Introduction

Of all the domains of “sponsored film” recently rediscovered, product advertising has received perhaps the least amount of attention in English-language scholarship. And yet, the sphere is rife with possibilities for the kinds of archival investigations suggested by Elsaesser: investigations into commissioning companies and contexts, into distribution and forms of screening, and not least of all into the theories and discourses of consumerism that informed both the production and circulation of these films. Moreover, product advertising is a particularly relevant field for anyone wishing to comprehend avant-garde film culture of the 1920s. Nearly all of the major proponents of avant-garde film in interwar Germany – including Ruttmann, Reiniger, Seeber, Richter and Fischinger – collaborated with advertising producers such as Julius Pinschewer. Most, if not all, of this work employs the signature forms we have come to associate with experimental cinema, from abstract animation (Ruttmann, Fischinger) to silhouettes (Reiniger) to montage (Ruttmann, Seeber, Richter), which these artists placed in the service of advertisements for products as diverse as chocolates, tires, alcohol, flowers, cigarettes, skincare products, perfumes and illustrated magazines. Nor would it be correct to describe this use of experimental aesthetics for advertising as “secondary” or derivative; as Ingrid Westbrock long ago argued, advertising film provided a consistent forum for experimentation in the 1920s and many of the major innovations in experimental film (in color, sound and montage) were actually first tried out in advertising films.

Only recently has much of this work become available for researchers outside of archives, and only a handful of publications have devoted extended attention to its role within the avant-garde film culture of the interwar period. No doubt, this dearth of research is in part the result of tacit assumptions, in avant-garde history, that such advertising commissions represented a “compromise” of artistic integrity or simply a means of financing the artists’ more “serious” projects in visual music. But if we approach these films outside of such assumptions, a different picture begins to emerge, one suggesting – as Jacques Rancière has argued in a different context – that modernist formalism and advertising design in fact shared some fundamental goals and principles.