Society for Cinema & Media Studies

Countering Censorship: Edgar Dale and the Film Appreciation Movement

Author(s): John Nichols
Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 3-22
Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies
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Countering Censorship: Edgar Dale and the Film
Appreciation Movement
by John Nichols

Abstract: In 1933 Ohio State University education professor Edgar Dale published
How to Appreciate Motion Picturesfor use in high schoolfilmi appreciation classes.
Configuring the adolescent as a refomoer, Dale'S text offered an alternative to the
Production Code's stark theory offilin reception, which predicated censorship on
imnnature filn viewers.

All entertainment enters intimately into the lives of men and women and affects them
closely; it occupies their minds and affections during leisure hours, and ultimately
touches the whole of their lives.
-Motion Picture Production Code, quoted in Thomas
Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, ai<nd Insur-
rection in Ahmericant Cinema, 1930-1934

Two high school students, Bill and John, went to a movie. VWhen they came out of the
theater, Bill said, "That was a pretty ordinary picture, wasn't it?"
"Yes," John replied, "but wasn't the direction nll usual?"
His friend looked puzzled. "What do you mean?" he asked.
"Well, didn't you enjoy the clever way by which the director had a character back
into the camera, in this way fading out the action and beginnillg a new type of scene in
a different place on the boat?"
-Edgar Dale, How to Appreciate Motion Pictures

In 1938 Martin J. Quigley, editor in chief'of the Motion Picture Herald and coauthor
of the censorious Production Code, warned of a crisis in the motion picture industry.
In an editorial Quigley depicted a Hollywood about to succumb to "dictation by
educators" and argued that "ax grinders" would soon determine what was shown
on-screen.1
Despite its hyperbolic vision of a dictatorship run by educators, Quigley's column
acknowledged the nascent strength of the film appreciation movement." Less a call
for censorship than a national education program to train critical film viewers, the film
appreciation movement consisted of university professors, high school teachers, librar-
ians, museum directors, women's clubs, state and federal departments of education,
and civic leaders who wished to educate viewers about the value of cinematographic

John G. Nichols is an associate professor of English and the director of filhn studies at Chris-
topher Newport University. He is completing a book on early-twentieth-century guidebooks
and their interpretive advice about films, plays, and literature.

? 2006 by the University of Texas' Press, PO. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

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complexity and also urged viewers to attend to representations of such pertinent
Depression-era issues as class and race. The movement's prime theorist was Edgar
Dale, an Ohio State University professor of education whose book How to Appreciate
Motion Pictures provided the movement with its appellation and central focus (the
wide dispersal of a teachable method for scrutinizing film).
At the center of Dale's efforts to reform viewing was the portrait of a critical
film spectator. Dale's model of a sophisticated filmgoer was radically at odds with
the depiction of film viewers proffered by the adherents of the Production Code
and other 1930s calls for censorship, for example, the National Legion of Decency's
national campaign calling for Hollywood to renew its pledge to the Code as written
in 1930 by Motion Picture Herald editor Martin Quigley and Father Daniel A. Lord,
a Jesuit priest. Responding to the legion's political power and facing "scientific"
proof from the Payne Fund Studies on film's detrimental effects on children, the
film industry appointed Joseph Breen to head the Production Code Administration.3
From 1934 to 1954 Breen effectively enforced the Code, dampening the social
realism prominent in films from the early 1930s, shaping the classical Hollywood
style, and suppressing sexual punsters such as Mae West and W. C. Fields.4
Censorship has long been at the center of historical narratives of 1930s film
production. Studies of the Production Code and its impact on film production have
traditionally focused on only one part of the Code document, namely, the conclud-
ing sections that outline what could not be shown on screen such as plots involving
miscegenation and references to homosexuality.
In its opening passages, however, the Code initiates a little-discussed treatise on
film reception that establishes the central and underlying justification for censorship:
that film viewers were blank screens onto which films projected a larger-than-life
immorality. In language paradoxically sensual for a document devoted to purging
sexual allusions, the Code's introduction (quoted in the first epigraph) describes
how audiences are penetrated by what they see, noting how art first "enters" and
then "touches" audiences' lives, thoughts, and desires. In the Code's lexicon, audi-
ences were sensually "taken in" by film, with the metaphor of physical engulfment
punctuating the Code's somewhat dissonantly eroticized language. Implying that
art seduces audiences at the first point of contact and then continues to influence
viewers over time, the Code refutes the film industry's main contention that film was
merely a form of entertainment or essentially an escapist experience that tempo-
rarily released audiences from their daily lives and then returned them unharmed.
Instead, the Code asserted that films alter viewers because in a cinematic mode of
procreation films "reproduce the morality of men who use pictures as a medium for
the expression of their ideas and ideals.""5 This claim would have been of particular
concern to film industry critics who considered Hollywood overpopulated by non-
Christian producers and directors.
The Code cements its depiction of how audiences were seduced by films when
it invokes a series of comparisons to other media, including newspapers and plays.
While the Code continues to assert that all arts impart the morals of their creators,
it argues that film accomplishes this task more readily than others because film is
a transparent medium capable of relaying exact transmissions from film to viewer.

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Articulating the difference between reading a book and watching a film, the Code
presents the viewer as utterly devoid of agency and ultimately incapable of any
potential for resistance:

A book describes; a film vividly presents.

A book reaches the mind thru words merely; a film reaches the eyes and ears thru the
reproduction of actual events.
The reaction of a reader to a book depends largely on the keenness of the reader; the
reaction to a filmn depends on the vividness of presentation."

In such passages the Code blurs the conceptual line between medium and mes-
sage, arguing that film overwhelms viewers both by the transparent representation
of "actual events" and, somewhat paradoxically, through the manipulation of those
events into the most "vivid" image possible. In the Code's formulation film's vibrant
approximation of reality, which stems partly from its visual impact and partly from
its novelty as a new medium, made it more powerful than other arts and therefore
deserving of stricter regulation than other media such as literature. An emphasis
on film's powerful simulation of reality also gave the Code grounds to portray audi-
ences as wrapped in an intimate scene of reception where they succumb to a film's
image and to the medium's transparent messages. The spectacle of film, the Code
concluded, threatened to overwhelm even the most mature of adult minds, because
in large audiences a film "affects and arouses more intensely the emotional side of
the audience" and therefore has "larger moral responsibilities" than other forms of
mass media." By this logic, film's power of influence meant that viewers required
protection, for they lacked the mechanisms for resisting film's totalizing effect.
In its depiction of the compliant viewer the Production Code drew upon long-
standing criticism of a mindless mass audience. Earlier film censorship efforts relied
upon such depictions, such as in the Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Com-
mlission of Ohio (1915), which denied films First Amendment rights based upon
the presumption of films' moral effects on adults and children.
Films that depicted film audiences often erased the boundaries between screen
and the film spectators. For example, Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr (1924) depicted
a projectionist magically transported into the film he shows; Edwin Porter's film
Uncle Josh at the Moving-Picture Show (1902) portrayed a country bumpkin who,
having fallen in love with a woman projected on a screen, rushes the stage to kiss
her, subsequently tearing down the screen and ending the show. Characterizations
of audiences witnessing such precinematic devices as the magic lantern also em-
phasized how viewers were overwhelmed by what they saw. The images rendered
them irrational." Such depictions of a bereft audience justified the need for an
unapproachable cadre of protectors-censors who safeguard audiences from the
dangers that result from their own supposed ignorance.
As powerful as the Code was in altering Hollywood film production for the next
twenty-five years, however, its bleak notion of reception failed to dominate period
discussions of audience response, particularly among groups and organizations that
sought alternatives to censorship. In contrast to the Code's assumption that viewers
were essentially empty vessels, proponents of film appreciation argued that film

