Edgar Dale’s Film Appreciation Programme: An Early Education in Adaptation

Abstract

This article is an examination of Edgar Dale’s Film Appreciation programme, from its beginnings in 1933 with the release of How to Appreciation Motion Pictures to its eventual demise in the 1940s. Its central focus is an evaluation of literary adaptations in this pedagogical history; investigating how adaptations of canonical literature were instrumental in the development of film education, and examining how such films were used in the development of teaching materials. Using reports and papers written during the 1930s as its primary evidence, and a comparative analysis of two original study guides on David Copperfield (1935) and A Tale of Two Cities (1935), this article gives a detailed account of how film appreciation was taught in American high schools and exposes the programme’s ideological underpinnings. Through an evaluation of such sources the article proposes that whilst using literary adaptations provided a culturally valorized rationale for film education, its reliance on the prestige of literature was ultimately responsible for its failure, since it maintained and promoted the hierarchies between cultural forms.