The monthly round-up of film and television publications compiled by Simon Baker, Institute of Historical Research and published at Learning on Screen by Andrew Ormsby.

This month the selection takes in Dorothy Lamour, ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’, television representations of the 1992 – 1995 Bosnian War, Hindi Cinema, James Bond films and Harrison Ford’s chest hair.

Paedagogica Historica, the international journal of the history of education, has an interesting piece by Angelo Van Gorp on the use of film in teaching in the 1930s: ‘ “Springing from a sense of wonder”: Classroom film and cultural learning in the 1930s’, looks at a 1935 government scheme in Birmingham to test the value of the use of moving images for teaching purposes by allowing film to be shown in the classroom in a number of local schools.  Projectors, films, operators, and screens were organised in 80 schools in the area. The essay looks at the historical and local context, as well as contemporary articles about the experiment, taken mainly from the British Film Institute’s ‘Sight and Sound’ magazine, concluding that the scheme was a genuinely innovative venture in cultural learning.

Media Screen Roundup June 2017