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viewers were educable. According to film appreciation advocates, film spectators
could accomplish changes in Hollywood's production process by learning to deploy
methods of viewing that included analyzing cinematography, studying narrative
representations of race and wealth, assessing historical accuracy, and relating a
character's behavior to their own personal lives. Such methods of viewing, it was
reasoned, would help make film viewers more sophisticated and discerning and as
a result make it lucrative for Hollywood to create quality films. By training viewers
to think like cinematographers, film appreciation proponents believed they could
produce a new generation of filmmakers, amateur as well as professional, who
might reform Hollywood either by working within the film industry or by compet-
ing with Hollywood in alternative venues devoted to educational and documentary
filmmaking.
While the Code located responsibility--and hence authority-in a central cen-
sorship office, film appreciation proponents dispersed the authority for interpreting
film across a wider spectrum of possible audiences-the very body, according to
the Code, that needed protection. Moreover, by attempting to work with such a
diverse audience, which would invariably approach films with multiple interests,
film appreciation activists were forced to advance a more complex explanation of
how audiences watched films. While the Code and its enforcers obsessed myopically
about how film offended viewers' decency, film appreciation proponents explored
the possibilities of how viewing could be tailored to the improvement of people's
lives. Thus, the underlying assumption of the film appreciation movement was that
training audiences was a key to changing films, which, in turn, would help effect
positive changes in social problems.
Throughout the 1930s the following organizations published film appreciation
materials, many adopting Dale's textbook: the National Council of Teachers of
English, the national boards of the YWCA and YMCA, the Jewish Welfare Board,
the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the National Congress of Parents
and Teachers all endeavored to train a generation of critically savvy audiences. Their
discriminating selection of films was understood as a "Vote at the Box-Office" that
would prompt Hollywood to create films that presented more socially nuanced
treatments and balanced views rather than its typical reliance upon the sensational,
stereotypical, and excessive.
Dale's prominence in film appreciation occurred between 1928 and 1947, after
which he turned his attention to the social effects of radio and newspapers. During
this time Dale promoted his method of watching films through nationally distrib-
uted high school textbooks, articles, study guides, newspaper columns, newsletters,
and radio programs, all of which complemented the Ohio State University gradu-
ate courses he taught in audiovisual education.9 Dale's interest in motion pictures
stemmed from his postdoctoral work with the Eastman Company in Rochester, New
York, where he composed study guides for films in the Eastman Teaching Films
series, a collection of documentary films used in primary and secondary schools.
In 1927 Dale joined the Payne Fund Study on Youth, an enterprise that bolstered
the scientific justification for censorship by testing the supposedly detrimental
psychological changes experienced by adolescents while they viewed films. Six

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years later Dale published How to Appreciate Motion Pictures, the concluding and
eighth volume of the Payne Fund studies. Unlike the earlier volumes, which were
written by social scientists who set out to prove that films overstimulated children
and unduly influenced youth and adolescents, How to Appreciate Motion Pictures
was a textbook intended to teach high school students how to watch films critically. "'
The text also introduced the nomenclature of "appreciation" as a new approach to
watching film and promoted a notion of reception that formed the cornerstone for
the film appreciation movement. Dale constructed the notion of expert amateur
viewers who ably united a formalistic analysis of film technique (or what Dale repre-
sented as filmmakers' expertise) with an attention to film's portrayal of contemporary
social and political issues. Practiced together, Dale reasoned, these two methods
of analysis enabled filmgoers to act as social reformers who might bridge the gap
between knowledgeable insiders producing filmns in Hollywood and those outside
Hollywood agitating for censorship.
Dale's notions of reception stood in such contrast to the dominant Production
Code that the reform efforts based upon his theories seemed profoundly idealistic.
In actuality, Dale borrowed from and enlivened an existing film reform begun in the
1920s that had subsequently faltered with Hollywood's adoption of the Production
Code. One such reform program was the better films movement; the other was
the visual education movement. The National Committee of Better Films, formed
initially under the supervision of the National Board of Review in 1914, became a
distinct organization in 1923 and promoted "the production and exhibition of a high
type of films by discriminating patronage of the best."''
To help create such a "discriminating" film audience the committee published
three journals, Photo play Guide, Filmn Progress, and Exceptional Photoplal.s, each
of which contained reviews, listed "better films," and produced guidelines on the
age-appropriateness of specific films. Though it claimed to offer an alternative to
censorship, the committee practiced an implied mode of censorship in its exclusive
promotion of films based on literary classics and biographies as well as educational
documentaries. Proponents of visual education, the second organized movement
predating Dale's work, focused exclusively on the educational uses of film, claim-
ing in their 1920 flagship journal, Visual Edutcation, that the motion picture "needs
defending, and . . . when once the proper hands are at work upon it, will outstrip
most of its predecessors in its total contribution to the great work of American
education."" Throughout the 1920s Visual Education provided a forum for debate
on screen education, a bibliography of articles about the pedagogical uses of film,
and testimonials (or "how-to") advice on the incorporation of films into elementary,
high school, and university classrooms.
Dale combined the goals of the National Committee of Better Films with those
of the visual education movement, thus linking schools with social reforms and de-
vising explicit pedagogical strategies to train viewers to watch films critically. Like
the members of the committee, Dale desired a discriminating audience that would,
through their paid attendance at quality films, economically reward Hollywood for
making better films. Dale, however, asked viewers to do more than attend films
that were already approved and listed in the committee's journals. Dale envisioned

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viewers who, if approached during adolescence, would become actively involved in
film reform throughout their adult lives. Through the teaching of film appreciation
in high schools, Dale reasoned, viewers could organize themselves into photoplay
clubs to discuss and evaluate a range of Hollywood films, even films that would
not have made the committee's lists, such as gangster films. This proposed use of
schools to teach film appreciation dovetailed with the efforts of the proponents of
visual education, who trumpeted the educational potential of motion pictures. Dale
argued that the unique techniques of film ought to be a subject taught in schools
and not considered merely as a complementary or illustrative teaching tool in his-
tory, literature, or science classes, as visual education journals often advocated.
After the publication of his textbook Dale disseminated the goals and ambi-
tions of the film appreciation movement in publications such as English Journal and
Crisis, both of which were distributed nationally. Dale's theorized methods spawned
hundreds of high school film appreciation classes across the United States, helping
to expand the academic study of film from nascent university courses at Columbia
and the University of Southern California into the secondary school system. :3 How
to Appreciate Motion Pictures also reached beyond the classroom as it sought to
redirect the work of community groups by promoting film appreciation rather than
censorship as the sole method of agitating for change in Hollywood production.

