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Consuming Global ImagesThe International Television Commercial as Short Film

Edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer

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Published 30 November 2026

About this book

Addresses the theoretical, industrial and creative gap in the history and criticism of the international broadcast commercial in respective media cultures

  • Critically examines the international television commercial as a form of film art
  • Cites international archival print and media sources, with some previously “lost” or impossible to access material now available for critical analyses
  • Incorporates critical interpretive strategies associated with Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger underpinned by the rigor of New Film History

The world watches commercials. This volume explores this aesthetic and cultural presence, the intermedial relationship and phenomena of international broadcast commercials as film art. Whether sitting in front of a television set in Egypt, Belgium or Portugal, ‘surfing’ across streaming services in Hungary, the Philippines or Chile, or glancing at messages broadcast on electronic billboards in Japan, India, Germany or in movie theatres and television screens in the United States, the question remains relevant: what are we looking at?

Consuming Global Images: The International Television Commercial as Short Film addresses the theoretical, industrial and creative gap in the history and criticism of the international broadcast commercial in respective media cultures as it reads the advertisement as a short film.

Reviews

Consuming Global Images is a timely collection that addresses many compelling issues, subjects and themes regarding international commercials from several national cinemas and historical contexts. Individual chapters offer exciting, useful discussions that address the content, style, auteurs and history of commercials, fulfilling the editors’ aim to expand scholarly and critical attention to an often overlooked form.
Building on their pioneering Consuming Images (2021), Rhodes and Singer’s exciting new collection, Consuming Global Images, examines commercial broadcasts from around the world as short films and therefore as cultural products with distinct aesthetic features that do more than just sell goods. At a time when the short film has emerged as a staple of commercial online video cultures, this collection reminds us of the need to see beyond the ‘ad’ and understand the aesthetic and cultural context that brings it to audiences.
Table of contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Notes on the Contributors

1. Introduction
Robert Singer and Gary D. Rhodes

2. And Now … A Cartoon From Our Sponsors: Examining the Narrative Form, Technique, and Evolution of European Animated Advertising Short Films
William J. Lorenzo

3. Make Them Wait: Desire, Delay, and the Serial Gap in Television Commercials
Michael R. Soriano

4. The Three Functions of the Commercial: Sensation, Emotion, and the Priming of Semantic Memory in Mobility Era
Manodip Chakraborty

5. Branded: Native America and the Television Commercial
Gary D. Rhodes

6. “If You Really Want It, You Can”: The Adidas Torsion Ad as Heterotopia in 1990s Romania
Monica Filimon

7. Fellini’s Commercials: The Art of Complicitous Subversion
Frank Burke

8. Anderson and Martins: On Trains and Magic Boxes
José Duarte

9. “Not for the faint of heart”: Japanese Viral Marketing and Found Footage Horror
Alex Svensson

10. “Tough-on-Crime” Political Advertisements as Home-Invasion Horror Short Films
Fielding Montgomery

11. Woman-Smoke-Burn: Sensational Declension in Cigarette Commercials
Robert Singer

Index

About the contributors

Gary D. Rhodes

Gary D. Rhodes is Professor of Media, Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the author of Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema (2012), The Perils of Moviegoing in America (2012), and The Birth of the American Horror Film (2018). He is a founding editor of Horror Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Rhodes is also the writer-director of the documentary films Lugosi: Hollywood's Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004).

Robert Singer

Robert Singer, Professor of Liberal Studies, CUNY Graduate Center [ret]. He received a Ph.D. from New York University in Comparative Literature. His areas of expertise include literary and film interrelations, interdisciplinary research in film history and aesthetics, and comparative studies. He is the ReFocus: American and International Film series co-editor for Edinburgh University Press. He has written and directed several independent short films and co-produced the animated film, Ulalume (2022). Among his more recent publications are Consuming Images: Film Art and the Television Commercial (EUP, 2020), co-authored with Gary Rhodes, and “A View from the Boardwalk: The W.P.A. New York City Guide and Coney Island Hypertext,” in Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project, ed. Sara Rutkowski, (2022).