Selling Technology: Advertising Films and the American Corporation 1900-1920

SELLING TECHNOLOGY: ADVERTISING FILMS AND THEAMERICAN CORPORATION 1900-1920 by Joseph Corn In the 1910s, when motion picture technology was still in its infancy, the American business community discovered film. Large corporations such as General Electric, Ford, Dupont, and International Harvester, began experimenting with the new medium, alert to its tremendous appeal to mass audiences. Companies made or sponsored two kinds of films: short films pushing particular products (what we would call advertisements), and "educational s," longer productions that promoted a company's products indirectly by treating its business in dramatic or historical fashion. Both types were intended for public distribution to commercial theatres and nonprofit exhibitors. My account of these films and of their corporate supporters represents a tentative exploration of a topic largely neglected by historians. Scholars of early twentieth-century film have focused mostly on the art, business , and cultural aspects of filmmaking. Their research has illuminated the seminal contributions of directors such as D. W. Griffith; the economic and organizational impulses that created stars like Mary Pickford or studios like Paramount; and the impact of movie entertainment on an ethnically diverse, increasingly urban, democracy. Except for the work David L Lewis has done on Henry Ford's pioneer filmmaking, however, we know little about the giant corporation's early embrace of motion pictures as a sales and promotional strategy. Studying early corporate films poses numerous frustrations, as only a relative few of the genre survive. Because the films possess little artistic merit and often lack entertainment value, collectors and cinema buffs have not preserved them. Nor have most of the corporations which made them. As a result, unique and irreplaceable prints have been thrown Joseph Conn teaches In the American Studies and the Values, Technology, and Society Pnognams at Stanfaond University. His book, The Winged Gospel: Aviation and American Society, is faonthcomlng fanom Oxfaond University Pness. away. Even when not deliberately discarded, early films, printed on volatile , nitrate-based material, often disintegrated over time, leaving the historian equally deprived of sources. Fortunately, however, some corporate films from the progressive era have come down to us, and I have screened a number of them for this paper. Additionally, I have consulted published sources related to industry filmmaking and examined archival material from General Electric's pioneering and long active film unit. One of the earliest corporate produced or sponsored films that I know of, but one I have not seen, is an 1897 production made by the International Film Company and in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It promotes Dewars' Scotch Whiskey. The film has no sound, of course, and no intertitles. It makes its sales pitch through pantomime alone. By the early 1900s, however, filmmakers had learned to edit intertitles into motion pictures, and advertising films began to speak to their audiences through words as well as images. Of the films I have seen, the earliest to do this was made in 1910 by the Edison studio to promote a dictating machine. It is titled The Stenographer's Friend, Or, What Was Accomplished by an Edison Business Phonograph. The film begins with an intertitle that announces: "Shorthand Troubles." We then see a harassed female stenographer struggling to take dictation from an impatient and increasingly irritated boss. Her problems have only begun. A second man enters the office and also starts dictating to the woman. Soon both men become exercised over her inability to keep up. Now on the screen comes the question: "What shall we do? After five and work not yet finished." At this point, with the wall clock showing twenty-fi ve minutes after five, the stenographer gets up to leave. The two men now go berserk and the stenographer responds by breaking into tears. Not total tyrants, the men console her but are obviously distressed and puzzled as to what to do about their inability to get out the firm's work. "Let Edison Help You!" implores the film and a salesman enters. He pulls out a brochure describing the "Edison commercial system conducted with the business phonograph." As the two businessmen listen to the salesman's claims for the dictating machine, they erupt into laughter. But...