IN TRANSITION FILM CULTURE FILM CULTURE EDITED BY VINZENZ HEDIGER FLORIAN HOOF YVONNE ZIMMERMANN Films that Work Harder The Circulation of Industrial Film Films That Work Harder Films That Work Harder The Circulation of Industrial Film Edited by Vinzenz Hediger, Florian Hoof, Yvonne Zimmermann, with Scott Anthony Amsterdam University Press This publication was made possible through a grant from the Open Access publication fund, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, with support from Philipps-Universität Marburg, by the Start- up Grant no. M4081571 from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and with support from DFG funded Institute for Advanced Studies Media Cultures of Computer Simulations (mecs), Leuphana Universität Lüneburg Cover illustration: Film cans in Bay Village, Boston 1 Cover design: Kok Korpershoek Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 653 4 e-isbn 978 90 4853 781 5 doi 10.5117/9789462986534 nur 670 Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)  The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2024 Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 Table of Contents List of Illustrations 9 Introduction: A Sequel and a Shift 19 Vinzenz Hediger, Florian Hoof, Yvonne Zimmermann Section 1 Networks and Flows: Visualizing Value Chains 1 The Aesthetics of the Global Value Chain 37 Container Shipping, Media Networks and the Problem of Visibility in the Global Sphere of Circulation Vinzenz Hediger 2 Object Lessons and Infrastructural Imperialism 105 Lee Grieveson 3 Energy and Industrial Film 123 Energo-Critical Registers Thomas Turnbull 4 Digital Afterlife of Industrial Film 143 Weak Dispositives, Choice Architecture and the Distribution of Industrial Cinema Florian Hoof Section 2 Operative Iconographies, Industry and the Nation State 5 Beautiful Luxembourg, Steel Works and a Swimming Pool 175 The Corporate Film Columeta and the Formation of a Corporate and a National Image Ira Plein 6 Hydropower for a Sealess Nation 203 Representation of Water Energy in Czech Visual Culture Lucie Česálková 7 Modern Water Sprites 227 History, People and the Landscape of Northern Sweden in Vattenfall’s Film Production in the 1950s Fabian Zimmer 8 Taxonomy of Techniques 249 Visions of Industrial Cinema in Post-war Japan Takuya Tsunoda 9 The Power of Flows 275 The Spatiality of Industrial Films on Hydropower in Switzerland Yvonne Zimmermann Section 3 Institutions and Distribution Frameworks: Archives, Festivals, Fairs 10 Industry on Screen 299 The British Documentary in Distribution – British Transport Films: A Case Study Steve Foxon 11 On the Red Carpet in Rouen 317 Industrial Film Festivals and a World Community of Filmmakers Brian Jacobson 12 Cinema and Industrial Design 339 Showmanship, Fairs and the Exhibition Film Haidee Wasson Section 4 Teaching Oneself and Others 13 Putting Films to Work 365 System, the Magazine for Business Gregory A. Waller 14 New Media for the Schools of Tomorrow 391 The AV Instructional Films of Robert W. Wagner Charles R. Acland 15 We Must Know More Than We Can See 423 Images for Vocational Training and the Emergence of Cognitive Ergonomics Guilherme Machado 16 Free Enterprise Film 447 Aims of Industry, Economic Propaganda and the Development of a Neoliberal Cinema Scott Anthony Section 5 Post/Colonial Industries and Third Industrial Cinemas 17 Framing Local and International Sentiments and Sounds 473 Unilever and Royal Dutch Shell in a Changing Nigeria Rudmer Canjels 18 Working through the End of Empire 495 Tom Rice 19 Cinema-going on the Railway Tracks 513 Transportation, Circulation and Exhibition of Information Film in Colonial India Ravi Vasudevan 20 The Latin American Process Film 533 Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky Section 6 Production Cultures and/of the Industrial Film: Amateurs and Professionals 21 Soviet Industrial Film across Categories 557 Negotiating between Utility, Art and Science Maria Vinogradova 22 “There Is No Life More Reckless and Adventuresome Than That of the Oil Prospector” 581 ENI’s Geologist-Filmmakers in Iran Luca Peretti 23 Industrial Film from the Home Studio 611 Amateur Cinema and Low-Budget Corporate Moving Image Culture in West Germany (1950 to 1977) Alexander Stark 24 Movie and Industry in Italy 635 The “Golden Age” of Italian Industrial Documentary (1950–1970) Anna Maria Falchero 25 A Film That Doesn’t Seem to Work 651 A Shot of Renault’s Early Assembly Line (1920 to 1929) – A Case Study, Methodology and 3D Restitution for Film Analysis Alain P. Michel Section 7 Ephemeral Artistry: Ecologies of Authorship in Industrial Cinema 26 Business and Art 683 Pharmaceutical Industries, Film Production and Circulation, and the French Film Production Company ScienceFilm, 1960–1980 Christian Bonah 27 Transfer of Power 711 Films Off icers in the British Coal Industry Patrick Russell 28 Saudi Arabia’s John Ford? 737 Robert Yarnall Richie, Desert Venture and Ephemeral Authorship in Industrial Film Martin Stollery 29 Sounds Industrial 757 Understanding the Contribution of Music and Sound in Industrial Films Annette Davison 30 Creative Films for Creative Corporations 779 Music and Musicians in Experimental Italian Industrial Films Alessandro Cecchi Indices 799 List of Illustrations Fig. 1.1a. EVER GIVEN stuck in the bank. Image released by the Suez Canal Authority. 39 Fig. 1.1b. The memefication of the EVER GIVEN incident (author unknown). 39 Fig. 1.2. Maersk crews share pictures via the company’s Instagram account, May 15, 2021. 40 Fig. 1.3. The MarineTraff ic.com landing page on May 10, 2021, 10:11 am CET (green: bulk cargo and container ships; red: tankers; orange: f ishing ships; blue: passenger line ships; lilac: cruise ships and yachts). 42 Fig. 1.4. Drone tracking shot of ship at sea. Evergreen line corporate video, 2019. 68 Fig. 1.5. Aerial tracking shot in a CMA-CGM video introducing the natural gas-powered line flagship Jacques Saadé, 2020. 68 Fig. 1.6. Aerial tracking shot of a Maersk Triple E ship with tracking info graphics. 69 Fig. 1.7. Aerial tracking shot of OOCL Hong Kong’s maiden call at Felixstowe, 2017. 65 Fig. 1.8. Maersk Instagram video, released on World Environ- ment Day, June 5, 2021. 74 Figs. 1.9a-i. Screen shots from the Maersk Instagram video. 75 Fig. 1.10. The visibility problem in global supply chains: The Paper Trail of a Container (Maersk, 2015). 77 Fig. 1.11. Aspirational concepts: Advertisement for Maersk’s Flex Hub, May 21, 2021. 78 Fig. 1.12. Evergreen Line corporate video, 2019. 83 Fig. 1.13. Aerial tracking shot of container being unloaded from a Maersk ship with converging movements of drone and container. Maersk corporate video for Europe, 2011. 85 Figs. 1.14a. and 1.14b. Time-lapse shots of urban traff ic f lows, from We Are Maersk (2015). 86 Fig. 1.15. Multi-layered temporalities: Market vendor and Maersk reefer container in Hong Kong, 2011. 87 Fig. 1.16. Inside a Nike factory in China, from We Are Maersk (2015). 87 Fig. 1.17. A Maersk rainbow container touring the tulip f ields outside of Amsterdam. Maersk Instagram account, May 19, 2021. 89 10 Films THaT Work Harder Fig. 1.18. Samantha Almon Adeluwoye interviewing Maersk CEO Søren Skou on innovation at Maersk under the watchful eyes of Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller, 2020. 90 Figs. 1.19a. and 1.19b. Economic experts: Former president of Nigeria Ernest Shonekan and Professor Aby Awosika explain Apapa container port. 91 Fig. 1.20a. Computer graphics locate growth at the point of congestion: Map of Lagos with Apapa container port in the foreground right. APM corporate video, 2011. 92 Fig. 1.20b. Congestion at Apapa port, 2018. 92 Figs. 1.21a. and 1.21b. Sharing the thrill of life at sea via the Maersk twitter account. 93 Fig. 3.1. Boiler horse power gauge. Still frame from Master Hands (1936). © Handy (Jam) Organization, archival footage supplied by Internet Archive (archive.org) in association with Prelinger Archives. 132 Fig. 4.1. The Mercedes-Benz Museum. 149 Fig. 4.2. Elevator cinema. 151 Fig. 4.3. Elevator cinema: Car racing. 152 Fig. 4.4. Film Installation: Descending from the Horse. 153 Fig. 4.5. Micro cinema. 153 Fig. 4.6. Legend Room One: The Dawn of the Automobile Age. 158 Fig. 4.7. Cinematic space becomes museum space: 2001: A Space Odyssey. 158 Fig. 4.8. The War Room set design turned into museum space: Dr. Strangelove. 160 Fig. 4.9. Film installation “Fragments.” 162 Fig. 4.10. Cinematic screens become museum screens: Blade Runner. 162 Fig. 5.1. Frames from Vu Feier an Eisen, a reconstructed version of Columeta (1921–1922), reel I. Courtesy of Centre national de l’audiovisuel (Luxembourg)/Arcelor Mittal. 180 Fig. 5.2. Frames from Vu Feier an Eisen, a reconstructed version of Columeta (1921–1922), reel II, III and IV. Courtesy of Centre national de l’audiovisuel (Luxembourg)/Arcelor Mittal. 181 Fig. 5.3. Frames from Vu Feier an Eisen, a reconstructed version of Columeta (1921–1922), end of reel IV. Courtesy of Centre national de l’audiovisuel (Luxembourg)/Arcelor Mittal. 182 lisT oF illusTraTions 11 Fig. 5.4. Frames from Vu Feier an Eisen, a reconstructed version of Columeta (1921–1922), reel V. Courtesy of Centre national de l’audiovisuel (Luxembourg)/Arcelor Mittal. 183 Fig. 5.5. Charles Bernhoeft, Hauts fourneaux de Dudelange (Blast furnaces of Dudelange), collotype, from the al- bum series Le Grand-Duché de Luxembourg (1889–1891). © Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art – Luxembourg. 189 Fig. 5.6. Nicolas Ries and Robert Hausemer, Le beau pays de Luxembourg (The beautiful country of Luxembourg, 1932). 190 Fig. 5.7. Article on the Luxembourgian pavilion at the 1937 World Fair in Paris in A-Z – Luxemburger illustrierte Wochenschrift, no. 23 (1937), pp. 4–5. 192 Fig. 5.8. Frames from Aciéries dans un parc (dir. Georges Lust, 1960s, 45 min). Courtesy of Centre national de l’audiovisuel (Luxembourg)/Arcelor Mittal. 193 Figs. 6.1a.–6.1c. Film stills from Přístav v srdci Evropy (The Harbour in the Heart of Europe, Drahoslav Holub, 1946). 213 Fig. 6.2a. Cover of J.S. Kupka’s novel Rušné dny (Busy days, 1955). 218 Fig. 6.2b. Cover of Zdeněk Pluhař’s novel Modré údolí (Blue valley, 1954). 218 Fig. 6.3a. Recruiting poster for the construction of Lipno hydro- power plant, 1952. 220 Fig. 6.3b. Cover of the economic research report Rozvoj energet- iky v ČSR (Energy development in the ČSR, 1950). 220 Figs. 6.4a.–6.4d. Film stills from Lidé nad Čertovou stěnou (People over the Devil’s Wall, Emanuel Kaněra, 1962), showing the construction of the dam, a look at the machinery inside and its recreational benefits. 221 Fig. 7.1. The water sprite at Trollhättan (Erik Josephsson/Carl Eldh, 1910). 228 Fig. 7.2. Old times and new times in Strömkarl (1956). 233 Fig. 7.3a.–7.3c. The “new face” as demonstrated in Det nya ansiktet (1958). 238 Fig. 7.4. An anxious gaze is met with a measuring eye in Den nya sjön (1957). 241 Figs. 7.5. and 7.6. Modern water sprites in Strömkarl (1956). 243 Figs. 8.1. and 8.2. From Sakuma Dam. Picture courtesy Docu- mentary Film Preservation Center, Japan. 257 12 Films THaT Work Harder Fig. 8.3. Blocking and diverting the Tenryū River in Sakuma Dam. Picture courtesy Documentary Film Preservation Center, Japan. 259 Fig. 8.4. Blasting in Sakuma Dam. Picture courtesy Documen- tary Film Preservation Center, Japan. 263 Figs. 8.5.–8.6. Workers’ faces in Sakuma Dam. Pictures courtesy Documentary Film Preservation Center, Japan. 264 Fig. 9.1. Screenshot from L’électrification des chemins de fer suisses/Die Elektrifikation der Schweiz. Eisenbahnen (The Electrification of the Swiss Federal Railway Net- work, 1921–1926) (Cinémathèque suisse Lausanne). 280 Figs. 9.2.–9.6. Screenshots from Dienstbare Kraft/Forces domptés (Useful Power), sponsored by OSEC in 1938 (Cinémathèque suisse Lausanne). 282 Figs. 9.7.–9.10. Screenshots from Drei in einem Boot (Three in a Boat) from the early 1950s (Cinémathèque suisse Lausanne). 291 Fig. 10.1. Lights dimmed and projector ready for a BTF non- theatrical f ilm show, c. 1970. 300 Fig. 10.2. The BTF unit on location at Marylebone railway station, London, during 1969. 