Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television,

Vol. 22, No. 3, 2002

Between Word, Image, and the Machine:

visual education and élms of industrial process

ELIZABETH WIATR, University of California, Irvine

FIG . 1. The subjects of visual education.

Goggle-eyed, all the children have their gazes éxed in one direction (Fig. 1). They are
rapt despite signs of material need, undeterred by a lack of movie palace accoutrements.
While each individual child’s expression is distinct, all express some version of pleasure
or fascination: they are interested, active spectators. These children, to a one, appear to
be undistracted by the photographer, who was probably only partially hidden by
darkness, indicating either their considerable experience in being photographed or,
more likely, the tremendous attraction of what they are watching. Although they are
èanked by standing adults, the children’s engagement appears uncoerced. The picture
plane careens, heightening the impression of bodily engagement, as if the children
might topple forward to achieve union with the object of their gaze. Tight cropping
makes the group of individuals function metonymically: this small microcosm of the
masses could be extrapolated far beyond the picture frame. Yet even as microcosm,
these spectators are no mass ornament; they are worlds away from later images of élm
viewers as passive, mindless consumers [1].
This image of children entranced by an instructional élm appeared on the cover of
F. Dean McClusky’s Visual Instruction: its value and its needs, a 1932 report aimed at
ISSN 0143-9685 print/ISSN 1465-3451 online/02/030333-19 Ó 2002 IAMHIST & Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/01439680220148741
334 E. Wiatr

encouraging the production and use of educational élms [2]. As cover image, it
emblematizes the aspirations of the American visual education movement, a broad-
based group of educators, government ofécials, and élm producers who since the 1910s
had been striving to make motion pictures an integral part of formal education.
Although many in the visual education movement feared what they perceived to be the
anesthetizing and corrupting effects of motion pictures, at the same time visual
technologies, appropriately used, promised salvation through a union of visual pleasure
and learning. Promoters of visual education saw élm as a superior way to stimulate and
enlighten students while making a far-èung technological world seem concrete and
knowable. More memorable and appealing than print, élm would communicate infor-
mation eféciently enough to make the staunchest Taylorist beam. And élm could build
the nation: visual education would standardize and modernize perception to equip the
masses, including immigrants and non-English speakers, for participation in the mod-
ern, visually-oriented world (Fig. 2).
In practice, that meant training pupils not only to observe and articulate their
observations, but also to visualize, or to see what was not present in an image. Both in
visual education and in the visual culture out of which it developed, learning to visualize
what one could not see, or what was to come, was as important a skill as learning to see
that which existed. To many visual educators, visualization was the most important
form of seeing, and the habitual practice of disciplined viewing was to train young
people in this conceptual operation. One educator, for instance, thought that élms and
photographs should ‘be consciously treated as aids to visualization, not as objects to be
visualized’ [3]. Truth was neither in the picture plane nor beyond it in the reality
represented, but in the relation between the mind of the observer and the image. No
simple notion of the representation of reality was at work here.
Visualization offered a solution to a widely perceived crisis of representation engen-
dered by large-scale industrialization, standardization, and urbanization. Commenta-
tors included Emile Durkheim, who, from an economic perspective, diagnosed the
representational problems engendered by globalization:

‘When markets expand across the globe, contact then is no longer sufécient.
The producer can no longer embrace the market in a glance, nor even in
thought. He can no longer see limits since it is, so to speak, limitless.
Accordingly, production becomes unbridled and unregulated. It can only trust
to chance. From this come the crises which periodically disturb economic
functions [4].

In Durkheim’s view, the irrationality of capitalism is at core a problem of representa-

tion. For visual educators, visualization was a way of managing a similar irrationality
experienced at the individual level. Visualization could be the anodyne for alienation
and anomie. It thus operated as a powerful trope that was thought to compensate for
a lack of direct experience by supplying ‘vicarious experiences’—a term extremely
popular among visual educators—and suturing the gaps between experience and
understanding [5]. Film was embraced as a site where the boundaries between the real
and the imaginary, the concrete and the abstract, could be negotiated. It would make
the abstract concrete and the absent present, educators believed.
Their enthusiastic interest in visualization formed part of a larger discourse about the
phenomenological effects of modernity, but was also, in part, driven by an effect already
produced by actuality élms, which presented the world as picture and further shifted
 Between Word, Image, and the Machine 335

FIG . 2. Advertisement from Visual Education, 1920.

