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Super Fritz Lang Knaller

The ability to remember a film before one has seen it is operative knowledge of film advertising. The designers of the advertising materials rarely see the entire final product in post-production. It is their job to make bets on stories and embed the various snippets and clues that they have found along the way in further stories. In media studies, we can learn a lot from this approach as long as we are willing to acknowledge that the speculative part of our work is indeed productive. Making bets on stories formulates expectations with which one can work. The dates of the Mexican lobby cards that I won on Ebay are unknown. Just as it is also unknown which (Fritz Lang) film they promote. The detour through the speculations of film advertising in a film culture with which I am not familiar helps to better understand the historical situations and the knowledge about media in which these films are implicated.