De onderwijsfilm als didactisch middel en creatief product:Het maakproces in films van de N.O.F.

This article considers the introduction of ‘the making of’ documentaries to the collection of the Stichting Nederlandse Onderwijs Film [Trust for Dutch  Educational Films] (n.o.f.), the Netherlands’ main supplier of films for classroom use in the post-Second World War period. Shorts about biological, geological or manufacturing processes were distributed to schools early on whereas material about the genesis of films were markedly absent from the collection in its early years. This article first discusses the n.o.f.’s tendency, in the 1940s, to divert the audience’s attention from the films’ status as media, and, by implication, as products of a process of creation. It argues that a shift in attitude later on coincided with a change in the attitude to the role of film as an aid to formal education. Second, it proposes that the institute’s adoption of material about the processes involved in filmmaking introduced a new sort of reflectiveness to the corpus and, more specifically, led to a shift whereby films were no longer simply seen as educational tools but gained the status of products of (collective) acts of creation.