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By Sue Walker

The Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection (Lettering, Printing and Graphic Design Collections, University of Reading) have significant holdings about work on filmstrips undertaken by the Isotype Institute for Common Ground between 1952 and 1972.  This includes correspondence, notes, sketches as well as filmstrips and accompanying booklets with notes for teachers.  A list of the filmstrips can be found in Graphic Communication through Isotype (Reading: 1975, 45), a catalogue produced to accompany an exhibition of the same name.

This blog is an abridged version of a chapter section in a forthcoming book about Marie Neurath’s Isotype children’s books and other resources to support visual education in schools in the mid-twentieth century. The images shown here are from the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection, reproduced with permission.

 

 

Marie Neurath was a key player in the development of the Isotype approach to visual communication in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. Isotype – the International System of Typographic Picture Education – was conceived as a method for assembling, configuring and disseminating statistical information through pictorial means.[1] First known as the Vienna Method, it was developed by Otto Neurath, Marie Reidemeister (later marrying Otto Neurath and taking his name), Gerd Arntz and others in 1920s Vienna. Isotype charts at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Museum for Social and Economic Affairs of Vienna) helped to explain and illustrate contemporary social and economic issues to the general public. Otto and Marie Neurath fled fascism and set up the Isotype Institute in Oxford. After Otto Neurath’s death in 1945, Marie Neurath moved to London and worked with Max Parrish and others at the book-packaging company, Adprint. She and her colleagues designed and produced around 80 books for young people, and it was this connection that led to a collaboration with the filmstrip making company, Common Ground.

Filmstrips for use in educational settings aligned with the Neuraths’ vision of a range of visual education resources for use in classrooms, so it is not surprising that Marie Neurath was keen to explore this when she moved to Britain. Writing to Adprint with ideas for a “visual education series” in 1944, Otto Neurath had included “lantern slides” as an example of resources that could be produced to support visual education:

“… to cover the whole whole curriculum including for kindergarten, backward children, the blind, the deaf and dumb, adult education, colonial education. Everything illustrated by examples, we know from experience. All kinds of illustrations, drawings, photographs, lantern slides, epidascops [sic], films, cartoons, models, museums, exhibitions etc.”[2]

After Otto Neurath’s death in 1945, Marie Neurath worked closely with Joseph Lauwerys, Reader and then Professor of Comparative Education at the University of London, an educationist with an interest in film. He was a keen proponent of Isotype and the idea of its “picture-text style” in which images and text were complementary. He worked with Marie Neurath on the “Visual History of Mankind” a series of three books that comprised an Isotype chart in the centre of a spread with related questions on each side to encourage young readers with the content of the chart. These charts attracted the interest of Common Ground presumably because they could see how such images worked in the filmstrip format.

 

 

Marie Neurath and her colleague, Barbara Young, went on to present to Common Ground ideas for filmstrips. One of Marie Neurath’s ideas for a strip, Old Stone Age, derived from the “Visual History.”  Even though the filmstrip format was in many ways suited to that of an Isotype chart because it encouraged a discrete visual presentation that could work alone or in sequence, Marie Neurath recognised difference between making a chart for use in a book and within a filmstrip:

“A frame has to make its point somewhat faster and more definitely than a page of a book; it is made for group inspection and has to start off a discussion straightaway … in books you can ponder a difficult chart as long as you like.”[3]

Her proposals were well received by Common Ground and resulted in a series of three strips, “Living before time,” comprising Cavemen and Hunters and Farmers and Craftsmen in 1952, and Travellers and Traders in 1966 were published by Common Ground as “Isotype Strips,” with acknowledgement to Max Parrish Limited for “permission to publish variations of many Isotype charts appearing in “The Visual History of Mankind”.” “Designed by the Isotype Institute”, with “Teaching Notes by Marie Neurath” appeared on the introductory slides.

Marie Neurath’s initial sketches in coloured pencil show how she adapted elements of the charts in Living in Early Times to align with the filmstrip format. More developed drawings included text below the illustration – a format that was carried through to the final versions. Though the filmstrip images were based on those in Living in Early Times, they were more representational with, for example, figures clothed in skins, and indication of fur on the mammoth.

