‘View’ and ‘Process’: Early British Industrial Films and Visual Culture

Scholarship on the ‘industrial film’ has tended to focus on the kinds of films produced within and for industrial organisations, from the 1910s onwards, and their many uses in education, advertising, and government. This article looks to the commercial antecedents of this tradition in Britain, namely the Edwardian industrial film ‘genre’, produced in vast quantities as theatrical entertainments for the popular market. It assesses both the aesthetics of these films and the discourses surrounding them, and explores how early filmmakers understood the uses and purposes of industrial films. The article argues that, although Edwardian industrial films were marketed as educational products, they lacked the temporal and thematic coherence required to meet filmmakers’ educational aspirations. Here the argument departs from several analyses that have foregrounded the way these films utilised ‘processual representation’. The article then sketches out the trajectories of industrial filmmaking during and after the First World War, when industrial films transitioned into new forms. The article concludes by considering the significance of that shift for the changing meaning of spectatorship across the early twentieth century.

reproduction. 3And ever since the Lumière brothers shot their Workers Leaving the Factory in 1895, it was also a form that found fertile subject matter in the world of industry. 4Cinema's early years saw filmmakers repeatedly take their cameras to places of work across the world, covering not only factories but mining, fishing, agriculture, and craft production.From around 1906, the 'industrial film' emerged as a genre in its own right, produced as commercial entertainment for the patchwork of fairgrounds, music halls, and picture theatres that made up the landscape of film exhibition before the First World War. 5 That landscape altered in the 1910s, but even then industrial filmmaking found newer outlets, in educational settings, or increasingly in industry itself, as large corporations began to see value in commissioning and producing films for advertising, internal communications and the like. 6And when the new 'documentary' tradition emerged in the 1930s, industry, once again, played a starring role. 7or film historians this sketch is perhaps familiar to the point of banality.Yet despite early-and transitional-era cinema's apparent fascination with industry, no single body of work has emerged to explore it.Unlike early science films, railway films, or travel films, the early industrial film has not received a book-length study. 8Industrial films, where they have been studied, have been deployed within a range of analytic contexts: 'visual education', the 'cinema-military-industrial complex', and 'useful cinema'. 9They have also been understood in relation to a number of different 'aesthetics': the 'view aesthetic', the 'operational aesthetic', the 'machine aesthetic', and, more recently, the 'process genre'. 10This article builds on those studies, and seeks to explain the popularity and significance of the early industrial film, both in its first incarnation as commercial entertainment, and as it transitioned into new forms during and after the First World War.It does so through looking at what filmmakers and viewers wrote about industrial films, as well as what the films themselves (where they survive) show.Its argument is that the 'industrial film' emerged as a generic marker within discussions among the early film trade about film's educational benefits, but that industrial films sat awkwardly within these discussions. 11For one, supporters of cinema as an educational tool proved largely unable to determine what kind of knowledge might be imparted by industrial films.Fears about 'advertising' or other malign intentions always lurked behind the industrial film's claims to impart pure knowledge. 12oreover, filmmakers were generally wedded to a conception of the cinematic image which foregrounded its ability to purvey raw visual experience, in a way that generally undermined the requirements for explication and didactic structure implicated in aspirations to 'educate'.
In this sense, something like what Tom Gunning famously called the 'view aesthetic' provides a useful framework for understanding early industrial films.In Gunning's formulation, the 'view aesthetic' was an open-ended and voyeuristic mode of image-making, one that claimed to simulate the immediacy of human vision, to present the world as it is. 13Yet he also suggested that the 'view aesthetic', in industrial films, lent itself to the portrayal of industrial 'process': neatly-ordered sequences designed to demonstrate the whole production procedure, from raw material to finished product. 14Gunning has been followed by several other scholars in this attention to the 'processual' logic of industrial films. 15y finding, by contrast, is that many, if not most early industrial films were not processual in form.Their aesthetics generally produced a disjointed rather than an orderly temporal logic, in way that undermined their professed didactic intentions.The first two sections of this essay address this tension between the educational aspirations of early filmmakers and the prevailing logic of the view aesthetic.A third section carries the story into the period during and after the First World War, when industrial films transitioned into newer, more specifically educational forms.Here something like 'processual representation' better describes the films' aesthetics, though I suggest that the key innovation in interwar industrial films was not only their deployment of narrative -'processual' sequences detailing the production processbut metanarrativeargumentative structures linking the films' subjects to broader discourses around capitalism, empire, and consumer culture.When in 1932, John Grierson disparaged early actuality films by claiming that they 'describe, and even expose, but in any aesthetic sense, only rarely reveal', it was the absence of metanarrativethe kind of metanarrative presumably involved in 'creative treatment[s] of actuality'he had in mind. 16 explore these issues within a single country, Britain.I do so not in order that it might be read as a 'representative' case for the history of industrial films, but because part of the story here involves understanding how industrial films circulated within specifically nationalist (and in Britain's case, imperialist), contexts. 17n addition, this article is part of a literature that seeks to re-examine Britain's experience of modernity. 18As several historians have pointed out, the early twentieth century was an era when the rational and the imaginative, the banal and the extraordinary, the technological and the magical were all coming to coexist in idiosyncratic and dynamic relationships. 19The world of industrial production was a mundane world, and if Edwardian filmmakers struggled to educate their audiences through it, they at least succeeded in re-enchanting it as a commercial spectacle.

