School of Frankenstein [electronic resource] : James Whale and the experience of film and architecture as education in progressive era America
Keywords: Art and Art History.

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between art and education in interwar America by studying in detail one production still-photograph from Frankenstein, the 1931 film adaptation directed by James Whale of the novel "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, " written in 1818 by Mary Shelley. The film presented audiences of that period and of years to come with a haunting scene of education. It portrays two children learning about the world through experience: a man-made creature and a little girl at a lake, floating daisies. As encapsulated in the still, the scene revolves around the two characters—movingly played by Boris Karloff and Marilyn Harris—exchanging flowers, which teaches them the joys of new-found friendship, the beauty and pleasures of the world, and in this unfortunate case, the perils of taking the world's gravity too lightly. This text is a monograph both on the still and on its author's visual and spatial imagination as it relates to art and education. I treat the still as a haunting philosophical object—one which captures the high dramatic point of not only this scene of education and others within the film (many coming from Shelley's Bildungsroman regarding child-rearing), but the sensibility and artistic awareness of experience-based education in 1930s America of British director James Whale (1889-1957). I propose we read it as a testament to the attempts of American Pragmatism —most prominently in the work of philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952)—to merge art, education, and democracy during that period after World War I, at the peak of the Machine Age, right into the Great Depression, when the most heated debates took place about the role of art, mass education, and technology in a society wanting to remain democratic in the face of international upheaval. I analyze the still as a complex cultural artifact, its subject existing only within a world beyond itself, thus denying a single definition. It contains within it both the world that shaped it as well as the one it is about to shape, complicating questions of the materiality assigned to its medium. The film still from Frankenstein exists on three different planes: firstly, it pictures a scene from the novel, as envisioned by its director. Secondly, it exists as a shot taken for publicity representing a different type of scene, that from a film to be shown in actual theaters, on a screen in front of a concrete audience—a preview for an actual experience. Thirdly, it exists as a historical document, depicting actors at work, in costume, in a particular location where it was produced. In addition, it is with this relation between artistic experiences and places that the still grants us a variety of pictured architectures—referring to both the physical buildings and the designed structures we inhabit. Therefore, I think of the still and the School of Frankenstein, that is, this dissertation, as one and the same thing—our ticket to a guided tour of the architecture of experiential education in three chapters. Such is the beauty of this still-photograph: shot only once, on Monday, September 28, 1931, it nonetheless carries with it three different American scenes of education: the Monster and the girl at the lake in Frankenstein evoking children all over the country's schools, the theaters where the films played as the site of a grand pragmatist project in education, and finally the cast and crew working for Universal Pictures in Hollywood envisioning their role as educators of a democratic populace. The dissertation ends with a tribute to the still as art form and to its mnemonic powers—that is, its powers for remembrance of everything it contained.