Your Posture

     In class, we had the opportunity to discuss the use of videos in the classroom.  And that’s when the subject came up: mental hygiene films.  Everybody knows the type: an old black-and-white video with corny acting and a didactic tone, where kids accept warm advice from a disembodied male narrator with a pleasant “Gee, willikers!”  While we may make fun of them now, what I didn’t realize was just how revolutionary these films were when they first came out in the late 1940’s.  Up until that point, on-screen acting was largely a realm for adults, with child actors appearing few and far between.  For the first time, however, these films gave kids center-stage and allowed them to connect with a school-age audience.  The producers specifically designed the films to be teacher-proof; that is, they figured that some lessons in life are too important to risk being spoiled by incompetent teachers, so they circumvented the issue altogether by providing teachers with a simple reel of film to show.

     The video that we watched, called “Shy Guy,” showed young people how to properly interact with others and form a basic social life at school.  The descriptors put forth by my classmates summed the film up nicely: dated, corny, conformist, earnest, condescending, and paternal.  The corniness was no surprise, but I was struck by the other qualities.  There was definitely a sense of slightly ill-delivered advice coming from superiors (the father in the video actually tells his son to act more like the popular kids if he wants to have friends), yet the lesson definitely seemed well-intended.  I was curious to see if this trend could be found in other mental hygiene films as well.

http://archive.org/details/HealthYo1953

     If you click the link above, you’ll be directed to another example that I found online.  Entitled “Health: Your Posture,” the entire point of the video is to encourage students to make a habit of standing and sitting up straight.  As expected, the quality and general tone of the film are laughable (though the special effect with the mirror was probably a big deal at the time).  Yet there are other common themes to be found.  For instance, the teacher and doctor fulfill the role of the earnest, paternalistic source of advice for their students, and they (as well as the narrator) speak condescendingly in the most caring way possible.  It would be interesting to look for this phenomenon in other videos as well.  Perhaps this relates to the culture of conformity and benevolent authoritarianism that prevailed during the immediate postwar era?