Introduction

Abstract

It’s ten years now since Screen Education ceased publication and was absorbed back into its parent journal Screen. It had been born ten years before that, in the winter of 1971. It ran for 41 issues, four times a year, until closed down in the spring of 1982.1 The body which published both journals, the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT) had been founded (as the Society of Film Teachers) in 1950 as a grant-in-aid body of the British Film Institute (BFI). Working closely with the BFI’s Education Department, SEFT was an organisation representing film teachers at all levels of the education system in the UK. Its first publication was The Bulletin, which was expanded later into a 16-page duplicated sheet called The Film Teacher. In 1959 this was further transformed into a printed journal, Screen Education (SE), which combined accounts of film teaching with articles about the film industry and about film theory. Issue no 46, September/October 1968, contained a report on a festival of films for children, an article about making films with children, and, a premonition of things to come, an essay by Philip Crick asking ‘Is Cinema A Language?’ and one by Michael Budd entitled ‘Eisenstein’s The Film Sense: its Relevance Today’.