The other day I stumbled upon the
Prelinger Archives, a public-domain collection of films (mostly school filmstrips) from throughout the 20th century. Most of them are hysterically funny, especially the Coronet series of films. Most of the Coronet films were made in the late 40s and 50s, that era of extreme conformity in American culture. The films feature pre-rock'n'roll teenagers coping with the usual teenage problems: parties, dating, becoming adults, etc. but the issues are so cheesily presented and the problems so neatly wrapped up by the end of the end of each 10-minute film that it is hard to imagine that these films were any help at all to the teenagers who watched them. The acting in these films is atrocious, the actors stiff and amateurish, the dialogue itself sounds like its written by teenagers. They're a hoot to watch. I've been downloading some of the best and I might try to work a couple of them into my teaching next semester. I'm not sure how my students will take to them--whether they'll see the irony in them or not--since teenagers today seem strangely similar to the teens of yesteryear.
There are other interesting films as well. One is a puritanical anti-pornography film from the 1960s funded by criminal financier Charles Keating; the film is 30 minutes long and 25 minutes of it are still shots from smut mags of the time. It's hard to tell whether the film is meant to discourage people from them, or help them develop an interest in "sexual deviancy".
Another neat film is "How to Use the Dial Telephone" from 1927. It instructs viewers on how to dial a number, what the difference is between a busy signal and a ringing signal, and all the other things we take for granted nowadays. It's a trip. It's hard to imagine a time when people really didn't know how to work a telephone and they needed a film like that to help them know what to do.
