Publication details
Modernism, Industry, Film: A Network of Media in the Baťa Corporation and the Town of Zlín in the 1930s
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| Year of publication | 2009 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | The paper focuses on relationships between functionalist urbanism, industrial production, technical media and avant-garde artists in the 1930s, using an example of the Czech city "Zlín", which was completely modernized by Baťa s shoe factory, introducing Fordist methods into a rural area of Central-Eastern Europe. The company acquired its own film studio producing industrial films, as well as infrastructure of film distribution; it organized radio broadcasting and other hi-tech communication systems. Like the famous functionalist architecture in Zlín, Baťa s films express a symbiosis between modernist form, rationalism of industrial production, and the educational discourse implementing a complex structure based on clear composition, repetition and variation, rhythmical montage and variable framing. The most important effect of this symbiosis was the subject position of a "new industrial man", who was to become an ideal function of the production system, letting its own private and social life to be organized by the factory. |
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