336 E. Wiatr

the locus of the real away from lived time and space, towards élmic time and space.
Therefore, educational élm can also be seen as continuous with pre-érst World War
silent cinema in the way that it operated outside the strictures of the narrative feature
and incorporated visual appeal into widely varying subject matter. With its mixture of
photographs, élms, diagrams, illustrations, and even radio and phonograph recordings,
visual education even to some extent appropriated the multi-media display of early
cinema.
The often-discussed collapse of time and space brought about by modernity had a
distinct conéguration for many visual educators [6]. It signaled at once the possibility
of a new kind of mastery—an access to vast pictorial knowledge that could transcend
physical limitations—and the impossibility of a positivistic approach to the world. No
longer could knowledge be derived solely from direct experience. Instantaneous com-
munication and virtual presence were both possible and desirable, as long as they were
managed by a trained observer. Otherwise, as one high school teacher put it, images
could ‘inspire a discontent with life as it is and tend to make one seek “movie life”
where action is quick and results quicker’ [7]. To avoid this peril, one needed to be able
to translate screen time back into one’s own lived time by learning to master screen
time. Equally importantly, one must know which visual experiences should be taken as
real and which should not.
Under the onslaught of images from various quarters, both ‘real’ and pictorial,
modern minds were continually overstimulated, thought visual educators, partially
echoing Georg Simmel’s earlier analysis of the effects of urban life [8]. But instead of
building up a protective shell and becoming calculating rather than emotional, as
Simmel’s metropolitan type had, young élm viewers developed disorderly and unre-
liable minds. As persuasive as propaganda might be, as straightforward as factual
information might have been thought to be, both ran the risk of missing their mark with
minds such as these. Learning to think, then, meant learning to properly establish the
relations between images, and to articulate those relations in words. Pictures moved
freely across the boundaries of the self, passing from circulation out in the world into
a person’s mind, where they combined with one another to form thoughts and
memories. Reality itself could be understood as a conglomeration of images. Given this,
educating the observer required a multi-tiered labor, one that would work on both the
raw material and the process—the images themselves and the individuals in whose
minds those images were assembled.
Visual educators and those who made their élms spilled little ink theorizing élm
itself; instead, they generated an extensive discourse about the pedagogical virtues of
élm, conducted viewer response tests to prove those virtues, polled teachers for
suggestions on élm content and pedagogy, and devised structured methods of teaching
with élm [9]. In the late 1910s and 1920s educational élms followed patterns already
established in travelogues, city views, élms depicting industrial processes, and other
types of actualities, which migrated into education as their centrality on the commercial
theatrical circuit declined. Educational élm producers generally appropriated existing
élm rhetoric and even recycled footage. Eastman Kodak, for instance, a prominent
producer of educational élms in the late 1920s, followed conventions of editing and
titling employed in earlier élms and regularly used footage from corporations, the US
government, and such commercial producers as Burton Holmes, the well-known
travelogue showman [10]. In general, the move from commercial theater to classroom
signaled more a shift in emphasis and viewing context than a structural change at the
level of the élm. Voyeurship of the colonial world came under the aegis of social
 Between Word, Image, and the Machine 337

science, while visualizing the steps of a manufacturing process became as legitimate an

educational pursuit as studying the classics, if not more so.
Although visualization was a key goal of the educational élm movement, the types of
élms embraced most heartily by visual educators, travelogues and those representing
industrial and manufacturing processes, oddly seem to require little visualization. These
élms consist of sequential shots of activities, people, and places, most of which are
explicitly shown and labeled. Whether these élms represent aspects of the ‘real’ world
or use actuality footage to construct imaginary worlds, some kind of world is repre-
sented. Yet these seemingly descriptive élms do, in fact, encourage strategies of
visualization, though not exactly as visual educators intended. Instead of presenting
links that mimic ‘reality’, the élms redeéne knowledge as information about surface
appearance and encourage reading strategies that bridge temporal, spatial, and logical
gaps. While the existence of such gaps deées the positivist logic that visual educators
criticize, the gaps also effectively diminish the effectiveness of such élms to deliver
comprehensive knowledge.
Knowledge as surface and an illusory, elliptical logic characterize both travelogues
and élms of industrial process, which share signiécant formal and structural qualities:
both tend to be organized into segments in which short descriptive titles are followed
by images that are analogically related to the title; both overtly convey information
about how everyday things look; both tend to follow a logic of moving from far to near,
outside to in, general to speciéc; and both suggest that seeing can be a source of
pleasure as well as knowledge. Because the modern world of work and industry was
such an important aspect of any view of a place, genre distinctions between the two
categories of subject matter can be difécult to sustain. Films such as A Fish Factory in
Astrakhan (Pathé, 1908) and Gold and Diamond Mines of South Africa (Edison Conquest
Pictures, 1917), for instance, actively depict industrial processes as much as they do
foreign people and places. Often representations of the two are connected in élms only
through contiguity: the Edison élm, for instance, opens with a scene of a busy street in
downtown Johannesburg, then abruptly cuts to a pan of a gold mine. Tourism,
development, and the circulation of commodities are all of a piece.
Travelogues have been examined both as élms that create idealized, often timeless,
worlds and, in a more ideological reading, as élms that represent other peoples and
places through the lens of scientiéc and popular discourses about the Other [11]. Many
élms that more exclusively show industrial processes can also create idealized worlds
and be similarly inèuenced by ideology; where they differ most from travelogues is in
their emphasis on process. Like history, process is fundamentally a narrative device,
and many non-éction élms depicting industrial processes—including some of those
classiéed as travelogues—use image and text to inscribe industry into evolutionary
notions of historical time, introducing a (pedagogically questionable) type of narrative
as they reégure the relationship between image and text as a non-analogical one.
What sort of visual education did such élms offer and how did they deliver it? The
earliest élms representing large-scale industry foregrounded visual experience in the
present as pure spectacle. Among these is a group of more than 20 made by the
American Mutoscope and Biograph Company for the Westinghouse Corporation,
produced for projection in the Westinghouse exhibit hall at the 1904 Louisiana
Purchase Exposition in St. Louis [12]. The élms, averaging two to three minutes in
length, each showed one area of Westinghouse facilities or one step in the manufacture
of a Westinghouse product, and were combined in a program screened three times daily
at the Exposition. How the élms were ordered in the program and whether titles were
used is unclear, though there are clues: a 38-second shot of a steam whistle beginning
338 E. Wiatr

