Layers of Cheese: Generic Overlap in Early Non-Fiction Films on Production Processes

While defining genres and sub-genres may be one of the most difficult tasks of film scholarship in general, it seems an almost hopeless endeavor for those studying non-fiction cinema. 2 Approaching the largely uncharted territory of industrial and business films, authors such as Thomas Elsaesser, Yvonne Zimmermann, Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau have suggested taking into account paratextual discourses as well as the institutional contexts of films in order to establish, or reconstruct, the generic divisions structuring the industrial uses of cinematography. 3 While we agree with the general line of their argument (which one could characterize as a “historical pragmatics” approach 4), their focus on organizational functionality fails to address the fact that many of the generic markers that they rely on do in fact originate outside the context of industrial organization, and, in some cases, predate the systematic use of film by industry by years, if not decades. Fully accounting for the generic subdivisions of industrial film also requires a look into the past – and more particularly, a consideration of the emergence of what has retrospectively been termed “process films” in early non-fiction film.