With attention to film studies as part of workers’ education, this project explores how film studies developed within 1920s and 1930s US labor movements. It centers progressive, mainly communist, film collectives’ educational projects in the US. Friends of Soviet Russia with Workers International Relief in the 1920s and the Film and Photo League and Film and Sprockets Society in the 1930s were key organizations that developed educational programs designed for workers and designed by workers. US. By producing their own films, exhibitions, print materials, and schools, they made classrooms around the city to reach working-class people. Their films included newsreels and documentaries capturing post-revolution Soviet conditions and, in America, they filmed 1930s hunger protests, police brutality, Hoovervilles, Scottsboro Trials, and City College of New York students. They screened films in union halls, rural schoolhouses, and coal mines around New York and throughout the Midwest. Their efforts illustrate how modern art institutions often began with independent, amateur, and activist organizations. Members were mainly working-class Jews from first-or-second-generation immigrant families. Facing ethnic and economic barriers to traditional cultural-intellectual institutions, they invoked these experiences to provide more accessible learning to folks in their neighborhoods and beyond. These were also projects to build mass mobilization for diverse workers’ rights and to get more Americans interested in film. Formal film studies as a field did not exist, nor did film schools or sustained courses. Self-teaching and collaborative studying, therefore, allowed workers’ film collectives to build knowledge of film techniques, theories, histories, and social issues. These alternative educational systems became central to underground institutions beyond WWII. I situate “film studies” in a wider working-class history and history of modernism. Collectives developed schools, journals, exhibitions, distribution networks, and documentaries from the ground up as independent, democratic, experimental learning spaces in the 1920s-1930s. Groups frequently worked alongside European and Soviet institutions. In charting this process, New York City emerges as a central cultural landscape that made mobility between transnational film collectives possible.Many involved, including Leo Hurwitz and Bernard Gordon, were Blacklisted in the McCarthy period. Despite this, several continued creating films independently or under pseudonyms and taught film in the 1960s-70s when radical politics and culture underwent changes. These 1920s-30s film activities influenced 1960s-70s documentary and avant-garde cinema cultures and film studies in US higher education. While most films are lost, through archival materials and oral histories, this project traces groups’ creative dedication to elicit social change via film education.
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