Real picture films of advertising cinema screened in Spain between 1957 and 1967

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the formal characterization of what from the academic field has been called advertising cinema. Given the impossibility of a totalizing enterprise in this regard, we have chosen a spatial, temporal and formally bounded sample, specifically, the analysis of 29 real picture films of advertising cinema screened in Spain between 1957 and 1967. The selection of this corpus, geographically linked to the researcher environment, has been based, on the one hand, on the prevalence and importance of the technique in later audiovisual and advertising production; on the other hand, on the social, media, advertising and industrial mutations that took place on those years: the settlement of consumer capitalism, the emergence of cinema as an advertising media, the modernization of advertising and the arrival of television; finally, on the larger representational possibilities of the films in a national and sectorial monopoly. The research study has been based on the use of authoritative sources and film analysis, not forgetting, anyway, the distinctive features of advertising.