A Film Factory, Not a Film Manufacturer : AB Film Company, Studio Branding, and Emerging Regional Silent Film Industry
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper deals with the issue of corporate branding in Czech cinema of the early 1920s. To date, local film companies and their positions within the film culture have been scrutinized mainly from the perspective of economic and institutional approaches to historiography. The significance of branding operations has remained overlooked, although this industrial dimension offers a valuable insight into corporate ideas and regional business strategies. Focusing on paratextual practices, the paper examines the forms of establishing and reinforcing unique film brands in the transformative era of Czech silent cinema. Considering the post-imperial political and economic shifts as well as industrial reconfigurations, it addresses strategies employed by domestic firms to declare their commercial and artistic significance within the domestic market. In this respect, the article draws on the theory of paratextuality and the concept of industrial reflexivity to reveal (a) what types of rhetoric frameworks were believed crucial to succeed in the face of a competitive distribution landscape by local corporations; (b) how film producers and managers publicly located their individual position within industrial structures and manifested their business skills and creative contributions. In that regard, special attention is paid to the film company AB, its leading figures, and its corporate magazine distributed to local exhibitors. With the intention of centralizing Czech film production under its sphere of influence, AB launched its film studio in the early 1920s. The company promoted itself as a “film factory”, positioning its emergence as a milestone in the domestic cinema. I argue that corporate paratexts supported and coordinated this business strategy by associating the brand of AB mainly with management professionalism, aesthetic internationalism, financial viability, and technological competitiveness. In so doing, it deepens our understanding of the Czech silent cinema ecosystem, outlines the functions of industry-created paratexts, and uncovers noteworthy business patterns in regional cinemas. |
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