Education in the School of Dreams

Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film

Jennifer Lynn Peterson

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780822354536, 9780822354413
• eBook ISBN: 9780822378914
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In the earliest years of cinema, travelogues were a staple of variety film programs in commercial motion picture theaters. These short films, also known as "scenics," depicted tourist destinations and exotic landscapes otherwise inaccessible to most viewers. Scenics were so popular that they were briefly touted as the future of film. But despite their pervasiveness during the early twentieth century, travelogues have been overlooked by film historians and critics. In Education in the School of Dreams, Jennifer Lynn Peterson recovers this lost archive. Through innovative readings of travelogues and other nonfiction films exhibited in the United States between 1907 and 1915, she offers fresh insights into the aesthetic and commercial history of early cinema and provides a new perspective on the intersection of American culture, imperialism, and modernity in the nickelodeon era.

Peterson describes the travelogue's characteristic form and style and demonstrates how imperialist ideologies were realized and reshaped through the moving image. She argues that although educational films were intended to legitimate filmgoing for middle-class audiences, travelogues were not simply vehicles for elite ideology. As a form of instructive entertainment, these technological moving landscapes were both formulaic and also wondrous and dreamlike. Considering issues of spectatorship and affect, Peterson argues that scenics produced and disrupted viewers' complacency about their own place in the world.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Dreamworld of Cinematic Travel
• 1 | Varieties of Travel Experience: Burton Holmes and the Travelogue Tradition
• 2 | “The Living Panorama of Nature”: Early Nonfiction and the American Film Industry
• 3 | “The Five-CentUniversity”: Educational Films and the Drive to Uplift the Cinema
• 4 | “Atop of the World in Motion”: Visualizing the Pleasures of Empire
• 5 | Scenic Films and the Cinematic Picturesque
• 6 | “A Weird and Affecting Beauty”: Watching Travel Films in the 1910s
• 7 | “The Nation’s First Playground”: Wilderness Modernized in the American West
• Epilogue: Reveries of the Solitary Walker
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index