Abstract Established in 1915, Educational Pictures was the industry leader in short subject distribution by the late silent era, dominating the market in two-reel slapstick films. Yet by the mid-1930s the company's reputation had sunk precipitously, and Educational failed to survive the decade. This paper examines that history as a vantage point for reassessing traditional accounts of slapstick's sound-era decline, showing how slapstick cinema's dwindling industrial status was tied to upheavals in the short-subject market and growing cultural divisions within Depression-era America.
Film History publishes original research on the international history of cinema, broadly and inclusively understood. Its areas of interest are the production, distribution, exhibition, and reception of films designed for commercial theaters as well as the full range of nontheatrical, noncommercial uses of motion pictures; the role of cinema as a contested cultural phenomenon; the technological, economic, political, and legal aspects of film history; the circulation of film within and across national borders; and the relations between film and other visual media and forms of commercial entertainment.
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