ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to explore the impact of so-called useful cinema as it emerges through processes of transportation, circulation and exhibition, mainly in relation to the railways. This instructional cinema related to agricultural improvement, animal husbandry and public health, and it targeted rural and small-town populations in India from the 1920s. The braiding of media forms and transportation technologies was key to how audiences were invited to position themselves in order to access a wider universe of images, spaces, temporalities, technologies, production practices and commodity life. This film culture was driven by governmental and business enterprise, but also by more dispersed commercial networks in which an avowedly useful object and communication medium segued into a complex film, media and commodity ecology.