305 Fig. 10.3. Checking 16 mm prints on completion of a screening. As many as two hundred copies of each title were held in the BTF Film Library. 308 Fig. 10.4. British Rail’s prestige cinema coach, which was launched in 1975, could be used on special trains to show f ilms at 100 mph! 309 Fig. 10.5. A BTF non-theatrical programme for 1955 creates an appetite for travel. 311 Fig. 11.1. Cover of L’avant-scène cinéma. 319 Fig. 11.2. Editorial in L’avant-scène cinéma with an image of Charlie Chaplin. 320 Fig. 11.3. The cover of a special issue of La revue de Rouen devoted to the festival (1958). 325 Fig. 13.1. System colour logo, July 1915. 366 Fig. 13.2. H.B. Vanderblue, “Bringing the Factory to the Clerk: Motion Pictures of Making Processes Visualize Sales Arguments for Counter Use,” System (December 1912). 372 Fig. 13.3. Henry W. Mitchell, “The Camera as a Salesman,” System (December 1910). 376 lisT oF illusTraTions 13 Fig. 13.4. David Lay, “Putting ‘Movies’ on the Sales Force,” System (July 1915). 381 Fig. 13.5. David Lay, “Drawing the Crowds to Your Films,” System (September 1915). 383 Fig. 14.1. Chicago Teachers College, experimental multimedia teaching environment, in Business Screen (1962). 394 Fig. 14.2. Production Still, “Communication Series,” interim report, January 1965. Robert Wagner is on the right. 396 Fig. 14.3. Still from Airborne Television: Profile of a School (1962). 399 Fig. 14.4. Dial-up language instruction, in The Teacher and Technology (1966). 405 Fig. 14.5. Central control room, U of Miami’s octagonal AV instructional facility, in The Teacher and Technology (1966). 406 Fig. 14.6. Mulitmedia classroom usage, in The Information Explosion (1966). 407 Fig. 14.7. Panel discussion, The Communication Revolution (1960), with, from the right, Keith Tyler, Marshall McLuhan, Gilbert Seldes, and Edgar Dale. 411 Fig. 14.8. Index for modular possibilities, “A Galaxy of Motion Picture Documents on Communication Theory and the New Educational Media” (1966). 412 Fig. 14.9. Splicing illustrated, “A Galaxy of Motion Picture Documents on Communication Theory and the New Educational Media” (1966). 414 Fig. 14.10. Identif ication of asteroid 2 on print of The Information Explosion (author photo, 2014). 415 Fig. 15.1. Example of a subcam user’s point of view. Image provided by Saadi Lahlou. 433 Fig. 15.2. Example of a subcam user’s point of view. Image provided by Saadi Lahlou. 433 Fig. 15.3. The replay interview. Image provided by Saadi Lahlou. 435 Fig. 17.1. Over thirty Unilever f ilms were available in the Nige- rian UAC f ilm library in the early 1960s, suggestions on their classroom use were supplied. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever from an original in Unilever Archives. Advertisement f ile, UARM UAC/1/11/21/8. 477 Fig. 17.2. The UK advertisements for the f irst three UAC f ilms conjure up a pre-industrial world, in line with 14 Films THaT Work Harder traditional colonial images. Advertisement, Film User, March 1957, p. 93. 480 Fig. 17.3. The new face of Africa is represented by the sixteenth- century bronze head of Queen Mother Idia, emerging from a long period of obscurity. Advertisement, Film User, October 1958, n.p. 481 Fig. 17.4. One of Shell-BP’s “cinerovers” that would tour various districts and regions of Nigeria with a 16 mm projector, a generator, speakers and a collapsible screen on the roof. “More Requests for Films,” Shell-BP Bulletin, no. 1, May 1963, p. 3. 486 Fig. 17.5. Shell’s tour operator invites everybody to take a journey to far away exotic lands. Advertisement, Film User, November 1962, p. 567. 487 Fig. 17.6. After the premiere, Enterprise in Nigeria toured several districts in western Nigeria and was shown to state rulers, governmental off icials and other distinguished personalities. “Enterprise in Nigeria.” UAC News, vol. 11, no. 2, February 1962, p. 10. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever from an original in Unilever Archives, UARM UAC/2/19/3/6/1/1. 489 Fig. 20.1. From Tejidos Chilenos (Fernando Balmaceda, 1965). From the opening. 541 Fig. 20.2. From Tejidos Chilenos (Fernando Balmaceda, 1965). Part of the 2:20 narrationless sequence, which is not in sequential order. There are shots missing from this f igure, but not steps (as there are multiple views of the same step). 542 Fig. 20.3. From Mimbre (Sergio Bravo, 1957). Finished creations. 545 Fig. 20.4. From Mimbre (Sergio Bravo, 1957). Vibrating f ibers. 545 Fig. 20.5. From Mimbre (Sergio Bravo, 1957). Film strip—two ways. 546 Fig. 20.6. From Mimbre (Sergio Bravo, 1957). Four consecutive shots. The f irst two transitions are dissolves; the third is a straight cut. All the transitions are establish graphic matches. 548 Fig. 20.7. From Mimbre (Sergio Bravo, 1957). Compare the visual eye metaphor of the earlier moment (left) to the eye of the penultimate shot of the f ilm (right), an aerial view of the outdoor work space. In both, the metaphoric pupil uses light (from the bottom of the cavity in the lisT oF illusTraTions 15 f irst case and from the reflection of the sky in the second) to suggest life. 549 Fig. 20.8. From Mimbre (Sergio Bravo, 1957). The opening and close shots of the f ilm—of a tree. 549 Fig. 21.1. Soviet delegate walking through the Leonardo Da Vinci Gallery at the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan. Leonardo was one of the early researchers of the process of formation of cracks in metals. 572 Fig. 21.2. University professor using f ilm to explain the process of formation of cracks in metals. 572 Fig. 21.3. Izhor-Film amateur f ilmmakers preparing for a shoot. 576 Fig. 21.4. Filming coworkers on the factory floor. 576 Figs. 22.1. and 22.2. The f ilms in the Archivio Storico ENI. Photographs by Luca Peretti. 584 Fig. 22.3. Filming. From 1. Scenette locali villaggi zona Goxar (Local Vignettes from Towns in the Goxar Area). 587 Fig. 22.4. Bath. From 27. No title. 587 Fig. 22.5. Eating. From 36. Campo attrezzato con tende lungo la costa (Camp with Tents along the Coast). 588 Fig. 22.6. Working. 38. Mezzo di trasporto in movimento, locali al lavoro (Means of Transport in Movement, Locals at Work). 588 Fig. 22.7. Working. From 36. Campo attrezzato con tende lungo la costa (Camp with Tents along the Coast). 589 Fig. 22.8. Working. From 24. Riprese del territorio del Mekran e di alcune attività di rilevamento dei geologi (Filming of the Makran Territory and of Some Survey Activities of the Geologists). 589 Fig. 22.9. Local people, including a veiled woman. From 38. Mezzo di trasporto in movimento, locali al lavoro (Means of Transport in Movement, Locals at Work). 590 Fig. 22.10 Harsh conditions. From 31. Momenti di difficoltà della spedizione dei tecnici verso la Provincia di Fars (Difficult Moments in the Expedition of the Technicians toward the Fars Province). 595 Fig. 22.11. A broken helicopter. From 38. Mezzo di trasporto in movimento, locali al lavoro (Means of Transport in Movement, Locals at Work). 604 Fig. 22.12. Iranian police. From 23. Momenti della spedizione dell’Agip Mineraria negli Zagros (Moments in the Agip Mineraria Expedition in the Zagros Mountains). 597 16 Films THaT Work Harder Fig. 22.13. Dance. From 20. Danze e svaghi di baktiari in un campo. Aerei dell’Agip Mineraria sulla pista nei pressi di Jask (Dance and Recreation in a Bakhtiari Camp. Agip Mineraria’s Airplanes on a Landing Field Close to Jask). 597 Fig. 22.14. Close up. From 1. Scenette locali villaggi zona Goxar (Local Vignettes from Towns in the Goxar Area). 604 Fig. 22.15. Close up. From 37. Immagini varie da una barca in navigazione, scarico pacchi in spiaggia e atterraggio dell’elicottero al campo base lungo la costa del Mekran (Various Images from a Sailing Boat, Unloading Boxes on the Beach and a Helicopter Landing at the Base Camp along the Makran Coast). 605 Fig. 22.16. Orders. From 6. Riprese di danze di beluchi, adulti e bambini e delle attività di un campo in disallestimento (Dance of the Baloch People, Adults and Children, and Dismantling a Camp). 600 Fig. 22.17. Inside a helicopter. From 26. Riprese aeree di un vasto territorio dell’Iran, in particolare dell’area del Mekran (Aerial View of a Vast Territory in Iran, the Area of Makran, in Particular). 600 Fig. 22.18. View from above. From 26. Riprese aeree di un vasto territorio dell’Iran, in particolare dell’area del Mekran (Aerial View of a Vast Territory in Iran, the Area of Makran, in Particular). 601 Fig. 22.19. A city from above. From 17. Documentazione filmica che mostra riprese aeree del territorio degli Zagros, dei villaggi e il campo base della spedizione (Film Documen- tation Showing Aerial Shots of the Zagros Territory, the Villages and the Base Camp of the Expedition). 601 Fig. 22.20. Land. From 26. Riprese aeree di un vasto territorio dell’Iran, in particolare dell’area del Mekran (Aerial View of a Vast Territory in Iran, the Area of Makran, in Particular). 603 Fig. 25.1. Still frame from the assembly line sequence in the documentary f ilm Aux Usines Renault (1920). © Gau- mont Pathé Archives, 1920. 652 Fig. 25.2. Analytical grid of visual sources. © A. Michel, 2001/2017. 659 Fig. 25.3. First written attestation of a Renault Assembly line (Omnia September 1922). © Omnia (1922), Archives de Renault Histoire. 663 lisT oF illusTraTions 17 Fig. 25.4. Picture showing a f irst form of the f inal assembly line, 1917. © Archives de Renault Histoire, Rights reserved, 1917 664 Fig. 25.5. Ferro’s analytical grid of f ilms, 1973. © Marc Ferro, Annales ESC, 1973. 665 Fig. 25.6. Drawing of the C5 workshop, 1918. © Service Outillage Entretien (SOE, 1918), Archives of Renault Histoire Association. 667 Fig. 25.7. Table of the sequences of the documentary Aux usines Renault (1920). © A. Michel, EHESS, 2001. 668 Fig. 25.8. Structure of the scenario of Aux usines Renault (1920). © A. Michel & J. Bernard, EHESS, 2001. 670 Fig. 25.9. Geography of the scenes in Aux usines Renault (1920). © A. Michel & J. Bernard, EHESS, 2001. 672 Fig. 25.10. A 3D restitution of an assembly line operation, 1922. © IDHES-Evry et ArchéoTransfert (2010). 675 Fig. 26.1. Promotional leaflet for the f ilm Following Balint (1976) produced by ScienceFilm and Duvivier for the phar- maceutical company Delagrange. It is an example of authorial ambiguities that could exist in medical f ilms between its medical “author” (Sapir) and the f ilm’s “director” (Duvivier). 695 Fig. 26.2. The actor Michael Lonsdale in Éric Duvivier’s f ilm Following Balint (1976), playing a rather hesitant, middle- aged physician relating his patient case to the peer group. 697 Fig. 26.3. The actor Michael Lonsdale in Jean Eustache’s f ilm A Dirty Story (1977), playing a man who f inds a peephole in the female toilets of a café, conveying in the second part of the f ilm in an off-the-cuff manner. 697 Fig. 26.4. Invitation card announcing the experimental surreal- ist short f ilm programme “Hallucinations” at the La Ranelagh art gallery and experimental movie theatre Le Ranelagh in the capital’s fashionable sixteenth arrondissement in November 1968. The screening was cancelled due to censorship. 700 Fig. 26.5. Poster announcing the experimental surrealist short f ilm programme “Hallucinations” at the experimental movie theatre Le Seine in early 1970. 702 Fig. 26.6. Original entrance ticket to the experimental surrealist short f ilm programme “Hallucinations” at the experi- mental movie theatre Le Seine in early 1970. 703 18 Films THaT Work Harder Fig. 26.7. Publicity for the experimental surrealist short f ilm programme “Hallucinations” at the experimental movie theatre Le Seine in early 1970. 704 Fig. 27.1. Donald Alexander (1913-93), photographed (by his f irst wife, the artist and illustrator Isabel Alexander) in 1939 (BFI National Archive; courtesy Robin Alexander). 712 Fig. 27.2. The opening image of Mining Review 1st Year No. 1 (1947) (BFI National Archive). 718 Fig. 27.3. Autumn 1958 edition of NCB f ilms catalogue (BFI National Archive). 722 Fig. 27.4. Francis Gysin (1921-95), looking through viewfinder of Newman Sinclair camera, directing an early DATA Mining Review. Cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky (1912-2016) looks on (BFI National Archive) 724 Figs. 28.1–28.4 Sartorial transformations in Northwest Passage and Desert Venture. 