to blow, blowing, then ceasing to blow, may have marked a beginning or end of the
program; and three panoramic élms might have offered a kind of mise-en-scène [13].
Still, the vast majority of shots represent discrete moments in a wide range of activities
at four different plants and could have occupied any position in the program. The élms,
as much as the workers in the plant or the products they make, are but replaceable
elements of an overall picture. If the program at the Exposition could have been
experienced as a whole or a totality, it would not have been one based on causal
connections, èow, or any discernable logic. Instead, the élms offered a panorama of
visual instants that unfold across time.
The assemblage of élms creates an aggregate portrait of a vast hive of activity, a set
of images of movement, more than it represents a process with beginning, middle, and
end. Even the individual Westinghouse élms of which the program was comprised
generally begin and end arbitrarily. While there could be a practical explanation for
this—in some cases the work was endlessly repetitive, in others the time needed to
complete the task far exceeded the real time of the shot—the abrupt ending was
repeated in most industrial élms up through the 1920s and appears to be more a matter
of sensibility, an attitude towards narrative and time, than of practicality. Arbitrary
beginnings and endings suggest the iterative, a mode of time in which actions, events,
or motions occur repeatedly, though they may only be shown once. But in the
Westinghouse élms iterative time refers not to the a-temporality of an unchanging
pre-industrial world, as it would in many travelogues, but to the dynamic time of the
modern. The present is represented as apogee without any hint that it may be only
relative or temporary. What awaits beyond the end of the élm is more of the same. Even
if it is different, it will be fundamentally the same, just as change becomes not newness
but a constant in a culture of perpetual novelty.
Not only do the Westinghouse élms demonstrate the lack of a logical representation
of time and change characteristic of the genre, they also demonstrate another character-
istic feature, the lack of closure, of an ending that makes logical or emotional sense, of
the fuléllment of some purpose, or telos. As such, closure is a narrative device generally
regarded as fundamental in pedagogy that aspires to relate to the human world. Films
of industrial process dispense with closure and other aspects of narrative as well,
especially pathos: the world of Westinghouse machines had not yet been subjected to
the same laws as human beings. This is generally true of élms of industrial process
through the 1920s: one of the things that distinguishes these élms from contemporane-
ous written descriptions of labor and mass production, such as Upton Sinclair’s The
Jungle, and towards the other side of the political spectrum, celebrations of industrial
might and wealth, is the written sources’ ready framing of history in sentimental and
mythological terms [14]. Similarly, educational élms of the 1920s differ from contem-
poraneous ‘documentaries’ not so much because the latter creatively express actuality
or make arguments while the former do not—both do, just differently—but in the way
that many of the most well-known documentaries of this period, such as Robert
Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, deploy pathos.
Rather than appealing to pathos, the industrial élm characteristically appeals to
reason, inculcating an illusion of rational knowledge. Among the most remarkable of
the Westinghouse élms is Panorama of Street Car Assembly Room, a 2-minute, 38-second
tracking shot made by mounting the camera and a light to a ceiling crane spanning the
length of an immense assembly room. All the mechanical rationality of modern
production assists the equally mechanical camera in a union of technologies. Yet while
the camera travels in a perfectly straight line, the main aisle of the shop èoor is
 Between Word, Image, and the Machine 339

FIG . 3. Frame enlargement from Panorama of Street Car Assembly Room (American Mutoscope and
Biograph Co., 1904).

irregular. Activities, though methodically recorded, are unreadable except in the most
general way. Process reveals itself to the camera as motion and activity, in all its unruly,
ungraspable complexity. From its mobile vantage point the camera shows not an ideal
picture of rational, orderly modern manufacturing but a more organic whole, closer in
form to a medieval city than one based on a grid. Seeing is rationalized—linear, at
constant speed, controlled—yet the object seen is not, and since it is not analyzed by
the camera movement, the process being élmed remains as mysterious, as distant, as
the 12th century. The primary source of illumination, a newly-developed mercury
vapor lamp, appears to be suspended a number of meters in front of the camera,
lighting only the center of the frame [15]. Objects begin to be bathed in light as the
camera approaches, come into full light, then recede into darkness as the camera moves
away. Real knowledge—as the comprehension of the relationship between visible
patterns, the surface appearance of things, and what they imply or entail—is never
attained, yet the promise of new knowledge is held forth throughout by the steady
revealing of the shop èoor (Fig. 3).
In Panorama of Street Car Assembly Room, just as every object receives equal illumina-
tion, every object shown receives equal time in the light. The mechanical rhythm of the
crane levels and de-individualizes all that it passes over. As an image of time, this élm
expresses a succession of pure present instances: as each momentary view recedes from
the light, it is immediately replaced by an equally intriguing and equally èeeting view.
This is the present as apogee; viewers are witnesses of an event. Movement and the èow
of time are inexorable, but change is not, beétting an established corporation that
resiliently and successfully clung to anti-union practices, practiced early forms of
welfare capitalism to win worker loyalty—making small changes to forestall larger
ones—and had just permanently replaced many defeated workers with scabs.
Panorama of Street Car Assembly Room ironically refutes its name; a panorama, at least
340 E. Wiatr

