"Useful Cinema," of What Use?: Assessing the Role of Motion Pictures in the Largest Public Relations Campaign of the 1920s
Using testimony and subpoenaed exhibits published in the seventy-two-volume record of a Federal Trade Commission investigation, this article traces the role of motion pictures in the private utility industry’s public relations campaign against municipal ownership and federal regulation in the 1920s. This article reconstructs the utility companies’ decision to employ films in its campaign; the production, distribution, and exhibition strategies for its motion pictures; and the relationship of producers to sponsoring organizations. Ultimately, the article argues that the use of film in this campaign was experimental and, relative to other media, limited, but by investigating such experiments with film, we can identify institutional agents struggling to find a “use” for cinema, thereby enabling media historians both to identify what determinants might cause an organization to find cinema more or less useful at different historical moments and to better assess cinema’s changing cultural status and social functions.
Documenting the documentary : close readings of documentary film and video
Originally released in 1998, Documenting the Documentary responded to a scholarly landscape in which documentary film was largely understudied and undervalued aesthetically, and analysed instead through issues of ethics, politics, and film technology. Editors Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski addressed this gap by presenting a useful survey of the artistic and persuasive aspects of documentary film from a range of critical viewpoints. This new edition of Documenting the Documentary adds five new essays on more recent films in addition to the text of the first edition. Thirty-one film and media scholars, many of them among the most important voices in the area of documentary film, cover the significant developments in the history of documentary filmmaking from Nanook of the North (1922), the first commercially released documentary feature, to contemporary independent film and video productions like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005) and the controversial Borat (2006). The works discussed also include representative examples of many important national and stylistic movements and various production contexts, from mainstream to avant-garde. In all, this volume offers a series of rich and revealing analyses of those ""regimes of truth"" that still fascinate filmgoers as much today as they did at the very beginnings of film history. As documentary film and visual media become increasingly important ways for audiences to process news and information, Documenting the Documentary continues to be a vital resource to understanding the genre. Students and teachers of film studies and fans of documentary film will appreciate this expanded classic volume. Contributors Include: Bart Testa, Carl Plantinga, Caryl Flinn, Catherine Russell, Charlie Keil, David T. Johnson, Diane Scheinman, Frank P. Tomasulo, Jeanne Hall, Jeffrey K. Ruoff, Jim Leach, Joan Nicks, Joanne Hershfield, John R. Cook, Julia Lesage, Leshu Torchin, Linda Williams, Lucy Fischer, Matthew Bernstein, Paula J. Massood, Robert Stam, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Seth Feldman, Sheila Petty, Thomas Waugh, Virginia Bonner, Vivian Sobchack, William Guynn, William Rothman.
Publicity as a Preventive of Abuses By the Retailer
All successful business men consider publicity an indispensable feature of their enterprises. In making appropriations for yearly expenditures, a large part of the amount set aside is designed for this purpose. A merchant prince who spends millions of dollars for publicity of one kind or another once said that a business house might as well take down its sign as to discontinue advertising. Such a house might have the best goods obtainable, the most efficient help, the most capable management, but if it did not keep these facts before the public its patronage would be small and it would be doomed to failure. While the business man has thus been blazing abroad the things he wanted the consumer to know, or believe, the latter has been for the most part dumb. He has had no system of disseminating the facts which as a class he needed to know to safeguard his rights in dealing with the retailer. The knowledge of the individual consumer was not passed on to the others. Consumers are now learning to use the weapon of the business man, publicity, to protect themselves and are finding that it is much more efficient than the so-called strong arm of the law and an indispensable ally of the latter. In direct proportion to the extent that home industries have been taken out of the home and commercialized has the business of defrauding the unsuspecting housewife flourished. Much of the best thought and energy of our time have been devoted to devising ways and means to fool her and to give just as little value as could be given without exciting her suspicion. This manifestly does not