Workshop: INDUSTRIAL FILMS AND OTHER EPHEMERAL MEDIA

The industrial film presents a peculiar conundrum for scholars of visual media. Didactic and crude, they are
characterized by stilted performances and transparently propagandistic rhetorical techniques, although they
often employ arrestingly beautiful industrial imagery and create uncannily anthropomorphic scenarios featuring
what Marx referred to as “the beautiful labor of the machine.” Consequently, these films seem to provide
us with few interpretive options, encouraging readings that either denounce them as exploitative artifacts of
corporate visual culture or unmoor them from history to celebrate the purity of their machine aesthetics. The
task of this workshop is to move beyond this analytical impasse. Through screenings and discussions, we will
explore the possibilities of the industrial film as a hermeneutic key for a renewed understanding of the hidden
politics of the everyday.

Konferenzraum des SFB/FK 427, Pohligstr. 1, EG, Köln-Zollstock