Seventh International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

This study draws on a brief cartographic analysis of how worldwide corporations have developed, depicted, and promoted their industrial labor processes and outputs, especially in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Italy. Tremendous employment of financial and logistic resources resulted in vast filmic harvests that, besides shaping corporate identities and their internal circulation among workforces, represented the turning point for the birth of media economics as a geopolitical and ideological instrument for self-promotion. The communicative power of cinema is the means through which mainly documentary and even fictional contents shape manifold techno-industrial, institutional, sponsored and commercial films on behalf of some of the most influential corporations. This whole process of production, comprising over 400.000 samples, materialises a significant aesthetic and affective world-making operation that triggers the formation of an increasingly integrated global industrial-economic architecture. Nevertheless, within this range of perspectively oriented gazes, a growing chorus of critical voices emerges, patently trespassing the cultural and ideological limits of that purely cultic religion named capitalism. Authors like Vertov, Flaherty, Ruttman, Losey, Resnais, Ivens, Olmi and many others displayed the evolution of electrification, radiocommunication, and industrial automation against a backdrop of world conflicts, decolonisation, labour disputes, and environmental risks generated by energy consumption.