Education by moving picture
In or around 1910, it became a common assertion among British filmmakers writing in the trade press that educational and industrial films were the 'future of the business'.As film historians often point out, cinema in this somewhat inchoate period had not yet established itself as a modern media institution. 20Concerned about the commercial viability of the medium, filmmakers turned to affirming the cinematograph's value as an educatorthough this was hardly an imaginative leap, given cinema's indebtedness to the much older culture of public lantern lecturing. 21In making the case for cinema's educational value, the film industry appealed to contemporary languages of 'uplift' and 'rational recreation'.How far filmmakers genuinely believed in these ideals, and how far they were motivated by a desire to protect profits by appealing to wealthier audiences, are not easy questions to untangle. 22In any case, the Edwardian film trade settled on a conception of cinema that emphasized both its educational role and its other, more fundamental role as a purveyor of visual entertainment.
Perhaps the figure most convinced of cinema's ability to educate was the entrepreneur Charles Urban, managing director of the Warwick Trading Company from 1897, and founder of the Charles Urban Trading Company in 1903.Urban liked to stress that he alone recognized the 'value of the living picture as an educator'. 23His 1907 pamphlet The Cinematograph in Science, Education, and Matters of State served as a neat synthesis of most of the arguments reverberating around the trade press of the day about the educational potential of the cinema.'The time has now arrived', he wrote, 'when the equipment of every hospital, scientific laboratory, technical institute, college, private and public school is as incomplete without its moving picture apparatus as it would be without its clinical instruments, test tubes, lathes, globes or maps.' 24 Formulaic arguments in favour of cinema's educational role circulated frequently around the trade press.One often-repeated assertion was some variant on the claim that cinema provided instruction with entertainment. 25A subset of this claim was that the moving image somehow 'awaken[ed]' the intellect. 26As a 1904 trade press editorial hypothesised: 'the man in the streetdrops into the Music Hall, he learns, whilst his attention is arrested, that which he will not read'. 27inked to these points were claims that the moving image was more efficient and memorable than other methods of conveying information.'The unfolding before the eye of actual life', claimed one writer, 'will teach more in three minutes than would in many cases be learnt in three weeks of hard grinding'. 28nderscoring all the arguments about the educational value of cinema, then, was a baseline faith in the primacy of visual perception as a means of attaining knowledge.Perhaps the most common point made in favour of cinema's educative roleif also the most superficialwas a claim, in various forms, that films allowed viewers to see objects, events, or activities which they otherwise would not.Here, the cinematograph took on the role of technological extension of vision, neutrally recording 'actuality' and delivering it to distantly-stationed viewers.Viewing could be a source of visual pleasure, but viewing the new or unfamiliar could provide pleasure and impart knowledge.How exactly viewers would gain knowledge simply by looking was a question rarely, if at all raised, a fact that might reveal something of what filmmakers assumed to be a direct equivalence between seeing and knowing.For many in the film business, it seemed, the line between what was educational, and what was pure spectacle, was indistinct.
The 'industrial film' genre emerged within this rhetorical ambiguity.Where references to the 'industrial film' appeared in trade literature, it was most commonly alongside travel films, 'historical' films, and science films.All were spectacular entertainments, produced for the theatrical market, but all were nonetheless promoted for their ability to educate.Unlike the travel, historical, or science film, however, the industrial film did not slot into existing pedagogical categories like geography or science.Its educational application was believed to span a number of disciplines, including engineering, arts and crafts, and trade-specific vocational training. 29Still, industrial films were corralled into the standard claims about education by moving picture: How many people in Surrey, Middlesex, or Berkshire have ever seen one of the enormous guns with which our Dreadnoughts are armed?Not many [ … ] and yet, thanks to the cinematograph, it is possible for persons in the most remote parts of the earth to witness the whole process on screen. 30he film referenced here, The Birth of a Big Gun (1908), was one of the more widely-publicised industrial films of the Edwardian period.That the film tilted towards the spectacularthe last scene showed the 'enormous guns' being fired across a rangewas apparently entirely consistent with its educational ambitions.For the moment at least, those educational ambitions appeared to consist in granting viewers in Surrey the direct visual experience of an arms factory in Newcastle, in transmitting pictures to 'persons in the most remote parts of the earth'.
