Description
A lost relic of the twentieth century, the filmstrip, comprising a series of still-images on a strip of film with accompanying written or audio commentary, was an inexpensive alternative to film projection and was often used more widely than moving images in instructional contexts. This paper presents the filmstrip as a medium of possibility. First, I emphasise that the affordability and accessibility of the filmstrip allowed women and rural (post)colonial subjects – media-makers that are often overlooked or side-lined – to shape educational conversation. I take the example of the British independent female filmstrip-maker Marian Ray, whose filmstrips (1940s-1980s) were used in schools to teach science across the world; and of the filmstrips made by Indian villagers as part of projects organised by UNESCO and UNICEF (from 1950s-1970) that I read as a disregarded record of rural self-representation in education. I contend here that filmstrips upheld the democratic idealism underpinning postwar European (and global) political reconstruction. Second, I suggest that the filmstrip continues to uphold marginal positionalities today. As an overlooked media form the filmstrip has been neglected within archives, with often only one element of the filmstrip (the strip, the written lecture notes, or the accompanying audio commentary) surviving, and in other cases, educational, reports, journals, and catalogues remaining as the only record of filmstrip usage. This “incomplete” existence of the filmstrip necessitates the reconstruction of its histories by speculatively interpreting extant fragments. This makes the filmstrip an important case-study in how to reconstruct “lost” and forgotten media and their historical value. Further, researching the filmstrip also shares an affinity here with feminist historiographical methods that have similarly mobilised fragments to spotlight, lost, suppressed, and erased histories. Through its historical examples and conceptual connections, the paper ultimately presents the filmstrip as a medium that is generative: the filmstrip’s use, form, and marginality can be marshalled to comprehend and extend the historical and theoretical possibilities of Media Studies itself.| Period | 9 Mar 2026 |
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| Event title | IMACS/NECS Lecture |
| Event type | Seminar |
| Degree of Recognition | International |