Still upset about the cancellation of this year's Oktoberfest? Let's get you some beer. If you want it from the world's most modern can this #ThirstyThursday, we've got you covered.
This ca. 1965 commercial advertises the Carling Brewing Company's new tab-open beer cans and was produced by Cinecraft. Founded in 1939, the Cleveland-based Cinecraft is the country's longest-surviving commercial producer of industrial and sponsored motion pictures, a sector that included thousands of companies at its high point during the mid 20th century. In addition to Carling, Cinecraft also made commercials for brewers like Cleveland's Leisy Brewing Company and Pittsburgh's Iron City Brewing Company.
In 2018, Hagley acquired the Culley family collection of Cinecraft Productions audiovisual materials (Accession 2018.20), which offers an introduction to Cinecraft's history and samples of their productions from the company's first thirty years (you can explore that collection online by clicking here).
We've recently added to that acquisition by bringing Cinecraft's film archive into our collections. This new collection is the largest motion picture film collection ever acquired by Hagley and will make the Library a destination for researchers of visual culture and the history of industrial films for many years to come. As far as we can tell, it is one of the largest intact collections from an industrial film producer to survive from an era when thousands of businesses specialized in advertising, industrial, and sponsored films. The paper portion of the Cinecraft Productions collection is now fully processed and a finding aid is available online.
We will also be processing and digitizing a significant portion of this film collection over a ten-year period. For now, you can explore our Digital Archive of the collection in progress, which includes about 100 films as well as scripts and still images, by clicking here.