Bo Florin – författare

While moving image advertising has been around us, everywhere, for at least a century, the topic has tended to be overlooked by cinema studies. This far-reaching new collection makes an incisive contribution to a new field of study, by exploring the history, theory and practice of moving image advertising, and emphasising the dynamic and lasting relationships between print, film, broadcasting and advertising cultures.

In chapters written by an international ensemble of leading scholars and archivists, the book covers a variety of materials from pre-show advertising films to lantern slides and sponsored ''educations''. With case studies of advertising campaigns and archival collections from a range of different countries, and giving consideration to the problems that advertising materials pose for preservation and presentation, this rich and expansive text testifies to the need for a new approach to this burgeoning subject that looks beyond the mere study of promotional film.

From the Introduction:

"There are certainly enough ingredients to fire imagination: a director [Mauritz Stiller] who had just finished a masterpiece [Gösta Berlings Saga]; a leading lady, the directors protégée, becoming known through his film [Greta Garbo]; a Russian exile with an extraordinary true story to tell [Vladimir Semitjov]; a film company with a spectacular big budget production in Egypt on its track record [Trianon Film AG]; an extravagant hotel in Constantinople, in a setting bridging East and West, poverty and luxury, set against the background of the recent Russian revolution; a heated quarrel on intellectual property rights; a film crew in distress, left by their director on Christmas Eve as luck had turned; The End."

No film, but a rediscovered manuscript A Tale from Constantinople written by Mauritz Stiller and Ragnar Hyltén-Cavallius, here published for the first time with an introduction and two contextualising essays.