GPO Films: American and European models of Advertising in the Projection of Nation

Abstract

The article seeks to reappraise the ‘documentary’ output of the General Post Office Film Unit in the 1930s with reference to a broader context of historical and contemporaneous debate concerning appropriate sites, media, and subjects for advertisement. Film, alongside other advertising media, was harnessed to a general objective to ‘project the nation’ at home and abroad. The employment of artists in industry served to enhance an image of Britain as a progressive manufacturing nation, fit and able to compete effectively in international markets. The modernizing influence of American and European precedents in promoting public and private institutions is traced in both production and commentary in this period. Films and filmmakers, it is argued, were aided and abetted, rather than compromised, by received attitudes towards advertising. The article explores promotion of the GPO as an exemplary model of patronage in commercial art and design in subsequent decades. The legacy of certain personnel responsible for the administration of GPO merchandizing and advertising activity is duly followed, from the Empire Marketing Board, through wartime propaganda, to the introduction of commercial television (a subsequently more familiar placement for screen advertisements) in the 1950s. The designation and appraisal of affiliated material as documentary, advertisement, propaganda, or plain fiction has often proven slippery and contestable.