A Neat Old Timey Soap Ad
It’s a little soap ad from the 1930s, and its considered somewhat an important modernist experiment in graphic design and animation. You can watch it on Ubu.Com, my favorite archive of old art and cinema. Its called Bubbles Game. It was directed by Karel Dodal, a Czech auteur with some prestige in his home country, but, as evidenced by his lack of an English Wikipedia page and the sparseness of his article on the French Wikipedia, less familiarity elsewhere.
I think I may have an allergy to advertising that tries to pass itself off as an essay: Shaq giving a legitimate testimonial, imposing himself as an authority on success itself, or affiliate marketers pretending to have identified the objective ranking of cheap pasta sauces, these instances where an advertiser makes a case based off of lies seems more dire than using pretty shimmering bubbles to make a soap memorable. If you want some jurisprudence to back it up, you can’t sue for defamation if speech is obvious hyperbole, and so a poetic advertisement, with poesy and hyperbole being blood relatives, seems well divorced from the truth. I would rather have an advertisement with no real truth value, where no claims are made, than one whose claims are duplicitous. I don’t like it when lies are passed off as objective. I would prefer the subliminal connection between Carl’s Jr. Burgers and sexy ladies over a lie pretending at the truth. Maybe I just think myself resistant to propaganda, or I know too well the power of argumentation and perceived credibility, being an essayist in the rough.
Is it grim that the arts are so beholden to commerce, that Dodal, a director of some repute, would make a commercial for soap? Of course. Don’t go asking questions you know the answer to. But so it has always been, as the soap ad above does show, and the wonderful murals painted by the WPA, and the jewelry of Marie Antoinette. I just don’t care enough anymore to defend the honor of art against commerce.
I like the music. The simple graphic design patterns. The fact I could probably recreate this on my personal website where I’ve learned to animate simple shapes using CSS and JavaScript. It is a neat old timey soap ad. It’s sweet, clean, pure.