one that would fuléll the goal of educators, that of a comprehensive visualization
leading to knowledge, is precisely what the élm does not deliver. The repeated revealing
and concealing of objects in the frame encourages yet ultimately thwarts panoramic
vision, as deéned by Roland Barthes as a type of seeing that stages a struggle between
perception and knowledge, between sensation and memory [16]. Barthes discusses
panoramic vision in the context of the observer’s view of Paris from the Eiffel Tower,
but the viewing process he describes is nothing if not cinematic: it unfolds over time
and requires movement of the eye across the space and from place to place. One’s view
shifts from wide shot to close-up as it oscillates between sensation and decoding [17].
Both the point of view and the image seen contribute to panoramic vision: it requires
a point of view that is distanced enough to reveal plenitude, while the image itself must
contain a wealth of potential information. It is both a ‘euphoric vision’—one that
perceives continuity and totality—and an intelligent vision that seeks to divide, identify,
and comprehend the view. In other words, it encourages both synthesis and analysis,
and is therefore a powerful method of coming to knowledge through seeing.
Another quality of panoramic vision is its similarity to the sublime: they are both
structured around a tension between two very different responses, one rational, the
other an intense feeling that deées logical description, but both are fundamentally
visual. Where panoramic vision and the sublime differ is in the nature of the non-ratio-
nal response and in their respective forms of resolution. In panoramic vision, the self
may be overwhelmed, but the experience is not unpleasant and a person’s physical
existence is secure. In the sublime experience, the self is dwarfed and threatened.
Panoramic vision is more of a process itself: it does not rapidly result in synthesis but
rather lingers in a state of becoming. In contrast, the sublime, as formulated by Kant,
is ultimately a test of the human spirit’s mettle: the human mind vanquishes the
disruption and emerges victorious [18]. The panorama of the Westinghouse élms may
have elements of the sublime, but the views are too detailed, too full of motion,
ultimately too intimate to be read through its logic. What is terrifying emerges only over
time, and is tempered by vast amounts of visual pleasure.
An aporia occurs about midway through the élm, when large pieces of material begin
to rain down just ahead of the camera (Fig. 4). The camera stops for a moment—
clearly, this is unplanned—workers scatter and look up, then, after no more debris falls,
the camera resumes its journey, destination the far wall. Why these 15 seconds were not
excised or the whole élm re-shot remains a mystery, since even in 1904 industrial
accidents did not make for good corporate public relations. One answer might be found
in the lower right-hand corner. There a man in a bowler hat and suit, undoubtedly one
of the members of management whose presence is conspicuous throughout the élm,
stands only slightly ahead of the debris, unèinching. In the élm he appears to walk right
under falling debris to emerge unscathed, defying anyone to read raining debris as a
problem. Ultimately though, the moment can also be understood through the logic of
the sublime, only with conquering reason located not in the viewer but in the machine,
the camera. An interruption, falling debris, temporarily delays the autotelic quest of the
camera, but, paralleling the workings of the Kantian sublime, present-time representa-
tion is reestablished as the camera forges ahead, emerging victorious, having van-
quished the disruption by the mechanical process of simply moving forward.
The effect of viewing all the Westinghouse élms, while fundamentally visual, does
not encourage visualization. Visualization, as a process of fashioning a coherent whole
out of separate images, both those invented and those once seen and remembered, is
difécult with the Westinghouse élms because the oscillation Barthes describes, the one
 Between Word, Image, and the Machine 341

FIG . 4. Falling debris, Panorama of Street Car Assembly Room.

that encourages both synthesis and analysis, is impossible. Each élm offers a vision, but
in a fragmentary, impoverished manner that works against the viewer’s comprehension.
The disparate elements in the corporate self-portrait are, in the viewing context at the
1904 Exposition, ultimately linked by the knowledge that all that is seen is Westing-
house. What may be more readily available to the viewer, along with an incipient
panoramic vision, is a more general impression or emotional response, such as awe at
the sheer volume and scale of the enterprise and fascination with the act of looking into
new places from unusual vantage points; in other words, the view may offer far more
pleasurable entertainment than information.
Visual educators, aware of this pitfall, strove to maintain a clear distinction between
ediécation and entertainment, but the line still could be fuzzy. In part this occurred
because subjects that had recently been banal, such as everyday life, had become
legitimate objects of study. Even when the once banal was reframed as serious subject
matter, it might continue to amuse or delight, as does the disruptive episode in
Panorama of Street Car Assembly Room. Moreover, most visual educators regarded a
measure of visual pleasure as not only admissible but desirable, further confounding
distinctions between the serious and the frivolous, and the association of pleasure with
frivolity. In the 19th century, visual pleasure had been subsumed under marvel—the
marvel of new technologies and of extending one’s gaze by peering into new, exotic,
and sometimes dangerous places. While there was still much to marvel at in the
industrial America of the 20th century, by the érst decades visual pleasure, like so much
else, had become both a business and a science. It was treated as a discrete phenom-
enon that needed to be consciously manipulated and deployed in order to be socially
useful.
Once catering to visual pleasure was acknowledged as necessary and good, what
made viewing for entertainment and viewing for learning different was as much one’s
342 E. Wiatr