742 Fig. 28.5. Advertisement for Desert Venture in Business Screen. 745 Fig. 28.6. Publicity image of Robert Yarnall Richie for Desert Venture. 748 Fig. 29.1. The chief engineer’s wife turns on the radio. 767 Fig. 29.2. “Do you suffer from corns and bunions?” [close-up of speaker]. 767 Fig. 29.3. A child recites addition. Fig. 29.4. The last sum. 775 Fig. 29.5. A till presents the answer. 775 Introduction: A Sequel and a Shift Vinzenz Hediger, Florian Hoof, Yvonne Zimmermann This book is unique in that it is a sequel. Academic publications do not usually have sequels. Sequels in the f ilm industry limit novelty as much as possible to minimize risk, whereas in science, like in art, risk-taking is a virtue and relevance flows from originality and novelty. This book, however, departs from its predecessor, Films That Work,1 not through minimal varia- tion, but through what the language of management calls diversif ication and expansion. In business, diversif ication and expansion result from a quest for prof it. This book has a different motivation: It reflects the conviction that the work which the f irst book started was not f inished, but only beginning. It also reflects the reality that a signif icant number of scholars, many of whom are now represented in this volume, shared this conviction and had already set out to consolidate and expand the f ield mapped by the f irst book. The original Films That Work covered a wide variety of topics but was held together by what may be described as a shared research design. It combined a broad and bold working hypothesis with a manageable, relatively limited focus. The working hypothesis was that economic activity is inexorably tied to – i.e. dependent upon and shaped by – media and media infrastructures. Industrial f ilms were, in other words, not merely an add on and, over time, a source of historical information but an indispensable part of industrial organization. This was a bold claim for the f ields of social and economic history and, following the work of JoAnne Yates2 and Susan Leigh Star,3 less so for management and science and technology studies. Prior to Films That Work, Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson’s Useful Cinema,4 Lee 1 Hediger, Vinzenz, and Patrick Vonderau, editors. Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 2 Yates, JoAnne. Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 3 Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43, no. 3, 1999, pp. 377–91. 4 Acland, Charles R., and Haidee Wasson, editors. Useful Cinema. Duke University Press, 2011. Hediger, V., F. Hoof, Y. Zimmermann, with S. Anthony (eds), Films That Work Harder: The Circula- tion of Industrial Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2024 doi: 10.5117/9789462986534_intro 20 Films THaT Work Harder Grieveson’s Cinema and the Wealth of Nations5 and Florian Hoof’s Angels of Efficiency,6 it was certainly a bold claim for f ilm studies – a f ield which owed its existence to the demonstration that a canon of important art works exists in cinema and which, as a consequence, had barely paid attention to objects deemed artless like commissioned f ilms, let alone to the nexus between business, industrial organization and f ilm. The focus of Films That Work was manageable because it was limited to the f irm as the privileged organizational entity; to the 1895–1970 time period with an emphasis on the post-war period of economic expansion; and to moving images as key elements in the “Medienverbund” of the f irm, the media network which sustains the f irm and makes its operation possible. Films That Work Harder maintains the original working hypothesis and diversif ies and expands this approach to include a broader array of organiza- tions beyond the classical f irm; to cover a broader geographical territory – in fact, all continents except Australia and Antarctica – and to expand the time frame from about 1970 to the contemporary transformations of the global economy. The most important modif ication, however, is the one indicated by the subtitle of the book: a shift from a focus on production to circulation or, if you will, a shift from the f irst volume of Das Kapital to the second. Industrial films from the period of early cinema through what Anna Maria Falchero in this volume calls the “golden age” of industrial film, which coincides with Les Trente Glorieuses in France and the “economic miracles” in Germany and Italy, i.e. the post-war economic expansion between 1945 and 1973, tend to focus on processes of production. As Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky shows in her contribution to this volume and her recent book,7 the process f ilm is a genre unto itself, a cultural template of modernity which originates in visual representations of the eighteenth century and, by way of the industrial f ilm, pervades other areas of cinema as well. In the spirit of the industrial f ilm’s focus on production, the subtitle of the first volume spoke of the “productivity of industrial cinema.” But as Karl Marx writes in the Grundrisse einer Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, modern industry production is not an end in itself, but a means. Production serves to accumulate surplus value, which is the subject of Volume 1 of Das Kapital. However, that value is only realized in the sphere of circulation, which is the subject of the (unfinished and posthumously 5 Grieveson, Lee. Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System. University of California Press, 2017. 6 Hoof, Florian. Angels of Efficiency: A Media History of Consulting. Oxford University Press, 2020. 7 Aguilera Skvirsky, Salomé. The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor. Duke University Press, 2020. inTroduc Tion: a sequel and a sHiFT 21 published) Volume 2. So, if indeed we are to fully understand how industrial organization relates to the moving image, we need to look not only at produc- tion, but at circulation, and at how circulation enables and informs production. This claim seems even more valid from the vantage point of today’s economy and the transformation brought about by the introduction of the standardized shipping container and the development of point-to-point supply chain logistics,8 which runs parallel to and goes hand in hand with digitization. The classical factory, the focus of many, if not most, industrial f ilms up to 1970, had a specific location close to raw materials such as iron ore and coal, proximity to markets and large inventories. From the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, the classical factory – in exemplary fashion in the textile industry, which was at the forefront of industrialization in North-western Europe – greatly benefited from colonialism’s exctractive supply chains for raw materials and human labor spanning Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, which also served to trade f inished products back to the point of extraction. But in this system, the classical factory was the central node, a site of production organized around proprietary technologies and processes which were jealously guarded by their owners. It was also typically a national institution. “What is good for General Motors is good for America,” Charles Erwin Wilson, president of General Motors, famously said during his Senate confirmation hearings to become Eisenhower’s secretary of defense in 1953. Wilson said this to justify his decision not to divest himself of his important shareholding position in his company and was widely ridiculed for it, but he expressed, in the words of one commentator, an “undisputable fact of modern political life.”9 Container shipping has largely invalidated Wilson’s equation. By dramatically lowering the cost and increasing the speed and reliability of transportation, containerization has replaced the classical factory model with global supply chains, which span the globe according to where labour and raw material inputs are cheapest and where demand is highest. General Motors took the lead in this process when they relocated most of their production away from Detroit and Flint, Michigan, to lower cost locations in the 1980s, leaving a trail of social and economic destruction which Michael Moore showcased in what was at the time the most successful theatrical documentary of all time, Roger 8 Levinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton University Press, 2006; Klose, Alexander. The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think. MIT Press, 2015. 9 Redish, Martin H., and Howard M. Wasserman. “What’s Good for General Motors: Corporate Speech and the Theory of Free Expression.” George Washington Law Review, vol. 66, no. 2, 1997–1998, pp. 235–96. 22 Films THaT Work Harder and Me from 1989. But this change from what Marc Levinson describes as the “massive industrial complexes in vogue since the turn of the twentieth century” to “networks of much smaller factories, linked by international supply chains and employing even smaller numbers of workers” affects not just the volume and location, but the types and forms of labour. Well-paid factory jobs disappeared, and in the new economy value comes “from in- novation, design, and marketing, not from the physical process of tuning raw materials into finished goods.”10 What is more, as Anthony G. Hopkins writes, “the breakdown of complementarities between industrial metropoles and primary-producing peripheries, undermined vertical, hierarchic imperial systems,” potentially furthering notions of racial equality and democracy.11 What is clear is that what economists and sociologists started calling glo- balization in the 1980s amounts to more than just an extension of trade and a proliferation of what William Cronon, in his discussion of the emergence of the futures market for grain in the nineteenth century, calls the “transmuta- tion” of material objects and their displacement into “the symbolic world of capital.”12 From a media theory point of view one could argue that with containerization production, distribution and consumption f inally fully catch up with the property of money as the primary medium of exchange, which according to Marx, still in the Grundrisse, is to split exchange into two acts, sale and purchase in different locations at different times. As early as 1990, at the very onset of the second wave of globalization, Arjun Appadurai described what the emerging economic and social order means in terms of disjuncture and difference in the new global cultural economy.13 Considering the history of the industrial f ilm and its long-standing focus on production and the f irm, the demise of the classical factory alone is reason enough to shift the focus from production to circulation. Film and media studies in the years since the publication of Films That Work has seen a turn towards the study of infrastructure in the work of Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Lisa Parks, Nicole Starosielski, Gabriele Schabacher, Rahul Mukherjee and others.14 A shift from production to circulation in 10 Levinson, Marc. An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy. Random House, 2016, p. 131. 11 Hopkins, A.G. “Globalisation and Decolonisation.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 45, no. 5, 2017, pp. 241–42. 12 Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W.W. Norton, 1991, p. 120. 13 Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Last: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 14 Braun, Marta, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier, editors. Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema. John Libbey, 2012; Parks, Lisa, and inTroduc Tion: a sequel and a sHiFT 23 the study of industrial f ilm involves a similar focus on the material ar- rangements that sustain industrial organization and economic activity beyond the factory, both in the past and present. At the same time, the question of how cinematic forms act as part of such material arrangements remains central. Across the transformations sketched above, the moving image remains a constant factor of the “Medienverbund,” which sustains industrial organization, and it remains what is perhaps the privileged format of corporate communication with so-called stakeholders, even as digital infrastructures and technologies supplant older media across organizations. The circulation of industrial f ilms has always been facilitated by small- gauge f ilms and mobile projectors.15 But while Les Trente Glorieuses and the “economic miracle” period may have been the golden age of the theatrical industrial f ilm, the transition to digital platforms and the emergence of compression formats like MP4 – which is to sounds and images as the shipping container is to consumer goods, and which is a global standard approved and regulated by the same body, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)16 – has created more outlets for moving images which can be described as industrial f ilms than at any other point in history. In particular, corporations use digital platforms like YouTube for global recruitment and to spread messages of sustainability. The latter have become de rigueur since the human and environmental costs of what J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke call “the great acceleration” have become apparent, i.e. the phase of unprecedented growth since 1945, which has made humans the determining factor in the history of the environment and which is also known as the “Anthropocene.”17 In that sense, the study of the circulations of industrial f ilm offers a perspective on media history more generally, as well as on environmental history and the study of the ecology and/of media.18 Nicole Starosielski, editors. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. University of Illinois Press, 2015; Starosielski, Nicole. The Undersea Network. Duke University Press, 2015; Schabacher, Gabriele. “Mobilizing Transport: Media, Actor-World, and Infrastructures.” Transfers, vol. 3, no. 1, 2013; Mukherjee, Rahul. Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty. Duke University Press, 2020. 15 Wasson, Haidee. Everyday Movies: Portable Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture. University of California Press, 2020. 16 Sterne, Jonathan. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Duke University Press, 2012; Jancovic, Marek, Alexandra Schneider, and Axel Volmar, editors. Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media. Meson Press, 2020. 17 McNeill, J.R., and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Belknap Press, 2014. 18 See, for example, Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Techno- culture. MIT Press, 2007. 24 Vinzenz Hediger, Florian HooF, Y Vonne zimmermann What we propose to call the “circulations of industrial cinema” has three aspects: How industrial f ilms represent circulation, how they operate as part of the infrastructures of circulation, and how they themselves circulate (that is, how distribution affects and potentially transforms their meaning and operation). In sales, the role of f ilm is usually limited to advertising rather than the visualization of process (unless the visualization of process serves advertising purposes, as a symbolic warranty of the quality of the product).19 This makes the infrastructures and networks of circulation all the more signif icant if and when they come into view – for instance, in f ilms about state-sponsored building projects, shipping and communication, but also in f ilms about the primary medium of exchange, money. But it is equally as important to pay attention when they remain absent and their operation is simply assumed. In the f irst volume, industrial cinema was discussed as a parasite form, i.e. a form of cinema that strategically adopts and inhabits other forms of cinema and adapts artistic forms and techniques to the requirements of specif ic pragmatic contexts or spaces of communication, to use Roger Odin’s term,20 with the ultimate goal of “disappearing in communication,” as Michel Serres phrases it.21 This is a property of infrastructures more generally speaking. Media infrastructures disappear into communication, and they only become perceptible when they break down, as Karen Ruhleter and Susan Leigh Star have argued,22 or, following Fritz Heider, when established routines or formats of perception are thwarted.23 In that sense, industrial f ilms as part of the media infrastructure of circulation are particularly salient when they leave their designated space of communication. As they migrate across other spaces, in the new, decentralized and fluid forms of corporate communication, but also in new environments such as relational databases and digital archives, industrial f ilms become media boundary objects,24 i.e. objects that can mean different things to different people and 19 See Florin, Bo, Patrick Vonderau, and Yvonne Zimmermann. Advertising and the Transforma- tion of Screen Cultures. Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 20 Odin, Roger. Spaces of Communication. Amsterdam University Press, 2022. 21 Serres, Michel. Le parasite. Grasset, 1980. 22 Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces.” Information Systems Research, vol. 7, no. 1, 1996, pp. 111–34. 23 Heider, Fritz. “Thing and Medium.” On Perception, Event, Structure, and Psychological Environment: Selected Papers. International Universities Press, 1959. 24 Hoof, Florian. “The Media Boundary Objects Concept: Theorizing Film and Media.” MediaMat- ters: The Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath. Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 180–200. inTroduc Tion: a sequel and a sHiFT 25 serve different purposes in different contexts, ranging from the original purpose of industrial organization to an afterlife in the sense of Warburg,25 whether as historical markers or as raw material for artistic production. The contributions to this book cover the three aspects of the circulations of industrial f ilm – representation, operation, distribution – from a variety of angles and based on a broad range of case studies. The volume escapes the fate of what Hegel calls the “schlechte Unendlichkeit,” the miserable infinity, of an endlessly proliferating series of case studies by largely sharing the modified heuristics which informs this sequel: that in industrial modernity, there is no production without circulation and neither without media, and that the moving image, as their enduring element, offers a privileged handle on both the analogue and digital media networks of industrial organization. The book is organized in seven sections. Section 1, “Networks and Flows: Visualizing Value Chains,” consists of four approaches to infrastructures and media networks beyond the factory. Furthermore, it tackles the afterlife of industrial f ilm both as the circulation of meaning and by focusing on the material and political consequences that prevail over time. In Chapter 1, “The Aesthetics of the Global Value Chain: Container Shipping, Media Networks and the Problem of Visibility in the Global Sphere of Circulation,” Vinzenz Hediger addresses the question of the form of infrastructures by analysing the corporate image strategy of Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping provider. He develops the outline of an aesthetics of the global value chain by analysing three different, but interconnected types or styles of visibility: critical, operative and representational visibility. In Chapter 2, “Object Lessons and Infrastructural Imperialism,” Lee Grieveson highlights the antecedents of the recent transformations of the world economy by showing how the US government in the 1910s and 1920s used industrial f ilms to promote the construction of roads and the Pan-American highway system, with a view to facilitating the circulation of capital and new practices of economic imperialism during the period in which the US become the world’s dominant industrial state. Thomas Turnbull adds an aspect of media theory in Chapter 3, “Energy and Industrial Film: Energo-Critical Registers,” by proposing a thermodynamic reading of industrial f ilm that addresses them as agents of form, content and transmission of energy. He draws on a wide range of industrial f ilms from the 1920s through the 1960s to argue that industrial cinema can be analysed in ways that are congruent with the physicist’s 25 Warburg, Aby. Nachhall der Antike. Zwei Untersuchungen. Edited by Pablo Schneider. Diaphanes, 2011; Didi-Huberman, Georges. The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art. Penn State University Press, 2016. 26 Vinzenz Hediger, Florian HooF, Y Vonne zimmermann concept of energy. In Chapter 4, “Digital Afterlife of Industrial Film: Weak Dispositives, Choice Architecture and the Distribution of Industrial Cinema,” Florian Hoof develops a theoretical model to describe the digital afterlife of industrial f ilm. Taking the German car industry as his example, he discusses the reappearance of industrial f ilm as a cinematic experience structured by “weak dispositives” that are constantly being stabilized by relating them to “cinematic time” and “cinematic space.” Section 2, “Operative Iconographies, Industry and the Nation State,” studies the implications, tensions and contradictions inherent in Charles E. Wilson’s famous claim that corporate and national political interests align. Putting a focus on water and (media) infrastructures of hydropower, it illustrates how media and industrial f ilm in particular turn the economic resource of water into a (national) cultural resource.26 In Chapter 5, “Beauti- ful Luxembourg, Steel Works and a Swimming Pool: The Corporate Film Columeta and the Formation of a Corporate and a National Image,” Ira Plein focuses on the steel industry in Luxembourg and shows how this industry, represented by the dominant company, ARBED, created and perpetuated an iconography that became operative also for the nation state of Luxembourg. In Chapter 6, “Hydropower for a Sealess Nation: Representation of Water Energy in Czech Visual Culture,” Lucie Česálková explores the cultural imagination of rivers, waterways and generally water as a source of energy in Czech f ilm and visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In particular, she traces landlocked Czechoslovakia’s dream of ocean ac- cess and its water management projects across the economical paradigm shift from capitalist to nationalized socialist order. In Chapter 7, “Modern Water Sprites: History, People and the Landscape of Northern Sweden in Vattenfall’s Film Production in the 1950s,” Fabian Zimmer outlines a cultural history of hydroelectricity in Sweden by looking at f ilms from the Swedish state-owned enterprise Vattenfall. Zimmer traces the narratives of hydroelectric modernity through the “golden age” of Vattenfall’s f ilm production to study their rhetoric and discursive contexts. In Chapter 8, “Taxonomy of Techniques: Visions of Industrial Cinema in Post-war Japan,” Takuya Tsunoda discusses an infrastructure project in post-war Japan, which was the subject of Sakuma Dam, a series of highly popular industrial f ilms for theatrical distribution made between 1954 and 1958. Tsunoda shows 26 Bartelheim, Martin, et al. “‘ResourceCultures’ – A Concept for Investigating the Use of Resources in Different Societies.” Persistent Economic Ways of Living: Production, Distribution, and Consumption in Late Prehistory and Early History, edited by Alžběta Danielisová and Manuel Fernández-Götz. Archaeolingua Alapítvány, 2015, pp. 39–50. inTroduc Tion: a sequel and a sHiFT 27 how these f ilms served to convey a new sense of industrial modernity both through the infrastructural changes they represented and through their form and technique as an epitome of state-ordained modernization and democratization. In Chapter 9, “The Power of Flows: The Spatiality of Industrial Films on Hydropower in Switzerland,” the f inal chapter of this section, Yvonne Zimmermann draws on Manuel Castells’ concept of “the space of flows” to explain how films