In their 2011 edited volume Useful Cinema, Charles R Acland and Haidee Wasson argue that the majority of cinema scholarship misses an important feature of the medium by focusing on commercial public films. The 20th century, they note, witnessed not only the rise of entertainment cinema but also the creation of a vast universe of what the authors term ‘useful cinema’: educational and instructional films created by schools, public agencies, and private businesses. Such films – played on the walls of classrooms, exhibition halls, and offices – projected a different, yet equally important, vision of cinema’s place and purpose in modern life. Here, the medium was technology more than art: a tool for ‘making, persuading, instructing, demonstrating’ (Acland and Wasson, 2011: 6). To arrive at an accurate understanding of 20th-century film culture, they conclude, scholars must pivot away from theatrical releases and begin to consider film history’s entanglement with institutional history, exploring how cinema was ‘adapted to institutional directives, wielding influence outside of the multiplex and the art house’ (p. 13).

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评论：汤姆赖斯，殖民地电影：电影和大英帝国的保护

Charles R Acland 和 Haidee Wasson 在 2011 年编辑的《有用的电影》一书中认为，大多数电影学术研究都将注意力集中在商业公共电影上，从而忽略了媒体的一个重要特征。他们指出，20 世纪不仅见证了娱乐电影的兴起，还见证了作者所说的“有用电影”的广阔天地：由学校、公共机构和私营企业制作的教育和教学电影。这些电影——在教室、展厅和办公室的墙壁上播放——投射了一种不同但同样重要的电影在现代生活中的地位和目的的愿景。在这里，媒介是技术而不是艺术：一种用于“制作、说服、指导、展示”的工具（Acland 和 Wasson，2011：6）。为了准确了解 20 世纪的电影文化，