Academic Film Archive of North America finds a home at Johns Hopkins

It's the 1970s. A metal cart creaks into a classroom. Students tuck books into desks. The teacher struggles to thread a 16-mm film through sprockets in a projector, and then asks someone to turn off the lights.

With a whir and a rhythmic flick-flick noise, reels rotate and images appear on a white pull-down screen.

The students see a bumblebee visiting a coneflower. Scientists throwing balls across a spinning table. Young people learning to handcraft violins or build fishing boats.

Lessons come to life at the front of the class.

Adam Rodgers, a senior lecturer in JHU's Film and Media Studies Program, remembers this ritual from junior high school. "The arms of that projector would sort of snap into place. I just was fascinated by the nature of that, and the noise and the light," says Rodgers, who soon borrowed his father's Super 8 camera to make his own movies. "I sensed the spirit to get out there and get into the world and talk to people and shoot what's in front of you, making it quickly. And it can still be beautiful, exciting, and full of energy."

Decades later, after directing such successful films as the romantic comedy At Middleton (2013) starring Andy Garcia and Vera Farmiga, Rodgers got a call from a collector in San Jose, California named Geoff Alexander. A former teacher, Alexander rescued thousands of the 16-mm films when libraries began throwing them out in the 1990s. Alexander founded and became director and CEO of the Academic Film Archive of North America, called the AFA. He donated the physical collection—all 7,600 films-worth—to Hopkins in late 2022. "I fell in love with Johns Hopkins," Alexander said at the time. "I fell in love with the people who wanted the films."

The films, canisters, and teaching guides now reside at the Sheridan Libraries' Service Center at Johns Hopkins, an off-site shelving facility in Laurel, Maryland. Sheridan librarians value the films as archival objects and for offering students "a sense for important topics, historical topics, news topics, creative outlets like animation," says Donald Juedes, JHU librarian for Film and Media Studies.

For nearly four decades, millions of students in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere watched such 10- to 30-minute academic films to learn about wide-ranging topics like volcanoes, Charles Dickens, and U.S. anti-discrimination laws.

During the 1950s through mostly the mid-1980s—as generations were raised on TV—this unsung genre offered engaging new ways to teach the tales of humankind. Unlike social-guidance films—stagey short films on topics such as personal hygiene tips—more than 100,000 films were created for school curricula in subjects like history, social studies, geography, science, math, arts, culture, language, and literature.

Many were made on small budgets, often around $10,000 and up to $50,000, by adventurous filmmakers experimenting with filmic styles, according to Alexander's scholarly book, Academic Films for the Classroom: A History (2010). Some directors relied on amateur actors or deployed guerrilla-style filmmaking without local permits. One seminal director, William Deneen, skirted foreign censorship in Mexico and elsewhere by stashing films in a secret compartment of his small airplane and other times tilting the camera out a window for aerial shots while steering the aircraft with his knee.

Currently, Sheridan librarians face an ongoing process of cataloging and preserving vulnerable films, a long-term endeavor to make the physical archive more accessible. So far, nearly 500 films have been digitized and can now be found at the official AFA site on the Internet Archive. There, anyone can surf titles like Georgia Sea Island Singers, Night Club Boom, and the animated Sun Flight: The Myth of Daedalus and His Son, Icarus.

And, with a click or a tap, these stories can be brought to life again.

This deep dive story offers a retro-cinematic journey in the spirit of a mini-survey course or virtual film festival. Viewers can get a feel for sitting in those classroom desks. An opportunity to learn—not just about sciences, art, or history—but about who we were then and are today. To ask ourselves questions: What insights can we gather about cinematography, life, education?

"Many of these films are timeless," says Alexander, who still leads the research- and history-oriented AFA nonprofit. "You can look at them today, and the topics resonate. Sometimes the clothing and the cars are a little bit old. But, you know, that's pretty funky too. I mean, everybody likes seeing old cars."

Quirky, retro, or remarkably relevant and revelatory today, here are a few visual lessons to check out with glimpses of wild volcanoes, mysterious stained-glass windows, and a little old lady seeking dignity in New York's Central Park.

Science and Nature

The scene opens on a desolate post-apocalyptic tableau of scorched tree trunks and blackened earth at Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii in 1970. Scientists are using portable seismographs to track underground earthquakes, a needle rapidly sketching what looks like an erratic heartbeat EKG.

The static surface starts to erupt into burbling lava vents. A volcanologist warns: "She's going wild. She's going wild."

A massive eruption soars twice the height of Niagara Falls and beyond. Meanwhile, scientists wearing hardhats and mostly regular clothing dodge or run past boiling red-and-orange lava splatter.

Closest to the action: academic filmmaker Bert Van Bork, burning through two pairs of Hush Puppy shoes.