on hydropower in Switzerland from the 1930s and 1950s mediate between the dynamic space of flows of technology and economy and the static places of society within a national framework that uses water – and its power – as a cultural resource. Section 3, “Institutions and Distribution Frameworks: Archives, Festivals, Fairs,” tackles the distribution aspect of the circulations of industrial f ilm and how this relates to the conceptualization and the building of audiences, the creation of imagined communities, and technological frameworks of visual display. In Chapter 10, “Industry on Screen: The British Documentary in Distribution – British Transport Films: A Case Study,” Steve Foxon provides an overview of the distribution of the British documentary f ilm from the interwar period to the 1960s and its “aftermath” in the age of video and the digital. With a focus on the f ilms made by British Transport Films, he describes the various target audiences that should be persuaded by these f ilms and outlines a typology of distribution modalities and venues. In Chapter 11, “On the Red Carpet in Rouen: Industrial Film Festivals and a World Community of Filmmakers,” Brian Jacobson discusses the history of industrial f ilm festivals as key nodes in shifting global networks of cultural and economic exchange. Tracing the history of these events from early f ilm festivals held in the 1950s in Europe, he argues that they were crucial to build and unite a community of capitalists with an international community of f ilmmakers. In Chapter 12, “Cinema and Industrial Design: Showmanship, Fairs and the Exhibition Film,” Haidee Wasson discusses the history of form and circulation of industrial f ilm in context of industrial fairs and exhibitions. By focusing on the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, she describes how cinema was an integral part of a wider array of presentational techniques but also how f ilm stood out as a key element of such events, as one of the persistent and most voluble public interfaces for industrial and sponsored media. Section 4, “Teaching Oneself and Others,” focuses on pedagogy and governance in and through industrial f ilms. It looks more closely on how these f ilms were part of the co-creation and the circulation of knowledge and how they affected concepts of subjectivity. In Chapter 13, “Putting Films to Work: System, the Magazine for Business,” Gregory A. Waller studies 28 Vinzenz Hediger, Florian HooF, Y Vonne zimmermann how this prominent American business periodical advised manufacturers and retailers on how to use moving pictures to boost sales and increase eff iciency and managerial oversight in the workplace. Waller argues that System at this formative historical moment articulated the possibilities of f ilm as an emerging and still largely untapped “force in the world of business.” In Chapter 14, “New Media for the Schools of Tomorrow: The AV Instructional Films of Robert W. Wagner,” Charles R. Acland looks at how new media and multimedia ensembles related to the educational realm in the post-WWII period. He parallels the work of Robert W. Wagner with ecological concepts from media theory that try to understand new environ- ments of images and sounds. In Chapter 15, “We Must Know More Than We Can See: Images for Vocational Training and the Emergence of Cognitive Ergonomics,” Guilherme Machado analyses techniques of video-based pedagogy and the emergence of a new type of ergonomics, which is focused on mental rather than bodily processes in a key moment in the broader history of industrial labour, the transition to the so-called “post-industrial” or service economy in the 1960s and 1970s. In Chapter 16, “Free Enterprise Film: Aims of Industry, Economic Propaganda and the Development of a Neoliberal Cinema,” Scott Anthony discusses the f ilmmaking activities of Aims of Industry, an influential educational organization in Britain in the immediate post-war years. He analyses how Aims’ library circulated a range of industrial and sponsored f ilms and argues that in the consumerist, privatizing and post-industrial mode of cinema patronized by Aims some of the cultural origins of neoliberalism can be discerned. Section 5, “Post/Colonial Industries and Third Industrial Cinemas,” brings together approaches to industrial f ilm and empire at the threshold of decolonization and shows how industrial f ilm built and shaped colonial audiences. In Chapter 17, “Framing Local and International Sentiments and Sounds: Unilever and Royal Dutch Shell in a Changing Nigeria,” Rud- mer Canjels shows how the f ilm department of Royal Dutch Shell, one of the oldest and most prolif ic units of any major company, used music to anchor their image and educational f ilms in local and regional cultures and soundscapes to postulate a connection between enterprise and na- tion with a view to its continued operation in post-independence Nigeria. In Chapter 18, “Working through the End of Empire,” Tom Rice discusses industrial f ilm as a governmental approach to shape concepts of citizenship in the context of the colonial history of the British Empire and shows that f ilm became increasingly important in the government’s work to def ine and shape productive citizens and to formalize economic ties between colonizer and colonized. In Chapter 19, “Cinema-going on the Railway inTroduc Tion: a sequel and a sHiFT 29 Tracks: Transportation, Circulation and Exhibition of Information Film in Colonial India,” Ravi Vasudevan addresses the role of railways as a mode of f ilm distribution and a site of exhibition in colonial India. Discussing the logistics and programmes of the mobile exhibition by train, Vasudevan shows how the British administration used f ilm to educate the rural population by intermingling educational f ilms with travel f ilms and other attractions to cultivate an audience. In Chapter 20, “The Latin American Process Film,” Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky addresses a shared concern with process, i.e. with the material and bodily aspects of production, across a wide range of Latin American f ilms and discusses the connection between post-war industrialization and the emergence of the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Section 6, “Production Cultures and/of the Industrial Film: Amateurs and Professionals,” demonstrates that, much as f ilm has never been exclusively tied to the dispositive of cinema, industrial f ilms are not exclusively tied to the factory. Rather, they need to be understood as cultural practices that exist beyond and constantly permeate organizational boundaries. In Chapter 21, “Soviet Industrial Film across Categories: Negotiating between Utility, Art and Science,” Maria Vinogradova shows how despite the absence of an established category of “industrial f ilm” within the Soviet f ilm industry, such films were produced and spanned a broad variety of types, such as industrial process, educational, labour and advertising f ilm. She explains how the focus on production processes reflects an economic system based on central planning. In Chapter 22, “‘There Is No Life More Reckless and Adventuresome Than That of the Oil Prospector’: ENI’s Geologist-Filmmakers in Iran,” Luca Peretti shows how the prospectors of Italy’s state energy company ENI were also consummate amateur f ilmmakers who combined their geological exploration with the making of personal travelogues and family f ilms, which complement the off icial presentation of the company’s activities in Iran in f ilms, such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s three-part documentary La via del petrolio. In Chapter 23, “Industrial Film from the Home Studio: Amateur Cinema and Low-Budget Corporate Moving Image Culture in West Germany (1950 to 1977),” Alexander Stark takes amateur f ilmmaker Elisabeth Wilms, “the f ilming baker’s wife” from the city of Dortmund in Western Germany, as his case study to show how amateur f ilm practices intersected with the f ield of sponsored f ilm in the 1950s to the late 1970s. In Chapter 24, “Movie and Industry in Italy: The ‘Golden Age’ of Italian Industrial Documentary (1950–1970),” Anna Maria Falchero offers a comprehensive account of in- dustrial f ilm production during the post-war boom era, with a focus on the main lines of f ilm on output in terms of production arrangements, 30 Vinzenz Hediger, Florian HooF, Y Vonne zimmermann themes and distribution. And f inally, in Chapter 25, “A Film That Doesn’t Seem to Work: A Shot of Renault’s Early Assembly Line (1920 to 1929) – A Case Study, Methodology and 3D Restitution for Film Analysis,” Alain P. Michel traces the trajectory of At the Renault Factory, a f ilm produced in the 1920s to showcase Renault’s effort during WWI, through different storage and distribution formats. He discusses the implications of the loss of the f ilm’s original materiality as he reconstructs the f ilm’s original production context through a combination of new methodologies such as systematic cross-analysis and 3D technology. Section 7, “Ephemeral Artistry: Ecologies of Authorship in Industrial Cinema,” addresses a spectre which continues to haunt industrial f ilm research despite the f ield’s radically pragmatist orientation and focus on the nexus of cinematic form and industrial organization rather than expression: the spectre of authorship. In doing so, the section highlights one aspect of cinematic form in particular which has hitherto been largely neglected: sound. In Chapter 26, “Business and Art: Pharmaceutical Industries, Film Production and Circulation, and the French Film Production Company ScienceFilm, 1960–1980,” Christian Bonah sheds light on the production and circulation of chemical-pharmaceutical f ilms from the point of view of the f ilm production company ScienceFilm, founded by French f ilm director Éric Duvivier, a nephew of Julien Duvivier. Bonah shows how Duvivier connected his industrial f ilmmaking practice, which spans f ifty years from 1950 to 2000, with contemporary f ilm art while enlisting leading physicians as allies for contracting with industrial sponsors. In Chapter 27, “Transfer of Power: Films Off icers in the British Coal Industry,” Patrick Russell sug- gests that pragmatism and functionalism developed in the early phases of industrial f ilm research by arguing for a concept of co-authorship. Based on a comprehensive survey of the British post-war f ilm production in the energy f ield, Russell proposes an engagement with f ilm style which remains attentive to moments of singularity rather than focusing exclusively on regular patterns. In Chapter 28, “Saudi Arabia’s John Ford? Robert Yarnall Richie, Desert Venture and Ephemeral Authorship in Industrial Film,” Martin Stollery offers an even more direct challenge to Rick Prelinger’s sugges- tion that we should try to avoid the trap of auteurism this time around. He proposes the concept of “ephemeral authorship” to show how reviews and other paratexts treated Robert Yarnall Richie’s Desert Venture, a f ilm commissioned by Saudi-American oil giant ARAMCO, as a documentary work in the tradition of Robert J. Flaherty and John Ford, enlisting auteurist discourse to broaden the audience for a corporate f ilm. In Chapter 29, “Sounds Industrial: Understanding the Contribution of Music and Sound inTroduc Tion: a sequel and a sHiFT 31 in Industrial Films,” Annette Davison focuses on a sample of promotional industrial f ilms produced by the Shell Film Unit in the 1950s under the supervision of Arthur Elton to highlight the importance of sound and music in industrial f ilms. She identif ies and evaluates techniques of audiovisual rhetoric which are crucial to the work of industrial f ilms but have so far been overlooked. In the f inal contribution to the volume, Chapter 30, “Creative Films for Creative Corporations: Music and Musicians in Experimental Italian Industrial Films,” Alessandro Cecchi shows how Italian corporations in the 1950s and 1960s enlisted modernist composers like Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, Franco Potenza and Vittorio Gelmetti to produce musical scores which often featured electronic sounds and projected an aura of innovation and technological sophistication even as they resonated with some of the major trends of the contemporary musical avant-garde. This book is partially based on a discussion and screening event held in Frankfurt in December 2015. Other contributions were then added to fully represent the current state of the f ield. Frankfurt is an apposite choice for a discussion on industrial f ilm and circulation not just because of its role as the f inancial centre of Germany and, increasingly, Europe. Frankfurt was also the headquarters of the Thurn und Taxis postal service monopoly from 1810 to 1867, which was a key system of communication in the early phases of industrialization and became an agency of the Prussian state after the war of 1866, further boosting the industrial development of “Gründerzeit” Germany. Frankfurt is today the site of DE-CIX, the world’s largest internet exchange in terms of average traff ic throughput and the key node of the internet in Europe. It is, in other words, a good vantage point for further sequels. The editors wish to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for funding. The book was made possible with the help of Nayang Technological University, ConTrust Frankfurt and MECS Lüneburg. And, last but not least, the editors wish to express their gratitude to our editorial assistants, Matthias Augsbach and Luca Schepers, without whose tireless effort this book would never have seen the light of day. Works Cited Acland, Charles R., and Haidee Wasson, editors. Useful Cinema. Duke University Press, 2011. Aguilera Skvirsky, Salomé. The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor. Duke University Press, 2020. 