Arguments made in favour of industrial film's educational function thus tended to retreat into broad claims about cinema's ability to surrogate human vision, to have spectators see for themselves.Such claims even became the subject of a badtempered exchange on the pages of The Bioscope in 1910, when the American film entrepreneur Watterson Rothacker published a pamphlet promoting 'showing advertising films in picture theatres'. 31The pamphlet defined 'advertising' broadly, including not only those films that promoted companies or products, but also those that demonstrated the workings of factory machinery, explained manufacturing processes, and displayed views of city centres and tourist destinations.Rothacker's expansive definition was puzzling to the journal's editors, since, as they pointed out, many such films were already produced and shown in Britain without falling under the rubric of advertising.Films announcing themselves as advertisements in a stricter sense were rarer.'The trouble', the editorial claimed, was 'to know where to draw the line.' 32 That 'trouble' was thought to be particularly acute in the case of industrial films, since the commercial relationships between filmmaker and subject were often unclear.On occasion, the manufacturing firm directly commissioned the film, while in other cases it was the filmmaker who remunerated the manufacturer for the use of their premises, and on others still the manufacturing firm allowed free use of their factory for filming provided that their name would be displayed on the film's titles. 33The 'industrial' was a class of film which, the Bioscope pointed out, while not definitively advertising, 'could reasonably be classed as such'. 34The editors decided to put the question of 'where to draw the line' to cinema proprietors.They were asked firstly whether they would be prepared to include advertising films in their programmes, and secondly whether 'industrial subjects', which exhibitors already widely included in their programmes, could be considered a form of advertising.Reaction to the first question was almost unanimously negative: respondents considered that playing adverts would harm both their profits and their reputations.The second question proved more controversial.While a minority of printed responses considered there to be no difference at all between 'industrials' and advertisements, a more common response differentiated the two by stressing the educational potential of the industrial film.Many claimed that the industrial film only fell into disrepute when the name of the firm whose factory was being filmed was displayed too prominently on the titles.As one exhibitor wrote, 'audiences are very smart, and do not like paying to see what they imagine you are being paid to show.' 35 Not only was it the advertising potential of industrial films that viewers found troubling.One showman, early in 1910, wrote to the Bioscope to air his 'continual complaint' against 'industrials' he felt to be unnecessarily moralising: 'do they think we want teaching how to work?Why, in this part of the country we do harder graft than all the rest of the world put together, and yet, after a day's work, we are expected to show as a recreation, pictures of work, work, WORK.' 36 In the following issue, G.H. Cricksof Cricks & Martin, a production company specializing in 'industrials'mounted a familiar defence of the industrial film: I think that educational and industrial films are the future of the business.Take, as an example, the film, 'The Birth of a Big Gun'.Surely all the audiences in the North are not gun-makers, and would, presumably, be pleased to see how these monsters of modern warfare are made.Industrials provide instruction with entertainment, and I think exhibitors will study their own best interest by showing occasionally good industrial subjects. 37 defending industrial films, Cricks returned to the assumption made by many of his contemporaries: the value of a film rested on its ability to provide a vicarious form of visual experience to its audience.What is noteworthy about this exchange is that the claim on the other side of the debate, that 'audiences do not like what they imagine you are being paid to show', rested on the same assumptions.Instead of providing a visual record of the real world, an advertising film was immediately and obviously confected.Its world maintained no independence from the act of filming it, thus forfeiting the important element of neutrality bound up in the notion of the nonfiction film as a visual record of actuality.Watching a film while imagining that there was some hidden purpose behind itadvertising a product, or moralising about 'how to work'was no longer just watching.Concerns about 'advertising' were concerns about oppositional viewing practices, ones that undermined the strength of the connection between seeing and knowing on which early actuality film was premised.

