"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.
Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and The How
Public opinion, narrowly defined, is the thought of a society at a given time toward a given object; broadly conceived, it is the power of the group to sway the larger public in its attitude. Public opinion can be manipulated, but in teaching the public how to ask for what it wants the manipulator is safeguarding the public against his own possible aggressiveness. The method of the experimental psychologist is not as effective in the study of public opinion in the broad sense as is that of introspective psychology. To create and to change public opinion it is necessary to understand human motives, to know what special interests are represented by a given population, and to realize the function and limitations of the physical organs of approach to the public, such as the radio, the platform, the movie, the letter, the newspaper, etc. If the general principles of swaying public opinion are understood, a technique can be developed which, with the correct appraisal of the specific problem and the specific audience, can and has been used effectively in such widely different situations as changing the attitudes of whites toward Negroes in America, changing the buying habits of American women from felt hats to velvet, silk, and straw hats, changing the impression which the American electorate has of its President, introducing new musical instruments, and a variety of others. Group adherence is essential in changing the attitudes of the public. Authoritative and influential groups may become important channels of reaching the larger public. Ideas and situations must be made impressive and dramatic in order to overcome the inertia of established traditions and prejudices.