32 Vinzenz Hediger, Florian HooF, Y Vonne zimmermann Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Last: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Uni- versity of Minnesota Press, 1996. Bartelheim, Martin, et al. “‘ResourceCultures’ – A Concept for Investigating the Use of Resources in Different Societies.” Persistent Economic Ways of Living: Production, Distribution, and Consumption in Late Prehistory and Early History, edited by Alžběta Danielisová and Manuel Fernández-Götz. Archaeolingua Alapítvány, 2015, pp. 39–50. Braun, Marta, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier, editors. Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema. John Libbey, 2012. Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W.W. Norton, 1991. Didi-Huberman, Georges. The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art. Penn State University Press, 2016. Florin, Bo, Patrick Vonderau, and Yvonne Zimmermann. Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures. Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. MIT Press, 2007. Grieveson, Lee. Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System. University of California Press, 2017. Hediger, Vinzenz, and Patrick Vonderau, editors. Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Heider, Fritz. “Thing and Medium.” On Perception, Event, Structure, and Psychological Environment: Selected Papers. International Universities Press, 1959. Hoof, Florian. Angels of Efficiency: A Media History of Consulting. Oxford University Press, 2020. Hoof, Florian. “The Media Boundary Objects Concept: Theorizing Film and Media.” MediaMatters: The Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath. Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 180–200. Hopkins, A.G. “Globalisation and Decolonisation.” Journal of Imperial and Com- monwealth History, vol. 45, no. 5, 2017, pp. 729–45. Jancovic, Marek, Alexandra Schneider, and Axel Volmar, editors. Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media. Meson Press, 2020. Klose, Alexander. The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think. MIT Press, 2015. Levinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton University Press, 2006. Levinson, Marc. An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy. Random House, 2016. McNeill, J.R., and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Belknap Press, 2014. inTroduc Tion: a sequel and a sHiFT 33 Mukherjee, Rahul. Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty. Duke University Press, 2020. Odin, Roger. Spaces of Communication. Amsterdam University Press, 2020. Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski, editors. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. University of Illinois Press, 2015. Redish, Martin H., and Howard M. Wasserman. “What’s Good for General Motors: Corporate Speech and the Theory of Free Expression.” George Washington Law Review, vol. 66, no. 2, 1997–1998, pp. 235–96. Schabacher, Gabriele. “Mobilizing Transport: Media, Actor-World, and Infrastruc- tures.” Transfers, vol. 3, no. 1, 2013. Serres, Michel. Le parasite. Grasset, 1980. Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43, no. 3, 1999, pp. 377–91. Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces.” Information Systems Research, vol. 7, no. 1, 1996, pp. 111–34. Starosielski, Nicole. The Undersea Network. Duke University Press, 2015. Sterne, Jonathan. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Duke University Press, 2012. Warburg, Aby. Nachhall der Antike. Zwei Untersuchungen. Edited by Pablo Schneider. Diaphanes, 2011. Wasson, Haidee. Everyday Movies: Portable Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture. University of California Press, 2020. Yates, JoAnne. Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Section 1 Networks and Flows: Visualizing Value Chains 1 The Aesthetics of the Global Value Chain Container Shipping, Media Networks and the Problem of Visibility in the Global Sphere of Circulation Vinzenz Hediger Abstract Facilitated by containerization global value and supply chains have largely replaced the factory-in-one-place model of production prevalent from the industrial revolution up until the 1970s. But if there was an aesthetics of the factory, i.e. a generic way in which the visibility of the production process was organized in the interest of controlled transparency, operational eff iciency and social legitimacy, is there a comparable aesthetics of the global value chain? Drawing on recent work in infrastructure and media studies, this contribution focuses on the social media, f ilm and design work of Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company, to analyze three different, but interconnected regimes of visibility in and of global value chains: critical, operative and representational. Keywords: infrastructure; visibility; containerization; globalization; social media; corporate communications Factories are now like ships: they mutate strangely, masquerade, and sometimes sail away stealthily in the night in search of cheaper labor, leaving their former employees bewildered and jobless. ‒ Allan Sekula and Dave Sinclair, “Freeway to China (Version 2: For Liverpool),” 2000 Always act as if there were a crisis and the company was in a crisis. ‒ Maersk internal management guidelines, September 5, 1994 Hediger, V., F. Hoof, Y. Zimmermann, with S. Anthony (eds), Films That Work Harder: The Circula- tion of Industrial Film. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2024 doi: 10.5117/9789462986534_ch01 38 Vinzenz Hediger Prologue: Sailing into Sight On March 23, 2021, the Ever Given, a four-hundred-meter-long container ship carrying 20,000 TEU, twenty-foot equivalent unit containers, was hit by strong side winds and got stuck in the bank of the Suez Canal. The ship, operated by the Taiwanese Evergreen line and one of the largest of its kind, blocked the world’s busiest waterway for six days. Close to four hundred ships lined up on either side of the canal, causing signif icant delays and an estimated nine billion dollars of losses. The Suez Canal Authority released photographs, and memes started circulating. Among them was one which identif ied the container ship as the main vehicle of global capitalism, and as something critical theory should study (albeit probably to little effect). That suddenly everyone paid attention to container ships seemed to illustrate one of the properties of infrastructure identif ied by Susan Leigh Star, namely that it is usually transparent and only “becomes visible upon breakdown.”1 In the prologue to his 2010 f ilm essay The Forgotten Space, which he co-directed with Noël Burch, Allan Sekula describes container shipping as “100,000 thousand invisible ships, 1.5 million invisible seafarers, binding the world together through trade.” To the extent that these are indeed invisible, it is not so much because their owners hide them from view like the capitalists of the nineteenth century hid machines and working conditions behind factory walls. Rather, “the increasing reliability of […] operation makes rapid diffusion feats unremarkable,” as Vaclav Smil writes.2 However, the infrastructures of global trade – which for the purposes of this contribution we take to include ships, ports, contain- ers, traff ic networks connecting the sea to the hinterland, media and knowledge – have in fact been highly visible for some time now, and have become increasingly so just around the time Sekula and Burch released their f ilm. Maersk Line, long the world’s largest container shipping company with roughly eighty thousand employees, a turnover of €40 billion and a world market share of seventeen per cent in 2020, is a case in point. Unusually for a business-to-business company, Maersk has systematically built a social media presence in the years after the f inancial crisis of 2008–2009, which evolves around corporate videos and photographs providing inside 1 Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43, no. 4, 1999, p. 382. 2 Smil, Vaclav. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. MIT Press, 2019, p. xiv. THe aesTHeTics oF THe global Value cHain 39 Fig. 1.1a. eVer giVen stuck in the bank. image released by the suez canal authority. Fig. 1.1b. The memefication of the eVer giVen incident (author unknown). 40 Vinzenz Hediger views of global supply chains with a documentary feel rather than the default glossiness of more conventional corporate image f ilms.3 Maersk was surprised, according to one executive, to f ind out that a business which it suspected people f ind “boring” was anything but in the eyes of a substantial 3 Agerdal-Hjermind, Annette. “The Enterprise Social Media Strategy: The Case of Maersk.” Communication & Language at Work, no. 3, 2014, pp. 3–17; Katona, Zsolt, and Miklos Sarvary. “Maersk Line: B2B Social Media – ‘It’s Communication, Not Marketing’.” Berkeley Haas Case Series, vol. 56, no. 3, 2014, pp. 142–56. Fig. 1.2. maersk crews share pictures via the company’s instagram account, may 15, 2021. THe aesTHeTics oF THe global Value cHain 41 public.4 Maersk’s Facebook page had more than three million followers in May 2021, more than seven times the number of BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, also a multinational and a company roughly twice the size in terms of turnover (but with a similar number of employees, roughly eighty thousand). Maersk’s Instagram account had 234,000 followers, as opposed to BASF’s combined 50,000 for its global and German accounts. The combined impact of the 2008 f inancial crisis and climate change have led shipping companies to adopt new ship models with up to 25,000 TEU or twenty-foot equivalent unit containers, i.e. f ive times the capacity of an average container ship in the 1990s. These gigantic ships have become the object of a widespread fascination even as their carbon footprint is the focus of growing concerns. In 2009, the shipping industry’s carbon footprint was slightly larger than that of Germany.5 It has since decreased through a variety of measures including the lowering of travel speeds from twenty-four to as low as twelve knots,6 and companies like Maersk and CMA-CGM currently work to fully decarbonize their f leets in the space of a few years rather than a decade or two. But in online forums, the ships themselves are the main concern. Ship-spotting videos of mega containerships are a popular YouTube genre. Discovery documentaries about the building of these ships and their operation often have an afterlife with millions of clicks on YouTube. One six-minute video made by a Maersk crew member offering a tour of his cabin in March 2019 had registered no fewer than 2.3 million views by May 2021.7 Ship-spotting videos and photographs, whether sent in by employees or followers, are also an important part of the Facebook and Instagram feeds of Maersk. Astride between the operative requirements of global supply chains and the widespread fascination with ships sits a website like MarineTraff ic. com. Here volunteers provide data through an automated identif ication system (AIS) to track the movements of more than eighteen thousand ships worldwide on Google Maps in real time. MarineTraff ic.com was started in 2007 as an academic project by Dimitri Lekkas, a professor of systems engineering at the University of the Aegean on the island of Syros in Greece, 4 Katona and Sarvary. “Maersk Line: B2B Social Media,” p. 146. 