'View' and 'process'
The early film trade thus channelled its claims for the educational virtues of industrial films through its appeal to a prevailing conception of the cinematic image as a purveyor of raw visual experience: a 'view'.Yet, perhaps paradoxically, it was precisely this conception that often prevented early industrial films from achieving their aspiration to educate.'Views' alone were rarely adequate to the task of explication, and filmmakers' commitment to providing them often sat uneasily alongside their attempts achieve a logically and temporally-coherent portrayal of 'process'.The 'view aesthetic' and the 'process genre', rather than being allied, often worked against each other. 38mages in Charles Urban's catalogues, for instance show Urban sitting at his desk, followed by 'views' of the clerical and sales department, the various operations at Warwick's film works in Brighton, more operations at their factory in Foot's Cray, Kent, and pictures of cameraman Joe Rosenthal filming the South African War.The photographs are ordered in a processual fashion to depict the whole chain of operations involved in the making of a film.They are also organized hierarchically: Urban is the first image, followed by the administrative departments; a photo of the manager of the Brighton Film Works precedes all the other images of the factory; the same again is true for the Foot's Cray works. 39epresenting complete chains of operations was a task that clearly animated Urban: his first 'Urbanora' catalogue, published 1908, claimed to provide a complete record of the 'various manifestations, transformations, and phenomena of nature'. 40 similar representational logic could be found in Urban's industrial films.Describing his 1906 industrial mega-series The Romance of the Railway, which ran for an unmatched 14 weeks at London's Alhambra theatre, Urban convened a bewildering array of commodities, processes and systems, and fashioned a whole out of their discrete parts: 41 [The viewer] is enlightened as to the methods employed in the construction of a railway, from the cutting of the first sod to the complete line, with its systems of junctions, tunnels, bridges, embankments and signals.He can see for himself how rolling-stock is madeengines, carriages, and trucksfrom virgin ore, through the smelting, moulding, and casting processes to the general work of the fitter's shop; until an express train, as he sees it thundering on at seventy miles an hour, becomes to him a living, almost sensate thing. 42 Luke McKernan has argued, Urban's catalogues operated within the kinds of nineteenth-century knowledge projects that found expression in the century's Great Exhibitions, museums, and department stores. 43These were projects that offered both rational knowledge and visual spectacleprojects that presented, in Gunning's words, 'the world itself as a consumable picture', or in Thomas Richards's, 'a single expanded world composed entirely of commodities'. 44And yet, for all the tidy organisation of Urban's mind, 'processual representation' was far from the dominant logic in early industrial and educational cinema.Oliver Gaycken's analysis of George Kleine's 1910 educational film catalogue, for instance, likens it to a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities, not a nineteenth-century museum.Kleine made only a haphazard attempt to order the catalogue's films, and employed a 'cut-and-paste aesthetic' that spoke more to miscellany than to rational classification. 45ven in Urban's catalogues, claims to orderly representation tended to break down as they were made.Vanessa Schulman has argued that the use of photographs in depictions of industrial labourparticularly in comparison to earlier line-drawingstended to flatten perspective, blur outlines, and introduce 'compositional distortion'. 46'Views', ultimately, were images that captured the granularity of visual experience, that focused attention on the surfaces of objects instead of rendering intelligible the relations between them.The images in the Warwick catalogue, presenting combinations of workers, tools, and machinery all vying for the viewer's attention without any overriding schematization (Figure 1), do not alone provide any secure indication as to which part of the filmmaking process was being represented.What processual qualities the photographs had emerged more from their cumulative effects than their individual ones.The captions, rather than the images, do the explanatory work, and each individual photograph only has meaning in so far as it relates to the whole process of film manufacture.
Order and miscellany, precision and 'distortion': these conflicting energies drove the representational logic of early industrial films.These tensions became most apparent after 1903-4, with new techniques for lighting factory interiors, the use of explanatory intertitles, and increases in film length.Where the very earliest industrial films were sold as a series of separate scenes, later Edwardian filmmakers generally packaged these scenes as one film, and marketed them as quasi-narrative forms purporting to show the 'story' or 'making' of particular commodities.And yet, despite their claims to depict a whole process of manufacture, these later multi-shot industrial films still never fully freed themselves from being a series of largely interchangeable 'views'.
In Cricks & Martin's Candle Making (1910), for example, scenes of production processes are stitched together in an often-indeterminate way.'Processual representation' is notable for its absence.The film depicts the making of three different types of candles, though there is little to distinguish one from another.At first there is a semblance of narrativewax is melted in a barrel, then poured into a mould for a shorter, thicker type of candle, then cut from the mouldyet by the film's later stages it has broken down.At one point the film moves from showing a worker cutting lengths of deck-lights to a scene of another worker dipping a different kind of candle (already pre-made) into a vat of dye, before cutting to a scene showing a machine winding wicks onto a spool.Each of these shots depicts a discrete process, but each could also be interchanged with another with no effect on the processual logic of the film.Each shot also performs the same kind of metonymic function as the photos in the Warwick catalogue, reducing the factory's operations to discrete 'views' taken to represent the process as a whole: here is the candle-mould in action, here is the wick spool, here is the excess wax from the nightlight machine.
