Abstract

This essay examines a sixteen-page brochure (1962) produced by American nontheatrical distributor Brandon Films. This booklet invokes the term film festival as a rhetorical gesture to sell products and potential programming formations to clientele. In addition to discussing the available 16mm products, this essay puts particular emphasis on the ways that the company promotes and ascribes meaning to its films in efforts to market quality, mostly foreign, films to colleges, museums, local libraries, and film societies. The brochure offers a snapshot of mid-twentieth-century American film culture and suggests ways distribution might be conceived of as a cultural practice.

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