Films that Sell

Moving Pictures and Advertising

Patrick Vonderau, Bo Florin, Nico De Klerk, Patrick Vonderau, Bo Florin, Nico De Klerk

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781844578917
• eBook ISBN: 9781838715816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

While moving image advertising has been around us, everywhere, for at least a century, the topic has tended to be overlooked by cinema studies. This far-reaching new collection makes an incisive contribution to a new field of study, by exploring the history, theory and practice of moving image advertising, and emphasising the dynamic and lasting relationships between print, film, broadcasting and advertising cultures.In chapters written by an international ensemble of leading scholars and archivists, the book covers a variety of materials from pre-show advertising films to lantern slides and sponsored 'educations'. With case studies of advertising campaigns and archival collections from a range of different countries, and giving consideration to the problems that advertising materials pose for preservation and presentation, this rich and expansive text testifies to the need for a new approach to this burgeoning subject that looks beyond the mere study of promotional film.

PART 1

HISTORIES AND APPROACHES

1

Advertising and Film: A Topological Approach

Yvonne Zimmermann

This chapter is concerned with outlining a framework for the study of advertising film: a framework that embraces research into the objects, screens and practices of moving-image advertising. I suggest a topological approach and consider what the question ‘Where is advertising film?’ can contribute to conceptualising the ephemeral practice of advertising with moving images. I focus on the exhibition and consumption of advertising film in different times and dispositifs to outline the productivity of a topological approach in more detail. There are other related topics that would be worth considering, such as the place of advertising in production culture, but they are outside the scope of the present chapter.

The chapter ties research on moving-picture advertising into recent debates by addressing the notions of topography and spectatorial experience. These two aspects have become core interests of film studies, not least as a consequence of the fundamental changes in the media sphere. Mobile media, satellite signals, cable, digital channels and global digital networks have increased and altered the spaces, places and trajectories of moving images. With media progressively converging, moving images have transgressed traditional media boundaries and become ubiquitous and ever present. These modified constellations challenge media studies, and film studies in particular, since film studies’ classical central object – the cinema – is no longer the primary site of film consumption. A focus on the largely under-researched object of advertising film can further contribute to the field, not only by refining our historical knowledge and current understanding of this ephemeral media practice, but also by eventually speaking to questions raised by digital technology.

DEMARCATING THE OBJECT OF STUDY

Although the focus of this chapter is on the spatial dimensions of moving-picture advertising, responding to the question of ‘Where is advertising film?’, it still seems useful to begin with the ontological, Bazinian question of ‘What is advertising film?’, if only to delineate the very object of study considered here. At the same time, this is an admission that it is impossible to separate clearly the ‘where’ from the ‘what’ (and the ‘when’), as will become evident later in this chapter. The 2009 Amsterdam Workshop on advertising film displayed the vastness and richness of the field: under the umbrella of the term ‘advertising film’, scholars and archivists presented moving images that varied in format (celluloid, video, digital), in length (from one-minute clips and shorter to feature length), in representation modes (fiction, nonfiction, animation), in style, in rhetoric and in audience address. Defining advertising film is tricky, given the ubiquitous yet ephemeral, multiform, shape-shifting, performative and transgressive character of moving-picture advertising. The elusiveness of this media practice makes it difficult even to determine the very object of study and to demarcate the research field.

In the history of advertising film production, a basic distinction would be made between advertising film in a narrow sense and advertising film in a broad sense.¹ This distinction, as simple as it is, can still help to conceptualise the object of study today. Advertising film in a narrow sense includes short movies, often called ‘commercials’, ‘spots’ or simply ‘ads’ that advertise a product, brand, service, or behaviour. If the predominant purpose of commercials is to raise sales, the aim of advertising in business practice can also be to out-compete other companies, as Michael Schudson argues in his classic 1984 study Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion.² Building a brand and ensuring customer loyalty are other objectives of commercials. Even if commercials in the western world pursue different aims in the short run and have symbolic and cultural utility that transcends the mere selling of merchandise, as Schudson claims, in the end and from the advertisers’ perspective, they serve the capitalist logic of economic growth. For several decades, the prevalent places of commercials or spots were cinema and television. The last twenty years or so have seen a fundamental diversification of channels for motion-picture advertising: the mobilisation and multiplication of screens, ‘the explosion of cinema’,³ ‘the dislocation of television screens’⁴ and the emergence of social media networks have provided commercials with the potential to inhabit virtually any screen, whether private or public.

