Films that Teach

The cliches of classroom science films --the white-coated chemist making voodoo, the spectacular, cymbal-scored shot of steel being poured or an oil well gushing, the concluding tide of coronation music as the sponsoring firm is identified --are familiar to every schoolboy who has slumped, bored but gratefully relaxed, through a reel or two of respite from the chore of learning. High school science teachers have tolerated these technological travelogues presumably because they are "visual aids to education," and the phrase sounds up-to-date; college science profs have ignored them almost completely.

Contempt for most classroom cinema is justified, but four new color films on chemistry--two for high schools and two, still in production, for advanced college study--should do much to wipe it out. The producer is Hollywood Film Maker John Sutherland, who has reeled off award-winning documentaries, among them the 1954 cancer film, Horizons of Hope, as well as binsful of eye-scratching TV commercials and industrial gong beaters. Sutherland's chemistry films, his first purely educational projects, are concentrated (about 15 minutes) doses of basic science, without musical scores or might-of-industry hoopla. They aim at concepts hard to visualize from textbook explanations or chalkboard diagrams.

Pay Attention. The high school films Combustion and Chlorine focus narrowly on their subjects, show only a pair of hands--those of Phillips Academy (Andover) Chemistry Master Elbert Weaver --performing experiments. Explanations are amplified by animated drawings showing molecular action. Weaver's scripts are tough enough to keep students out of that double-feature daze, call for as much attention as a classroom lecture. The films present no chemical formulae and do not show a periodic table--these can be handled better by textbooks and classroom charts. The Manufacturing Chemists' Association, which commissioned the films (cost: $20,000 each), will distribute them through nonprofit rentals this fall, plans to have four more made.

Where Sutherland's high school films treat simple reactions and phenomena, his college productions will be attempts to show visually two of the most basic theories of physical chemistry--the concept of molecular vibration: taught by Nobel Prizewinner Linus Pauling, and famed Chemist Henry Eyring's study of reaction kinetics. The idea that such theories, normally discussed in detail in junior-year college chemistry, might be presented in films belongs to Dr. Thomas Jones of the National Science Foundation, who conceived the project as a Brussels Fair exhibit. But "the U.S. Government is very poor," Chemist Eyring observes pointedly, and there was no federal financing to be had. Eventually 83-year-old Philanthropist Alfred P. Sloan Jr. heard of Jones's plan, and although the fair deadline had passed, agreed to development and production through his Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Ford Foundation is paying for prints and distribution.

Spare the Rods. The two college-level films are being done entirely in animation. Observes Berkeley Chemist Joel Hildebrand, head of the American Chemical Society advisory committee that approves every frame of the films: "We've been very careful to avoid the Walt Disneyish type of film. There are no little fairies pushing things around." Neither are molecules represented--as they are in classroom models--by little balls held together by rods. Says Hildebrand: "We have taken out the rods and put in dotted lines to represent axes. That way nobody will mistake them for anything physical." Middleman--and translator--between the chemists and the cinemakers is Earl Mortensen, one of Eyring's graduate students. He draws rough sketches of reactions, helps Sutherland's art director with their translation into smooth, readily understood pictures. Hildebrand's committee reviews screen tests of animated reactions (it turned down six of the first eight shown) and reworking begins. When the first classes see the two $50.000 films next spring, nine months of painstaking effort will have gone into them. Sample: frequency of the vibration of the atoms within the molecules is calculated on computers, scaled down to slow motion. Says enthusiastic, new-fledged Film Maker Hildebrand: "We're dealing with complex motions and time effects--different molecules doing different things. We explain each molecule before we combine it into the molecule complex. The motion picture is the ideal medium."

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