HOW FORD USED FILM TO IMPROVE EFFICIENCY

Useful Cinema: A History of Non-Theatrical Film Summer term 2013 Prof. Scott Curtis

Franz Burgmann Matriculation number: 9617155 Study code: C190 406 344

Table of Contents

1 2 3 4 5

Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 3 The Ford Motor Company and Fordist Cinema ............................................................................... 5 Films and Efficiency ......................................................................................................................... 7 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 12 Bibliography................................................................................................................................... 14

1 Introduction
Time is money (Franklin 51). This statement made by Benjamin Franklin in 1748 could be said to have become one of the main pillars of American lifestyle. This striving for efficiency has taken a huge step ahead in the early 20th century with men like Henry Ford, who introduced the assembly line into mass production and who, with the educational films produced by the Ford Motor Companys in-house movie department, broadcast the American lifestyle throughout the United States as well as other parts of the world. This way Ford taught the millions of viewers of their films about American lifestyle, good citizenship, and efficiency, in a word, Americanization. Americanization is a term used for two basically different concepts, one of which might be used more inside, the other more outside of the United States.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary Americanization on the one hand is to cause to acquire or conform to American characteristics, and on the other hand the term stands for the influence the United States has on other countries in terms of politics, commerce, and culture (Merriam-Webster). Brands like Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Starbucks, Apple, and Microsoft are as well-known abroad as within the United States. In this paper it is the first aspect of Americanization that will be dealt with. In the early 20th century immigrant rates reached their climax with about 900,000 immigrants coming to the United States every year from 1900 until 1914, and with 45 percent of them coming from Central and Eastern Europe; only about 10 percent of them had knowledge of the English language (Whaples). Additionally, many of them came from a socialist background, threatening to undermine the American capitalist
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system. Thus Americanization was understood as a necessary way of teaching these immigrants good citizenship. The Ford Motor Company took part in this teaching program, and what they used as a means for teaching was at that time a new, much lauded, exciting medium: film. In the early decades of the 20th century, film was regarded as being the solution for many issues connected to education. Studies showed that films in their impact on students were comparable to an excellent teacher, with the additional benefit of being available to a much wider audience and being even more memorable. (Shepherd 17680). Ford made good use of this hype around film, establishing their own movie department and using it to becoming more efficient, more productive, and, last but not least, more profitable. Fordist cinema also seemed to be the appropriate answer to Hamilton and Knights claim for integrating citizenship into the syllabus, as film was seen as a way of sugar-coating the pill, combining education and entertainment (Hamilton 63).

This paper deals with the Ford Motor Company and its movie department, which had its height in the years from 1914 to 1932. It investigates how the Ford Motor Company used film for improving efficiency; light will be shed on both the period where Ford used films for time-motion studies and the much longer period in which Ford produced films to be seen by a worldwide audience. At the beginning, an overview of the Ford Motor Company and Fordist Cinema throughout the early decades of the 20th century is given.

2 The Ford Motor Company and Fordist Cinema

The Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903 by Henry Ford. Its headquarters were and still are in Detroit, Michigan. Nowadays, Henry Ford is known as the father of the assembly line and of mass production, even though the basic idea of the assembly line goes back to meatpacking factories, as Henry Ford himself revealed in his autobiography My Life and Work: "The general idea came from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef." (81). Regardless of Fords statement, many historians mistakenly attributed the invention of the assembly line to Henry Ford.

The historian James Barrett tried to do away with this misinformation, observing that [h]istorians have deprived the [meat]packers of their rightful title of mass-production pioneers, for it was not Henry Ford but Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour who developed the assembly-line technique that continues to symbolize the rationalized organization of work (20). Henry Ford still deserves credit in regard to the assembly line, though, for he reversed the outcome of the process of slaughtering in that a product is created rather than fragmented on the assembly line (Tyler 52).

This new emphasis on efficiency also had its downsides, with large numbers of workers leaving the Ford Motor Company after the introduction of the assembly line (Tyler 53). Tyler criticized Ford in regard to that he dismembered the meaning of work, introducing productivity without the sense of being productive. Fragmentation of the human body in late capitalism allows the dismembered part to represent the whole. (53). Controversial as Henry Fords role in the development of mass production was and still is, unquestioned is the impact he has had in regard to it. Part of this impact