Despite its disjointed temporal logic, the film still betrays a striving for completeness.A review of the film in the Bioscope praised it for showing 'many interesting items'; a letter in the same issue suggested that it should be used as an 'object lesson' in schools. 47Depicting a start-to-finish process of manufacture was not the key indicator of success here.The film might be better understood as factory tour rather than manufacturing demonstration: a series of views of the different operations with only a cursory sense of how they connected.
Even when a more processual logic prevailed in early industrial filmsusually when the film focused on the production of a single commodityfull temporal order was still rarely achieved.Cricks & Sharp's A Visit to Peek Frean & Co.'s Biscuit Works (1906) is widely cited by film historians as an example of a successful process film, though it is a complicated one for several reasons. 48The film was commissioned by Peek Frean for its 50 th anniversary and not originally intended for theatrical release.It ran to an unusually extravagant 2169 feet, though Cricks & Martin released a shortened version for theatrical exhibition in 1909. 49The long version of the film, the one most commonly analysed in the scholarly literature, begins as a coherent depiction of process, but, like Candle Making, it too becomes disjointed.The delivery of milk and flour comes first, the dispatch of packed crates last.Yet a scene midway through shows a fire drill, probably an exceptional and almost certainly a staged occurrence.At another point workers leave for 'dinner time'; they do not return, but in the very next shot men and boys are washing empty tins.The film conforms neither to a temporality of production (the time it takes to make a product), nor to a temporality of labour (the time it takes to complete a working day).A better example of a coherent, developmental narrative might have been the shorter version released in 1909.The catalogue lists the shots as follows: 1. Receiving flour.2. Unpacking eggs.3. Assembling ingredients.4. Dough mixing.5. Rolling out dough.6. Stamping out biscuits.7. Entering and leaving the oven.8. Icing and ornamenting biscuits.9. Packing biscuits.10.Labelling tins.11.Cake icing.12.The Easiest Task of All. 50ve the final scene (showing a family at home eating the biscuits), no new footage was taken for this version of the film.And yet, even here, the scene showing 'cake icing' appears after the biscuits have been packed into tins, and the tins labelled.Moreover, as Elizabeth Wiatr argues, the framing and composition of the shots themselves within the film also serve to undermine the film's attempt to achieve narrative composure, by introducing what she calls 'excess'. 51In Biscuit Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Making, as in many other Edwardian factory films, workers are conscious of the camera's presence, glancing, smiling, and waving.By drawing visual attention away from the narrative drive of the filmfirst and foremost a 'series of relations between objects'this form of 'excess' both underlined and undermined the central tenet of the 'view aesthetic', namely that the filmed world would act unpredictably and independently of the camera, even if that meant acknowledging its presence.In another film, Making Christmas Crackers (1910), workers snatch furtive, guilty glances at the camera almost as if they have been told not to (Figure 2).
Other industrial films would embrace this kind of excess more wholeheartedly, especially those produced in colonial settings or those depicting the work of primary sectors like mining, agriculture, and fishing.Here, the aesthetics belonged more to the travelogue genre than to the film of process: still a series of views, but ones that made no attempt at processual logic.Partly this was for practical reasonswe are not witnessing the making of a consumer product, per se, but the labourer in their repetitive daily toilbut may also have been for ideological ones.Rianne Siebenga has recently argued that the focus on small-scale crafts, and the attendant use of the 'photo-album' style, in films made in British India served to advance notions of the region's 'backwardness'. 52In this she follows from scholars of early travel films, who have tended to see travelogue films as implicated in the production of the colonial Other. 53Typically, these travel-industrial films contained a mixture of views of natural scenery, artisanal crafts, and ethnographic depictions of native 'types'.Occasionally, these aesthetic qualities would find their way into industrial films made in the British Isles.Mining, fishing, and farming, just as banana-picking or tea-growing, were often filmed as 'native' industries.This may have had similar othering effects: mining and agriculture were industries that were becoming decreasingly influential in the national economy, but were at the same time widely noted as having distinctive work cultures.Yet the uncontaminated naturalism that most Edwardian filmmakers sought to achieve in capturing 'views' made it difficult for them to advance any specific arguments along those lines. 54ertainly, there were instances where travel-industrial films were employed as vehicles for colonial ideology and technologies of colonial rule, like when the British North Borneo Company funded Charles Urban's Trip through British North Borneo (1907).Still, the ideological effects of these colonial films seemed to depend mainly on viewing contexts rather than aesthetics.Based on footage taken during two expeditions in 1903 and 1904, the North Borneo series depicted the 'local industries' of the island: tobacco cultivation, rubber tapping, and manganese quarrying.The Company had the films displayed at their annual shareholders' dinner and, according to a Daily Mail report in 1904, the screening assisted in raising 'half a million in extra capital' for further expansion. 55Similar colonial ambitions were in evidence in a series of films made for the Canadian Grand Trunk Railway System by the Butchers & Sons production companythough here it was primarily emigrants, rather than investment, that the railway was after. 