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This chapter, by Ross Melnick, examines the history of the Army Motion Picture Service (AMPS) and the intricate relationship between the U.S. Army and motion picture exhibition during both war and peacetime. Focusing on the industrial, logistical, and economic formation of AMPS, this chapter focuses on three key periods in the history of U.S. Army film exhibition. It argues that AMPS’s early status as independent of Army Morale, Welfare, and Recreation created unique challenges that hindered its early growth on U.S. Army bases and ultimately led to its withering amid the coming of digital projection and other contemporary challenges.

The American Legion emerged in March 1919, in the immediate aftermath of world war, a point at which the focus of conservative discourse and government policy shifted from overseas campaigns to domestic threats, from military to political targets. This chapter, by Tom Rice, examines the myriad ways in which the hugely influential American Legion used film at this critical juncture, extending military activities and imperatives into the postwar nation. Whether appropriating wartime government films; becoming an influential and respected voice on film reform; or—after the establishment of a designated film service in 1921—producing, distributing, and exhibiting movies, the American Legion used film to mold American citizens and to visualize, project, and shape the postwar nation. The American Legion’s initial uses of film reveal an industry—and a nation—challenged and torn apart by anxieties about immigration and foreign threats and by a wider battle over American national identity.

This chapter, by Florian Hoof, describes how the military utilized vocational training films in the 1910s and how producing, promoting, and selling such films turned into a profitable business model for filmmakers. It specifically looks at vocational training films produced by Frank Gilbreth for the U.S. Army in the context of the Great War. Due to the development of industrialized warfare, concepts from Gilbreth’s industrial work proved to be newly relevant for the military. Film addressed the problem of how to organize the transfer of complex topics in military training. The chapter sheds new light on the interrelations between film, the organizational culture of the military, and educational theory. Lastly, the utilization of film in the military is situated in the broader context of a film history on nontheatrical film.

The chapter tells the history of New Day Films, a film collective founded 1972. Today, New Day is one of the most financially stable nontheatrical distribution collectives in North America, boasting more than 165 members and 1m USD in yearly revenues. Films distributed by the collective have been screened, broadcast and awarded around the workd, studied in media journals, discussed at organised events, showcased in museums and collected by libraries. New Day’s collective (and its collection) provide compelling objects of study for the history of gender and documentary authorship.

The introduction describes television’s use as an instrument of orientation engaged in cultural and logistical management in three interrelated senses: (1) shaping viewers’ understanding of their world and their place within it, (2) enabling action in space, and (3) offering a site for groups and institutions to engage the “problem” of electronic workplace communication. Arguing that industrial television sought to acclimate workers to the conditions of post-Fordism, it describes this transition in the US, focusing on one vector of the move to post-Fordism that was a favored target of television: the diminishing boundaries between work and nonwork. It also provides an overview of three bodies of literature: (1) media studies understandings of the conjuncture between labor and audiences (e.g., the audience commodity), (2) the cultural and political interventions of useful cinema, nontheatrical film, and institutional media research, and (3) methodologies for historical studies of emergent technologies. It ends with a chapter overview.

Forgoing an examination of the media industries, Chapter 1 focuses instead on the rise of what one might call the mediated industries. A prehistory of television at work, this chapter traces an intensifying relationship between electronic media and the workplace that follows the development and industrial application of telegraphy, telephony, recorded sound, wireless, applied radio, Muzak, faxing, and nontheatrical film. Situating this discussion in the context of scholars’ treatment of communication and empire, it argues that television occupies a key transitional position for the mediated corporation in which electronic communication’s dual uses as a logistical tool and as a conduit for cultural production converge. These processes illustrate the development of an alternative media sector and the symbiotic relationship between the “knowledge industries” and corporate expansion, as well as the specificities of how media infrastructures are created at scale.