“Reality Is There, but It's Manipulated”

Industrial films shape ideas and knowledge about industrial trades, production operations, and economic processes using a wide variety of stylistic forms. They can be seen as part of both internal and external communication strategies within companies. If the image of industry, however, is based solely on the self-representations of companies, a central feature in the structure of industrial production is disregarded: that of labor and the perspective of the workers. Within the system of industrial relations their image has been represented traditionally by the counterpart to the employer and entrepreneur perspective – by the trade unions as institutions of the organized workforce. The German labor movement – the trade unions as well as the Social Democrat and Communist parties – took up the new medium of film rather early on. Until 1933, however, with certain exceptions, the filmic representation of workers in relation to industrial production was not emphasized as often as political confrontation or the documentation of working-class or labor movement culture. ¹