"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.
Developing the student-citizen of finance: sponsored film at the New York Stock Exchange, 1947–1973
This article examines seven films produced as part of a mid-century NYSE campaign to increase shareholdership and reconfigure the Exchange’s symbolic place within American life. Seen by millions of people in theatrical and nontheatrical venues as well as on television, the NYSE campaign showcases the sponsored film – one of our most prolific, but least studied categories of cinema – in its golden period. Sponsored films masquerading as educationals, they also provide an opportunity to examine the superficially pedagogical strategies adopted by business hoping to induce monetary and ideological investment in capitalist systems. Tracing the Exchange’s attempted cultivation of a particular kind of American economic subject, the student-citizen of finance, I explore how films situate viewers as pupils – subjects occupying a subordinate, dependent position in relation to the films’ authoritative teaching. I then turn to these films’ ‘overorganizing image’ to show how they posit the act of learning as a precondition for participation in the market and, in turn, American democracy; to be a proper member of the nation, viewers must position themselves as the films’ willing students. Familiar to today’s financial media landscape, the student-citizen of finance remains central to the project of fostering individualised economic activity and neoliberal economic citizenship.
Glass Walls
The event reflected in the pages of this special issue of the journal took me back (with some nostalgia) to the early seventies, a time when with Danny Robbins, then director of the Harvard Art Museums, we discussed ways in which the "invisible glass walls'" (as he used to call them) that separated the museums of "art" in the university and that of "archaeology and ethnology"?as well as those between anthropology and art history? might possibly be shattered.1 It has taken some doing: among other initiatives, the appointment of teachers in non-Western/non-Oriental arts on both sides of the divide and twenty-five years of multidisciplinary interactions at a sort of "museum-without-walls" in print, called RES. Our "Crossing Borders" symposium is further proof that those walls were not unassailable, and are finally coming down.