Introduction: utility and cinema / Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland --
"What a power for education!" : the cinema and sites of learning in the 1930s / Eric Smoodin --
"We can see ourselves as others see us" : women workers and western union's training films in the 1920s / Stephen Groening --
Hollywood's educators : Mark May and teaching film custodians / Charles R. Acland --
Unesco, film, and education : mediating postwar paradigms of communication / Zoë Druick --
Health films, cold war, and the production of patriotic audiences : the body fights bacteria (1948) / Kirsten Ostherr --
Projecting the promise of 16mm, 1935-45 / Gregory A. Waller --
A history long overdue : the public library and motion pictures / Jennifer Horne --
Big, fast museums/small, slow movies : film, scale, and the art museum / Haidee Wasson --
Pastoral exhibition : the YMCA motion picture bureau and the transition to 16mm, 1928-39 / Ronald Walter Greene --
"A moving picture of the heavens" : the planetarium space show as useful cinema / Alison Griffiths --
Double vision : World War II, racial uplift, and the all-American newsreel's pedagogical address / Joseph Clark --
Mechanical craftsmanship : amateurs making practical films / Charles Tepperman --
Experimental film as useless cinema / Michael Zryd.