at “India’s strange and colorful past.” The remainder of the film presents “exotic” Indian customs for the benefit of the Western viewer. This film, and other works from the BFI’s “India on Film” collection, are useful vehicles for students to deconstruct problematic racial and Orientalist rhetoric.[8]

Looking at historical film objects can mean exposing students to uncomfortable aspects of history and troubling imagery. Showing challenging subject matter can produce discomfort and potentially even upset or anger students. I strive to be as sensitive as possible to students’ diverse needs and subject positions, and communicate precisely why I think including certain subject matter is important within the context of the class. I encourage students to use seminar sessions and their weekly writing responses as spaces to critically reflect on their ideas. I also invite students to directly reflect with me on the ethics of teaching and viewing fraught subject matter. All syllabi are enlivened by student engagement. Making pedagogical decisions transparent to students is as integral to advancing students’ critical thinking as the course content itself.

Using Amateur Filmmaking to Highlight Women behind the Camera

Travel films shot by amateur filmmakers are another way to evoke the transnational flows of cinema and the colonial gaze. If we only study feature films in the context of national cinemas and major artistic movements, the historical ubiquity of home movies falls through the cracks. In my class I briefly mentioned American philanthropist Adelaide Pearson’s ethnographic travel films (Mayan Rituals is available via the Northeast Historic Film archive’s website). If I were to teach the course again, I could include Egypt and Back with Imperial Airways (1932)—an amateur film shot by Ruth Stuart, whom I learned about via the Amateur Film Database—or one of many travel films shot by Helen Miller Bailey, available via the University of Southern California’s Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive. In a more commercial vein, the films of Aloha Wanderwell, many of whose works have been preserved by the Academy Film Archive, could also be an engaging way to evoke travel films and the depiction of “the other” through a Western lens. In teaching a course on cinema prior to the 1960s, where access to female-directed feature films are especially challenging to come by, drawing attention to these three female moviemakers is a way to bring attention to the comparative paucity of women filmmakers covered within the course, and a small gesture to correct the gendered imbalance of film history.[9] In addition to discussing how these works may exoticize faraway places, the creation of the films also reflect the socioeconomic conditions of travel and camera ownership, a productive way to address class. Moreover, in focusing on their screenings in the home, they show yet another example of film’s use beyond the commercial theater.[10]

Nontheatrical Cinema and Imperial Governance

Cinema produced by the British Colonial Film Units is a generative way to reveal how film was enmeshed in imperial governance. I assigned an essay by Tom Rice about British mobile film units in Africa in the 1950s, which were often organized and led by local African commentators.[11] The essay was a valuable way to teach students to think of how participation in film culture extends beyond film production, and the study of cinema beyond film texts. Moreover, in focusing on the role of the African commentator, it addresses questions of local agency, albeit limited, within an imperial system. Earlier in the semester, during my week on documentary cinema, I used Nadine Chan’s excellent essay on screening caravans in 1930s British Malaya that discusses how local audiences read British-produced financial educational films against the grain, a foundational concern of reception studies and a way to counteract the stereotype of the primitive colonial subject.[12] If I were to teach the course again, I would try to include an excerpt from The Boy Kumasenu (1952), a film shot in Ghana by a British crew with several Ghanaian assistants, and which Emma Sandon has shown promoted nascent nationalist sentiment.[13] While not national cinema in the traditional sense, Colonial Film Units established in several British territories trained local filmmakers and fostered conditions for national cinemas to take root post-independence. Approximately 150 British colonial films are accessible to stream online at the Colonial Film Database.

Nontheatrical Cinemas as/against National Cinemas

Speaking of the British Colonial Film Units in Africa is of course radically different from speaking about African cinemas. It does, however, foreground the taken-for-granted definitions of “national cinema” and regional cinemas, revealing the epistemological shortcomings of these terms to students. That is, it opens up considerations of when a national cinema “happens” and who gets to speak for the nation (and who is excluded).

As African cinema independently produced by Africans did not come into its own until the 1960s (and thus falls outside the confines of the specific survey course addressed here), I did not devote time to it during the first iteration of the course. While I had briefly mentioned the conditions that challenged my ability to include African cinemas in the pre-1960 class, at the end of this first semester, one of my course evaluations asked about the absence. This question has enriched subsequent iterations of the course and I now center my concluding lecture on this topic, titled: “Cinema in Africa or African Cinema?”

After a discussion of British Colonial Film Units and French policies restricting film production by colonized subjects in its West African territories, the lecture concludes with a short film by sub-Saharan director Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Afrique sur Seine (1955).[14] At once documentary, ethnography, and essay film, Vieyra’s short—narrating the experiences of African students living in Paris—is considered the first true African film, its exploration of African subjectivity anticipating the work of Ousmane Sembène and many other filmmakers in Africa during the 1960s and beyond.[15] Because students encounter this film after discussions of film’s use for imperial governance, as well as travelogues and amateur cinemas shot by outsiders, Afrique sur Seine helps illustrate the politics and power of self-representation. Had the course focused only on feature films through a national cinema lens, this important short would have fallen through the cracks. Ending the course on this note also allowed me to point ahead to the “1960 to present” survey many of my students would be taking the following semester.