From Passive Viewers to Tutored Audiences. Prior to 1910 negative depictions

of easily excited viewers such as "Uncle Josh" supported middle-class stereotypes
of the laboring and immigrant classes, who formed the primary audiences for nick-
elodeon theaters, especially in large cities.'" As middle-class audiences began to
patronize movies in the 1910s and 1920s and large luxury movie palaces replaced
smaller nickelodeons, the negative characterization of film viewers began to share
space with more favorable representations. Film apologists, among them educators
and literary figures, addressed middle-class film audiences about the possibility
that watching films could have beneficial effects, both emotional and educational.'1
Encouraging film's new, upwardly mobile, culturally striving audience, a host of
books attempted to legitimate film as an aesthetic art worthy of critical attention,
among them Vachel Lindsay's The Art of the Moving Picture (1915) and Hugo
Munsterberg's The Photoplay (1916).16 Such books complicated discussions of film
reception, and-not by coincidence-generally associated critically savvy interpre-
tive approaches with more affluent viewers. Lindsay, for example, compared movies
with other middle-class cultural pursuits such as attending art exhibitions and view-
ing sculpture, suggesting that these cultural experiences mutually reinforced one
another. He implored middle-class audiences to visit the movies as a necessary point
in a cultural evolution from the "cave-men and women of our slums" who currently
populated the film audience, thus associating film viewing as part of a middle-class,
Progressivist Americanization project.17
Munsterberg, a professor of psychology at Harvard, overtly appealed to middle-
class Progressive activism. While he maintained a less enthusiastic view of film as
a new artistic medium, Munsterberg argued that "the spellbound audience in a
theater or in a picture house is certainly in a state of heightened suggestibility and

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is ready to receive suggestions."'" But he did hypothesize that audiences could use
films to enhance a collective cultural spirit, arguing that the suggestibility of audi-
ences could also be used to produce social benefits, for "any wholesome influence
emanating from the photoplay must have an incomparable power for the molding
and upbuilding of the national soul."'9 Reconceptualizing the supposed hypnotic
quality of film as an opportunity to instruct mass audiences in broad cultural and
civic projects, Munsterberg gave both academic and scientific credence to emerg-
ing interests in the educational uses of film. It would be Dale, however, who would
articulate the methods for studying film to enable the kind of positive transformation
Munsterberg envisioned.
As early as 1912 Thomas Edison upheld the educational value of spectatorship
when he claimed, "Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools," a sentiment
that Edison repeated throughout the 1920s and that film education journals subse-
quently co-opted, helping set the tone for serious discussions of educated viewing.2"
From the start Edison planned a special section of his film company to the exclusive
production of educational films devoted to remote geographical locales and show-
ing wild animals in their natural habitats.2' His plan was the first of its kind, and
it received wide coverage in popular and educational journals such as School and
Society, Harper's Weekly, and The World To-Day. Edison's hometown of Orange,
New Jersey, promised that its schools would incorporate his educational films and
substitute them for books in the curriculum."' Films could be useful in educational
settings, Edison argued, "while schoolbooks are made for children, children were
never made for schoolbooks. ... The eagerness with which a child plays shows how
keen it is for action. But schoolbooks neither show anything in action, nor show
the inside of anything. They are but pale shadows of things as they are.""2:3 Edison's
program encompassed not only the aesthetic appreciation of films (as Lindsay had)
and the broad social ramifications (which Munsterberg had proffered), it also detailed
how films might enhance academic subjects, extending the broadly transformative
power of film that Munsterberg outlined into specific disciplines. Edison's notion of
film's social potential rested on the assumption that film was a window to an existing
truth or a transparent medium that viewers could accept without question, a vision
that would remain a cornerstone of film reception theory throughout the 1920s.
Over the course of the 1920s claims for the educational purposes of film gained
wider recognition through the emergence of several journals devoted specifically to
the uses of films in primary and secondary schools. Even as these journals praised
film's potential as an educative force, they nevertheless assumed the naivet6 of film
viewers. Visual Education, for example, published in 1920 by the Society for Visual
Education, featured essay-length testimonials from teachers who had incorporated
films into their classes and scientific articles on cognition, such as an article on the
optic nerve and how it transmitted visual images."4 Although such pieces treated
film as a dynamic medium, many of the journal's articles erased any interpretive
agency on the part of the film viewer.
In articles such as "Russia, the Home of the Patient Peasant" and "Getting
Acquainted with the Birds" the documentary film is celebrated as a medium that
deposits information into viewers more readily than books. Some film educators

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argued that educational films had to adopt Hollywood-style filmmaking to heighten
a viewer's learning experience, linking production-not interpretation-to film's
educative potential. In an essay on the "pitfalls" of visual education Flora Warren
Seymour, corresponding secretary for the National Federation of College Women,
observed that since "young America demands gun-play," therefore "some concession
will undoubtedly have to be made to this craving for violent action" in the making
of educational films.25 Contrary to censorship concerns about the popularity of
Hollywood films with youth, Seymour and other educators considered Hollywood's
success in reaching audiences as a stylistic model to imitate in the service of teaching
history, literature, and science. Like other selections in Visual Education, however,
Seymour's article looked to Hollywood filmmakers-rather than community leaders
or educators-to set the tone for educational approaches to film.
Prior to Dale film educators trumpeted the pedagogical value of film by em-
phasizing the speed and efficiency by which it could convey content; they avoided
claiming expertise in analyzing film's unique form, especially how to teach students
to attend to film as a medium. Before Dale the clearest articulation of what it meant
for film viewers to attend to film's formal constructions appeared in Victor Oscar
Freeburg's The Art of Photoplay Making (1918). Freeburg's text, based in part
on his "photoplay" or screenwriting classes at Columbia University from 1915 to
1917, advised aspiring screenwriters on the mechanics of writing for the movies.
One chapter, "The Psychology of the Cinema Audience," particularly complicates
notions ofa passive, naive film audience. In it Freeburg distinguishes between two
kinds of viewers: the "crowd" and the "public." The crowd, Freeburg notes, "is a
compact mass of people held together by a single purpose during any period of
time whether long or short." While the crowd consists of distinct individuals, their
temporary and intense focus on the film causes them to fimunction as one entity;
according to Freeburg, the single person becomes "subconsciously influenced by
his companions or neighbors until his emotions are heightened and his desire or
ability to think is lowered." Consequently, the single-minded viewer "never has
time to reflect [and] must decide and act on instinct or impulse or, at best, on the
first flash of thought.""26
Freeburg's "public" viewer, on the other hand, is less "single-minded" and more
"many-minded," tied to a "web-like association of unified groups, families, cliques,
coteries, leagues, clubs, and crowds." Like other early writers on film, Freeburg
assumed that the "crowd" mentality tended to dominate film viewing, but he pre-
sented the "public" as an alternative and idealized identity for viewers. "Public"
viewers retained their individuality in the theater and resisted the reactions of those
around them, Freeburg argued, such that "views are expressed, discussions carried
on, letters are written, until as a result of this reflection a deliberate expression is
arrived at [which is] public opinion." Significantly, Freeburg contended that even
viewers in a "crowd" could be remade into "public" viewers. Consequently, Freeburg
urged potential photoplay writers to use their scripts to transform the crowd into
a public or to "coax even one crowd into captivity." Screenwriters could create a
"public," Freeburg suggested, through scripts that had a pleasing "surface appeal."
"When penetrated, [these scripts] reveal[ed] a deeper appeal capable of holding

