Afterword: school documentaries, childhood and new cinema history

Abstract

This paper was written as a response to the six main articles that appear in the special issue Education in Motion: Producing Methodologies for Researching Documentary Film on Education. The afterword first tries to locate the special issue in a wider debate on the reassessment of the relationship between film, children and education. The article then considers how the usage of film as a research resource by historians of education might open up issues sometimes overlooked in mainstream film studies, particularly those spaces 'beyond' the text: the social-cultural contexts in which production, distribution, exhibition and reception of documentary films are located.Commenting on this special issue is an unexpectedly difficult task, especially for someone who does not work in the field of pedagogy or educational studies. In this afterword I would like to reflect on the contributions to this issue from a film studies perspective, which is a field that has invested so much time and energy into analysing the complexities of the film text, of cinematic style, of cinema's meaning repertoires and ideology, or in questions of defining film genres. Surprisingly perhaps, I would like to concentrate more on how this collection of stimulating articles on school documentaries or non-fiction films dealing with education in a school setting fits into recent developments and debates within the field of film studies itself. And, conversely, how these developments might inspire other scholars outside film studies, who since the "visual turn" are increasingly discovering films as historical documents and see how these might challenge their understanding of the past. 1 By focusing on a "genre" that has barely received any attention from film scholars, this special issue throws up a couple of -for historians of education probably unexpected -questions for scholars interested in the cultural and social history of the film medium. I see at least two directions in which this special issue and, by extension, the Documentary Film in Educational Research (DFER) project, strengthen recent questions in the study of cinema.