Do Corporate Films Dream of Cybernetic Governance? Computers (as Metaphors of) Industrial Labor and Society in Olivetti-Sponsored Films

Addressing the audiovisual construction of computer labor, the essay focuses on the relationship between computers and film in their lifetimes as useful media. It analyzes the films sponsored by the leading Italian IT manufacturing company Olivetti between the late 1950s and the 1970s. Questioning Vinzenz Hediger’s hypothesis on industrial cinema’s inability to make computing visible, it argues that the cinematic representation of computers is invested with broader rhetorical functions and responds to a specific form of governmentality, inflected by the application of cybernetics in scientific management. Based on this premise, the essay is articulated in two sections. The first one, “Computer’s Screen Debut,” retraces Olivetti’s early outbreak in the IT market and its concurrent participation to the Italian industry film festivals. At that time, company executives and film practitioners problematized how the new and still largely unknown machines could be (re)presented to persuade potential clients. The second section, “Envisioning Cybernetic Governance,” analyzes Olivetti’s computer-themed films. Through a comparison with those produced in the previous years, it maintains that company’s corporate narrative and self-representation changed from a “pastoral” ideal of the factory as a community, to the cybernetic one of work organization as a socio-technical, data processing system. This shift enabled discursive analogies among computer, industrial labor and social organizations at large. The metaphorical tropes that re-occur across the considered film corpus are grouped into three categories to demonstrate how Olivetti’s films turned computers into models of cybernetic governance.