My presentation sketches how 20th century German-language educational film discourse and practice repeatedly drew on early cinema as a point of reference to define film’s potential as a teaching aid in contrast to other uses of cinema (entertainment, art, promotion, research…). More specifically, I focus on two instances in the history of educational film: The development of the format of “Unterrichtsfilm” (classroom film) in 1920s and 1930s Germany, Austria and Switzerland was not least driven by “boundary-work” (Thomas F. Gieryn) that differentiated this type of film from other contemporaneous genres (Kulturfilm, newsreel, documentary, fiction filmmaking). This often involved gesturing towards and reinterpreting place and process films typical of early non-fiction film, memorializing and re-distributing “pioneering” works (such as the Austrian teacher Alto Arche’s ca. 1907 collection of process films), and emphatically pointing to parameters of early cinema production and presentation (such as film lengths, looping, the modularity and performance-dependence of individual films). This orientation towards early cinema returns – with different focus points – in the mid-1960s to early 1970s, when the new educational film type of the “single-concept film” for classroom use is imported from Britain and the US to Austria and Germany. The “single-concept film”, which is closely associated with advances in small-gauge projection, is occasionally given a distinct local spin, for instance with the concept of “Impulsfilm” (impulse film) as realized by the Austrian Ministry of Education’s film service as a collection of loosely connected views of everyday life. By tracing the uses of “early cinema” as a reference point in educational film practice, I propose to contribute an underexamined aspect of the historiography and vigorous afterlife of what we call “early cinema”.