Birth of the Brute Light Beast

[Terrance]

The flourishing, state sponsored Soviet
> cinema of the 1920s and 1930s should be viewed in this light: as
> essentially a cinema of propaganda.

Man made the machine in his own image. She has limbs which act; lungs
which breathe; a heart which beats; a nervous system through which runs
electricity. The phonograph is the image of his voice; the camera the
image of his eye. The machine is his daughter born without a mother. ...
Man gave her every qualification except thought. She submits to his will
but he must direct her activities. ... Through their mating they
complete one another. She brings forward according to his conceptions. 

Haviland's rhetorical strategy of feminizing the machine strains to
reassure readers that the power relationship of man over machine is a
"natural" one. 

In the 1940s, the ideological underpinnings of the era finally came
undone. The sophisticated weapons used during the Second World War,
especially the devastating atom bomb, effectively diminished the popular
idealization of advanced technology as a benign force for social
regeneration. Not coincidentally, machine iconography becomes less
prevalent in the post-war era as abstract pictorial idioms began to
dominate the art scene in America. Nevertheless, the concept of
dehumanized technological production has continued to transform life in
the US during the post-industrial era, even though the public largely
remains cynical or fearful of its impact. In the highly bureaucratic
corporate sphere, huge multinational companies identified by cypher-like
acronyms--IBM, for example--have risen to prominence over the older
fiefdoms associated with individual entrepreneurs such as Ford and
Woolworth. No longer "presidents," heads of companies now bear the
depersonalized title of "CEO." The machine-age concept of the
individual has been transmuted and diffused; now--along with factoiry
labor--individual white-collar workers, consumers and even corporate
officers disappeared into an anonymous network of economic activity. 

_Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine_
Karen Lucic