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the public.""27 For Freeburg, such "depth" consisted of appealing to the eye, the
emotions, and the intellect. Freeburg's "public viewer" was far from a single-minded
spectator; what enabled Freeburg to imagine this type of viewer was his sense that
viewers were able to draw upon experiences rooted in their everyday or "public"
associations with family and civic groups. That said, Freeburg's vision of viewers'
agency was nonetheless limited. His book presumed that only screenwriters could
enable viewers to value the artistic composition of films. For him, viewers required
specific scenarios and considerable encouragement to function as active viewers.
Both censorship advocates and film educators assumed that film overwhelmed
viewers' interpretive abilities, supplanting individual will with the movie's profound
influence. From this basis they could justify either the need for film censorship or
the use of film in schools. Yet film censors did not delve into the ways in which films
potentially affected audiences; the presumption that audiences were imperiled by
films constituted the limit of censors' concerns. Educators such as Freeburg and
Munsterberg, however, did begin to probe the agency of viewers, for they envisioned
change in the viewer as resulting from educational intervention. Because they lo-
cated the origin of this change in film itself, its content or style, neither explored
the depths to which viewers themselves could actively engage in watching films in
particular ways so as to achieve specific and [Link] goals.
By contrast, Dale's How to Appreciate Motion Pictures called for high school
adolescents to see themselves as engaged, critical viewers who found pleasure in the
construction of the cinematic image and who found their civic sensibilities roused
by provocative representations of race, wealth, and sexuality. Among film educa-
tors Dale was the first to suggest that film analysis and civic duty were compatible
enterprises. In so doing Dale set forth a broad scenario of how audiences could act
as social reformners, and he located knowledgeable, experienced filmgoers, not critics
or screenplay authors, as the best sources of film's capacity to affect reform.

Theorizing a New Spectator. Although Edgar Dale's How to Appreciate Motion

Pictures was the Payne Fund's concluding study, it initially garnered little attention
when it was published in 1933. Dale's text received brief mention in a review by
Malcolm Willey in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sci-
ence. Willey described the text merely as "the most unique in the list," which perhaps
signaled his inability to place the work at all, since he wrote no more about it.28 The
preceding seven Payne Fund volumes presented a presumed scientific record of
film's effects on children, capping decades of attempts to justify the censorship of
films.2" The alarmist depictions of psychologically overstimulated child and adoles-
cent viewers in the previous Payne Fund study publications overshadowed Dale's
vision of film spectators as social reformers. In particular, Henry James Forman's
flamboyant Our Movie Made Children, published in the same year as Dale's book,
fit the Payne Fund study's implicit calls for censorship. Written in layman's terms,
Our Movie Made Children dramatized the threats movies posed to children, dangers
that were amplified when in 1933 Forman's book was excerpted for publication in
Redbook, a magazine aimed at middle-class women. Dale's How to Appreciate Motion
Pictures, however, spoke to the new stage of film reform-changing the viewer and

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not just what is viewed. Consequently, How to Appreciate Motion Pictures attends
more to viewers' approaches to film and less to a prescribed canon of acceptable
films. Dale clearly had preferences for certain films over others. In his guidebook
films that could be explicitly connected to social issues such as war, poverty, and
crime, films like All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930), Cabin in
the Cotton (Michael Curtiz, 1932), and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn
LeRoy, 1932) received positive mention. Dale downplayed star vehicles or sequels,
which he viewed as emphasizing the role of the individual (usually a type of hero) in
society, preferring films that depicted individual characters in the service of larger
societal problems. Because How to Appreciate Motion Pictures was a textbook for
adolescents, Dale referred to a wide variety of American films, praising, for example,
the camera work in Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931) and the
narrative explanation of orangutans in Rango (Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1931). Dale
encouraged his readers to develop their own lists of films with their own criteria.
How to Appreciate Motion Pictures laid the theoretical groundwork for the
film appreciation movement that developed after 1933 largely because of this one
study. It shared with the other Payne Fund volumes only the assumption that films
could be used for more than entertainment. "The purpose of [How to Appreciate
Motion Pictures]," Dale argued, "is to help you see that the purpose of a motion
picture production should be social. Every individual has a job in connection with
that program, and one of the important parts of that job is to be intelligent about
the motion picture and what it can do. . . . We need to consider the effect of these
pictures on American life."" Even though Dale agreed with his fellow researchers
that films had social consequences, he pushed beyond the narrow solutions proffered
by the earlier volumes, which concluded that Hollywood needed federal oversight.
Instead, Dale focused on the expanded role filmgoers could play as he reconfigured
their attendance at films as a civic duty rather than a leisure activity.
The central and idealized figure at the center of How to Appreciate Motion
Pictures was an engaged viewer who watched films with a filmmaker's eye for craft
yet who unflaggingly took up the position of a social reformer.:3 Neither of" these
spectatorial roles-along with their attendant methods of viewing film-was new,
yet Dale's combination of craft and ideology was. As early as 1915 film critics such
as Frank Woods critiqued movies based on their lack of continuity and awkward
acting; state and local censors examined films for their narratives of sexuality and
violence.:32 Dale, however, merged these two methods of methods of analyzing film,
one concerned with the craft of filmmaking, the other with the social implications of
a film's narrative structure, in effect arguing that filmmaking should be conducted
with a sense of its power in defining national identity, personal development, and civic
unity.:" What was perhaps unique about Dale's theory of viewing was its emphasis
upon the technical understanding of film; he asserted that viewers must learn to
watch films as filmmakers did and speak the technical language of editors, cinema-
tographers, directors, set designers, costume designers, and lighting technicians.
"Too many persons who are working on 'Better Films' committees," Dale
claimed at a National Council of Teachers of English Conference in 1936, "know
little about the cinema and are inspired largely by a desire to protect their children."'34