56The Canadian series premiered in 1910 at Caxton Hall in Westminster, where lectures stressing the need for workers in Western Canada accompanied the showing of each film in the series.A reporter for The Bioscope came away from the evening enthusing about the 'advantages which Canada holds for the prospective settler'. 57et the films were open-ended enough that they could still be put to multiple uses.Although the North Borneo series was shown to shareholders at the Company's annual dinner, it was also exhibited theatrically.When displayed to a paying public, the films' meaning was transformed.Reviews couched the films' appeal in the language of adventure and romance.The Citizen imagined that the films depicted places 'which had never been trodden by a white man before', while the Morning Post was taken by the idea that the films showed 'the descendants of ferocious pirates'. 58Likewise, when a review of one of the Butcher's Canada Series films (Silver Mining in Cobalt) appeared in the Bioscope, its propagandistic qualities were not mentioned.It was praised instead as an 'educational subject' and as an example of 'first-rate' photography. 59uch of this malleability owed, I argue, to the open-endedness of the films' aesthetics.Consider, for example, the most successful mining film of the period: Kineto's 1910 A Day in the Life of a Coal Miner.The film took its day-in-the-life format relatively seriously: it begins in the doorway of a miner's home and ends after he returns.The very final scene shows a 'cosy fireside' in a stereotypical middleclass living room, with a servant pouring coal on the fire.We could read this move from working-class toil to bourgeois comfort either as an idealized, harmonious depiction of the social order, or as a subtly oppositional commentary on it.(The catalogue listing for this scene named it 'ye little know their worth'). 60Both readings are, I think, plausible: the ambivalence is what makes it compelling.The social order was not discussed, but merely presented, the unequal distribution of work and comfort reduced to mere elements of the system of coal production that were no more or less true or important than any other. 61till, the film's claims to present the social order broke down even as it made them.Despite the opening image showing a housewife waving her husband away to work, many of the workers shown in the film were, in fact, women.Here the film went into full ethnographic mode: a catalogue description of one scene read 'the Lancashire Lass at work.Shawls and clogs in evidence.No light tasks here but solid, hard toil.' 62 One part of the film showed a 'portrait' of someone whom the catalogue described as a 'typical old hand' (Figure 3).Under the camera's glare, she smiled, furrowed her brow, and stared quizzically into the camera.The image brings into focus quite how crucial looking, in its most naked and unsublimated form, was to the early nonfiction film. 63We stare at her; she stares back at us.There is no conceit to this exchange; it contains its own justification.It is looking for the sake of looking.But A Day in the Life of a Coal Miner would arrive just before a moment when this kind of unhinged voyeurism ceased to be the only logic at work, when unbridled, unsublimated viewing began its long ebb.

The arrival of documentary
Major shifts in the formal qualities of industrial films first became detectable during the First World War.In 1915, the Cinematograph Committee established by Urban and others to secure permissions for war filming, produced Britain's first state propaganda film: the twelve-reel epic Britain Prepared. 64Here, hidden amongst the footage of army drills, was a process film showing the manufacture of a naval gun at Vickers's steel works.Stylistically, the Vickers film would have been familiar to viewers of Edwardian 'industrials'.At times it was virtually indistinguishable from Cricks & Martin's 1908 Birth of a Big Gun (Figures 4 and 5).Both were straightforward process-style films, with short, descriptive intertitles and ending with the great spectacle of gun-testing.But Britain Prepared was less significant for its stylistic innovations than for the precedent it set for the content of industrial filmmaking during the war.Where industry featured on film from then on it was nearly always with the explicit aim of 'propaganda'. 65n this new landscape of filmmaking, producers tended to organise their material not according to industry or production process, but according to broader arguments about Britain's role and activities in the war.In 1918, for instance, the Ministry of Information, the newly-formed government department with responsibility for censorship and official communications, issued a film titled Women and the War.It began by declaring that 'luxury shopping is not helping' before showing scenes of women making munitions, providing childcare, working as nurses and mechanics, and driving ambulances.It revealed the degree to which films that ostensibly followed standard pre-war stylistic conventions underwent subtle shifts to suit their repurposing as propaganda.An earlier film produced by the War Office, A Day in the Life of a Munitions Worker (1916), followed a worker as she left her house in the morning, worked in the factory and returned home.The longer and more conversational intertitles made the film's didactic intentions explicit.Preceding an image of a row of finished shells, one title read 'Ready for the Front: one of the many avenues of monster Shells to be presented to the Huns'.This new, explicitly propagandistic deployment of intertitles 'reconfigured', in Elizabeth Wiatr's words, 'the relationship between image and text as a non-analogical one'. 66Instead of merely announcing the contents of the following shot, as in many of the pre-war industrials, these intertitles attempted to explain the significance of the image and thus anchor it in relation to a wider metanarrative.'Working for victory' were the words written on the very last intertitle, before a smiling portrait of the film's unnamed protagonist (Figure 6).
