Hope: A Red Cross Seal Story (1912)
The Temple of Moloch (1914)
The Lone Game (1915)
Thomas Edison Films about Tuberculosis
Between 1910 and 1915, Thomas Edison's film company made six films about tuberculosis in collaboration with the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis. They're often called the Red Cross Seal films because they also advertised the stamps. The films tell stories designed to educate people about hygiene and health reforms.
My work on these films notes that they had to negotiate two big changes: the transition from early silent film to narrative film, and the transition from earlier notions of disease transmission to current ideas about germ theory. I argue that narrative and germ theory perform similar functions in these films. Both arrange people and places into logical chains of cause and effect, and both attempt to make sense of a disorderly, arbitrary world.
My essay is slated to be published in Learning with the Lights Off: An Educational Film Reader, edited by Marsha Orgeron, Devin Orgeron, and Dan Streible (Oxford, 2010).