“What Hollywood Is to America, the Corporate Film Is to Switzerland”

Until recently, industrial or corporate film has been a neglected category in film studies, despite the often quoted fact that the very first work in film history, the Lumières’ sortie D’Usine (Workers Leaving the Factory, 1895) was an industrial film. ¹ This has various causes. Due to the traditional focus of film studies on feature film, interest in non-fiction film, which includes industrial film, developed late and remains comparatively limited even today. In addition, from the perspective of production, industrial film belongs to the category of commissioned or sponsored film, and from a pragmatic perspective, it can be considered a subgenre of the utility film. Both sponsored and utility film contradict the idea of film as the work of an author, of film as art. Therefore, they do not fit into a concept of film studies that is primarily concerned with film art. While this fixation on “art” can be historically understood as an attempt to legitimate the subject as an academic discipline, a wider perspective is necessary today, one that examines the entire field of audiovisual production, dissemination, and consumption of non-fiction films, that looks at amateur film practice in addition to professional, and that examines the whole spectrum of film consumption outside commercial cinemas, which already played an important role well before the introduction of video, DVD, and the Internet.