Compare this image of a smiling woman with the image of the 'old hand' in Kineto's Day in the Life of a Coal Miner.Positioned in relation to the unequivocal phrasing of the text -'working for victory'the munitions worker's gaze here, unlike the collier-woman's, was not indecipherable but direct and unambiguous.It was evidence of how the filmic medium was learning, slowly, to mobilize the look in service of its moralizing ambitions.Of course, the idea of utilizing cinema as a medium of persuasion was not purely an innovation of the war. 67Still, I want to  make two claims for the distinctiveness of the wartime industrial film.First was the perspicacity of the film's message.While some of the writing about, say, Urban's North Borneo series highlighted the film's potential to attract investment, there was nothing in the film itself that stated this ambition.Few early 'industrials' were as open about their intentions as those made during the war.Second was the systematicity of its deployment.Firms prior to the war might have sponsored industrial films on an ad-hoc basis, as an experiment, or on the invitation of the filmmaker hoping to capitalize on the theatrical market for such films.The war, however, provided an opportunity for both industry and the state to patronise cinema in a more thorough way.
These new opportunities would continue to be exploited after the war, when producers of the old-style 'industrials' began to find the theatrical market for their work rapidly slimming, and started to look for new outlets for their footage. 68rban, for instance, turned his attention to the 'cinemagazine' format, launching Movie Chats and Kineto Review in 1919, both designed for the supporting slots in picture theatres.Almost as soon as he had set up Movie Chats, Urban began trying to pitch his magazines at the institutions associated with the emerging visual education movement in America. 69By the middle of the 1920s visual education advocates could be found across American civil society.Many of these organizations compiled their own libraries of educational film material, and many of these included films made by Urban. 70A comparable movement failed to materialise in Britain, though the traction gained by the American movement invited direct comparisons between the two countries.One author of a 1920 pamphlet pointed out that, in America, 'scientific, industrial, and philanthropic bodies send out films free, except for transport charges'.'In the new England that is to be', she went on, 'something on these lines must be done'. 71he idea that 'scientific, industrial, and philanthropic bodies' might have a role to play in the creation and dissemination of industrial films was a relatively new one in the interwar period.Urban himself had seized on the idea, and in the years around 1920, made films for the George W. Baker Shoe company, the Tide Water Oil Company, and the Wayne Oil Tank & Pump Company. 72Around the same time, other corporations began to produce films in-house: early pioneers here included Ford and Krupp, both from as early as 1913. 73Several other manufacturers, such as Britain's Lever and France's Renault, also began regularly to commission films during the 1920s. 74his movement towards the systematic use of film by industry and government in the 1920s foreclosed much of the open-endedness characteristic of the Edwardian 'view' film.In many of the industrial films of the 1920s, there is a sense that the basic ambiguity of meaning, the struggle between 'process' and 'view' that had been so essential to early 'industrials' had been lost.The purpose to which these films were being put was not only clearly-demarcated but made explicit throughout the length of the film.Lever, for instance, was well known for viewing his company as an organ of British imperial development, and a 1926 film, Coconuts and Copperheads, was highly candid about its colonialist politics. 75At the start of the film, two white children listen to the story of how the Lever brothers brought 'industry and progress' to the Solomon Islands.A series of ethnographic images of the native Islanders follows, and towards the end of the film Lever officials arrive on the island and begin the process of recruiting islanders to work on their plantations.After undergoing a medical examination, the recruits signed up for two years of 'service' by touching the end of a pencil held by a Lever Brothers official.Colonial violence, mineral exploitation, the circulation of commodities, and the march of 'civilization' were all bound together in filmic space.
