In the earliest years of cinema, travelogues were a staple of variety
film programs in commercial motion picture theaters. These short films,
also known as "scenics," depicted tourist destinations and exotic
landscapes otherwise inaccessible to most viewers. Scenics were so
popular that they were briefly touted as the future of film. But despite
their pervasiveness during the early twentieth century, travelogues have
been overlooked by film historians and critics. In Education in the
School of Dreams, Jennifer Lynn Peterson recovers this lost archive.
Through innovative readings of travelogues and other nonfiction films
exhibited in the United States between 1907 and 1915, she offers fresh
insights into the aesthetic and commercial history of early cinema and
provides a new perspective on the intersection of American culture,
imperialism, and modernity in the nickelodeon era.
Peterson describes the travelogue's characteristic form and style and
demonstrates how imperialist ideologies were realized and reshaped
through the moving image. She argues that although educational films
were intended to legitimate filmgoing for middle-class audiences,
travelogues were not simply vehicles for elite ideology. As a form of
instructive entertainment, these technological moving landscapes were
both formulaic and also wondrous and dreamlike. Considering issues of
spectatorship and affect, Peterson argues that scenics produced and
disrupted viewers' complacency about their own place in the world.
