Publication details
Modernität, Industrie, Film: Der Verbund der Medien in der Firma Ba`ta und in der Stadt Zlin in den 1930er Jahren
| Title in English | Modernism, Industry, Film: A Network of Media in the Ba`ta Corporation and the Town of Zlín in the 1930s |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2007 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Filmische Mittel, industrielle Zwecke: Das Werk des Industriefilms |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Art, architecture, cultural heritage |
| Keywords | industrial film |
| Description | The study focuses on the ways how media chains and networks conditioned the conceptualizations, rationalizations and self-observations of industrial and urban structures of 1930s. The general relationships between urbanism, industrial production and media will be analyzed on the basis of the case study of the Czech city Zlín, which was completely rebuilt and modernized by one company, Ba`tas shoe factory, using the city as a stage of its own ambitions and successes and subordinating it to its own purposes. The company acquired its own film-production facilities in 1920s, followed by fully equipped film studio in mid 1930s. Apart from this, it also organized its own infrastructure of film distribution and exhibition, film festivals, film and photographic courses, implementation of educational films into the programs of primary schools and other training institutions; it was involved in radio broadcasting and production of gramophones, publishing the journals, in the projects of modernization of national communication and transport systems, etc. The key elements of Ba`tas media strategy were industrial and promotional films that helped to construct close ties and feedbacks between the regime of assembly line on one side and the architectural, urbanistic, communication, social, cultural and educational networks and infrastructures established by the company on the other. Trying to introduce and promote quasi-Fordist production methods into the Central-Eastern European rural area, the company became a focal point of a complex media chain, connecting avant-garde filmmakers, photographers, musicians and architects with modernism of the new industrial techniques. The most important effect of this media-chain was the production of the subject position of a "new" worker (industrial man), who was supposed to become an ideal function of the production system, letting its own private and social life, housekeeping and leisure, sporting activities and health care, education and housing, etc., to be organized by the factory. But the subject position constructed by the dispositif of Ba`tas factory was not the same as in classical disciplinary dispositif and in mechanistic modern management - it was already anticipating post-modern principles of Deleuzian "societies of control", based on transcending the borders between so-called spaces of inclusion: school, factory, hospital, family house, etc. The main means of this crossing were the technical media: film, radio, telephone etc. |
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