Prelinger Archive: The Girl on the Magazine Cover

The short film that I chose to watch over the weekend is titled The Girl on the Magazine Cover by Jam Handy. The film is a near nine minutes long and portrays how professional models are used in making up magazine covers in the 1940's. The film is narrated and uses much visual gimmickry to try and use the beauty of women to capture the audience's attention into what it really is trying to sell: Chevrolet cars. The film acts as an advertisement for Chevrolet as the cars are placed within all of the frameworks in which the women are being photographed.  It’s so interesting to see such rampant sexism in a film like this because surely an advertisement like this would never make it on to TV today because of the way that it objectifies women. In the film, women are provocatively equated to cars, even down to the explanation of their features. Auto design is often presented in feminized terms, and the relationship between male drivers and their vehicles has been eroticized. Therefore, the purpose of the advertisement is certainly not to sell cars to women, but to lure in the men in society into seeing their cars as beautiful women and to care for them as they would their women. I find the film to be completely sexist and highly offensive; yet, it is very interesting to see how history has transformed since this time of advertisement and to see how far banter and objectification were accepted at this time. From watching it, we can learn how far the industry has come into equalizing men and women in advertising—yet, it also proves to be an eye-opener to how much farther the industry must go to fully and completely equalize men and women when you would compare this advertisement to advertisements that are seen on TV today (which still don’t always equate men to women). The growth in advertising that presents equality has been profound, but it still has lots of room to mature further.

https://archive.org/details/Girlonth1940