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Instead, Dale argued, schools should teach adolescents technical methods for evalu-
ating films for themselves. Toward this goal, the beginning of How to Appreciate
Motion Pictures (quoted in the second epigraph) introduces two typical high school
students. One, John, watches with a cameraman's eye. His counterpart, Bill, lacks
the technical knowledge that can be used to categorize films and hence cannot
distinguish one film from another. John determines a film's status within a tradition
of filmmaking by ascertaining whether the film was ordinary or unusual in relation
to other films. Furthermore, John can explain that status with specific attention to
the film's technical construction, in this case, direction and cinematography.
Taken together, John and Bill represent a stunning departure from the Code's
characterization of moviegoers, which used children and adolescents as metonyms
for the easily swayed spectator. Bill and John converse rationally about a film; they
are not swayed by emotion, as the Code suggests they would be. John, Dale's ideal
viewer, attends to issues of cinematography and direction; though Bill expresses
boredom, he is coolly unemotional, untouched by the medium, rather than spell-
bound, as the Code describes viewers. Moreover, Dale's two spectators exhibit how
audience members might experience film differently despite being part of a mass
audience, contradicting the Code's claim that audiences essentially viewed a film
in a uniform fashion. Dale also ignores the Code's language of intimacy to describe
the way a film works on viewers. Instead, he offers a portrait of critical viewers
who reimagine the pleasures of viewing not in flights of emotion but in a cerebral
appreciation for the filmmakers' decisions, including "clever" camera movements
and editing techniques.
Many of the chapters in How to Appreciate Motion Pictures attend to the
processes of film production and distribution, providing readers/viewers with
knowledge of the film industry. Across these chapters readers are invited into the
history and discourses of the professional field of moviemaking. Six of the book's
thirteen chapters ("The Story," "Acting," "Photography," "Settings," "Sound and
Music," and "Direction") focus on the technical details of film composition. These
aspects of moviemaking are complemented by chapters entitled "The History of
the Movies," "A Visit to the Studio," and "Motion-Picture Reviewing" that offer
historical and social contexts for film production. "The History of the Movies"
focuses on the development of various technical innovations in film production
such as the "Latham Loop." In "A Visit to the Studio" the reader is taken through
a studio production process, beginning with the writing of the script through to
the editing of the film. "Motion-Picture Reviewing" examines film reviews that
emphasize these six aspects of production.
If How to Appreciate Motion Pictures contained only those nine chapters, it
would have contributed significantly to a technical understanding of film, making
it comparable to contemporary screenwriting guides such as Freeburg's The Art
of Photoplay Making and histories of the cinema, among them Paul Rothka's The
Film till Now (1930). Dale, however, connects film production and film history
with contemporary social issues such as crime, gangsters, and prison reform. The
arrangement of the chapters in How to Appreciate Motion Pictures reveals how
Dale urges his readers to see the social consequences of viewing films. While the

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bulk of the chapters asks readers to watch films as those who made them might, the
introductory and concluding chapters-"What Is Motion Picture Appreciation?"
"Shopping for Your Movies," and "What Are Motion Pictures For?"-discuss how
to select which movies to attend, how to treat teachers' and film reviewers' opinions
on movies, and how to form motion picture appreciation clubs.
The first two chapters in the book deal mostly with issues of taste and emotional
response. The concluding chapters focus on the psychological effects of movies on
youth and the viewer's responsibilities to exert aesthetic pressure on the industry by
demanding better-made films. How to Appreciate Motion Pictures, in other words,
did not define film as an autonomous aesthetic object, at least not entirely. In the
text's latter chapters Dale queries his readers about the degree to which movies
have social consequences. He asks his readers to consider if films that depict crime
"give some insight to the fundamental sources of criminal behavior." Dale also
suggests that a film could be used to question the judicial system: "Did [the film]
show the strong and weak points of our present methods of legal justice? Did it
leave the impression that punishing the criminal solves the problem of crime? Did
it show the great inadequacies of our modern methods of handling criminals in our
jails and penitentiaries?" Dale even suggests that films critical of the legal system
do not go far enough in their critique; for example, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain
Gang "did not show us what causes lie back of the chain itself. By the way, what are
those causes?":'" Through such questions Dale presents film as a vehicle for students
to inquire about the social construction of crime during the Great Depression. In
doing so Dale locates film as a part of the general development of 1930s social
activism.." Instead of viewing films as a source off immorality, Dale treats them, at
best, as symptoms that lead viewers to questions of the social reform not only of
Hollywood but of society as a whole.
Most significantly, How to Appreciate Motion Pictures countered censorship
effi)rts by allowing Dale to argue for a broader, more sophisticated regulation of film
production than that offered by the Payne Fund or other censorship activists. Dale's
vision did not encompass "regulation" in the strictest sense; instead, he invoked the
vision of a market economy where the best-informed consumers would use their
power to demand better technically constituted and socially conscious films that
represented the pressing social issues that mattered to them. In order to create vast
numbers of educated, influential consumers Dale turned to high schools and their
potential for inculcating civic consciousness.
In 1934, the year following the publication of How to Appreciate Motion Pictures,
Dale attempted to solidify the study of film in high schools as well as expand the
consequences of analyzing film beyond high school and into a larger public sphere,
or, in Dale's words, to "gear the work of the school in to the fact of social change.5":37
Through generous funding from the Payne Fund and agreements with state educa-
tion departments Dale arranged for his text to be taught in film appreciation classes
in forty-five Pennsylvania city schools, from large cities such as Pittsburgh to smaller
towns such as Slippery Rock and Hershey. Dale stated four aims for the project.
The first goal was "to acquaint students with the influence of the motion picture on
children, youth, and adults," which was essentially the Payne Fund Studies' objective.

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The second and third objectives, "to teach high school students to select their motion
picture entertainment more wisely" and "to teach high school students to evaluate
critically the motion pictures which they attend," were to be met by the adoption of
Dale's advice text in high schools and by teaching young people about the technical
construction of film. The fourth aim was "to develop student leadership as far as the
motion picture problem is concerned.""38
This last mission pointed to the creation of what Dale called "lay leaders" in
movie production. In effect, Dale challenged the power of local civic and religious
censorship groups by making distinctions between censors (whom he labeled "re-
formers"). He claimed that proponents of film appreciation (whom he described
as "re-formers") "are interested only in absolute standards, stereotyped patterns
and censorship. The re-formers are trying to help the motion picture win its place
with other significant arts. [Re-formers] exhibit an honesty of purpose, a feeling for
people and their rights.""' According to Dale, not only were censors, or reformers,
ignorant about the making of films, but they denied high school students a voice in
selecting which films they saw. Thus, Dale argued, censors were neither knowledge-
able about nor connected to a significant youth culture that constituted one third,
or approximately twenty-eight million people, of the total moviegoing audience
in the 1930s."' High school film appreciation programs, according to Dale's plan,
educated young people about film production and invited them into a community
discussion about film exhibition, thereby initiating teens into a larger and critically
sophisticated community.

