Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies

Abstract

With both Screen and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies recently celebrating significant birthdays with retrospective events and issues, screen studies has taken to addressing its own history as a practice and an academic discipline in what feels somewhere between an apologia and a midlife crisis.1 Terry Bolas's Screen Education is a useful addition to these histories, and to some extent a corrective to the heroic accounts of theoretical combat in some participants' memoirs. Bolas was briefly Screen's first joint editor, when the journal aimed to provide a forum for debates about film teaching, before the événements and counter-reformation at the British Film Institute (BFI) in 1971 launched the journal's new emphasis ‘on theory’.2 Screen Education is in large part a history of Screen's early publisher, the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT), but Bolas's broader concern is with the development of screen education as a working practice in British education, particularly in schools. His narrative begins in the early 1930s, with the report of the Commission on Education and Cultural Films, concerns about the effect of cinema on children, and the need for training in film appreciation as a means of providing ‘an education in taste’ (p. 17). In the USA, film appreciation developed with significant industry support as a defensive strategy intended to resist the critiques of moral and cultural conservatives.3 In Britain, without the same level of industrial integration or production base, film appreciation was a much less generously funded grassroots activity with its origins in teachers' enthusiasm for popular cinema's absence of a class-based cultural hierarchy. In the immediate postwar years and again in the 1960s, the screen education movement was an incidental beneficiary of the raising of the school leaving age, with film appreciation regarded as an appropriate activity for the less privileged participants in state education.

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