For his 20-minute film, Heartbeat of a Volcano (1970), Van Bork often filmed at night for dramatic shots. "They took reflective tape and ran it down the mountainside so he would have an escape path," says Alexander, who chronicled Van Bork's work among other academic filmmakers in Academic Films for the Classroom. To capture close-ups, Van Bork looped a belt around his waist, held by a film crew member, to lean into lava-spewing crevasses: As Alexander notes, "It was really dangerous stuff."

Such seat-of-the-pants professional filmmaking in the 1960s, and '70s especially, was made possible by lightweight and improved 16-mm film stock and cameras, often handheld, allowing for more access to real-life scenarios and individual perspectives.

Students in classrooms benefited from filmmakers' ingenuity, with then rare opportunities to witness such scientific natural phenomena. Says Alexander, "And the images were so big on screens that you were really in the middle of all this stuff."

Science-oriented films particularly soared after the rise of a small Russian satellite, the first to circle Earth. The Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1 on Oct. 4, 1957, sparked outcry that America was losing superiority in science and technology. With concerns that students were falling behind, science, math, and engineering became high priority. In a speech to the nation in November, President Dwight D. Eisenhower urged Americans to "scrutinize your school's curriculum and standards. Then decide for yourselves whether they meet the stern demands of the era."

Such concerns soon brought dramatic changes to American school curricula. As noted in Academic Films for the Classroom, in 1958, the U.S. Congress responded by passing the National Defense Education Act with about $480 million in matching funds to help update curricula, "including film and audiovisual equipment," funding later phased out. Educational film companies, such as Learning Corporation of America, McGraw-Hill Films, Coronet Films, and Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, among others, received federal monies over time, funding "a generation of new young filmmakers with new young ideas on how to make the United States a better place to live," Alexander says.

Various films focused on straightforward basic science—often with a touch of engaging whimsy. Men in horn-rimmed glasses or suits demonstrated phenomena, such as shifts in human perspectives in the 26-minute film Frames of Reference (1960), directed by Richard Leacock, a pioneer in both cinéma vérité and modern documentary filmmaking. In the droll physics film, a professor smoking a pipe in a classroom explains that "things look different to us under different circumstances," while a fellow professor walks around him, upside down. They soon argue over who is really upside down in the grainy black-and-white frame: "You're upside down," one claims. "No, you're the one that's upside down." As the camera pulls back, the viewer will make the call.

Some films provide cultural context, including dozens that depict the decades-long environmental movement, such as a prescient film, Global Warming: Hot Times Ahead (1990). Other films explore conservation stories, including spare interpretive shorts on meditative moments in nature.

In Nature Is for People (1969), produced by Stuart Roe, a California family gets away for a weekend camping trip. In the nine-minute film, there's no heard dialogue, only guitar music and ambient sound—shifting from cartoon evil-villain laughter and a rattling office typewriter to soothing sounds of bubbling brooks, birdsong, and a crackling campfire. The viewer witnesses the family bond, away from the harsh cacophony of society—each taking home nature's peaceful echoes.

Art and Culture

The screen fills with images of soaring Gothic cathedrals. Christian saints glow in the filtered light of centuries-old stained-glass windows. The art of Europe's late Middle Ages "was focused directly on the divine," the narrator notes, symbolized by two-dimensional statue-like figures.

As the 15th century's Early Renaissance dawned, art incorporated new perspectives. Biblical figures were depicted through humanistic prisms—artists making use of light and shadow, the study of human anatomy, and mathematical principles to capture the world in three dimensions.

In one painting, Jesus Christ prays on the Mount of Olives, while his disciples sleep below. Implied triangular lines tie together the somber scene.

The narrator notes such historical transformation in art revealed humankind's "new awareness of reality."

The 16-minute film Art Portrays a Changing World: Gothic to Early Renaissance (1963) was directed by Johanna Alemann, sole proprietor of her own academic film company, Alemann Films, and one of the few women in the field. Her life is featured in a 23-minute documentary by filmmaker Stewart Nestor, Mr. Alemann (2021), so titled since people who wrote letters to her assumed she was a man. She was director, producer, cinematographer, scriptwriter, editor, promoter, typist, and more for 20 academic films. Said Alemann in the documentary: "I did it because I loved it."

In the documentary, an art teacher noted she had never seen an art history film so succinct and illuminating, saying it remains a strong resource. "This was like a semester-long college art history class without the lectures and chapters," said Nebraska art history teacher Sharon Joyner, who touted Alemann. "I really believe she was more than just a filmmaker—such a fabulous educator."

Upon her death at age 89 in 2012, she donated her films to AFA, as well as funds used to digitize her films, which can be viewed on her page in the Internet Archive's AFA collection.