Appropriating Dale's Ideal Film Spectator. By Dale's reckoning, in 1934, the

year after the publication of How to Appreciate Motion Pictures, fifty articles and
editorials on film appreciation (as opposed to three in 1932, also by Dale's count)
appeared in major publications in the United States, and over 100,000 high school
students were taught Dale's text by approximately 1,000 different teachers.4 After
its publication and adoption in hundreds of high schools across the United States,
How to Appreciate Motion Pictures' approach to film viewing was reprised in subse-
quent film appreciation manuals, parts of which were written by researchers work-
ing under Dale's supervision. Many such texts were published by groups formerly
aligned with censorship efforts, suggesting that the film appreciation movement
offered 1930s viewers a viable alternative to censorship. Later publications such
as Motion-Picture Study Groups: Handbook for the Discussion Leader (1934) and
How to Judge Motion Pictures (1934) elaborated upon Dale's How to Appreciate
Motion Pictures, attempting to extend his methods of film appreciation work to
community groups.
As they incorporated Dale's approaches to film appreciation these texts also
began to challenge the strategic union Dale had created between a film's aesthetic
construction and its social implications. Elizabeth Watson Pollard's Motion-Picture
Study Groups: Handbookfor the Discussion Leader, a companion piece to Dale's text,
developed from discussion groups under Dale's supervision at Ohio State University.
As Pollard acknowledges, the text was written with Dale in mind and with the idea
of broadening the audience of those invested in film appreciation. Intended for use

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in community study groups on motion pictures, Pollard's handbook addressed the
ways film appreciation could be taught to children as well as parents. Pollard sug-
gested that children could remain frozen in certain viewing habits (often identifying
with movie characters and plots) that they should "outgrow."42 As children matured,
Pollard argued, so too would their ways of understanding film. Consequently, Pollard
argued that only certain methods of film analysis should be taught, depending upon
the viewer's age, instituting a sense of a graduated film curriculum. Young children
were encouraged to discuss the effects of certain films (such as horror films) on
their sleep and dreams. Discussion groups with adolescents focused on topics of
greater relevance to teens, such as filmic depictions of passion and romance. For
adults and older community group members, however, the artistic aspects of film
and evaluation were deemed most appropriate. While Dale placed teenagers at
the center of his argument for revolutionizing the film industry, beginning with a
recognition of film's social and artistic quality, Pollard associated film composition
(as well as analysis of film's social consequences) with adult viewers. Attempting to
devise a strategy by which film appreciation could unite the school and community,
Pollard apportioned the task of using film as a basis for cultural critique among a
range of film viewers, from child to adult.
Other guidebooks from the film appreciation movement not "only used age to
distinguish among the various activities of appreciating films but also focused on
gender. Working with the National Committee for the Teachers of English, Sarah
MacLean Mullen's How to Judge Motion Pictures: A Pamphlet for High School
Students, like Pollard's guide, sought to distill a classroom activity list from Dale's
text." In a concluding section entitled "How to Organize a Photoplay Club" Mullen
states that girls and boys within the club will have different interests. Girls "usually"
like to see photoplays in the theater, "shop" for the best movies, discuss pictures
and judge them, keep scrapbooks and diaries, learn how to write scenarios, read
books about films, and vote on favorite photoplays. Boys, on the other hand, will be
"more interested" in the technical side of motion pictures, such as how to operate
cameras and how to solve problems of lighting and angles. Mullen suggests that
boys prefer to visit projection booths, arrange school shows, and direct business
affairs.44 Mullen thus invoked Dale's vision of social activism as it was defined in
How to Appreciate Motion Pictures but along strict gender lines. Both boys and girls
were still encouraged to see their roles as having the potential to affect Hollywood
production. Girls, however, were encouraged to locate their participation as vigilant
moviegoers whose primary responsibility was to their clubs and local communities,
while boys were invited to see themselves as future filmmakers.
Dale's text was often cited in Catholic publications, an indication that Dale's
contemporaries understood his emphasis on film appreciation as an attractive
complement, if not alternative, to censorship. In the National Council of Catholic
Women's "Study Club Outline on Motion Pictures" Dale's text is consistently listed
as a source of facts and discussion points for study groups interested in the "problem
of motion pictures." Unlike Pollard and Mullen, the "Study Club Outline" rejected
Dale's emphasis on film form, labeling cinematography and editing as a "veneer of
artistry" that can "blind our judgment to the violations of the true cannons of art

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and its obligation to Eternal Truth, Beauty, and Love." Yet the guide also suggested
(while invoking Dale's language of appreciation) that an educated film audience
trumped censorship as a means of improving the quality of Hollywood films. The
outline queried its readers on the usefulness of "Black lists" and "White lists" and
asked, "Is it enough to stay away from a bad or questionable movie?" suggesting
that censorship only treated the symptoms and not the causes of such films. Alterna-
tively, the guide asked viewers to focus on film's narrative construction, particularly
representations of racial prejudice, and as a result unite film's form with its social
import, or, in the guide's language, join "conscience and good taste."45
The wide adaptation of Dale's theories by both film educators and censorship
proponents suggests a broad and dynamic interest in exploring questions of film
reception in the 1930s. The purveyors of the Production Code simplified and then
abandoned debate on the complexity of audience response in order to focus their
regulatory efforts solely on film production. While such a move fundamentally
changed Hollywood film style, it nevertheless maintained Hollywood's authority to
police its own artistic productions rather than have them reviewed by outside com-
munity, state, or federal censorship boards. By contrast, Dale challenged Hollywood's
existing autonomy by blurring the lines between reception and production.
When educators such as Pollard and Mullen and organizations such as the
National Council for Catholic Women adapted Dale's concepts, they explored more
deeply than Dale the implications of various kinds of film reception by distinguish-
ing among different types of viewers; but their delineations also reinscribed some
of the boundaries between film production and reception that Dale's ideal viewer
crossed. Pollard and Mullen restricted the teaching of cinematography by age and
gender. The National Council for Catholic Women ignored form altogether in
favor of content. Even though subsequent film appreciation practitioners adopted
Dale's fundamental views of an enlightened critical audience, their definitions of
sophisticated viewers and how to teach them reveal the questions posed about the
strategic goal of creating a critical film audience, especially one that could reform
Hollywood from outside.
Faced with the entrenchment of the Production Code and perhaps realizing
the limits of his ambitious plan to create a generation of critical film audiences, in
the late 1930s Dale expanded his efforts in film appreciation by focusing on amateur
filmmaking. His publications during this period suggest that, like film appreciation,
amateur filming should be taught in high schools. Teaching with Motion Pictures:
Handbook of Administrative Practice (1937) was devoted to the specific and ad-
vanced training of students as it focused on creating high school film programs,
libraries, and departments; Motion Pictures in Education (1938) contained advice
to clubs devoted to making films. In these texts Dale elaborated upon the premise
of How to Appreciate Motion Pictures, namely, that social criticism directed toward
the movies must be matched with knowledge of the production process. In his later
texts Dale advised student clubs to use their own schools as sites of inquiry into
social conflict. Through amateur filmmaking Dale hoped to develop conscientious
"filmmakers to show us why America lynches Negroes, why hate comes so easily,
why love is so cheap and sentimental. We need some scenario writer with acid in

