Hans Bausch Mediapreis 2024
"Don't drink and drive!", "Respect Covid regulations!", or "Don't get the vaccine!": In the public spheres of democratic societies, there are many insistent audiovisual messages that appeal to the public in the name of the "common good". This monograph examines such social advertisements against a multi-disciplinary field of theoretical reference in order to develop a discourse-analytical approach. By analyzing films serving "mundane" purposes as cinematic forms of meaning-making, it opens up audiovisual discourse formations to aesthetic and political critique. This film studies perspective sheds new light on media practices where propaganda, advertising, and public relations intersect. What emerges through this analysis is a poetics of persuasion: a political instrumentalization of fictional worlds, with their inherent possible actions, responsibilities, and views of humanity, staged in the language of cinema. Drawing on a number of case studies, this book teases out three main elements of social advertising: the genre-specific pedagogy of negative audience feelings, cinematic metaphors that shape public media discourses, and the temporal structure of prevention. It shows that audiovisual persuasion is not a unidirectional rhetorical maneuver, but rather a process of negotiation, of shaping ideas and stances through the medium of cinematic fiction. Through this reflection of media-specific societal practices, the study contributes to the interdisciplinary research on contemporary public media spheres.