Watch and Learn: Film and British Education c.1900

Description

This talk examines how cinema shaped early-twentieth-century British education. Investigating the absences of film and the preference for other media – magic lantern, print – in the visual instruction at religious and scientific institutions, I argue that cinema’s pedagogical usefulness went beyond its use: Institutions designed their instruction to counter cinema’s ‘negative’ socio-cultural and psychological influence. Championing a historiography of absences, I challenge the positivist film histories that only prioritise instances of media-use. Here, I connect with similar feminist historiographic approaches that value absences and also emphasise early cinema’s pedagogical relevance to contemporary conversations regarding Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence in knowledge-making.

Period	30 Apr 2025
Held at	University of Leeds, United Kingdom