Produced in July 1897, Admiral Cigarette is recognized, along with the Lumières’ Laveuses (1896), as one of the earliest advertising films. Thomas Edison would often finance his film productions by outsourcing his expenses, resulting in various collaborations with commercial companies; Charles Musser points out that “Between 1896 and 1900, nearly half of all Edison films were financed this way.”
This commercial for Admiral Cigarettes is completely in line with “the cinema of attraction” and strategies of sensation. A lot is packed into 30 seconds: four men representing different attributes (including John Bull, a Native American, and Uncle Sam), sitting in front of a backdrop advertising the product “Admiral Cigarette”, are surprised by a woman in tights who jumps out of an oversized cigarette pack, distributes cigarettes and then tosses the rest into the air; they all start puffing away, including the woman, while unfurling a banner reading “WE ALL SMOKE”.
Employing exotic female imagery to promote cigarettes was already in use by the 1890s, when the American Tobacco Company offered trading cards inside the packs of some of its brands, so the visual reference of a woman emerging from a pack of cigarettes would have been familiar. While one can make a case for seeing the commercial as an example of female objectification, it’s possible to find alternate readings, since the woman who comes out of the box also smokes, and bursts onto the male scene with a certain amount of power. With the sign “We all smoke,” the ad implies that everyone, men and women, are consumers in a fully merchandised world.

Enrique Moreno Ceballos, Isabel Krek