Commercial Cinema

Martin L. Johnson is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States.

Introduction Chapter 1: An "Advertising Punch" in Every Frame: Image Making in Early Advertising Films. Chapter 2: Exhibitors! Stop Being the Goat! The curious failure of the advertising film in the United States Chapter 3: Letting Dynamite Do It: The Rise of Corporate Cinema Chapter 4: Distribution and the "free" film: How advertising films became educational Chapter 5: Trade Follows the Film Chapter 6: Sixty Seconds of Sales: How the Federal Trade Commission Shut Down the Advertising Film business in 1943 Conclusion

"What is an advertising film? Martin Johnson's invaluable, meticulously researched study of its production, distribution, and exhibition in the early twentieth century reveals it to be a 'genre of disguise.' A variety of companies and even government agencies masked its promotional purposes in both fiction and nonfiction guises that circulated in a variety of commercial and especially non-theatrical venues (i.e., schools, religious institutions, city halls, civic clubs, showrooms, etc.). For the development of non-theatrical film, Commercial Cinema argues, the advertising film could not be more crucial." --Richard Abel, author of Our Country/Whose Country? Early Westerns and Travel Films as Stories of Settler Colonialism