viewing practices as it was the subject matter viewed. An earlier assumption that élms
could provide meaning and useful information instantaneously, or ‘at a glance’, as
commentators often put it, had by the 1920s yielded to a more sophisticated under-
standing of the aims and function of visual communication [19]. Although pictures
were thought to be more efécient than written text because they could work their
transference more rapidly and thoroughly, receiving communication required discipline
and contemplation, and both practices needed to be inculcated. Even the most
quotidian images should be read and pondered, according to Dr. Charles A. Coulomb,
Chairman of the History Committee of the Philadelphia Elementary Schools:
The direct appeal to the eye is, in most cases, only a beginning. The pupil is
not likely, the érst time such a task is imposed upon him, whether in the
grades or in high school, to see very much. The érst time, and the hundredth
time, he is likely to need the stimulus of guiding questions asked by the
teacher [20].
Children therefore must be taught how and what to see. In essence, images were
coming to be understood as texts that required interpretation, and visual education was
an effort to discipline those interpretations by training vision.
But what sorts of visual stories would give the best training? Other élms of process
offer an answer. Within two years of the 1904 Exposition, élms of industrial process
would begin to employ narrative elements very similar to those present in dominant
notions of history. Historical time was no longer visible in these élms as open-ended
present time or simply iterative time, but as a developmental story of the èow of
materials and labor, érst within one factory, as in the British-sponsored élm A Visit to
the Peak Frean and Co.’s Biscuit Works (Cricks and Sharp, 1906), then in one region,
and eventually across the world.
In the early part of the 20th century, both natural and human history were generally
understood as the collection and recounting of the entire development of society or the
world. Although every discipline, economics, science, language, etc., had its own
developmental narrative and these were often discontinuous with one another, all were
linked through the common thread of evolution, as Michel de Certeau has pointed out:
Evolution sewed all these discontinuities together by running through them as
if they were the successive or coexisting égures of a same meaning—that is, of
an orientation—and by evincing in a more or less teleological writing the
interior unity of a direction or a development [21].
Transformation of raw material into énished product was yet another species of
development, an evolutionary narrative complete with its own telos. Industrial process,
then, could become of a piece with natural history. But in order for this same telos to
apply, an object such as gold, rubber or beets had to become a subject, and these élms
indeed show social relations to be foremost relations between objects, now made
subjects. Films of industrial process may have expressed a will to countermand the
fragmenting and reifying effects of the commodity, those theorized by Karl Marx and
Georg Lukács, by showing connections between énished products and their origins
[22]. In bestowing a kind of historical gravity on the relations between objects and the
transformation of objects under capitalist mass productions, however, these élms
ultimately reinforced the effects of the commodity.
The relatively ‘inefécient’ written text was crucial to the insertion of production into
history. Titles began to inscribe historical narrative by identifying actions and grouping
them together, usually in stages that paralleled a production process such as the path
 Between Word, Image, and the Machine 343

of gold from potential resource in the ground to énished dental crown. The linguistic
sign—the intertitle—charts the transformation from potential resource to commodity
by offering temporal, spatial, and interpretive anchoring of a series of images. In A Visit
to the Peak Frean and Co.’s Biscuit Works, titles are short and minimal: ‘Making Brighton
Biscuits’, ‘Washing Returned Empty Tins’ (Fig. 5). They schematically name a primary
activity depicted in the image or images that follow and in this way stake out separate
functional spheres for image and text. Generally a single shot follows each title, so titles
are the cuts. Text identiées and deénes blocs that can then be grouped and ordered,
while image provides the information. Knowledge is produced through the union of
ordering text and image, now set up by the titles to be read as information rather than,
say, pure optical experience or poetic pattern.
Although the structure of A Visit to the Peak Frean and Co.’s Biscuit Works is
straightforward, and titles and images each seem to serve a recognizable function, the
actual difference between the linguistic and visual signs is less clear. One familiar
distinction, explained by W. J. T. Mitchell, casts image as natural, language as artiécial:
The image is the sign that pretends not to be a sign, masquerading as (or, for
the believer, actually achieving) natural immediacy and presence. The word is
[the image’s] ‘other’, the artiécial, arbitrary production of human will that
disrupts natural presence by introducing unnatural elements into the world-
time, consciousness, history, and the alienating intervention of symbolic
mediation [23].
Though Mitchell rejects this as an explanation of any real difference between image and
text because the central opposition on which it is based, nature versus culture, is itself
a reiécation, the formulation has at times been accepted as truth and can be useful in
understanding how images and text might have been read in the past.
At érst glance, A Visit to the Peak Frean and Co.’s Biscuit Works appears to support
much of the interpretation Mitchell rejects. Actuality footage does offer immediacy and
presence, and text imposes order by tethering the images. Here, in this space of
production, each stage of biscuit production is identiéable and in plain view. Every
individual part is clear and coherent, though the élm offers no information about the
overall spatial layout of the plant or the connections between parts of the whole, and
few clues about social space. The whole, however, can be grasped as an ofécial story:
in compressed time, each cog in the great machine of biscuit production turns. A Visit
to the Peak Frean and Co.’s Biscuit Works directly encourages a simple kind of visualiza-
tion, not panoramic vision: the information provided is complete and self-contained;
the historical narrative of èour and milk being transformed by machines and labor, then
moving out into the world as biscuits, in tandem with workers moving out into the
world in search of dinner, shares the ‘interior unity’ of which de Certeau writes, and
demands no more. Surplus is available through the élm’s attention to human detail
when the camera lingers on workers who are aware of, and not uncomfortable with,
being élmed. Yet in Biscuit Works, the image is far richer than the word, and the
word cannot fully contain the image. Workers are washing tins, but they are also
self-consciously looking at the camera, showing how their arms can perform tasks
almost independently of everything from the neck up, and attracting the viewer’s gaze
to their own. An increased emphasis on titles and avoidance of workers who acknowl-
edge the camera would be a later attempt to contain this excess.
Titles became longer and more numerous as élms of industrial process began to
present more information, serving the latter half of the dual imperative expressed in the
344 E. Wiatr

