Zurich – City of Capital

The exhibition Zurich – City of Capital explores the history of Zurich from a cinematic perspective. It presents commissioned films and activist short films from the 20th century that provide insight into political, social, and economic developments and contexts.

For decades, commissioned films represented the most important sector of Swiss film production. Businesses, public authorities, and educational institutions had films made for image cultivation, instruction, or advertising. Today, these films offer valuable perspectives on how Zurich rose to become one of Switzerland's major economic centres over the course of industrialisation. They reveal production conditions and global interdependencies, and document the city’s evolving urban landscape and demographic structure. As instruments of their commissioners, most of these films serve the interests of the elite. They rarely focus on the lives of city dwellers or criticise the prevailing conditions. The introduction of state film funding and the adoption of cheaper formats such as 8mm and 16mm film or video changed film production throughout the second half of the 20th century. In the context of political, cultural and social movements that shaped Zurich as much as large corporations, various individuals turned to film to denounce existing power structures or to imagine alternatives. Most of the works in this exhibition were digitized, restored, and newly made accessible as part of a multi-year project to re-evaluate Zurich's commercial films. The selection is supplemented by videos and photographs from the Swiss Social Archives. Because commissioned films were often produced in both German and French versions, the exhibition presents both whenever available.