Behaviorism, Animation, and Effective Cinema

After the end of World War II, new media representations of industrial work were created in the US. A new genre of industrial educational film was developed in the areas of military strategy, operations research, organization theory, and cybernetics: ¹ the management film. ² Based on the assumption that industrially disciplined work in the production process had long been established, indeed, had already become a sui generis social model, the management film focused instead on another aspect of productivity in industrial work: its functional and abstract regulation. Unlike other forms of the industrial film like the work-study film, the management film did not concentrate on optimizing physical processes and worker performance, but on establishing and stabilizing its functional contexts.