Joel Golby on the surreal horror of the educational films and videos that many of us grew up with:
[A] calm voice tells you of the mysteries of the ocean; a man with an ungroomed beard stands emotionlessly in front of some cream-colored industrial machinery; an incredibly lo-fi, three-cel animation tells you how frogs are born and die. All of this time you thought you weren’t learning, and then you come to with a start, fully adult now, and up from the Mariana trenches of your memory comes a factoid: “There are over 40 species of dolphin living in the ocean today,” you say, or, “Arachnids include scorpions, mites and ticks.”
Of all the crumbling bricks of knowledge that make up the cathedral that is your brain, there is no doubt that some of them were bafflingly relayed to you via a warped video watched in a greying science lab while rain pelted the window outside. But who made them? Why did they occupy such a strange aesthetic beige zone? . . .
To understand the educational video, it is important to understand the concept of fear itself. . . .
Ask people what their memories are of watching videos at school and you can draw an international map of horror, a geography of fear based on various unique-to-their-locale ways children could die if they stopped paying attention and the tapes that taught them to be afraid of them. In England we had the constant threat of trains blasting us apart and also fireworks, which, if held too long in autumn, would explode all of our arms and legs off in one go. This is also a threat in Lithuania: “The most vivid ones I remember were the ones telling us not to buy fireworks and play with them in wintertime,” Indre tells me. “They included gory scenes of hands with fingers missing and faces fucked up by small explosions.” In India, the menace of contaminated water loomed large. “I have very fond memories for a public information film that taught you how to make an oral rehydration solution, so that you or your small child or your elderly parent didn’t crap themself to death with diarrhoea,” Lekha, who moved to the UK from India in her early twenties, tells me. “I still get a Pavlovian response on seeing garden ponds,” she continues, “because of all the public health films about how still water breeds mosquitoes and how you’ll die horribly because you let a bit of water collect in a dish”. . . .
In Finland, Anna tells me, children are taught to fear the very surface beneath their feet, in case a misplaced Särmä sees them plunge through delicate ice into the freezing water below. “I remember being traumatised by it,”” she says. “I never went on thin ice, though, so I guess it worked.” Watch the wordless warnings of Varokaa Heikkoa Jäätä – or, “Beware of Thin Ice” – and see how the educational video so easily zigs into the world of eerie horror: a barely motional teddy bear, a square bird that honks like a siren, an ambient soundtrack as if taken from a fever dream. Varokaa Heikkoa Jäätä teaches us two things: you can crawl on ice and use your scarf as a primitive lasso; and the world is edged with a baseless terror that makes your soul unanchor from your body and float around there, gurgling, in the pit of your stomach. The ice breaks. The water freezes. A bird like a fridge screams that you are going to die.
Source: Educational Films: The Crumbling Bricks of Knowledge That Make Up the Cathedral of Your Brain
Special hat tip to Jesús Olmo for directing me to the essay.