CHAPTER 1

Education’s History of Technotopia

“I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system,” Thomas Edison said in 1922, “and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. I should say that on the average we get only about two percent efficiency out of textbooks as they are written today.” A decade earlier, Edison had been even more pedagogically expansive, saying that film makes it “possible to touch every branch of human knowledge.” Now he added: “The education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture, a visualized education, where it should be possible to obtain one hundred percent efficiency.” Three years later, Edison’s vision was undiluted: “In ten years textbooks as the principal medium of teaching will be as obsolete as the horse and carriage are now. . . . There is no limitation to the camera.”

Almost as curious as this snippet of grandiose soothsaying from one of America’s greatest inventors is the context in which it was presented. Edison’s outlook was reported in a 1939 book, by which time the author had already found reason to be skeptical of technologists’ promises to schools. The book was entitled Motion Pictures As an Aid In Teaching American History, by Harry Arthur Wise, who used Edison’s quotes to prove an axiom. “Like many new educative devices,” Wise wrote, “the motion picture was received into the school with a confidence and an enthusiasm not well founded.” Educators’ faith in films was particularly unjustifiable, Wise asserted, because it was “more far-reaching and all-inclusive than can be justified by the findings of more recent educational research.” Wise, a specialist on this subject, arrived at this conclusion after reviewing seven previous studies of teaching through films and finding mixed results; he then conducted his own study, which carefully used equivalent experimental and control groups and other measures of scientific validity current at the time....

One of the problems with studying genres historically is the tendency to impose contemporary definitions onto the past. For example, as James Naremore has pointed out, film noir can be understood as ‘an idea we have projected onto the past’ rather than a coherent group of films [1]. To put it another way, film noir can be seen as ‘a nostalgia for something that never existed’ [2]. Of course, this is not to claim that it is illegitimate for critics to look back on previous periods and identify patterns and connections that may not have been noticed at the time. The original understandings of a text are no more or less ‘real’ than those of later periods. But there is a problem when the critics of a later period present their own interpretations as being inevitably present within earlier contexts of reception.

As a result, reception studies can help us to reconstruct the ways in which films have not only been generically identified in specific periods but also how generic categories were understood. For example, if the term film noir was not in operation during the period in which many of its classic examples were originally produced and consumed, these films did not exist as a coherent group that were simply waiting for a name. 

Children can already see the results of Ms. Peña’s scrutiny on Disney XD, a new cable channel and Web site (disney.go.com/disneyxd). It’s no accident, for instance, that the central character on “Aaron Stone” is a mediocre basketball player. Ms. Peña, 45, told producers that boys identify with protagonists who try hard to grow. “Winning isn’t nearly as important to boys as Hollywood thinks,” she said.

Actors have been instructed to tote their skateboards around with the bottoms facing outward. (Boys in real life carry them that way to display the personalization, Ms. Peña found.) The games portion of the Disney XD Web site now features prominent trophy cases. (It’s less about the level reached in the game and more about sharing small achievements, research showed.)

Fearful of coming off as too manipulative, youth-centric media companies rarely discuss this kind of field research. Disney is so proud of its new “headquarters for boys,” however, that it has made an exception, offering a rare window onto the emotional hooks that are carefully embedded in children’s entertainment. The effort is as outsize as the potential payoff: boys 6 to 14 account for $50 billion in spending worldwide, according to market researchers.

The first great American film was a ten-minute western shot in Dover, New Jersey. The director was a company man for Thomas Edison, Edwin S. Porter, and the result was a film that revolutionized movie making -- The Great Train Robbery. In most American films before The Great Train Robbery, except for newsreel shorts of footage such as pedestrian traffic in front of the Flatiron Building in New York City and hundreds of others, story films were shot on cheap and false sets, the camera positioned and unmoving as if in a middle row center orchestra seat and the actors entering and exited stage left and right.

The Great Train Robbery changed all that. Here Porter has actors moving towards and away from the camera. Action takes place on the phony sets but moves outdoors for action scenes. At one point the camera actually moves to follow action -- a new idea in camerawork occurring because to shoot out of doors implies off-screen space that can be utilized.

The simple tale is what the title says -- a story about a train robbery. But Porter cuts from one scene to another -- an outdoor scene then follows an indoor scene. As the scenes change so does the point of view: one scene follows a little girl's discovery of the robbery and another scene follows the bandits. And the contrasts between the two types of scenes are harsh and jarring. The outdoor robbery scenes have a gritty reality but when Porter cuts to a dance hall scene or a scene in a stationmaster's office, the sets are crude and elemental.

But by cutting back and forth between scenes, Porter unintentionally discovered the principle of film editing and narrative film storytelling, which would be taken to artistic levels in the few years after The Great Train Robbery by D.W. Griffith (among others). I say unintentionally because Porter seems not to have known what he discovered. After The Great Train Robbery, Porter's films regress back to the by then old-fashioned, sparsely painted backdrops -- a style made obsolete by his own The Great Train Robbery.

The nutties...

In 1921, after three trials, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, popular film comedian, was acquitted of the manslaughter of Virginia Rappe at an archetypal wild Hollywood party. The Arbuckle case, because of its lurid features, continues to attract prurient interest, while solid information on what actually happened in what was undoubtedly a key moment in Hollywood history becomes ever harder to find, such is our thirst for conspiracy and lowering tales of human fallibility.

A one-woman mission to unpick fact from fiction is being conducted by Joan Myers (aka Frederica Merrivale), whose investigations into the Arbuckle case and the background of the little-known Rappe, have been highlighted here before. Now she has published a lengthy piece on the New Research in Feminist Media Art/Theory/History blog. Entitled The Case of the Vanishing Juror, it traces the the story behind the first Arbuckle trial (there were three - the first two ended in hung juries, at the third he was acquitted) and the legend that grew up that there was a hung jury at the first trial owing to the intransigence of one stubborn female juror, Mrs Helen Hubbard.

I won’t recount the details here - you should read Joan’s article instead - but essentially she re-examines in depth the newspaper record to recover Mrs Hubbard’s reputation (see this account for an example of how she has been described in the past, supposedly with fingers in her ears during the defence’s case) and to go in pursuit of the ‘missing’ juror (Thomas Kilkenny), because the first trial was hung by a vote of ten to two. Kilkenny was similarly convinced of Arbuckle’s guilt, but he was not subjected to the insinuations about his motives as was Mrs Hubbard. It’s an exemplary piece of work, well grounded in in an understanding of legal procedure (women had only begun serving on juries in California in 1911, and their presence was still controversial for some). Its primary achievement is to make us reject the muddle of myth and innuendo that surrounds the case and makes us yearn for a hist...