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his pen to expose the essentially escapist nature of much of our culture that we try
to pass on to our youngsters."4~ Such critical filmmakers, as an extension of Dale's
critical viewers, moved beyond concerns about offensive images that supposedly
created the need for censorship. Instead, Dale urged viewers to produce films that
depicted the causes of social problems rather than view movies that exploited social
problems for their potential to titillate.47
During World War II Dale redirected his efforts to produce instructional training
films for U.S. troops, and, following the war, he focused on other mass media such as
newspapers and radio. Dale's agitation for film appreciation in the 1930s, however,
helped educators and communities reimagine the film spectator as crossing into
the sphere of social and political activism and as influencing and even taking part in
film production. In the process Dale did more than threaten Hollywood with what
Quigley awkwardly termed "dictation by educators." Instead, Dale expanded the
boundaries of expert debate about filmmaking, which the Production Code quietly
reserved only for filmmakers and Hollywood censors, to include a broader popula-
tion of filmgoers trained to be aware of the social implications of film as well as the
Hollywood production process.
In the amateur experts he hoped to create through the film appreciation move-
ment Dale located a nascent and untapped potential for reform. Envisioning an
educable film viewer, Dale helped establish the groundwork for the intellectual
study of film, one linked to a social activism and civic participation that lent dignity
to watching films for their engagement with social issues rather than viewing movies
only for entertainment. If fully realized, Dale's filmgoers promised to become the
next generation of film producers, directors, actors, critics, scholars, and teachers who
would collectively wield more power than any single Hollywood insider. Within the
highly stratified business of Hollywood cinema of the 1930s this message undercut
the many channels of professionalized privilege-academic, production oriented,
censorship minded. Dale's legacy of active, amateur participation suggests how,
during the 1930s, a purposeful and deeply political movement could be based in
schools, communities, and local theaters, a grassroots advocacy against Hollywood
that viewed audiences as the forces and not the justification for reform.

Notes
1. Martin Quigley, "Dr. Dale and Martin Quigley Debate Screen and Education," Motion
Picture Herald, April 2, 1938, 2-3.
2. The term filn appreciation represents what Dale and other educators and civic leaders
used to describe their filhn reform efforts in the 1930s. Lea Jacobs uses the phrase "film
education movement" in "Reformers and Spectators: The Film Education Movement
in the Thirties," Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies
22 (January 1990): 29-49. As I will go on to describe, film "education" is perhaps more
suited to 1920s efforts to use films in classrooms as substitutes for books, chalkboards,
maps, and other visual instruments of instruction. Courses on film appreciation, I
argue, focus on film as a medium of expression rather than attending only to what was
represented in a film. Ian Jowett, Garth Jarvie, and Kathryn Fuller use the term in
their call for a historical recovery of the project when they note that "film apprecia-
tion has been an overlooked area of cinema studies" (Children and the Movies: Media

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 Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy [Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University
Press, 1996], 210).
3. The Payne Fund Studies consisted of twelve volumes written between 1926 and 1933
that examined the effects of motion pictures on youth. The scientific study began as an
attempt to justify preconceived views concerning film's detrimental impact on children.
Gradually, however, Payne Fund researchers developed more sophisticated sociological
studies of fihn reception. The last published volume was Edgar Dale's How to Appreciate
Motion Pictures. For the history of the Payne Fund Studies see Robert Sklar, Movie-
Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Random House,
1994); Kathryn Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of
the Movie Fan Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); and
Garth Jowett, Ian Jarvie, and Kathryn Fuller, Children and the Movies: Media Influence
and the Payne Fund Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
4. See Sklar, Movie-Made America; David Bordwell, Kristen Thompson, and Janet Staiger,
The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and
the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censor-
ship, and the Production Code (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Gregory
D. Black, The Catholic Crusade against the Movies, 1940-197,5 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998) and Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the
Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Morris Ernst and Pare Lorentz,
Censored: The Private, L~fe ofthe Movies (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith,
1930). These studies examine the complex relationship between the Production Code
and its effect on film production, eliding disculssion of the intersection of censorship
with filml reception.
5. Thomlas D)oherty, Pre-Code Holliywood: Sex, Innorality, and Insurrection in American
Cinema, 1930-1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 349.
6. Ibid., 349-50.
7. Ibid., 350.
8. Charles Musser, The Emlergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 321, 23.
9. Other fihll appreciation proponents held related and concurrent notions of filmn ap-
preciation. Yale University professor Mark May, as Lea Jacobs has shown, conducted a
series of film analysis sessions that utilized excerpts from Hollywood filmhns as part of the
classroom text. William Lewin and Max Herzberg wrote study guides on Hollywood films
for the National Council of Teachers of English. Dale's textbook was published prior
to other such study guides and was consequently more widely accepted and promoted
among film appreciation groups. Perhaps most important, Dale critiqued Hollywood's
social and formal construction of films, something that May and Lewin, who received
funding through Hollywood, did not do. See Jacobs, "Reformers and Spectators," 36; and
Dale Adams, "A History of Film Study in the Discipline of English," Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Texas at Austin, 1976.
10. Paul G. Cressey's sociological studies of New York community viewing habits breaks
from the central argument about facile reception that the Payne Fund promoted, but
his findings were not published in the 1930s. His previously unpublished manuscript
appears in Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller, Children and the Movies.
11. Wilton A. Barrett, "Better Films Movement to 1923," Film Daily Yearbook, 1924, 499.
For a slightly more extended history of the better films movement see Richard Koszarski,

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 An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), 208-9.
12. Nelson L. Greene, "Foreword," Visual Education 1, no. 1 (January 1920): 4-5.
13. Victor Oscar Freeburg taught one of the first university courses in screenwriting at
Columbia University from 1915 to 1917. The University of Southern California taught
the first film history course in 1929.
14. In Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 21, Steven J. Ross briefly mentions middle-class
depictions of working-class and immigrant film viewers as passive viewers. While Ross is
interested in recuperating the interpretive agency of such film viewers, I am interested
in how the category and invocation of the passive viewer dominate period film criticism
until the appearance of Dale's formulation of another, more active film spectator.
15. Usually small stores converted into theaters, nickelodeons offered an hour-long program
of short comedic, dramatic, or documentary films interspersed with live acting or magic
tricks. For the cost of only a nickel and admittance allowable at any point in the program,
the nickelodeon provided cheap, immediate entertainment for passersby on the street.
Between 1910 and 1920 movie theater owners changed their methods of exhibiting films
to attract such middle-class audiences. Rather than showing their films in makeshift
theaters, owners built new theaters, or "movie palaces," with posh seats, primitive air
conditioning, and larger screens. They raised ticket prices to ten cents. They replaced the
nickelodeon program of short filmns with longer, multireel feature films on more literary
and aesthetic subjects, such as adaptations of plays by Shakespeare and novels by Zola.
See Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United
States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 30-34.
16. Histories of film, such as Koszarski's An Evening's Entertainnwnt (1990), have often cited
these books as important in legitimating film as an aesthetic art. However, such studies
often focus on the ways the books define the artistic integrity of the cinematic text and
ignore the depictions of viewers in the text, which, to be fair, are not the explicit focus
of Lindsay or Munsterberg. Dale's text, I argue, allows us to reconsider these classics in
film studies for how they present film audiences.
17. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 199.
18. Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1916), 47, 95. Munsterberg also reported that "sensory hallucinations and
illusions" were among the possible psychological effects of watching films.
19. Ibid., 96.
20. Henry Wysham Lanier, "The Educational Future of the Moving Picture," American
Review of Reviews, December 1914, 725.
21. See "Edison's Revolutionary Education," Literary Digest, October 4, 1913, 576-78.
22. According to the educational film catalogs for Edison's company, schools had to purchase
filmhns but then could exchange them at later points for other films. Subjects for the
educational films included Elephants at Play, Ceylon, Codfish Industry, Newfound-
land, Modern Weapons for Fighting Fire, and The Wise and Foolish Virgins ("This
well known parable, taken from the New Testament, is graphically portrayed, showing
the Virgins on their way to the bridegroom's house, the interiors of the house and the
scenes that followed as they slept and the bridegroom suddenly was announced").
See Motion Picture Films for Use on Edison Home Kinetoscopes for Education and
Entertainment at Home, in Schools, Sunday-Schools, Clubs, Lodges etc. (Orange, N.J.:
Thomas Edison, 1912), 15, 17.
23. The World To-Day, 1925.

