Heide Solbrig is assistant professor in The Media and Culture program in the English and Media Studies department at Bentley University where she teaches and works in dual areas of scholarship and media production. Her work as documentary producer and media scholar each address similar questions about discourses of work and self within the larger social and political conditions of modern capitalism. Her current documentary, Man and the Middle-Class: The Work and Vision of Henry Strauss (2010) tells the story of Henry Strauss, an industrial film producer who lived through the Great Depression and WWII and how his experiences intersected with debates about post-war labor/management relations. This film illustrates through interview, voice-over and historical footage how the life and films of Henry Strauss reflected and intersected with la- bor management debates critical to the production of a post-war middle-class. The film reflects Solbrig's scholarly research into the history and development of the industrial film genre but also her interest in telling personal stories about the experience of capitalism.
Solbrig's research into the history of the industrial film brings together a number of scholarly fields and methods in order to ask questions about the history of capitalism and institutional culture. Her work operates at the intersection of political economy and cultural studies by ex- amining the ways that institutions have told stories about themselves through film--and how these stories have often been deployed to reflect and reproduce economic and political condi- tions in an organization. This research examines how ideology and material culture intersect to create historically specific and experientially distinct film genres reflecting modern business cul- ture in the 20th century. The genre of industrial film is as diverse as capitalism and in her explo- ration of the genre Solbrig explores how different historical moments and film genres reflect the relationships between corporations, employees and the state; in Dr. ERPI Finds His Voice she ex- plores how in the 1930s, the Bell Company hoped to use educational film genres to reshape the film industry, and circumvent anti-trust laws through a national visual communication policy for the public school system; the documentary The Work and Vision of Henry Strauss and other writ- ing, explores the material and narrative struggles over post-war labor law and the creation of the middle-class; and The Personnel is Political looks at how the therapeutic genre of management training video for Affirmative Action initiatives enacts a social negotiation between the public good of integration and the ideologies of individualism and laissez-faire capitalism.
As both a video producer and a scholar, Solbrig's work oscillates between research, practice and education. The work examines capitalism from what may seem an almost trivial perspective of industrial media products, with a very serious intention of pulling out accessible stories about specific historical moments of the modern business institution for public consumption. The hope of the researcher is to frame these different moments in the history of capitalism, its rela- tionship to the state, to employees and our notion of self, as a series multiple possibilities, incar- nations and directions rather than as any single inevitable progression. The purpose of creating documentaries, such as The Work and Vision of Henry Strauss, is to explore these themes in order to engage larger, less scholarly audiences in discussions over the history of capitalism. In addi- tion to addressing similar topics about the history of industrial film production in her documen- tary and in her scholarly research, her most recent research has explored the conditions of insti- tutional discourses of media production and media education.