Coercive cinema: police film in schools, 1966–75

Screen studies theorists have long maintained that the cinematic apparatus is geared towards the production of consent. 1 But such a focus can risk developing unbalanced accounts of screen culture that privilege the analysis of discourse while ignoring the centrality of material infrastructures to the reproduction of coercive power.In analysing the ways in which cinema is conscripted into the processes of building hegemony, it is possible to overstate the cultural aspects of hegemony while losing sight of the coercive affordances of culture.Through an analysis of a forgotten archive of British cinema -police cinema -the films produced, distributed and exhibited by police forces, and a particular focus on recruitment films shown in schools, I challenge this blind spot, prompting a reconsideration of how policing functions through culture and ideology and how this function is connected to its repressive maintenance of social order.Through the production, exhibition and distribution of recruitment films, policing and education were brought together in the space of the school, mediated by cinema, intended both to undermine ideological resistance to policing and intensify the surveillance and criminalisation of young, racialised, working-class people.Marxist accounts of the institution of the police hold that it functions through repression, using violence as a means to reproducing the conditions of production. 2 These approaches usefully describe the connections between public order and the wage relation, linking the brute operation of police power to the reproduction of capitalist society.But these accounts can be extended to reveal how the police operate 1 Media studies scholars often refer to the 'manufacturing' of consent: see