Concluding Words

This essay recounts some of the ways I have integrated examples of nontheatrical films, useful cinema, and nonfiction footage into a specific undergraduate pre-1960 film history survey. All survey courses run the risk of becoming a “greatest hits” of feature film history and lionized auteurs, reaffirming the structural inequalities that continue to inform much of the film canon. But I am not advocating that surveys reject the canon entirely. Students should experience the wonders of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Man with a Movie Camera; they should encounter the oeuvres of Renoir and Ozu. Instead, I am demanding a survey that actually surveys the full scope of film history, exposing them to alternative works they are unlikely to encounter on their own. Doing so teaches students to deconstruct dominant interpretative frames. As I hope I have shown, integrating just a handful of nontheatrical and useful cinemas into a basic survey opens up a more expansive body of film forms and their places in history. It can also vividly illustrate the political and social conditions that occasioned the rise of major cinematic movements. As educators we must model curious and critically engaged viewership. The deliberately eclectic film survey has the power to do so.

Tanya Goldman is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University. Her research primarily focuses on mid-twentieth-century nonfiction film and its history as a political and cultural practice. Her dissertation considers these questions via the career of New York Workers Film and Photo League member and independent nontheatrical distributor Tom Brandon. Her work has appeared in Cineaste, Feminist Media Histories, Film History, and, most recently, in the edited volumes Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, 2019) and InsUrgent Media from the Front: A Media Activism Reader (Indiana University Press, 2020).

1. The course met once a week for four hours and usually comprised a PowerPoint lecture with film excerpts followed by a feature screening. The course also had weekly 75-minute recitation sessions led by a graduate teaching assistant. I’ve been lucky to have been supported by three excellent ones. Thank you, Zoe Meng Jiang, Daryl Meador, and Dominic Clarke. ↑

2. JCMS Teaching Dossier Vol 5 (2), edited by Paul McEwan and Allison Whitney, is devoted entirely to updating film history survey pedagogy. Diana W. Anselmo’s “The Perks of an Heirloom Armoire: The Film History Survey as a Vehicle to Introduce Diversity to Undergraduate Students,” and Marcos P. Centeno Martin’s “Challenging Eurocentric Surveys: The Transnational Topic in Film Studies,” are especially germane to my discussion here. I hope my essay can supplement their important work on updating film history surveys. ↑

3. I’m partial to Song of the Clouds (Shell Oil Film Unit, 1957). The film is currently available via Internet Archive from stock footage company Periscope Films. ↑

4. A wealth of ideas can be found in Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, eds. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), and Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky’s The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). ↑

5. In early lectures, I underscore that the silent film history taught in textbooks is a Eurocentric history, as well as a history informed by what films happen to have survived. I punctuate the discussion of silent film survival rates with the closing minutes of Dutch filmmaker Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1991). Instructors of survey courses should make absences or oversights in course content transparent to students. ↑

6. Two excellent sources to consult on this topic are Jeffrey Ruoff’s edited volume Virtual Voyages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) and Jennifer Peterson’s monograph Education in the School of Dreams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). The Travel Film Archive YouTube channel is a treasure trove of resources. ↑

7. Cinema’s relationship to anthropology and the ethnographic film have articulated these ideas most explicitly. See, for example, Alison Griffith’s Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) and Fatimah Tobing Rony’s The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Given time constraints, I am cautious about showing anthropological films because of concerns I would be unable to give this fraught subject enough time and space for discussion. In the most recent iteration of this course, I briefly lectured about Jean Rouch to discuss power dynamics and draw attention to examples of American cultural imperialism expressed within Rouch’s Moi, un noir (1959). ↑

8. For an example of how similar rhetoric manifests in narrative features, I show two short excerpts from Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937). ↑

9. Liz Czach has specifically shown that the travel lecture circuit was more welcoming of women filmmakers than the mainstream industry. See “‘The Girls,’ Lisa Chickering and Jeanne Porterfield: Trailblazers of Travel Lecture Filmmaking, 1959–1979” (presentation, Orphan Film Symposium, Museum of Moving Image, New York, NY, April 14, 2018) and “A Suitcase Full of Cameras: The Travel Films of Lisa Chickering and Jeanne Porterfield,” Smithsonian Collections Blog, October 6, 2016, https://si-siris.blogspot.com/2016/10/a-suitcase-full-of-cameras-travel-films.html. My course includes screenings of works by Alice Guy, Germaine Dulac, and—when time allows—Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1954), as well as frequent references to figures highlighted on the Women Film Pioneers website. ↑

10. Or in an entirely different direction, it might be interesting to incorporate a film sponsored by a national or regional tourism board to introduce mediated constructions of nation and place framed to attract foreign visitors. One readily available example is This Is London (1950), produced by the British Travel Association with commentary by British actor Rex Harrison. ↑

11. Tom Rice, “‘Are You Proud to Be British?’: Mobile Film Shows, Local Voices and the Demise of the British Empire in Africa,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 36, no. 3 (2016): 331–51. ↑

12. Nadine Chan, “Making Ahmad ‘Problem Conscious:’ Educational Film and the Rural Lecture Caravan in 1930s British Malaya,” Cinema Journal 55, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 84–107. ↑

13. Thank you to Jamie Berthe for drawing my attention to this film. Emma Sandon, “Cinema and Highlife in the Gold Coast: The Boy Kumasenu (1952),” Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 39, no. 3 (2013): 496–519. See also Peter J. Bloom and Kate Skinner, “Modernity and Danger: The Boy Kumasenu and the Work of the Gold Coast Film Unit,” Ghana Studies 12–13 (2009): 121–153. ↑

14. Thank you to Paul Fileri for bringing this film to my attention. ↑

15. JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies recently published several of Vieyra’s texts in translation by Mélissa Gélinas; see issue 58, no. 3 (2019): 118–36. ↑