Films that Work: Industrial Film and Productivity of Media (review)

To the uninitiated, musty industrial and educational films must seem improbable progenitors of a cult following. But certain of these "sponsored" films, such as those made for General Motors by the Jam Handy Organization, are as riveting and well made as the Hollywood fare of their era.

Jamison "Jam" Handy (1886-1983) is one of the unsung pioneers in visual education acknowledged in Films that Work, whose editors, Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, regard industrial films as "the next big chuck of uncharted territory in cinema studies." The book's 25 essays are sure-footed preliminary steps in mapping this vast, unclaimed territory, which spans Europe and America and encompasses silent films. In the U.S. alone, industrial films number 400,000; add corporate video, "which almost nobody's done serious work on, and you're talking millions of works," notes Rick Prelinger, an innovative archivist and advocate for the preservation of "orphan," or non-Hollywood films.

Viewing industrial films on their own merits, as "art" rather than mundane historical "source material," demands a recalibrated methodology. Traditional criteria, such as the stylistic merits of individual directors, have little or no bearing upon such typically "anonymous" sponsored films, which credit neither directors, writers, nor actors. Even though some uncredited works have a clearly distinguishable voice or reflect a "house style," Prelinger believes that "avoiding the auteur theory" for sponsored films "would be a great leap forward for cinema studies." Assessing sponsored films may be less about aesthetics or style than analyzing the context of their screenings, which differ from film to film. "Some of the Jam Handy films were made for just one person to see," explains Prelinger. "Maybe you're trying to sell a vice president on making a big equipment purchase." Such singularity led Prelinger to consider calling sponsored works "ephemera" when he founded the Prelinger Archives in 1982, an invaluable collection of educational, industrial, advertising, and amateur films.

One useful critical approach advocated in Films that Work is loosely—and sometimes pedantically—labeled "rhetorical." Paradoxically, the compelling rhetorical analysis by Ramon Reichert, "Behaviorism, Animation, and Effective Cinema," eschews the term. Reichert catalogues the persuasive strategies employed in McGraw-Hill management training films. (The company's initial films in the late 1940s were versions of its textbooks geared to reach a wider audience.) Reichert calls his compendium "rules of showing," or "a pedagogy of images." The McGraw-Hill films aim to "popularize knowledge." This they do, says Reichert, by directing and controlling the viewer's gaze through a "surplus of theatricality" that includes animation, special effects, zooms, and wipes. For instance, the zoom, "a gestural method of emphasis," confers special meaning upon an object. This is seen in McGraw-Hill's Internal Organization (1951), which zooms only the upper echelons of an organization chart, thereby forsaking the bottom-dwelling "worker." Furthermore, alternative readings of the chart are prohibited through the univocal/visual expedient of an authoritative voice-over in tandem with animation. Such clean linearity, which admits no interpretative play, is the perfect visual expression of "scientific management"—the dubious promise of efficiency marketed by Frederick Taylor as the means to workplace harmony and prosperity.

In 1912, Frank and Lillian Gilbert, of Cheaper by the Dozen fame, tried to "out-Taylor Taylor" by filming the hand motions of factory workers who built braiding machines used to make shoelaces and electrical insulation. In "Images of Efficiency," Scott Curtis uses the Gilberts' motion studies to probe the rhetoric of the scientific film. The Gilberts lighted upon the New England Butt Company of Providence, Rhode Island, placing workers and their tools in a specially constructed room to better film the lighting conditions (thought to be a key factor in efficiency). To give their motion studies a scientific gloss, the Gilberts always filmed each worker against a background grid pattern, ostensibly to facilitate the measure of movements. (The idea was to examine the film slowly or under a magnifying glass.) However, Curtis ascertained that workers were...