Civil Defense film strips

Below are some representative images from some Civil-Defense 35mm film strips I purchased from Xerxes Books' 'atomic ephemera' list. Content-wise these filmstrips are utterly predicatable -- fallout, basics of radiation dosage, radiacs, decontamination, shelters, etc, ad nauseum.

The graphical style is pretty nice though, typical of the era. Unfortunately the quality of the images here suffer for two reasons: (1) the Eastman film suffered the usual color degradation (attenuated blues, accentuated reds) and (2) these were scanned with a 300dpi flatbed scanner, not with a 35mm transparency scanner. Each image (standard 35mm frame) was scanned at 1200 dpi (interpolated), hand color corrected, cropped and otherwise processed. I'll eventually get them scanned on a transparency machine which will fix at least the lack of detail.

The number of frames reproduced is low, due only partly to the labor involved in processing -- most frames were stultifyingly dull, and about half are text only.

Oh yeah, for those of you not familiar with industrial-type indoctrination proceedures, generally film strips (or slide sets or overhead transparencies) like this are accompanied by a narrator with a pointer, handout sheets (generally reproductions of the slides themselves) and a booklet for the presenter suggesting Q and A questions, etc. Makes for a rather dull afternoon.

And finally, some of the filmstrips contain two presentations; I haven't bothered to separate them here, since I'm not including narrative info anyways.

WPS HOME