Synopses & Reviews
Production studies has developed into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry of film and television "production cultures," going beyond traditional examinations of authorship and industry structure. Studying production as culture involves gathering empirical data about the lived realities of people involved in media production - about collaboration and conflicts, routines and rituals, lay theories and performative actions. This volume broadens the scope of production studies by analyzing geographic and historical alternatives to contemporary Hollywood. At the same time, it invites disciplines such as ethnography, aesthetics, or sociology of art to reconsider established concepts of film and media studies like creative agency, genesis of a film work, or transnational production.
Synopsis
Conceptualizing production studies from a European perspective, the book evaluates the history of European thought on production: theories of practice, the languages, grammars, and poetics of film, practical theories of production systems such as film dramaturgy, and the self-theorizing of European auteurs and professionals.
About the Author
Petr Szczepanik is Associate Professor at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He is a researcher at the National Film Archive, Czech Republic and editor-in-chief of the journal
Iluminace. In 2009-2010, he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. He is the author of
Canned Words: The Coming of Sound Film and Czech Media Culture of the 1930s (2009) and has co-edited several books on the history of film thought, including
Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908-1939 (2008).
Patrick Vonderau is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. He is an editor for the journal Montage AV and a co-founder of NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies). His most recent books include Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media (2012), The YouTube Reader (2009), and Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (2009).
Table of Contents
Introduction; Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau
PART I: FIELDS AND APPROACHES
1. Borderlands, Contact Zones, and Boundary Games: A Conversation with John T. Caldwell; Patrick Vonderau
2. Analyzing Production from a Socio-Material Perspective; Sara Malou Strandvad
3. The 'Cultural' of Production and Career; Chris Mathieu
4. Pacts of Embodiment: A Comparative Ethnography of Filmmakers' Gestures; Emmanuel Grimaud
5. Film Production as a Palimpsest; Sylvie Lindeperg
PART II: MODES OF PRODUCTION
6. Stress Aesthetics and Deprivation 'Pay' Systems; John T. Caldwell
7. The State-Socialist Mode of Production and the Political History of Production Culture; Petr Szczepanik
8. A Flexible Mode of Production: Internationalizing Hollywood Filmmaking in Postwar Europe; Daniel Steinhart
9. A European Take on the Showrunner? Danish Television Drama Production; Eva Novrup Redvall
10. Exporting Nollywood: Nigerian Video Filmmaking in Europe; Alessandro Jedlowski
PART III: THE POLITICS OF CREATIVITY
11. Inequalities in Media Work; Rosalind Gill
12. Subjects At Work: Investigating the Creative Labour of British Screenwriters; Bridget Conor
13. Policy or Practice? Deconstructing Creative Industries; Philip Drake