White-hot metal pushed into form; glass bubbles modeled by human breath; fluid plastic hardening into familiar patterns: The industrial film has minted its own iconography of industrial creation wherein all that is solid rises from amorphous matter. While most industrial films stress the controlled directionality of moulding materials into consumable shapes, a prestigious lineage of promotional films, reaching their apex around 1960, stage elaborate plays of form. Destination Unknown translates the title for one flashy Austrian plastics industrial from 1963: The emphasis is less on the result than on the process of moulding and stages of not-yet-form. Accordingly, both factory work and its filmic representation get promoted from acts of creation to showcases for creative play. Focusing on Austrian examples clearly indebted to contemporaneous industrials by Resnais or Haanstra, I trace this poetics of creativity-at-work and its significance both to the self- conception of promotional filmmaking and changes in industrial culture.

Organizer: NECS  European Network for Cinema and Media Studies, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and the University of Udine