• Acknowledgments Introduction: Utility and Cinema / Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland Part I. Celluloid Classrooms "What a Power for Education!": The Cinema and Sites of Learning in the 1930s / Eric Smoodin-- "We Can See Ourselves as Others See Us": Women Workers and Western Union's Training Films in the 1920s / Stephen Groening-- Hollywood's Educators: Mark May and Teaching Film Custodians / Charles R. Acland-- UNESCO, Film, and Education: Mediating Postwar Paradigms of Communication / Zoe Druick-- Health Films, Cold War, and the Production of Patriotic Audiences: The Body Fights Bacteria (1948) / Kirsten Ostherr Part II. Civic Circuits Projecting the Promise of 16mm, 1935-45 / Gregory A. Waller-- A History Long Overdue: The Public Library and Motion Pictures / Jennifer Horne-- Big, Fast Museums / Small, Slow Movies: Film, Scale, and the Art Museum / Haidee Wasson-- Pastoral Exhibition: The YMCA Motion Picture Bureau and the Transition to 16mm, 1928-39 / Ronald Walter Greene-- "A Moving Picture of the Heavens": The Planetarium Space Show as Useful Cinema / Alison Griffiths Part III. Making Useful Films Double Vision: World War II, Racial Uplift, and the All-American Newsreel's Pedagogical Address / Joseph Clark-- Mechanical Craftsmanship: Amateurs Making Practical Films / Charles Tepperman-- Experimental Film as Useless Cinema / Michael Zryd Filmography-- Bibliography-- About the Contributors-- Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

By exploring the use of film in mid-twentieth-century institutions, including libraries, museums, classrooms, and professional organizations, the essays in Useful Cinema show how moving images became an ordinary feature of American life. In venues such as factories and community halls, people encountered industrial, educational, training, advertising, and other types of "useful cinema." Screening these films transformed unlikely spaces, conveyed ideas, and produced subjects in the service of public and private aims. Such functional motion pictures helped to shape common sense about cinema's place in contemporary life. Whether measured in terms of the number of films shown, the size of audiences, or the economic activity generated, the "non-theatrical sector" was a substantial and enduring parallel to the more spectacular realm of commercial film. In Useful Cinema, scholars examine organizations such as UNESCO, the YMCA, the Amateur Cinema League, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They also consider film exhibition sites in schools, businesses, and industries. As they expand understanding of this other American cinema, the contributors challenge preconceived notions about what cinema is. Contributors: Charles R. Acland, Joseph Clark, Zoe Druick, Ronald Walter Greene, Alison Griffiths, Stephen Groening, Jennifer Horne, Kirsten Ostherr, Eric Smoodin, Charles Tepperman, Gregory A. Waller, Haidee Wasson, Michael Zryd.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction : the dreamworld of cinematic travel
• Varieties of travel experience : Burton Holmes and the travelogue tradition
• "The living panorama of nature" : early nonfiction and the American film industry
• "The five-cent University : educational films and the drive to uplift the cinema
• Atop of the world in motion : the travelogue system
• Scenic films and the cinematic picturesque
• "A weird and affecting beauty" : watching travel films in the 1910s
• "The nation's first playground" : wilderness modernized in the American West
• Epilogue: reveries of the solitary walker.

In the earliest years of cinema, travelogues were a staple of variety film programs in commercial motion picture theaters. These short films, also known as "scenics, " depicted tourist destinations and exotic landscapes otherwise inaccessible to most viewers. Scenics were so popular that they were briefly touted as the future of film. But despite their pervasiveness during the early twentieth century, travelogues have been overlooked by film historians and critics. In Education in the School of Dreams, Jennifer Lynn Peterson recovers this lost archive. Through innovative readings of travelogues and other nonfiction films exhibited in the United States between 1907 and 1915, she offers fresh insights into the aesthetic and commercial history of early cinema and provides a new perspective on the intersection of American culture, imperialism, and modernity in the nickelodeon era. Peterson describes the travelogue's characteristic form and style and demonstrates how imperialist ideologies were realized and reshaped through the moving image. She argues that, although educational films were intended to legitimate filmgoing for middle-class audiences, they were not simply vehicles for elite ideology. As a form of instructive entertainment, these technological moving landscapes were both formulaic and also wondrous and dream-like. Considering issues of spectatorship and affect, Peterson argues that scenics produced and disrupted viewers' complacency about their own place in the world.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)