Taking it to the street: Screening the advertising film in the Weimar Republic

Abstract

This essay examines the emergence of a new screen culture for advertising film in post-World War Germany, where a plethora of newly invented mobile screening technologies sought to take film out of the film theatre and into the commercial spaces of the new democracy. Asking how this drive to portability could exist alongside the continued praise for the traditional film theatres by advertising theorists, I argue that both types of screening-mobile projectors and traditional cinema screens-were understood in analogy to other types of advertising distribution, especially the phenomenon of 'traffic advertising' that emerged after the war. It is only by examining this new discourse on advertising-in particular the science of advertising psychology and its particular model of the interactions between images and spectators-that we can understand the screen culture of advertising film in its oscillation between portability and traditional cinema. © 2013 The Author.