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24. See Forest R. Moulton, "Human Eyes and Optical Instruments," Visual Education 1
(January 1920): 235-54.
25. Flora Warren Seymour, "Some of the Pitfalls," Visual Education 1, no. 3 (May 1920):
26.
26. Victor Oscar Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 6,
8,9.
27. Ibid., 8, 11.
28. Malcolm Willey, "Review of Forman and Four of the Payne Fund Studies," Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1935, 288-89.
29. The Payne Fund volumes were a continuation of the National Committee for Study of
Social Values in Motion Pictures. See Sklar, Movie-Made America, and Jowett, Jarvie,
and Fuller, Children and the Movies, for a history of the Payne Fund books and their
reception.
30. Edgar Dale, How to Appreciate Motion Pictures (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 35.
31. Ironically, this was the viewing position that, according to Doherty, made Joseph Breen
so effective: "Unlike most censors, Breen knew the art he bowdlerized. From story
treatments and shooting scripts he spotted early warning signs of trouble and resolved
difficulties before more expensive stages of production had proceeded" (Pre-Code Hol-
lywood, 327).
32. See Jack Vizzard, See No Evil: Life inside a Hollywood Censor (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1970); and Ernst and Lorentz, Censored.
33. Dale suggested that filmmakers must "introduce into the business mechanism some
of the nonbusiness spirit of the artist whose concern is not primarily with profit but
with the quality of the production" (Edgar Dale and John Morrison, Motion Picture
Discrimination: An Annotated Bibliography [Columbus: )hio State University, Bureau
of Educational Research, 1950], iv).
34. Edgar Dale, "Teaching Motion-Picture Appreciation," English Journal, February 1936,
115.
35. Dale, How to Appreciate, 215, 216.
36. See Arthur N. Applebee, Tradition and Reformn in the Teaching of English: A History
(Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1974), 115.
37. Edgar Dale, "Seeking New Educational Objectives through the Use of Films," Educa-
tion, April 1938, 2.
38. Edgar Dale, Teaching Motion-Picture Appreciation: An Account of a Series of Demon-
strations in Forty-Five Selected Pennsylvania Cities (Columbus: Ohio State University,
Bureau of Educational Research, 1936), 1.
39. Edgar Dale, "Reforming Movies and Movie-goers," Newsletter 6 (Columbus: Ohio State
University, Bureau of Educational Research, 1936), 1.
40. Elizabeth Watson Pollard, Motion Picture Study Groups: Handbook for the Discussion
Leader (Columbus: Ohio State University, Bureau of Educational Research, 1934), 4.
41. Dale, "Teaching Motion-Picture Appreciation," 113.
42. Pollard, Motion Picture Study Groups, 27.
43. Like Dale's text, Mullen's emphasized the work of motion picture appreciation as rec-
ognizing the "harmonious" relationships between the parts of the movie's narrative. In
addition, Mullen encouraged viewers to judge the appropriateness of the film's title,
consider the production crew as equal to the film's star actors, establish how the first
five minutes of the movie foreshadow the mood of the rest of the film, locate the film's
climax, and determine the film's themes. The advice continued to balance an emphasis
on the construction of the film with the psychological ramifications of that construction.

Cinema Journal 46, No. 1, Fall 2006 21

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 See Sarah McLean Mullen, How to Judge Motion Pictures: A Pamphlet for High School
Students (New York: Scholastic, 1934).
44. Ibid., 54. Such a conceptual fracturing of the activities of filmhn appreciation suggests the
difficulty faced by those wishing to use Dale's plan to build a community of fihn enthusi-
asts, a community where viewers were agents in social and artistic improvement, where
film producers were invested in viewers' opinions. Gendered theories were also the topic
of William Lewin's Photoplay Appreciation in American High Schools (New York: D.
Appleton-Century, 1934), which offered a similar list of what boys and girls enjoy about
film appreciation. Lewin, chair of the National Council of Teachers of English's com-
mittee on photoplay appreciation, argued that boys preferred to direct amateur movies
and operate cameras, while girls enjoyed reading movie magazines and keeping movie
scrapbooks (44-45). Consequently, boys were asked to see the club or class lessons on
appreciation as a place to test out vocations or actions beyond the club. Girls, on the
other hand, were asked to see the maintenance of the club or class as their continual
task and thus have no goals outside of the club itself.
45. The Problem of Motion Pictures (Washington, D.C.: National Council of Catholic Women,
1934), 10, 12.
46. Dale, "Teaching Motion-Picture Appreciation," 119.
47. One of the consequences of How to Appreciate Motion Pictures' emphasis on the craft of
filmmaking was that it encouraged the creation of high school clubs devoted to amateur
moviemaking. According to the Engli.s'h Journal in 1939, over two hundred schools in
the United States were engaged in producing more than 374 dramatic, comedic, and
documentary filmhns. Films ranged froln reenactments of literary texts such as David Cop-
perfield and Little Women to original screenplays by students such as films on "dramatic
football stories" to safety films such as A Sane Fourth and Spinnin Spokes (onl bicycle
safety). See Hardy R. Finch's "Film Production in the School-A Survey," Eng lish Journal
28, no. 5 (1939): 365-71. Finch, head< of the English Departlent at at (reenwich High
School in Connecticut as well as lnember of' the NCTE Commlittee oni Standards fbr
Motion Pictures and Newspapers, argued that when students made their own filmhns they
became "famliliar with the various phases of' production" and hence learned standards
by which to "evaluate commercial pictures." In addition to establishing a "closer union
of the school and community," Finch suggested, student-produced filmhns also permitted
students, faculty, and administration to understand better the strengths and weakness of
their own schools, particularly when the filmhns were documentaries about school life.

22 Cinema Journal 46, No. 1, Fall 2006

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