By exploring the use of film in mid-twentieth-century institutions including libraries, classrooms, and professional organizations, film scholars show how moving images became an ordinary feature of American life.

Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Utility and Cinema / Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland 11. Celluloid Classrooms"What a Power for Education!": The Cinema and Sites of Learning in the 1930s / Eric Smoodin 17"We Can See Ourselves as Others See Us": Women Workers and Western Union's Training Films in the 1920s / Stephen Groening 34Hollywood's Educators: Mark May and Teaching Film Custodians / Charles R. Acland 59UNESCO, Film, and Education: Mediating Postwar Paradigms of Communications / Zoë Druick 81Health Films, Cold War, and the Production of Patriotic Audiences: The Body Fights Bacteria (1948) / Kirsten Ostherr 1032. Civic CircuitsProjecting the Promise of 16mm, 1935¿45 / Gregory A. Waller 125A History Long Overdue: The Public Library and Motion Pictures / Jennifer Horne 149Big, Fast Museums / Small, Slow Movies: Film, Scale, and the Art Musuem / Haidee Wasson 178Pastoral Exhibition: The YMCA Motion Picture Bureau and the Transition to 16mm, 1928¿39 / Ronald Walter Greene 205"A Moving Picture of the Heavens": The Planetarium Space Show as Useful Cinema / Alison Griffiths 2303. Making Useful FilmsDouble Vision: World War II, Racial Uplift, and the All-American Newsreel's Pedagogical Address / Joseph Clark 263Mechanical Craftsmanship: Amateurs Making Practical Films / Charles Tepperman 289Experimental Film as Useless Cinema / Michael Zyrd 315Filmography 337Bibliography 343About the Contributors 365Index 369