5 Casdesus-Masanell, Ramon, Forrest L. Reinhard, and Frederik Nellemann. “Maersk Line and the Future of Container Shipping.” Harvard Business School Case Study 9-712-449, 2012, p. 5. 6 Carriou, Pierre, Francesco Parola, and Theo Notteboom. “Towards Low Carbon Global Supply Chains: A Multi-trade Analysis of CO2 Emission Reductions in Container Shipping.” International Journal of Production Economics, 208, 2019, pp. 17–28. 7 https://youtu.be/JBH78Lt3Kbw. http://MarineTraffic.com http://MarineTraffic.com http://MarineTraffic.com https://youtu.be/JBH78Lt3Kbw 42 Vinzenz Hediger the original hub of the Greek shipping industry. In itself an infrastructure in the sense that it is a boundary object which means different things to different people,8 MarineTraff ic.com caters to both industry professionals and shipping enthusiasts and combines tracking with options for uploading ship-spotting images and videos for a network of correspondents from around the world. Among other things, this shows that visibility and invisibility, as Brian Larkin argues, “are not ontological properties of infrastructures.” Rather, they “are made to happen as part of technical, political, and representational processes.”9 What is more, in the shipping industry “visibility” is also a 8 Star. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” 9 Larkin, Brian. “Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructures.” The Promise of Infrastructures, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hanna Apel. Duke University Press, 2018, pp. 178–86. Fig. 1.3. The marineTraffic.com landing page on may 10, 2021, 10:11 am ceT (green: bulk cargo and container ships; red: tankers; orange: fishing ships; blue: passenger line ships; lilac: cruise ships and yachts). http://MarineTraffic.com http://MarineTraffic.com THe aesTHeTics oF THe global Value cHain 43 technical term which refers to the ability to track assets in real time or, more specif ically, “the data-based creation of transparency through tracking of assets or events and the generation of information and insights from that process.”10 Visibility in this technical sense matters because what economists call “value creation,” i.e. the input activities of a company to create value for cus- tomers, now no longer happens in self-contained factories located near vital resources and markets, but in dispersed locations across the globe chosen for cost considerations. The container made “global sourcing imaginable because it is cheap and logistically manageable,” as historian Michael B. Miller writes.11 Because of containers, the factory model of organization, which drove economic activity from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, has largely been replaced with what has been known since the 1990s as global value chains.12 These global value chains in turn rely on the operation of global supply chains, i.e. transportation and distribution networks which put resources and assets in the right place at the right time. Setting up and operating global supply chains is no longer just a matter of shipping and distribution. Swiss-born Napoleonic general and military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779–1869), a continuing influence on the US armed forces’ doctrine of overwhelming force, coined the term “logistics” to describe “the practical art of moving armies” and supplying troops in the f ield.13 Now it refers to the management of supply chains, the backbone of economic globalization, another term of relatively recent vintage.14 The EverGiven accident, then, reveals not so much that global value chains are hidden from sight. Instead, it points us to the ways in which these value chains and the infrastructures of global trade “as technical objects, take on form”15 and become visible and readable. Brian Larkin has recently argued 10 Bauhaus, Henrik, Frederik Möller, Maleen Stachon, Christina Hoffmann, and Boris Otto. “Data-Driven Business Models in Logistics: A Taxonomy of Optimization and Visibility Services.” Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2020, p. 5379, https:// hdl.handle.net/10125/64403. 11 Miller, Michael B. Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth Century History. Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 343. 12 Gereff i, Gary. Global Value Chains and Development. Cambridge University Press, 2018. 13 Van Creveld, Martin. Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2004. 14 As Deborah Cowen’s analysis suggests, as global supply chains and their networks have themselves increasingly become a security concern, the military origins of the term have come full circle in the twenty-f irst century. Cowen, Deborah. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 15 Larkin. “Promising Forms,” p. 175. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/64403 https://hdl.handle.net/10125/64403 44 Vinzenz Hediger that one “risks fundamentally misrecognizing the range of ways in which infrastructures address, order, and constitute political relations” if one fails to consider technics and aesthetics as mutually constitutive.16 The study of industrial f ilm has similarly assumed that technology and aesthetics are mutually constitutive. But it has also assumed that we risk missing out on the operational logics of both if we fail to address economic activity as the third term of the relation. Starting from the f irm, the study of industrial f ilm has assumed that every company is a media company, since all economic activity is made possible and shaped by media networks.17 The global value chain expands the horizon of inquiry to an articulated sequence of companies interacting in and through media networks. In what follows, I want to argue that global value chains are the object of, and shaped by, three different, but related types of visibility: critical, operative and representational. These share two commonalities: First, all are aspirational. In the world of global trade and globalized production no one ever sees enough – not the Marxist critic, not the supply chain manager, not the shipping customer, technology enthusiast or ecological activist. And, second, all compensate for their limitations by resorting to different types of what Susan Leigh Stars calls “master narratives” of infrastructures, stories told by a “voice [which] speaks unconsciously from the presumed center of things.”18 In modernity, which includes the compressed modernity of a country like South Korea, the default master narrative of infrastructure is the national epic: a heroic tale of achievement through bravery and technology. But the new technologies and practices of global communication and trade increasingly challenge that framework. Nicole Starosielski has shown how conflicting approaches to the operation of undersea cables can be sorted into narratives of connection, disruption, nodes and transmission.19 Along similar lines, I want to argue that in critical visibility gives form to the infrastructures of global trade though narratives of crisis; operative visibility is tied to narratives of efficiency; and representational visibility produces 16 Ibid., p. 178. 17 Hediger, Vinzenz, and Patrick Vonderau, editors. Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam University Press, 2009; Acland, Charles R., and Haidee Wasson, editors. Useful Cinema. Duke University Press, 2011. Lee Grieveson has offered a comprehensive view of cinema, government, and global trade networks in the f irst half of the twentieth century in Cinema and the Wealth of Nations, while Alexander Klose has discussed the “box” as a new paradigm of thinking in culture and the arts. Grieveson, Lee. Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System. University of California Press, 2017; Close, Alexander. The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think. MIT Press, 2015. 18 Star. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” p. 384. 19 Starosielski, Nicole. The Undersea Network. Duke University Press, 2015. THe aesTHeTics oF THe global Value cHain 45 contested, but similarly aspirational narratives of growth, sustainability and inclusiveness, which can also be read as globalization age reiterations of the modernist logic that “through infrastructures and circulation […] development and modern subjectivity can be achieved” – albeit, as we will see, a reiteration in which global trade f igures as a substitute for politics in the nation state.20 With their adjacent narratives each of these three types of visibility constitutes what Jacques Rancière calls a “scene,” a clearly delineated territory where we can study and verify the constituent elements of an organization, and which is not reducible to shared metaphysical principle or any other scene, let alone an underlying “ur-scene.”21 The task of an aesthetics of global value chains, then, is to provide a composite view of the form of their constituent elements as articulated through the three scenes of critical, operative and representational visibility. The task is further to account for how these three scenes exceed, challenge and transform the frames of the nation state and the f irm, which provide the dominant form of infrastructure and the visibility of economic activity in the pre-1970s period. Precisely to capture the transformation of these frames, and since shipping f irms “have been singled out as key drivers of economic glo- balization,” it seems legitimate to start with an individual f irm.22 Apart from its already mentioned proactive media work, Maersk, a family- and partnership-controlled multinational headquartered in Denmark, is an appropriate choice because of the size of the company and its historical role in establishing container shipping. The Maersk group also covers – or covered at one point – all elements of shipping infrastructure. As of May 2021, Maersk operated 708 ships and held a 16.9% world market share. Alongside the Maersk Line, the Maersk group includes APM, which operates container terminals, including the hub in Algeciras, Spain, which connects West Africa with the main routes into Europe and Asia, a terminal in Singapore and a string of terminals in West Africa, including Apapa, the container port of Lagos, Nigeria. Until it was absorbed under the man brand in 2020, Maersk also owned DAMCO, a freight-forwarding/supply chain logistics f irm. Maersk also operated a shipyard until 2009, and from 1962 to 2017 it included Maersk Oil, a prospecting and drilling f irm specializing in deep sea oil rigs. 20 Larkin. “Promising Forms,” p. 190. 21 Rancière, Jacques. La méthode de l’égalité. Entretien avec Laurent Jeanpierre et Dork Zabunyan. Bayard, 2012, p. 99. 22 Peterson, Niels P., Stig Tenold, and Nicholas J. White, editors. Shipping and Globalization in the Post-war Era: Context, Companies, Connections. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 257. 