Article:

Frühes Kino und Frühe Werbetheorien in den USA

This essay explores the intellectual and institutional relationship of cinema and advertising in the early 20th century in the United States. The promotional activities of early film exhibitors and the writings of pioneering film theorists Hugo Münsterberg and Vachel Lindsay are placed in the context of the theories of perception and human behavior emerging in the young field of social psychology at the time, theories that were eagerly taken up in the rapidly growing advertising industry. Both cinema and advertising sought social rehabilitation from their less reputable 19th century forebears in the circus and travelling show, and both fields attracted the interest of contemporaneous scholars and poets. The problem of attention dominated much of the writing on advertising and early cinema, and experimental psychologists were eager to apply their theories in the new settings of the department store, shop window, electric billboard, and cinema screen. The essay argues that an interdisciplinary examination of the multiple contexts of early cinema and advertising might inform scholarly approaches to screen culture of our own time.