Cold War Classrooms: Educational Film and the Construction of Post-War American Culture.

The study of non-theatrical film or "useful cinema", has seen a growth in scholarly research in recent years, some of which has begun to look at the use of short film by governments and business in shaping the conduct of populations. The immediate period following WWII witnessed a boom in the production of films intended to educate the American youth as a confluence of new technologies, ideological imperatives, and business opportunities led school boards and local government to turn to film to help ease the strain on the expanding education system. The classroom film industry attracted the attention of independent producers and their corporate clients, among them, the most powerful industrial corporations in the world including General Electric, General Motors and du Pont, many of whom were already engaged in the production of sponsored film and advertising. Films were produced that endorsed emotional self-control, social conformity, American supremacy and the moral certitude of capitalism. Owing to a combination of the utilitarian nature of these media forms, their eventual obsolescence as a media format, and a lack of formal preservation until recent years, the social history and cultural significance of classroom films has remained largely unstudied. This research project will build from a body of existing theoretical work on the utility of industrial, educational, and ephemeral films that includes work by my UCL supervisors Lee Grieveson and Claire Thomson, as well as works by Haidee Wasson, Patrick Vonderau, Rick Prelinger, and Kelly Ritter to explore the ways in which classroom films have interacted with culture, Cold War political economy, and the governance of populations. The research is informed by three key ideas: firstly, that the involvement of corporate sponsorship in the production of classroom films visualised a model citizenry largely in the interests of sustaining industrial capital. Secondly, that this facilitated in the closure of progressive New Deal educational endeavours. Thirdly, that this attempt to shape the behaviours and actions of populations can be best understood as conforming to what Michel Foucault described as the process of liberal governmentality. This research aims to achieve several significant objectives: To examine classroom film beyond conventional understanding of educational utility to analyse how it was being used to influence the thoughts and behaviours of American youth. To explore the historical entanglement of corporate sponsorship in the production of classroom film, and the role that various producers played in bridging the gap between corporate advertising and educational film. To situate classroom films within the context of America's Cold War culture by examining the motivations of government in dovetailing educational initiatives with and for the benefit of foreign policy. Accordingly, the research will address the following questions: How did the experience of the WWII propaganda filmmaking and the imperatives of the Cold War inform the post-war educational film boom? In what ways and for what purposes have corporations, government, and film makers influenced the style and scope of post-war American education and visualised a new set of ideals and values? How do these values correlate with the later emergence of neoliberalism in America? In exploring these questions, this research will add to a growing body of scholarly work on non-theatrical film. By focussing on the economic and political logics that have shaped this media, this research will generate new critical perspectives on the intersection of educational film, political economy, and Cold War history. At the core of this thesis is an argument that the overt endorsement by these films of consumerism, conservatism, nationalism, economic liberalism, and anti-communism, aided in the radicalisation of liberalism and the emergence of neoliberalism as a socio-political reality in America by the late 1970s.