To browse Academia. Udine: Forum , pp. What if there were a cinema not only without names, that is a cinema deprived of auteurs and personal style, but a cinema without any style at all, or rather a cinema in which style is not a distinguishing feature because all films look the same?
The title refers to that specific quality in a film, that distinguishing trait that makes you ask who is behind it. More specifically, almost without exception, contemporary corporate image films talk about challenges, responsibility, the future, our children and sustainability, over music that sounds straight out of a toned-down lounge version of Philipp Glass, and they all feature images of large urban centers with futuristic steel and glass architecture, time-lapse photography of city squares and streets with masses of people going in all directions, images of children on playground or happy scientists in laboratories enjoying their teamwork.
It is only a slight overstatement to suggest that the only element that varies from film to film is the corporate logo. This paper was a first account of the methodological framework I am trying to develop for the analysis of corporate films. These visual regularities or patterns of montage, of space and time editing, of stagings of the body, etc. Corporations create images and avatars which work to bolster an idea in the public consciousness that they have personal identities which are knowable, likeable, even folksy.
These images are as familiar to us as any image can be. Yet most of us could not say how this happened, or when. Henrietta Ashworth places this odd sleight of hand alongside a history of the corporation and American identity while also examining how images such as these are used, both subversively and otherwise, in visual culture, and the extent to which it is possible to oppose or subvert the corporate agenda by means of film, either narrative or documentary.
This paper considers the industrial and aesthetic function of the studio logos of major entertainment companies such as Paramount and Warner Bros, and examines their brand function in responding to change in Hollywood history.
