Dear Colleagues,

Please consider submitting an abstract for the following panel, to be held at SCMS 2024 (Boston, March 14-17).

Corporate Cinema from the Industrial to the Digital Age

But there was this other cinema, one defined by film’s ability to transform unlikely spaces, convey ideas, convince individuals and produce subjects in the service of public and private aims.
- Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland, Useful Cinema (2011)

More than a decade has passed since Wasson and Acland called on scholars to challenge the primacy of aesthetics in film studies, to reorient our research, there where it seemed warranted, toward questions of utility: What do films do? How do they (intend to) function? And, of course, what role do aesthetics play in so-called ‘useful cinema’? We now have many essay collections, from Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron and Dan Streible’s Learning with the Lights Off (2012) to Bo Florin, Nico de Klerk and Patrick Vonderau’s Films that Sell (2016). The field of useful cinema studies has expanded to include analyses of science films, medical films, educational films, government films, military films, political films and many more. Yet corporate cinema—the use of film by businesses, whether public or private, to train employees, raise capital, create markets, advertise goods, cultivate trust, promote image, etc—remains underexplored. As Vonderau writes, it is “somewhat paradoxical [that] the most useful, or at least the most brazenly instrumental form of sponsored film-making so far has not been explored as such.”

The goal of this session is to explore the world of corporate cinema from the industrial to the digital age or, we might say, from 1930s Tennessee Valley Authority prestige films to 2020s Amazon product review videos. We understand corporate cinema as an economic and political investment in culture, which has always been central to the exercise of power. Businesses were among the first organizations to recognize the utility of cinema, and it is not an exaggeration to say that without the history of motion pictures, today’s global corporate landscape would be very different. Depending on the interests of panelists, this session may lean in a number of directions, with papers addressing one or more of the following points. This list is not exhaustive.

·         Canonical directors who worked in corporate cinema (Antonioni, Bertolucci, Fellini, Godard, Olmi, Renais, Ruttmann)

·         Unknown or understudied directors

·         Anonymous films

·         Methodological alternatives to auteur theory

·         Ideology and hegemony

·         Governmentality and desire

·         Company case histories

·         National case histories

·         Close readings of one or two films

·         Archives and sources

·         Internal and external communications

·         Labor-management relations and union busting

·         Human resources

·         Fundraising

·         Consumerism

·         Marketing and advertising

·         Corporate image

·         Sponsored films that hide their sponsors

·         Representations of race, class, gender and sexuality

·         Ecology and greenwashing

·         The politics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Please send the following to Jim Carter ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) by August 15:

·         Paper title (max 120 characters)

·         Paper abstract (max 2500 characters)

·         Essential bibliography (3-5 sources)

·         Author bio (max 500 characters)

All submissions will be acknowledged. Selected papers will be notified by August 25.


Jim Carter, Ph.D., FAAR ‘19
Department of Romance Studies
Associate Director of Cinema and Media Studies
Boston University
718 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 301D
Boston, MA 02215

Recent work: Italian Industrial Literature and Film<https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/65300> (Peter Lang Press, 2021)
Editorial Board, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies<https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-italian-cinema-media-studies>
Scholarship @ Academia.edu<https://bu.academia.edu/JimCarter>

Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti

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