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14
FILM AND RADIO GUIDE
Volume XII, No. 1
An ace Russian entertainment-film director, Sergei Vassillieff (left), introduces William Lewin, an American visual educator (center), to Vladimir Nicolay, production chief in charge of propaganda and classroom films at Leningrad, in 1932.* Lewin found that Russia was bringing the world into its classrooms, in terms of Soviet ideology, and using the power of the film for purposes of notional security. Russia was the first country to utilize the film non-theatrically for government purposes; Britain came next; and now the U. S. is organizing a program to interpret its aims.
films like ‘Woodrow Wilson,’ ‘Northwest Passage,’ ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ‘Union Pacific’ and ‘Abe Lincoln in Illinois.’ They would be better students, and better future citizens and leaders, after that experience. If I taught science or literature, I would be glad that boys and girls had their interest stirred by movies like ‘Pasteur,’ ‘Mine. Curie,’ ‘Yellow Jack,’ ‘Wuthering Heights,’ the Dickens and Mark Twain novels, and a lot of others.
*Lewin, after helping to launch the Erpi educational program in the United States, made a survey of British, French, German, and Russian documentary and educational film production during 1930-36. When this hitherto unpublished photo was made in 1932, Nicolay told Lewin that 25 percent of Soviet film production was devoted to education and propaganda, 75 percent to entertainment; that Russian entertainment and documentary directors worked together; that Vassillieff helped him (Nicolay) put entertainment quality into educational films, while he helped Vassillieff with research work for "Chapeyev," a film that has since become a screen classic. Russia's film program, even in 1932, was preparing Russians for the German onslaught.
“These were good, and the ones to come will be better.”
The important thing educationally is that the film is the instrument pa)‘ excellence for bringing the world into the classroom. Teachers who neglect to utilize films that are increasingly democratized are, to that extent, out of touch with the realities of life. We need fewer ivory towers in our schools, more town-meeting-type discussions ; fewer teachers who live in vacuums, more who breathe the air of freedom.
We must, for example, make extensive revisions of texts, films, slides, and other teaching devices dealing with Latin America. The American Council on Education has completed a study which challenges nearly everything we have been teaching about Latin America. We
must enlarge and visualize our critical vocabularies regarding India, China, Russia, Japan. How shall we view such films, for instance, as the screen version of Madame Butterfly? A class of high school girls in Los Angeles, discussing the question of what a Japanese girl should do if betrayed by a lieutenant in the American Navy, had no pity for the wife who killed herself when she and her child were deserted by the American lover. The class had only disgust — even a dozen years ago (on March 3, 1933) — for Lieutenant Pinkerton (Cary Grant). “It changed my opinion of lieutenants and sailors in the American Navy,” said one of the girls. Should such a film be discussed in a class? Should the restraint of brave little Cho-Cho-San be compared with the pathos of