‘View’ and ‘Process’: Early British Industrial Films and Visual Culture

Abstract

Scholarship on the ‘industrial film’ has tended to focus on the kinds of films produced within and for industrial organisations, from the 1910s onwards, and their many uses in education, advertising, and government. This article looks to the commercial antecedents of this tradition in Britain, namely the Edwardian industrial film ‘genre’, produced in vast quantities as theatrical entertainments for the popular market. It assesses both the aesthetics of these films and the discourses surrounding them, and explores how early filmmakers understood the uses and purposes of industrial films. The article argues that, although Edwardian industrial films were marketed as educational products, they lacked the temporal and thematic coherence required to meet filmmakers’ educational aspirations. Here the argument departs from several analyses that have foregrounded the way these films utilised ‘processual representation’. The article then sketches out the trajectories of industrial filmmaking during and after the First World War, when industrial films transitioned into new forms. The article concludes by considering the significance of that shift for the changing meaning of spectatorship across the early twentieth century.