Old corporate films and former factory workers: film reception as social memory

Abstract

This article explores the seemingly compliant reception of old corporate films by former workers in a deindustrialized Portuguese town. The analysis identifies a particular, memory-focused mode of film reception among those workers, prompting joint consideration of convergent acquisitions from memory studies and film reception theory. This sheds light on the ways in which these workers reshape corporate film as their own relevant memory tool, the specific features of corporate film that support its memory value from a worker’s point of view, and the workers’ crafting, even so, of a lucid, class-bound relationship to the films as (corporate) discourse.