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This chapter, by Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, establishes a framework for studying the American military, a singularly powerful institution, and its relationship to cinema. It first lays out a brief history of the American military and its rise to prominence and power, and then situates the enduring use of cinema across the broad remit of the armed forces alongside previous work in this area. Special attention is paid to the economic and industrial developments that have been intertwined with the military historically. This chapter also summarizes the breadth of the military’s use of cinema, ranging from propaganda to training and from war funding to munitions testing. Knowledge about the military’s use of film helps us to understand more about the history of film and its technologies and also the various ways cinema has been implicated in the complex geopolitical dynamics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This chapter outlines recent scholarly work on film made for purposes other than entertainment: to persuade, instruct and inform. Throughout the history of the moving image, governments, businesses and other interest groups have used film to educate their workers and the public, establishing networks and mechanisms to produce, screen and distribute predominantly short and narrow-gauge films, often on an international scale, and outside the theatrical cinema circuit. Such filmmaking has been termed ‘useful cinema’; this chapter explains how and why scholarly interest in the phenomenon has increased since the late 2000s, discusses the taxonomy of its various sub-genres, and outlines emerging research methodologies. The chapter also situates Danish informational film within this critical and historical framework. A brief outline is provided of the Danish institutions involved in producing and distributing informational cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s, including Dansk Kuturfilm and Ministeriernes Filmudvalg, covering extant scholarship in the field, and the relationship of the commissioned film and the state.

This chapter, by Noah Tsika, considers the U.S. military’s cultivation of documentary as a form of “useful cinema,” arguing that the institution’s emphasis on formal hybridity and pedagogic adaptability, far from being a neutral reflection of the contingencies of wartime, was, in fact, strategic—part of a broader attempt to naturalize the large-scale military and ensure its permanence. Even when the military identified them as timely documents designed to catalyze an Allied victory, many World War II training films were meant to last—to remain useful tools of the American military-industrial state, whether screened in conjunction with the public-education initiatives of local newspapers or excerpted for use in private manufacturing plants.

The introduction describes television’s use as an instrument of orientation engaged in cultural and logistical management in three interrelated senses: (1) shaping viewers’ understanding of their world and their place within it, (2) enabling action in space, and (3) offering a site for groups and institutions to engage the “problem” of electronic workplace communication. Arguing that industrial television sought to acclimate workers to the conditions of post-Fordism, it describes this transition in the US, focusing on one vector of the move to post-Fordism that was a favored target of television: the diminishing boundaries between work and nonwork. It also provides an overview of three bodies of literature: (1) media studies understandings of the conjuncture between labor and audiences (e.g., the audience commodity), (2) the cultural and political interventions of useful cinema, nontheatrical film, and institutional media research, and (3) methodologies for historical studies of emergent technologies. It ends with a chapter overview.