FIG . 5. Frame enlargements from A Visit to the Peak Freans and Co.’s Biscuit Works (Cricks and Sharp,
1906).

title of a 1917 Edison publication, The Open Road to Entertainment and Knowledge. A
widespread interest in imparting knowledge and making élm useful, which the visual
education movement wholeheartedly shared and encouraged, could, paradoxically, lead
to an even greater disjunction between text and image. Titles became longer and more
 Between Word, Image, and the Machine 345

numerous in order to convey more factual ‘information’. At the same time visual
representations of the world were becoming ever more important, and as a consequence
necessary, in culture at large, driven by the photo essay, press photography, and the
increased diffusion of élm. Signiécant production of propaganda élms during the First
World War also contributed to a belief that, through image and text, ‘fact’ could meld
with ideology to make abstractions such as ‘nation’ and ‘national purpose’ appear vital
and real.
As two competing signs, the linguistic and the verbal, were increasingly brought
together in élm and print media, their mutual effects grew more complex. The
unruliness of images, their ability to signify more than what might be desirable, is a
property equally common to language, but had been kept at bay in titles through the
use of limited descriptive language. This changed as the use of titles increased. Often
the factual information presented in élms of industrial process of the 1910s and 1920s
consisted of an odd detail that did not lend itself to representation the way the simple
name of an action or place could. Shorn of its illustrative function, the visual image
could become, even needed to be, less precise. On the one hand, an increased reliance
on descriptive or narrative titles and captions freed up images to better function
aesthetically, as they would in the montage of machinery in Act I of Walter Ruttmann’s
Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. On the other, it could make images empty signs—signs
that could mean anything and everything.
Titles can train the eye to look at something, sometimes so well that it does not even
need to be there. Consider as an example the Edison élm Gold and Diamond Mines of
South Africa (1917) (Fig. 6). In one scene the camera pans to the right as small open
rail cars glide across an evenly lit landscape on two tracks, cars on the front track
moving across the frame from left to right, cars on the rear track moving in from right
to left. Their motion is continuous, almost hypnotic, an effect exaggerated by the pan.
No people, no engines, no structures save one lone post complicate the view or account
for the movement of the cars. The apparent life force of the moving cars, a deus ex
machina more terrifying than Moloch because people have already been eliminated, is
heightened by the desolation of the barren, rocky plain that élls the foreground and
appears to extend in all directions. Wind may blow, but there is nothing for it to move.
The title that precedes this image, a straightforward statement of ‘fact’, is, in context,
rather cryptic.
‘The “blue earth”, containing the embedded diamonds, is brought to the surface and
allowed to “weather” for a year’: none of the referents of that sentence corresponds
directly to either the image that preceded it, a wide shot of a hill that a title has
suggested is a diamond mine, or the image of gliding wagons that follows. Only the use
of passive tense seems to bear a direct relationship to the equally invisible agent moving
the train cars. Presumably, if a viewer accepts the convention that the shot following a
descriptive title will in some way depict what the title describes, the cars contain ‘blue
earth’. One could, with keen powers of observation and the 13 seconds of footage of
gliding cars, notice that the front cars are full and the rear cars empty, and so infer that
blue earth is being transported to the weathering ground. But one might equally well
imagine the train cars on a year-long journey, gestating the pregnant earth within, or
traversing a vast éeld of weathering earth. Or, a viewer could simply suspend disbelief,
accept the words as fact or nonsense (often the line between the two is very thin in these
élms), and take in the compelling image as impression, and perhaps mnemonic device.
Whichever the case, the image and text are disjoined, and the image does not overtly
serve the text nor does the text illuminate the image. It could be said that in terms of
346 E. Wiatr

FIG . 6. Frame enlargements from Gold and Diamond Mines of South Africa (Edison Conquest Pictures,
1917).

inculcating comprehensive knowledge, the disjunction alienates the attempt. The text
becomes doubly unnatural in Mitchell’s sense: it artiécially stands in for the image, and
it becomes obdurate, rock or diamond-like in its refusal to explain the image.
 Between Word, Image, and the Machine 347