Some directors are still active and looking to the future. Canadian director and producer Paul Saltzman chronicled the passing down of creative traditions from one generation to the next in various cultures. His several films in the AFA archive, not yet digitized but made available by Saltzman, include Child of Gold, where 10-year-old Gopal learns his family's intricate enamel art on gold and silver in India. And Steve's Violin, which follows Steve crafting a fine violin, an art learned from generations of his grandfathers in West Germany.

Saltzman, who hopes to follow up with a few young creators today via film, spoke in an April interview on Zoom about how the youths' lives touched students. "It's a great connection with the viewer," Saltzman says, "and the connection is saying, 'Oh, I feel that too. I do that too. I struggle with that too,' or 'I have my own hopes and dreams.'"

Nickelodeon, which showed some of his films in the early 1980s, paid tribute in a Nick Knacks episode where Saltzman himself discussed his series titled Spread Your Wings (known as World Cultures and Youth in the U.S.), 27 short documentaries. One such inspiring Saltzman film, Journey from Zanzibar, conveys the enthusiasm of a boy helping build a fishing boat in his village: "I'm hoping to go on a real ocean voyage."

Saltzman, a successful director of numerous films, such as the 2009 documentary Prom Night in Mississippi featuring actor Morgan Freeman, relished working on educational short films. "In terms of creativity, it's the expression of spirit and soul that fascinates and excites me," Saltzman says. "Seeing people come alive in their creativity as children is just a thrill. I mean it's like 'Whoa, look at that.' And that brings up joy."

Then there's societal impact, "If we don't learn from the past, we're bound to make the same mistakes," Saltzman says. Access to such films, he added, is "invaluable in terms of an individual developing their own self and a culture developing itself."

Social Issues and History

An older woman walks alongside New York's Central Park. She speaks out, her garbled words recalling a long-forgotten stage. Teenagers bump her aside. Soon after, the woman sits on a park bench. The same girls call her a weirdo, kicking over shopping bags holding her belongings in the gritty Manhattan of 1975.

When one of the girls' papier-mâché puppets is left behind during the encounter, the woman picks it up, smiles, and later reads passages from Alice in Wonderland, propping the puppet beside the park's White Rabbit statue. In a lilting voice, she asks: "Will you, will you, will you, will you, will you join the dance?"

One of the girls starts to feel remorse. And the teenager (and students watching the film) gets a glimpse of the humanity of a woman who was once young like them.

The Shopping Bag Lady (1975) directed by Bert Salzman, a popular 21-minute film for schools, exemplifies another subgenre of academic films: fictional storytelling, with compelling characters and plots exploring issues of the day. Well-regarded actors were cast, including Mildred Dunnock, who plays the homeless woman and was twice nominated for an Academy Award for films including Death of a Salesman (1951).

Salzman was showing students "people who were on the downside of life," Alexander explains. "The whole idea was to try to put these students directly in the lives of these people who they were watching. And so that's one of the beauties of Shopping Bag Lady, and that's one of the reasons it's such a powerful film."

Termed "sociodramas" by Alexander, such films also included teaching guides, prompting class discussions on challenges facing elderly people or those with disabilities, as well as the plight of homelessness and experiences of people of various ethnicities and races. Historic events also led to federal funding for films on emerging social issues; The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other federal anti-discrimination laws led to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, supporting equal opportunity and access to education.

Some academic films were already documenting an evolving society, including Crisis in Levittown (1957), which chronicled responses to a Black family moving into all-white Levittown, Pennsylvania, in August 1957. The 32-minute film, by Lee Bobker and Lester Becker, includes stark interviews, some with harsh pro-segregationist language, while other residents are welcoming. And among social films, one of the most well-remembered is an Oscar-nominated 16-minute film about a woman who exemplified shifting attitudes about disability—toward resilience and respect. A Day in the Life of Bonnie Consolo (1975) featured a woman born without arms who narrates her daily life, relying on her feet to accomplish chores: shopping for produce, making family meals, and killing an intruding fly. In the AFA archive but not yet digitized, the director Barry Spinello posted the film on YouTube, and it draws supportive comments through today.

"I saw this in elementary school as a kid, and again later, in like 5th grade," one commenter posted recently. "I've always had mad respect for Bonnie Consolo, she's such a kind, inspiring friendly, open and honest person."

What ended the academic filmmaking era in the mid-1980s: the rise of the VHS tape.

Film projectors were always a bit unwieldy. A VCR machine and TV monitor were more convenient. Lower-quality video cassettes cost about $40, not $800 per film. Some films were simply copied without copyright permission.

Yet through a quirk of technological fate, our online existence has helped save such films from oblivion. "The internet has completely revolutionized the historical story of 16-mm academic film," says Alexander, who supports a new JHU Sheridan Libraries plan for an "Adopt a Film Digitization Program."

With new opportunities to view these films online, more people can witness the ebbs and flows of knowledge and societies. As Alexander notes: "These issues tend to come up again, generation after generation after generation. It's a matter of learning from our history through film."