What are educational film practices?

A short answer in four images:

To focus on the practices of educational film is to foreground the surrounding conditions that are intended to give a film a particular pedagogical meaning or function. In the case of educational films, firstly, this has often been done by combining films with other media such as supplementary sheets, slides, or lecture manuscripts. Sometimes these were matched somewhat spontaneously, but often films and other media were also offered as pre-planned media packages as in this example here:


Film box for the film "Lichtgeschwindigkeit – Römer" (1974), archive: GRG6 Rahlgasse, Physics collection.

Second, the practices of educational film include the question of who could determine under what conditions if a film was "educational" for whom. Not only was there a lively dispute about the principles and boundaries of educational film use since the beginning of the 20th century. But these matters were also to be regulated by laws and decrees and determined by expert commissions. Since certified educational films were often subject to tax breaks, these regulations also concerned the economic organization of the production of educational films. Here is a page from a state expert report from 1932 on whether and for which settings the film "Gipfelsprengung auf dem steirischen Erzberg" would be approved as an educational film:


Film appraisal "Gipfelsprengung am Erzberg"; OeStA, AVA, Unterricht, UM, allg-Akten, Film, K. 1894, Sig. 10G, 1932-1940, ZL. 34.335/5/30.

Third, the concept of "practices" in its social science tradition (for example, as defined by Michel de Certeau) lends itself to thinking not only about the actions of large institutions, but also about deviant and resistant ways of working with films. The history of educational film, not only in Austria, is characterized by a tension between local initiatives and attempts at centralization and standardization. This tension can be seen around 1950, for example, in the fact that classroom projectors were developed with funds from the Ministry of Education, which were intended to prevent certain ways of showing films by virtue of their mechanical construction. For example, it was not possible to project a film when it was stopped or rewinding. This led to some protest, and even in film prints from the 1980s, traces of these officially frowned-upon ways of using film could still be found in the form of burned-out film frames. Here is one of these 1950s devices, the Ditmar 1006:


The 16mm film projector "Ditmar 1006" (photograph: Josef Sikora, 1950; archive: Pädagogische Hochschule Steiermark).

Fourth, the question of practices also concerns the distribution and screening history of films. For educational films in schools, this concerns, for example, how long a film was held in distribution and when it was replaced. Some writings speak of a 'lifespan' of five to ten years, but this depended on changes in both film projection technology and the processes depicted. Thus, in a catalog of the SHB, the educational film office of the Ministry of Education, from 1963, it can be seen that numerous films from the production of the Nazi German Reichsanstalt für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (RWU) were still in use. They had been classified as politically unproblematic after 1945 and as continuing to be relevant for teaching in subsequent decades. Minor retouching adapted the films to the changed political circumstances of the Second Republic: The educational film "Deutscher Bernstein" ("German Amber", see cover image below) became "Bernstein" ("Amber") in the SHB catalog and the Austrian version, which otherwise identically shows the extraction and processing of the gemstone.

(Joachim Schätz)


Title credit of the Nazi German educational film "Deutscher Bernstein" (1940, RWU, archive: Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv), in use in Austria until at least 1963