The second title, ‘Although apparently an open space, this property is entirely
surrounded by an impenetrable barbed wire fence’, changes voice by directing the
viewer to see what is not shown, to imagine off-screen space. If the érst title emphasized
time, the second emphasizes space. Appearances are called into question, as are érst
impressions. First the obedient viewer must go back and ‘correct’ a érst impression by
circumscribing it, and not with just any barbed wire fence, but with an impenetrable
one. Then he or she must correct the appearance by imagining and superimposing on
the image ideas about the need for the fence, along with associated concepts such as
private property, theft, and inclusion and exclusion. The effect of the written text is,
however, complicated by the descriptive, now prescriptive, title as it foregrounds its
own imperious function and introduces a mass-cultural version of modernist self-
reèexivity. This revision and oscillation between text and image, between iterative time
and the time of process, between the abstract and the concrete, engages the viewer in
a structured form of panoramic vision.
Visualization of this sort is an activity to be undertaken not only with one shot—
‘imagine this, though it isn’t in the picture’—but also across the élm. Images of barbed
wire fences appear in the énal scene of the élm, surrounding the residential camp of
black workers (‘In the miner’s compound, where the natives are kept closely conéned
during their entire period of service’). Again, the function of a barrier is raised: to
conéne racialized workers, to protect privately owned resources. Edison’s élm offers a
strong ideological message and encourages active acquisition of that message through
visualization; at the same time, in a more optimistic reading, visualization could provide
tools with which to analyze that message. What is common to both readings is the idea
that through visualization, knowledge can ultimately be derived from a minimal amount
of descriptive text and visual information. In raising questions that it appears to have
no intention of answering—what ‘weathering’ entails and why it should take a year in
an arid-looking climate; why knowing about the impenetrable barbed wire fence should
matter—the Edison élm, like other élms of industrial process from the 1910s and
1920s, encourages in the viewer a mix of inquisitiveness, credulity, and obedience.
Films of industrial processes, or industrial élms, as they were already called in the
érst visual education journal, published in 1920, followed processes from beginning to
end as the Edison élm had, and employed the same basic structure. Educational élms
continued to offer immediacy and presence, though visual educators harbored few
illusions about their naturalness. Time and again, visual education boosters proffered
the reality-effect of motion pictures, not their indexicality, as evidence to support their
educational use. To increase the reality-effect, maps and diagrams were integrated into
élms to situate processes geographically and schematize the inner workings of a
machine or body part, and printed literature supplied additional information. By the
late 1920s a range of élmic devices, including more complex editing, dissolves, and
close-ups, had become the norm in industrial élms, which generally remained silent
even into the early 1930s. Eastman Kodak Co., a prominent producer of educational
élms in the late 1920s, made nearly 200 educational élms between 1927 and 1931,
including élms on industrial production, cities and countries of the world, hygiene,
natural history, and dramatized historical events. Like élms by other educational
producers, Eastman’s collection implicitly argues that modernizing vision necessitates
picturing industrial processes, since more than half the élms in the Eastman collection
highlight industrial processes [24].
By the 1920s it had became clear to those interested in the pedagogical value of élm
that the image needed help from the written text, outside the élm if not inside. This
348 E. Wiatr

FIG. 7. Piles of beet, Beet and Cane Sugar (Eastman, 1930).

primarily took two directions: a sparing use of on-screen titles, generally accompanied
by supplementary printed materials; and, after sound was introduced, a hypertrophic
increase in the use of verbal language through the voiceover. Eastman élms used more
concise titles than did the Edison élm, and with more shots between titles, but each
Eastman élm was accompanied by a Teacher’s Guide, a booklet that explained what was
visible in each shot and provided information that could not possibly be derived
visually. Figure 7, from Beet and Cane Sugar, shows a worker at the foot of tremendous
piles of beets, raking them into a èume that emerges at the base of a pile and èows to
the bottom of the frame. The shot is preceded by a sequence of eight shots that show
beets being picked, delivered to a factory, and transported on long conveyor belts; the
sequence itself is introduced by a single title, ‘Harvesting beets’. Editing rather than
written text conveys the progression from éeld to the mounds seen in this shot; ellipses,
aided by dissolves, mark small jumps of beets across time and space. The meaning of
any one shot or juxtaposition of shots is subsumed by the narrative of the transform-
ation of beets into sugar. Each element depicted in the élm becomes generic through
the combination of the framing narrative, the iterative nature of mass production, and
the linear way shots are organized to trace the path of beets-becoming-sugar. The beets
viewed stand in for all beets, the factory for other factories, each step of a process for
all similar processes, the workers for all workers. The other Eastman élms similarly
typologize everything in their path.
Given the overall chronology of the élm, each shot represents an intermediate step
in the life cycle of a sugar beet, but the nature of each step is mysterious. Moving the
mountains of beets from the darkness of the piles, where they are potential energy or
surplus capital, into the light of the water would appear to be a Sisyphean task. Lest
anyone catch more from the shot than a sense of quantity and scale, a note in the
Teacher’s Guide accounts for the piles: ‘The beets are placed in great piles at the factory
 Between Word, Image, and the Machine 349

FIG . 8. Frame enlargement from Beet and Cane Sugar (Eastman, 1930).

to minimize the damage done by freezing and thawing. When needed, the beets are
èoated from the bins in the èume and elevated to the washer’ [25]. This logical
explanation, an aid to visualization, is too long to have been read over the shot and was
intended for use in discussion—visualization training—following the élm. As in the
Edison élm, visualization entails receiving visual information and impressions, then
later correcting and ordering them with the assistance of plenty of facts. In visual
education, learning to visualize was to occur outside the élm as well as through the élm.
From the informational view of the teacher’s guides, the visual image alone is impover-
ished: it érst and foremost conveys impressions, which are then to be ordered through
the descriptive printed word, offered afterward by the teacher and printed sources.
The information offered in the teacher’s guides shows the visual image to be a poor
conveyer of knowledge but a great medium of something else: abstract ideas, taken at
face value. One the one hand, evolutionary narratives tied the world together in one
coherent vision of historical time, naturalizing exploitation of the land, production, and
development, and American hegemony. On the other, educational élms of industrial
process, and the earlier élms of industrial process from which they drew, further
stretched the limits of the believable even as they appeared to be empirically sound.
Glaring incongruities between image and text passed as comprehensible narratives,
aided by the visceral appeal of increasingly aestheticized images that shared formal
qualities with the photography of Charles Sheeler, Albert Renger-Patsch, and Margaret
Bourke-White (Fig. 8).
Visual education and élms of industrial process offer a concrete instance of the
training of the observer discussed by Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer.
Countering two art historical stories, one that bases the shift to modern vision in the
artistic avant-garde beginning with Manet and another that understands photographic
media as being an outgrowth of the camera obscura and the Cartesian subject associ-
350 E. Wiatr

ated with it, Crary locates a shift to modern vision in the early decades of the 19th
century [26]. By looking primarily at German scientiéc discourse, which found that the
human eye was unreliable and prone to distortion, Crary infers that social institutions
stepped in to regulate visual perception by disciplining observers. How, when, and
where this may have actually occurred in practice is outside the scope of his study. But
in American schools, at least, the practice of actively training vision began in the late
19th century and increased exponentially in the late 1910s and 1920s. This embrace of
vague abstractions under the sign of empirical truth contributed to a way of seeing that
would make the highly abstract visual propaganda of the 1930s completely intelligible.