 

 

The Isotype Institute drafted the text for the accompanying booklets and the captions for each of the slides. A short introduction provided additional context, as well as reference to the picture-text style that continued from the “Visual History” books:

Each picture in this filmstrip tells a story visually; the captions and teacher’s questions are intended to help the children to explore the pictures and to put the story into words for themselves. Most of the pictures present a technical problem and the solution found by early man; a few are real evidence in the form of cave men’s paintings.[4]

Each booklet included a list in the form of an ‘Index to pictures’, and a section “Notes on pictures” that included questions a teacher might about a particular image, followed by a short answer.

Barbara Young worked with Marie Neurath on ‘Nature story’ strips for young children to help with learning to read and, labelled as “An Isotype filmstrip” and “designed by the Isotype Institute,” one of the first Isotype filmstrips published by Common Ground was Peter and Jean in the Country (1951). The graphic style of the images was flat and schematic. Peter and Jean in the Country was reviewed in Teachers’ World (1951) as being “very suitable for infants and juniors” with the description, “The colour cartoons are first class, and each frame is devoid of unnecessary details. The captions are simple and easily understood. Children will readily identify themselves with these engaging children.” Barbara Young was named as the author on a related strip published in 1957, The Birthday Picnic.

An innovative and successful filmstrip series published by Common Ground was “The Ancient World,” comprising nine Isotype Strips published between 1953 and 1965. These strips explained histories of the everyday lives of ancient civilisations. Marie Neurath recalled:

“I had to immerse myself in this new medium: much less should be put into one frame than in the page of a book. Drawings and photographs lend themselves equally well to being used on film and we were able to mix chronological tables, diagrams and maps with photographs of landscapes, people and works of art. For Egypt the magnificent murals and reliefs of Egyptian tombs can be used directly as pictures of their lives.”[5]

The strips were accompanied by notes, most of which authored by Marie Neurath, that included text that teachers could read out when the slides were shown. For the first filmstrips, about ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, Marie Neurath collaborated with T. H. James, an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum. He provided advice on how ancient objects were used as well as providing photographs and references. The Isotype Institute distilled this information into sketches that informed the frames in the filmstrip. The approach taken in “The Ancient World” filmstrips was followed in the popular “They Lived Like This” series of twenty books published between 1964 and 1971.

 

Alongside her work on particular filmstrips, Marie Neurath was invited to attend the Common Ground Advisory Committee on the Fine Arts Advisory Panel on behalf of the Isotype Institute, and went on to suggest ideas for filmstrips, many of which were not taken further. However, her lively interaction typified her commitment both to finding ways to keep members of the Institute in work and to extending ways in which the Isotype approach could be applied to other media and contexts of use.

Sue Walker is Professor of Typography in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading. She is a Co-Director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, one of Reading’s inter-disciplinary research centres. Her research is in information design, health communication, Isotype and book design for young people. Recent publication:  an editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography (2026).

 

References:

[1] See Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel and Sue Walker (eds), Isotype: Design and Contexts 1925–1971 (Hyphen Press, 2013).
[2] Otto Neurath to Walter Neurath, 20 January 1944 (IC 1/31).
[3] Marie Neurath, “Isotype,” Instructional Science 3 (1974), 145.
[4] Living Before History, Part 1. Cavemen and Hunters, Teaching notes by Marie Neurath (Common Ground, 1952 (IC 3.2/28).
[5] Marie Neurath, ‘Wie es zu den Isotype Kinderbüchern kam’, Bulletin Jugend + Literatur October 1972, 68–70.

Images:

Featured Image: Example slides from the filmstrip Peter and Jean in the Country (1951).

Main Text Image 1: Original filmstrip boxes for Life in the Roman Empire and Life in Ancient Mesopotamia from the Isotype’s Ancient World Series.

Main Text Image 2: Spread from ‘”Visual History of Mankind,” Living in Early Times (London; Max Parrish, 1948).

Main Text Image 3: Spread from “How Cave Man Hunted Big Animals,” Living in Early Times (London; Max Parrish, 1948).

Main Text Images 4 and 5: Marie Neurath’s sketches for “How Cave Man Hunted Big Animals.”

Main Text Image 6: Frame from the filmstrips Cavemen and Hunters (1952), based on the same material as “How Cave Man Hunted Big Animals.”

Main text Images 7-8: Sketch and slide from Life in Ancient Greece (1954).

To cite this blog: Sue Walker, “Isotype filmstrips of Marie Neurath” Relocating Filmstrips, Remapping Europe Website eds. Tom Rice, Vinzenz Hediger, Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal, Johannes Praetorious-Rhein, 2026.