Similar emphases on civilization and development could be found in the group of industrial films, also from the mid-1920s onwards, produced for the British government's Empire Marketing Board. 76At the 1924 Imperial Exhibition, for example, the EMB commissioned a number of films -Zanzibar and the Clove Industry, Oil Palm of Nigeriaaiming to demonstrate how Britain 'transformed' its unproductive colonies into productive ones. 77The same exhibition also commissioned a series, directed by Percy Nash, depicting Britain's own 'national industries' to be displayed alongside the colonial films. 78Only two from this series survive: Manchester Ship Canal and Underwear and Hosiery.Both were effectively process films, yet they also demonstrated a concern with longer-scale, historical change.Intertitles in Underwear and Hosiery give details of the history of hand-knitting before contrasting it with images of 'modern power machinery'.The following year, Nash made another industrial series in which he once again demonstrated a concern with evolutionary, historical narratives.One film in the series, The Making of a Book, began with dramatized sequences showing the founding of the Clarendon Press in '1585', before depicting the state-of-the-art printing machinery of the 1920s.
What distinguished, say, The Making of a Book or Oil Palm of Nigeria from earlier industrial films was thus not only that they pulled off 'processual representation' more effectively, but also that they were able to harness the narrative drive of the films to metanarratives about imperial and industrial development.It was this near-constant presence of metanarrative that I would argue was the defining characteristic of the interwar industrial film.Michael Balcon and Victor Saville's first foray into filmmaking, 1919s The Conquest of Oil (produced for the Anglo-American Oil Company) began with diagrammatic illustrations of the geological formation of the Earth, moving through illustrations of plants, volcanoes and the Ice Age, before finally reaching 'the rise of man', shown 'progress[ing] through the Stone, Iron, and Coal ages to the greatest era of all [ … ] the Oil Age. 79 The film ends with an animated image of a 'future city', in which airplanes are the primary mode of transport.It is probably worth noting that without these fictionalized elements, The Conquest of Oil more or less consisted of a series of camera pans across oil fields and still images of pipes.The immediacy and the voyeurism that had characterized the Edwardian industrial had been sacrificed in favour of an approach that sought to align the spectator's perspective with the direction of the narrative.By using increasing numbers of images that bore an increasingly less direct relation to the real world, industrial filmmakers of the interwar period subordinated actuality to the needs of argument.In doing so, they reconfigured the act of looking.

Conclusion
Industrial films produced during the 1920s laid the groundwork for the 'machine aesthetic' of 1930s documentary.When the documentarist Paul Rotha wrote that the 'machine is not only compelling to watch, but symbolical also of infinite though controlled power', he was divulging something of the degree to which the act of looking had been sublimated over the first three decades of the twentieth century. 80The documentarists' spectator was not one who delighted in the mere presence of the moving image, nor one who was 'educated' in the simple act of gazing at a 'view', but one who had to be taught to marvel through the conscious manipulation of images.It was no longer enough that the machine was 'compelling to watch'; it had to be 'symbolical, also'.The naked compulsion to look, so characteristic of the way Edwardian industrial films were structured, had all but disappeared.Exactly how and why this happened is hard to say, though it is surely notable that the first signs of the shift appeared during the First World War, when filmmaking, industry, and the state were all brought closer together under new circumstances. 81Where, at the turn of the century, factories, work, and workers were spectacles to be marvelled at, by the interwar period they had all become things to be understood, and understood in relation to broader stories about progress, technology, empire, and modernity.
There were gains and losses in this transition.On the one hand, fin-de-siècle cinema's transformation of the industrial world into spectacle was inseparably entwined with discourses of race, class, gender, consumerism, and so on.Looking was never quite just looking.Although the early industrial film provided an enchanted window onto the factory it also emitted a sense of being fully at ease with the world it depicted, despite the cruelties and inequalities of modern industry.The Edwardian industrial film sought to display the world but never really to change it.On the other hand, although the films of the later period also evinced a level of ease and confidence about the role of industry in the modern world, by positioning their treatment of industry in relation to wider metanarratives they at least held out the possibility that those narratives might be subject to change or opposition.And even if not their primary ambition, makers of interwar industrial films had, to a great extent, successfully realized the aspirations of their Edwardian predecessors to provide education by moving picture.The education they delivered, however, was of a quite different form: more controlled, less prone to visual excess, and, ultimately, one that no longer believed in the primacy of raw visual experience as the surest route to attaining knowledge.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Photograph of lathe room, machine shops.Digitized catalogue page.We Put the World Before You By Means of the Bioscope and Urban Films (London, 1903), 168.By courtesy of Luke McKernan and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3.A Day in the Life of a Coal Miner (Kineto, 1912).Digital still.BFI National Archive.

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.A Day in the Life of a Munitions Worker (War Office Cinematograph Committee, 1917).Digital still.Imperial War Museum film archive.