To label this probably most blatant category of advertising films commercials or spots helps to distinguish it from a second body of advertising moving images: that is, advertising films in a broad sense, understood as a rhetorical type of moving image that intends to influence audience opinions, attitudes and behaviour. Such films are ‘made to persuade’, to quote the theme of the eighth Orphan Film Symposium, held in New York in 2012. Moving-picture advertising in the broad sense has a rhetorical ‘brief’ and the ‘charge’ to affect spectatorial thoughts and actions, to borrow two terms art historian Michael Baxandall (1985) uses to reconstruct the historical intentions behind art in order to explain its formal appearances. Historically, the broad category of advertising film overlaps to a large degree with another prominent category in film history, the (sponsored) documentary, and embraces a variety of genres: it includes travelogues and tourist films, industrial and corporate films, many Kulturfilme (cultural films) and educational films, social and political campaign films, as well as sanitation and recruitment films. Such moving pictures would normally range from ten or twenty minutes to feature length, be predominantly instructional in tone and often pursue their advertising goals in a discreet and indirect manner (without mentioning either commissioner or product/brand).

Two other types of advertising films that specialise in advertising movies – the trailer and the making-of – can also be added to this category. Finally, more recent audiovisual forms of buzz and viral marketing that work through social media networks can be incorporated into the category of advertising film in a broad sense as well.

To include these highly ephemeral and complex forms of moving-picture advertising into the study of advertising film is to acknowledge not only the impressively wide range of historical and current screen advertising practices that go way beyond the explicit advertising of brands, products and politicians; it is also to acknowledge the pivotal role that these implicit, latent advertising forms played and play in shaping media culture and consumer culture and in building communities and identities. From a historical perspective, these films often interlaced consumer education and civic education. They were the products and promoters of a joint venture of business and state, of corporation and nation, of an alliance of capitalism and democracy that has made advertising pervade our daily life.

IS ADVERTISING FILM A GENRE?

The question whether moving-image advertising can be conceptualised and studied as a genre lends itself to vivid debates. Such debates are often undermined by category misunderstanding and may benefit from a clarification of the term ‘genre’ and its various semantic implications. It is quite obvious that the question of genre is appropriate only in regard to advertising films in the narrow sense – that is, to commercials or spots – and is not relevant for the discussion of advertising films in a broader sense, given the generic diversity that characterises this latter category. To decide whether commercials or spots constitute a genre depends on how genre is defined. The German language distinguishes between the term ‘Genre’ and the term ‘Gattung’. This distinction may be helpful to frame the complex phenomenon of advertising film more precisely. Following Knut Hickethier’s comments on genre theory and analysis, the German term ‘Genre’, on the one hand, describes a formal or structural category that includes films that share a story formula, narrative convention, a particular milieu, specific character and conflict constellations, or specific emotional and affective constellations.⁵ The German term ‘Gattung’, on the other hand, refers to particular modes of representation (fiction, nonfiction, animation film) or to specific functions and uses of films. Gattung is therefore a predominantly pragmatic category. If we relate this to advertising film, we can state that, essentially, advertising film is defined by the function it performs, namely advertising, and not by intrinsic properties that perform this function. It is, therefore, primarily a Gattung, a functional and thus pragmatic category, rather than a Genre that builds on intrinsic properties. Yet, this general classification of moving-picture advertising as Gattung (or what could translate as ‘pragmatic genre’) does not preclude the possibility of commercials forming distinct bodies of films that share formal features and thus qualify as Genre (or what could be termed ‘formal genre’). Indeed, there are commercials that do share story patterns, character constellations and other similarities in form and content and thus do qualify not only as a pragmatic genre, but also as a formal one.

In a larger perspective, moving-picture advertising can be understood as a pragmatic subgenre of the category of Gebrauchsfilm (utility film), or what in Anglo-Saxon media studies would be called useful cinema. This research field has recently emerged both in Europe and in the USA and has been very productive for the study, preservation and presentation of ephemeral or orphan films – that is, neglected moving images such as science and industrial films, educational films, newsreels and home movies. Among the pioneering studies in the field are Films that Work edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (2009) on the use of moving images in industrial contexts, Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson’s anthology Useful Cinema (2011) on functional films in classrooms and civic circuits and the two collections of essays on educational and classroom films Learning with the Lights Off (Orgeron et al., 2012) and Lights! Camera! Action and the Brain (Bahloul and Graham, 2012). The concept of useful cinema refers to a wide range of films beyond the commercial mainstream and beyond the art film canon; it includes a large body of films that were neither primarily produced as commodities to make money with or as pieces of art, but that were used as in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: On Advertising’s Relation to Moving Pictures
• Part I: Histories and Approaches
• Part II: Forms and Practices
• Part III: Archives and Sources
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright