The product’s slogan, “Cleans the hands and homes of millions”, is quickly brought to life by a series of images, in three spaces, created by a triple exposure. First, on the left, a factory; on the right, a male worker scrubbing his hands, looking eagerly out a window; and in the middle (a constant, throughout the film), two figures dressed in white, washing a giant three-dimensional sign of a hand. The sides dissolve, and a new split screen shows workers, both female and male, on the left, leaving the factory (recalling the Lumières’ famous factory-exit film three decades earlier), while on the right a woman washes dishes. Flash Cleaner, we are told, is not only “a necessity for Mechanics”, but it also “Does wonders for the Housewife”.
The triple exposure creates three spaces: the public space of (primarily) male waged labour; the private space of female household chores; and the impossible, trick-space of the advertisement itself. While the commercial seems to make use of the evident division of public/male and private/female space, it is the third space, that of cinematic advertising itself, which complicates things, sending a mixed message to female audiences. It ensures that household chores remained a duty-bound female sphere, while also seducing women to seek escape and refuge from the daily routine of domestic chores in the dark haven of the cinema, when they should, in the words from 1913 of social reformer Victor Noack, be “tending to the fold – their children”.

Sebastian Köthe, Enrique Moreno Ceballos