Films That Work Harder: The Circulation of Industrial Film

What unleashed the forces of global capitalism which continue to shape the world that we live in? Economists and economic historians variously point to innovations in logistics and trade, the emergence of a new set of business-friendly values and the emergence of new forms of applied knowledge in early modernity to solve this riddle. This book focuses on the moving image as a factor of economic development. In a series of in-depth cases studies at the intersection of film and media studies, science and technology studies and economic and social history, Films That Work Harder: The Circulations of Industrial Film presents an in-depth, global perspective on the dynamic relationship between film, industrial organization and economic development. Bringing together new research from leading scholars from Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, this book combines the state of the art in the field with an agenda for a future research.

Vinzenz Hediger is professor of cinema studies at Goethe University Frankfurt, where he directs the Graduate Research Training Program Configurations of film (www.konfigrationen-des-films.de). His publications include Films that Work. Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam University Press 2009, with Patrick Vonderau) and Essays zur Filmphilosophie (Fink 2015, with Lorenz Engell, Oliver Fahle and Christiane Voss). He is a co-founder of NECS - European Network of Cinema and Media Studies (www.necs.org) and the founding editor of Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de) Florian Hoof is currently Professor of Media Systems and Media Organization at Paderborn University. He is the author of Angels of Efficiency. A Media History of Consulting (Oxford University Press, 2020) and co-author of Culture, Technology, and Process in ’Media Theories’ Toward a Shift in the Understanding of Media in Organizational Research. In: Organization, 2019, Vol. 26(5), http: //dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350508419855702. Yvonne Zimmermann is Professor of Media Studies at Philipps-University Marburg, Germany. She is editor and co-author of a volume on ’useful cinema’ in Switzerland (Schaufenster Schweiz: Dokumentarische Gebrauchsfilme 1896-1964, 2011) and co-author of Adverising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures (with Bo Florin and Patrick Vonderau, 2021). She has published widely on industrial film, ’useful cinema’ and nontheatrical film culture. Scott Anthony is a journalist and historian based at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His books include Shell: Art and Advertising (2021), Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain (2012), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (2011) and Night Mail (2007). He is currently completing a history of film propaganda for Bloomsbury.