Britannica Films

Movies are a half-century old and educators tried feebly to make teaching tools of them decades ago. Even now they are a mere educational side show. But last week the University of Chicago gave signs of leading a movement into the main tent. The University's President Robert Maynard Hutchins accepted as a gift Eastman Classroom Films, Inc., a $1,000,000 outfit which has been pretty much in the doldrums because the educational buyers of Eastman's raw film have never liked the competition of finished Eastman reels.

Eastman now becomes part of the University's Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc., which has also acquired from Western Electric the $3,000,000 ERPI Classroom Films. All told, Britannica can distribute about 500 films, graded from primary schools to teachers' colleges.* This makes Britannica the biggest thing in its field. And it agrees with film men who think it is small potatoes compared to postwar possibilities.

Film enthusiasts point to the U.S. Armed Forces' wartime record. Many a military trainer facing a problem has appealed to Washington: "Let's make a movie." The Signal Corps has made 1,000 films, the Navy-700 for training flyers alone. Today there are 15,000 16-millimeter projectors available in U.S. schools. New schools with projection facilities in every classroom are being planned by many communities.

In addition to Chicago, institutions active in producing or distributing educational films include Vassar, N.Y.U., Indiana, California, Georgia. The Rockefeller Foundation-backed American Film Center (headed by an old Hutchins colleague at Yale and Chicago, Donald Slesinger) has been working in the field. If such producers can overcome the hurdle of distribution problems, which defeated many earlier educational-film projects, they may lead in postwar developments. And the likeliest leader, in person, is Britannica's President Edward E. Shumaker.

He is a genial, gangling Pennsylvania Dutchman whose foresight and tenacity once did much to save a whole industry. When radio was born, it swept U.S. music lovers off their feet, swept the mechanical phonograph into the dustbin. But Shumaker of Victor phonographs (who later became Victor's president) did not quit. He believed in the possibilities of electrified phonograph recording and reproduction. Driven by him, Victor scrapped its elaborate machinery, began making a new type of machine and record. Electrified, the industry went on to its greatest boom.

Shumaker left the industry as a fanatic believer in educational films. Under him, since 1935, ERPI has been carefully studying school curriculums, shaping its film tools to fit. ERPI, while a leader in its field, has thus far failed to electrify education. But wartime experiences are making education much more subject to sparking. As Britannica's head, Shumaker will have a new chance to pioneer. And if the educational potentialities of films are realized, this stiff-necked Pennsylvania Dutchman will get much of the credit.

* Typical subjects: The Northeastern States, Kentucky Pioneers, Eskimo Children, Growth of Cities, The Eyes and Their Care, Pneumonia, The Horse, Simple Machines, Electrons, Development of Transportation, Irrigation Farming, Reproduction among Mammals, Three Little Kittens, The Earth in Motion, Pottery Making, A Baby's Day at Twelve Weeks, The Primary Teacher at Work.

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