In 1914, the Ford Motor Company opened its Motion Picture Laboratory, an in-house operation that produced motion pictures to educate its workforce and promote its products. Just six years later, Ford films had found their way into schools and newsreels, travelogues, and even feature films in theaters across the country. It is estimated that by 1961, the company’s movies had captured an audience of sixty-four million people.

This study of Ford’s corporate film program traces its growth and rise in prominence in corporate America. Drawing on nearly three hundred hours of material produced between 1914 and 1954, Timothy Johnson chronicles the history of Ford’s filmmaking campaign and analyzes selected films, visual and narrative techniques, and genres. He shows how what began as a narrow educational initiative grew into a global marketing strategy that presented a vision not just of Ford or corporate culture but of American life more broadly. In these films, Johnson uncovers a powerful rhetoric that Ford used to influence American labor, corporate style, production practices, road building, suburbanization, and consumer culture. The company’s early and continued success led other corporations to adopt similar programs.

Persuasive and thoroughly researched, Rhetoric, Inc. documents the role that imagery and messaging played in the formation of the modern American corporation and provides a glimpse into the cultural turn to the economy as a source of entertainment, value, and meaning.

“This book does important work by advancing a theory of how society may be organized around terms, values, images, and ways of thinking promulgated by corporations. It makes a valuable contribution to communication and rhetorical theory, to film studies, and even to economics.”—Barry Brummett, author of Rhetoric of Machine Aesthetics

“This book brings together a set of literatures that, taken together in service of the case study at hand, offer a fascinating perspective on the relationship between rhetoric, film, corporatization, and hegemony. The central concept—incorporational rhetoric—will undoubtedly be useful to a wide range of scholars studying consumerism and commercial discourse, and rhetoric writ large.”—Christine Harold, author of OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture

Timothy Johnson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville.

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One: Spreading the Industrial Aesthetic in Ford’s Education Films

Chapter Two: Ford’s Montage Films and the Formation of a “Rhetorical Economy”

Chapter Three: Ford’s Cinematic Production of Economic Space

Chapter Four: Spectacle and Spectatorship in Ford’s World’s Fair Films

Chapter Five: War, Industrial Globalization, and the Managerial Gaze

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction

Business & Economics

Communication Studies

           History of Communication

           Rhetorical Studies

           Media Arts

History

           U.S.

Sociology

           Twentieth-century

Rhetoric

Film & TV Criticism