Acknowledgement
Thanks to Dr Patricia L. Hartz for her keen editorial assistance.

Correspondence: Elizabeth Wiatr, 208 S. Westmoreland Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90004,

USA; E-mail: ewiatr@pacbell.net

NOTES
[1] Consider, for instance, infrared photographs of élm viewers taken by Weegee (Arthur Felig) and
a widely circulated 1952 Life magazine photograph by photographer J. R. Eyerman, which shows
seemingly endless rows of impassive viewers wearing 3-D glasses.
[2] F. Dean McClusky, Visual Instruction: its value and its needs (New York, 1932).
[3] Pedagogical Library Bulletin No. 4 (1918), quoted in James G. Sigman, Origin and Development
of Visual Education in the Philadelphia Public Schools (Philadelphia, PA, 1933), p. 40.
[4] Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (Glencoe, IL, 1933 [1893]), p. 370. Op. cit.,
James R. Beninger, The Control Revolution: technological and economic origins of the information society
(Cambridge, MA, 1986), p. 11.
[5] Joseph J. Weber, ‘What the University of Kansas is doing and planning in visual instruction,’
Educational Screen, 1 (January 1922), p. 17.
[6] On changing notions of time and space around the turn of the century, see Stephen Kern, The
Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1983) and Tom Lutz, American
Nervousness, 1903: an anecdotal history (Ithaca, NY, 1991).
[7] Don Carlos Ellis and Laura Thornborough, Motion Pictures in Education (New York, 1923), p. 37.
[8] Georg Simmel, The metropolis and mental life, in Neal Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture
(London, 1997), pp. 69–79.
[9] Two journals, Visual Education (1920–1924) and Educational Screen (1922–1956) anchored the
discourse, accompanied by scores of books and dissertations, debates in the National Education
Association, and commentary in the popular press and élm trade journals.
[10] Dutch East Indies was one Eastman Teaching Film that used footage from Burton Holmes. US
Government Copyrighted script, 21 April 1931. For similar practices in France see Frederic
Delmeulle, Le rêve encyclopédiste. Le cinema documentaire chez Gaumont, 1908–1928, Théo-
rème, No. 4 (1996), pp. 97–112.
[11] Jennifer Peterson, World Pictures: travelogue élms and the lure of the exotic, 1890–1920 (Ann Arbor,
MI, 1999); Alison Griféths, ‘To the world the world we show’: early travelogues as élmed
ethnography, Film History, 11 (1999), pp. 282–307.
[12] Tom Gunning, The world as object lesson: cinema audiences, visual culture and the St. Louis
world’s fair, 1904, Film History, 6 (1994), pp. 422–444.
[13] Actualities showing foreign or city views, especially, tend to follow this pattern.
[14] By mythological I’m referring to Western grand narratives: man’s eternal struggle with nature, the
centrality of the strong patriarch, love of family, the inexorability of progress. One such ‘scientiéc’
appeal to pathos is ‘Geographic progress of civilization’, National Geographic, VI (1894), pp. 1–22.
[15] Details of the lamps and other background information on the Westinghouse élms is from
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/papr/west/westabot.html.
 Between Word, Image, and the Machine 351

[16] Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower, in Susan Sontag, ed., A Barthes Reader (New York, 1982), pp.
243–247.
[17] Ibid., p. 244.
[18] Imanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, 1987 [1790]),
pp. 97–140.
[19] W. T. Snead, The Americanization of the World; or, the trend of the twentieth century (New York,
1902); also Frank M. McMurry, How to study stereographs and lantern slides, Visual Instruction:
Teacher’s Guide to the Keystone 600 Set (Meadville, PA, 1922). Even sophisticated treatises on the
workings of visual imagery retained the notion of the instantaneity of pictorial communication.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, argued that the ‘advantage’ of a visual model is ‘that it can be
taken in at a glance and easily held in the mind’. The Blue and Brown Books (New York, 1958),
p. 6. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, 1993), p. 49.
[20] Sigman, Origin and Development, p. 40.
[21] Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, translated by Tom Conley (New York, 1988), p. 83.
[22] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York, 1977 [1867]), pp. 125–177. George
Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA, 1972 [1920]).
[23] W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: image, text, ideology (Chicago, 1986), p. 43.
[24] There is some overlap across categories, e.g., a élm about a place will in large part be about
industry in that place.
[25] Eastman Classroom Films, Teachers’ Guide, No. 26, p. 3.
[26] Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century
(Cambridge, MA, 1992).

Elizabeth Wiatr is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine, where she is
completing a dissertation on visual education and modes of visuality in early 20th-century American culture.
She is a lecturer at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and makes experimental élms.