Projecting creative processes: art films and art education in post-war Britain

The relationship between film and art education has received little scholarly attention. This paper describes and discusses one instance in the long and multifaceted history of this relationship: the educational uses of nonfiction films about art and artists in post-Second World War Britain, known then invariably either as ‘films on art’ or ‘art films.’ As a new international genre (backed by UNESCO’s educational distribution schemes), it gained particular momentum in the UK with the Arts Council of Great Britain, a public body, set up after the war with a mission ‘to increase the accessibility of the fine arts.’ And one of the ways it did was via 16mm projection. Alongside building a substantial film library, in 1950 the Council, in collaboration with the British Film Institute (BFI), started a new mobile cinema scheme, the Art Film Tour, to directly engage with the nontheatrical cinema sector, especially its educational venues. By drawing on my research in the Arts Council Archive, I propose to adopt a ‘historical pragmatics’ perspective and to study the Art Film Tour’s media configuration as a dispositif (Kessler, 2018). In the 1950s, with an increasing number of art films dedicated to artists at work, art students encountered cinematic renderings of the creative process by renowned modern artists, such as Picasso, Henry Moore and Jackson Pollock. And therefore, I make a case for an inductive analysis of ‘showing making’ on screen and its implications within historicised art education contexts.

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