46 Vinzenz Hediger If Brian Larkin is (partly) correct in suggesting that in “the study of infrastructure, form is both ubiquitously visible yet absent from analytic consideration,” something similar can be said of shipping networks. The literature is growing fast now, but until recently systematic studies have been few and far between.23 In the f irst section I want to review the emergence of container shipping from earlier networks with a focus on media and the organization of global trade. In particular I want to discuss the national epic as the default master narrative of infrastructure in its tension with the emergence of global value chains. In the second section I want to focus on what I propose to call the cinematic shape of trade and argue that the shift from factory to global value chain can be described as a shift from framing to tracking, with Maersk as the case study. And in my conclusion, I want to summarize my f indings by discussing the notion of containerization as a revolution. Because of the antecedents of contemporary shipping networks and the current shape of the industry, the analysis is Euro- and US-centric. Further work will be required compensate for this defect. 1. From Empire to Logistics: Containerization and the Four Gs Containerization can be seen as a part of the global history of the four Gs: The Great Transformation, the Great Divergence, the Great Acceleration and the Great Convergence. The Great Transformation is Karl Polanyi’s term for the industrial revolution24; the Great Divergence describes the period of rapid growth in the nineteenth century which sees Europe and the United States pull ahead of other parts of the world, like India or China, which as 23 Marc Levinson, an economist by training, wrote his now classic book about container shipping as a history because the data were not suff icient for an economic study of the impact of containerization on the world economy (Levinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton University Press, 2006). Simi- larly, in the introduction to their historical case study of Maersk, Jephson and Morgen note that “the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of transport is surprisingly weak. […] [T] he role of transport remains ambiguous and subject to shallow interpretation” (Jephson, Chris, and Henning Morgen. Creating Global Opportunities: Maersk Line in Containerization, 1973–2013. Routledge, 2014, p. 4). Finally, Peterson et al. (Shipping and Globalization in the Post-war Era) consistently reference Michael B. Miller’s 2012 cultural history of European shipping networks (Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth Century History) as a groundbreaking work to be emulated in further studies. 24 Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Beacon Press, 2001. THe aesTHeTics oF THe global Value cHain 47 late as the mid-eighteenth century enjoyed comparable levels of economic welfare25; the Great Acceleration is the period of unprecedented economic and population growth after 1945 in which humans become the decisive factor in the ecology for the f irst time in history, a period now also known as the “Anthropocene”26; and the Great Convergence is the period of growth since 1990, which has seen the centre of the world economy shift to Asia as countries like South Korea, China or Indonesia progressively draw level with the wealthiest parts of the so-called West.27 At the dawn of the Great Acceleration, containerization dissolves the factory, the main locus of the Great Transformation and the Great Divergence, into the global value chain, the driver of the Great Convergence. At the same time, containerization can be seen as part of the intertwined processes of decolonization and economic globalization, in which, as Anthony G. Hopkins argues, “‘horizontal’ concepts of racial equality and universal democracy, as well as the breakdown of complementarities between industrial metropoles and primary-producing peripheries, undermined vertical, hierarchic imperial systems.”28 As such, containerization substitutes the promise of a reliable, accessible and coherent global network for the circulation of goods for what John Darwin describes as the often haphazard and structurally violent practices of colonial domination of the “unfinished” European empires.29 To situate this promise we have to f irst look more closely at the power differential containerization promises to overcome, and how that power differential, and its transformation, have been framed. The Shipworm and the Steam Engine Different from their landed predecessors, the European empires of the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries were built by sea.30 Starting from an experience of cultural inferiority to the mature landed empires which they encountered on their voyages of “discovery” to the Americas, India and 25 Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton University Press, 2000. 26 Engelke, Peter, and J.R. McNeill. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Harvard University Press, 2014. 27 Baldwin, Richard. The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2016. 28 White, Nicholas J. “Thinking Outside ‘The Box’: Decolonization and Containerization.” Shipping and Globalization in the Post-war Era: Context, Companies, Connections, edited by Niels P. Peterson, Stig Tenold, and Nicholas J. White. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 68–69. 29 Darwin, John. Unfinished Empire. Bloomsbury, 2013. 30 Darwin, John. After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405. Bloomsbury, 2008. 48 Vinzenz Hediger China,31 Europeans progressively translated their technological superiority into a sense of cultural superiority from the second half of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment onwards. Innovations in shipping and navigation, which in turn led to the invention of the steam engine, the railway and the steamship, laid the groundwork for their networks of global dominance. The connection between innovations in shipping and industrialization is complex, but in some ways quite straightforward. Capitalism came about through the emergence of mass consumer markets in North-western Europe from the seventeenth century onward (with important input in terms of capital provided through the plunder of Bengal in 1757).32 Land enclosures in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe had created a landless underclass, which migrated to cities and provided the cheap labour required for industrialized mass production. But neither the emergence of mass markets nor the industrialization of production would have been possible without shipping. Inexorably intertwined with colonialism, capitalism as a system of industrialized innovation owed its emergence in large part to the growth of shipping networks. “Little of what Europeans made, sold, or consumed […] was independent of overseas markets or sources of supply,” and it was shipping networks and infrastructure which made mass industrial and consumer societies possible.33 Ships brought raw materials, particularly cotton, from the various colonies to Europe and f inished products back to the territories of extraction. One of the most important innovation in the late eighteenth century was copper sheathing for ships, which prevented damage from tropical shipworms, a long-standing problem. Copper sheathing boosted the tri- angular trade of slaves to the Americas and goods to Europe by cutting “the death rates of slaves in the middle passage by half.”34 This turned the “planned disaster” of the middle passage – which incidentally, as Christina Sharpe points out, registers no mention in Allan Sekula and Noel Burch’s f ilm on shipping and capitalism35 – into a more calculable risk, which in turn increased the supply of cotton, coffee and other trade goods to satisfy 31 Bitterli, Urs. Die Wilden und die Zivilisierten. Grundzüge einer Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte der europäisch-überseeischen Begegnung. C.H. Beck, 2004. 32 Plumpe, Werner. Das kalte Herz. Kapitalismus: die Geschichte einer andauernden Revolution. Rohwolt, 2019. 33 Miller. Europe and the Maritime World, p. 3. 34 Rönnbäck, Klas, and Peter M. Solar. “Copper Sheathing and the British Slave Trade.” Economic History Review, vol. 68, no. 3, 2015, p. 806. 35 Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 25–27. THe aesTHeTics oF THe global Value cHain 49 demand in the emerging capitalist mass consumer markets in Europe.36 The steam engine was originally developed to pump water out of copper mines in Cornwall.37 From there it was adapted to power factory production lines, railway locomotives and ships. The introduction of steamships in the mid-nineteenth century reduced travel time and made schedules more reliable, paving the way for what is generally referred to as the f irst era of globalization, a period of global free trade between 1870 and 1914, which also includes the Berlin Conference and the subsequent comprehensive colonial occupation of Africa. Barriers to trade for European companies were minimal, and the new trade networks powered by steamships and the telegraph – as well as, in the view of some economic historians, an abundance of coal38 – consolidated the Great Divergence. But while shipping has been an important factor of both the Great Trans- formation and the Great Divergence, it can be argued that the technological superiority of the West was initially a superiority of media technology. Ships as carriers of goods, people and ideas can, of course, be understood as media. Ships have been around for a long time, but the most important novelty in European expansion were improved instruments of navigation and what Bruno Latour calls “immutable mobiles,” scalable and portable media like maps (even though Erhard Schüttpelz has rightly pointed out these technologies only reached reliable levels of standardization in the nineteenth century).39 Infrastructures from the telegraph to channels and ports, which have been discussed in terms of a theory of media and communication by Karl Knies in the nineteenth and Harold Innis in the f irst half of the twentieth century,40 further consolidated European and Western dominance. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, shipping lines aligned with global telegraph networks. According to economic historian Stig Tenold “shipping lines can be considered – in tandem with the telegraph network – as the tentacles of empire.” This is particularly true for the British 36 Sharpe. In the Wake, p. 27. 37 O’Sullivan, Mary. “Power & Prof it: Copper Mines & Steam Engines in Late 18th century Cornwall.” Working Paper, Paul Bairoch Institute of Economic History, 2021, https://www.unige. ch/sciences-societe/dehes/f iles/2516/1821/2863/Power_Prof it_WP_2021.pdf. 38 Pomeranz. The Great Divergence. 39 Schüttpelz, Erhard. “Die medientechnische Überlegenheit des Westens. Zur Geschichte und Geographie der immutable mobiles bei Bruno Latour.” Mediengeographie. Theory–Analyse–Diskus- sion, edited by Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielemann. transcript, 2009, pp. 67–110. 40 Knies, Karl. Der Telegraph als Verkehrsmittel [1857]. Baden-Baden, Nomos, 1996; Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. Rowman & Littlef ield, 2007. https://www.unige.ch/sciences-societe/dehes/files/2516/1821/2863/Power_Profit_WP_2021.pdf https://www.unige.ch/sciences-societe/dehes/files/2516/1821/2863/Power_Profit_WP_2021.pdf 50 Vinzenz Hediger Empire: “By 1914 the submarine cables that Britain controlled were almost twice as large as those of the next two powers (the United States and France) combined.” A precursor of sorts to the Internet of Things, the “shipping lines were to cargo what the telegraph network was to information,” and both were “a manifestation of British power, which contributed to preserving the very same dominance that it reflected.”41 Until the onset of decolonization global shipping networks evolved around European companies and ports. The most important ports were Hamburg, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Liverpool and London, with London serving as the hub of f inance, insurance, ship sales and charter. A limited number of large companies like HAPAG (Hamburg), Holland Amerika Line (Rotterdam)