An Unsentimental Education

The lights go down and the shades are pulled. The dry whir of a Bell and Howell 16mm projector starts up in a stuffy classroom. After the film leader and a garbled trumpet fanfare, the "Coronet Films" logo appears on the screen, and a dating etiquette, driver's ed, drug-scare, or sex education film begins playing for some 20-odd bored teenagers.

Educational films go by different names -- "classroom," "industrial," "propaganda," or "training" -- but they're all birds of the same feather, relics that occupy a strange and unique niche in the cinematic spectrum. Skip Elsheimer has made an obsession out of collecting such arcana. In the past several years, he has amassed a staggering 8,000 short films, a handful of which he'll bring to Austin on April 14 for his "Revenge of the A/V Geeks" show. The program features but a small sampling from Elsheimer's vast collection, but the shorts are representative of the vintage educational film genre.

By their nature, educational films are usually low-budget, with poor production values and the acting a study in minimalism. Still, by their topical nature and contexts, they reflect changing mores and habits in society. They are even more a product of the times than television, stripped as they are of TV and feature films' stylization. Often, though, their messages are wrapped around quite bizarre scenarios. Take, for instance, "Soapy the Germ Fighter," in which a small boy goes to sleep and dreams about a 6-foot-tall, talking bar of soap dressed in Western garb. Soapy addresses the little boy as "podner" and assures him that washing isn't just for sissies. Educational films can be bone-dry ludicrous (like "Mowing Lesson for Charlie"), grisly (like the Ohio Highway Patrol's infamous 1950s driver's ed films), or downright befuddling. Or, in the case of films like the Cold War-era "Duck and Cover" and "Radioactive Fallout and Shelter," sadly misinformed.

A curator of sorts for this pop-culture ephemera, Elsheimer has scoured the nation for more oddities to add to his holdings. Most of his scores have come at city and county school district auctions; the districts are all too eager to rid themselves of these films that they consider useless, obsolete. Eager to free up warehouse space, they often let the films go for next to nothing. Understandably, the smaller and poorer the school district, the more musty and obscure the finds are likely to be. Elsheimer recalls a trip to a rural Pennsylvania town: "I hauled back an entire huge Ryder truck full of the things, driving it through D.C. traffic and everything." The price? Zero dollars.

Predictably, the condition of the films varies greatly. "Some are absolutely pristine," notes Elsheimer, "while others look like they were fed into a cement mixer," the result of being run through one too many old and poorly maintained projectors.

From his home in Raleigh, N.C., Elsheimer has taken the A/V Geeks show on the road a few times now, toting his film flotsam from town to town. "It's such a part of the American subconscious," he notes. "And every time I come to a new place, there are folks that come up to me and want to know if I've seen such and such movie; they can't remember the name, but there's always one or two scenes that are stuck in their heads from age 14 on." And that's not even considering filmstrips, the instructional aids that were synchronized to a record, with a beep or bell on the soundtrack to signal the teacher when it's time to flip to the next frame.

For the A/V Geeks' showing at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, Elsheimer's armload of films include "More Dates for Kay" (1952), a film for socially clumsy adolescent girls; "Teeth" (1970), wherein the American Dental Association goes after the teen audience; and the sweetly awkward "Parent to Child About Sex" (1967). And of course, the audience will get warmed up by reading along with an educational filmstrip beforehand. They're more than just a hoot to watch; they're part of the fabric of 20th-century history.