Toward an Eclectic Film History Survey

ABSTRACT

Drawing attention to film's many uses beyond entertainment challenges students to rethink their object of study and its historical context. [...]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. [3] [#N3] Qven pie context of WWII, showing an excerpt from a "process film" about industrial production[4] [#N4] 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. To contextualize the Golden Age of Mexican cinema during the 1930s anddOs, 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 [https / /youtu.be /gSbZtOObesY] (1950t. a compilation of work by the early Mexican filmmaker Salvador Toscano reassembled by the director's daughter. If I were to teach the course again, I could include Egypt and Bark with Imperial Airways [http / /www.eafa.org.uk /catalogue /3284] (1932)-an amateur film shot by Ruth Stuart, whom I learned about via the Amateur Film Database [https// www.amateurcinema.org /index.php/ filmmaker/ ruth- stuart] -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. [http//uschefnerarchive.com /project/baileyfilms/] In a more commercial vein, the films of Aloha Wanderwell [https //www.alohawanderwell.com/] . many of whose works have been preserved by the Academy Film Archive, could