'Screen' and screen theorizing today

Abstract

Screen can lay claim to at least three, and perhaps as many as five, birthdays. The journal's beginnings may be dated first of all to the early 1950s, when an occasional mimeographed newsletter called The Film Teacher was launched under the banner of a newly formed membership organization calling itself the Society of Film Teachers.1The Film Teacher was eventually to evolve into a periodical with a new name, with the first issue under its present title, Screen, appearing early in 1969. However, we have chosen to mark the journal's birth year as 1959, for this was when the society – now more grandly and inclusively renamed the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT) – published the first issue of a print journal that has appeared regularly, and without breaks, ever since: an impressive achievement in itself. No more than a pamphlet, the 1959 inaugural issue declared a concern with ‘the impact of the visual media upon the young’, with ‘our’ [that is, teachers'] role being to interpret these media, since ‘all children should be trained to be “intelligent viewers”’. The journal was called Screen Education (figure 1), and over the subsequent ten years, forty-five increasingly substantial numbered issues followed. By 1969, when the journal relaunched itself as Screen under new editorship, SEFT had become a grant-in-aid body of the British Film Institute (BFI).2