On the 21 January 2019 ERC BodyCapital working day, the project members had the pleasure of hearing Fabian Zimmer, doctoral researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society (LMU Munich), speak about his ongoing research project.
Fabian skirted around one of the central perspectives of the BodyCapital project - the body - by examining how human bodies were used as allegories in audiovisual media for characterizing machines, for characterizing machine landscapes and technology-driven landscape change.
In his presentation titled Emotions, Bodies & Turbines. On the Imagination of Hydroelectric Landscapes in Industrial Film he analyzed a number of films produced by various European hydroelectricity companies between the 1930s and 1950s and showed how human allegories were frequently used by the companies to anthropomorphize and thereby to emotionalize landscape change brought by the construction of dams and power plants. He argued that these films had to be interpreted as part of the companies’ strategies to manage arising protest from nature conservationists and affected local people that grew significantly stronger in the 1950s as also dam constructions boomed all over Europe.
The presentation was rounded up by a screening of the 12-minute industrial film Det Nya Ansiktet (The New Face), produced by the Swedish company Vattenfall in 1959.
The discussion focused on how the interpretation of these films could be further enriched by contextualizing them within the history of corporate PR strategies in the 20th century and within the broader history of the imaginations of industrial landscape change. Additionally, whereas many medical and health education films (focus of BodyCapital research) use machines and machinery to explain the workings of the body, here the inverse was illustrated as medical intervention (plastic surgery) was used to explain industrial process.
Post by: Fabian Zimmer and Tricia Close-Koenig
Images on the right: Stills from Det Nya Ansiktet (1959). Courtesy of Vattenfall’s archive at Centrum för Näringslivshistoria, Bromma.
