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

The industrial film is one of many so-called orphan genres, like amateur film or science film, that were largely ignored in the early decades of cinema studies. But though these companion genres are finding homes in new subfields of the discipline, the industrial film has remained relatively neglected, despite the availability of extensive archival collections holding thousands of films. Films That Work, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, attempts both to explain the absence of scholarship on the industrial film and, more important, to show the possibilities for such scholarship to challenge how scholars in cinema studies think about the role of media in social institutions and organizations.

In their introductory essay, Hediger and Vonderau claim that many industrial films lack visual interest and therefore are not suited for the aesthetic and auteurist approaches to criticism that formerly helped scholars resurrect forgotten directors and genres. Instead, the authors propose that analysis of industrial film should focus on the circumstances in which the films were produced and used. Repeating a formula first used by Thomas Elsaesser, the editors argue that films have an Auftrag (occasion), Anlass (purpose), and Adressat (addressee) and that the scholar’s task is to locate industrial films in these three contexts. In addition, the editors argue that industrial films serve one of three purposes in industrial organizations: “record (institutional memory), rhetoric (governance) and rationalization (optimizing process)” (11). In more than twenty essays, covering a wide spectrum of historical periods, methodologies, and film producers, scholars from the United States and Europe use extensive archival research to write new histories of an underdescribed and undertheorized mode of production.

In the opening essays of the volume, Elsaesser, Hediger and Vonderau, and Rick Prelinger remind us just how difficult the industrial film is to define as a genre. Hediger and Vonderau argue that the industrial film is not a genre at all but a “strategically weak and parasitic form,” one that can become an educational film, a documentary, or a scientific film (46). Elsaesser suggests that by considering industrial films as events rather than as texts, scholars can consider them as part of a “network” in which social and historical relationships between film-events are formed. Prelinger, in an interview conducted by Vonderau, argues that the field of industrial films is so large and diverse that it is “almost fruitless” for a scholar to understand the work as a whole (53).

Subsequent chapters in the book are narrowly defined inquiries into various aspects of industrial film. In one clever essay, Frank Kessler and Eef Masson challenge traditional accounts of the formation of nonfiction film genres by comparing two films about cheese making: one a 1909 Pathé film set in Holland and the other a 1920 film set in Britain. Though both are process films, the Pathé film shows cheese making as a traditional practice, one bound up with Dutch identity, whereas the British film focuses on the modern manufacturing processes used in cheese production. Owing to these differences, Kessler and Masson show here that the Pathé film overlaps with the travelogue form, whereas the British film resembles instructional films used to educate employees about industrial processes. These two films were screened to general audiences as well as in educational arenas, thereby occupying different genre categories dependent on the circumstances of their exhibition. Kessler and Masson use these cheese-making films to show that the industrial film is not just film about industry, sponsored by industry, or screened for industrial purposes but rather a more mutable and complex category of film production and exhibition. Indeed, according to the authors, industrial films are often deliberately produced as open texts, ones that can be readily adapted for a range of exhibition sites and contexts.

This final point is emphasized in a number of studies of industrial film sponsors and producers. Yvonne Zimmermann analyzes Swiss corporate films as both the lifeblood of the country’s film industry and, in many cases, as the...