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Who were the French who wouldnt go to movies? The question was a vexing one in France after the Second World War, to which the film industry and the national government sought answers. In 1948 the Gaumont Film Company commissioned a survey of who went to the movies, who didnt, and why. In 1954, the Centre National de la Cinématographie, acknowledging La crise du cinéma, published an ominously titled Inquest about movies and the French public. Thus audience studies in France took on national importance, and created a sociological and psychological profile of viewers that could be used to enhance business practice and government policy.
Cinenova was relaunched in 1991 from the pre-existing womens distributor, Circles, which had operated throughout the 1980s. In keeping with their founders feminist politics, both Circles and Cinenova were run via a non-hierarchical management structure and focused on the distribution, promotion and exhibition of films and videos made by, for and about women. As the funding and economic climate became harsher during the 1990s this organisational model was severely tested, as Cinenova‘s workers were forced to try and survive on a more commercially viable basis. This article uses Cinenova‘s management committee meeting minutes of 1991–97 to explore how its management practices impacted on its operation and effectiveness.
Film production at Paramount Pictures during the so-called classical era required the mobilisation of massive material and human capital that depended on institutional systems of surveillance, knowledge creation and control ranging from departmental affiliations to the pre-printed budget forms. This article focuses on those pre-printed budget forms as technologies of knowledge and power, revealing that the necessities of creating and managing coalitions of expert labourers created alternative power centres and spaces where being the object of surveillance was itself a source of power. It concludes by discussing the implications of this ecology for the historiography of Hollywood.
Since its inception by the Council of Europe in 1989, Eurimages has been to the fore in financing European co-productions with the aim of fostering integration and cooperation in artistic and industry circles and has helped finance over 1,600 feature films, animations and documentaries. Taking as its thesis the idea that the CoE seeks to perpetuate Europes utopian ideals, despite the dystopian realities that frequently undermine both the EU and the continent at large, this article analyses select Eurimages-funded dystopian films from industrial, aesthetic and socio-cultural standpoints with a view toward decoding institutionally embedded critiques of the European project.
The outsourcing of film shoots has long been adopted by US producers to cut costs and improve box-office performance. According to the academic literature, outsourcing is exploited mainly for low- and middle-budget films, but this article aims to demonstrate that blockbusters are also migrating towards other states and countries to take part in an even more competitive film location market. It investigates 165 blockbusters released between 2003 and 2013. The collected data show that blockbuster shoots are not an exclusive to California, but are re-drawing the map of film production in favour of an even more polycentric and polyglot audiovisual panorama.
This article examines the cultural politics of American soccer fandom, with specific attention paid to the ways in which the sport is positioned and platformed by the major sports networks, including, especially, cable televisions biggest player in the United States, ESPN. The networks‘ failure to exploit soccer as a marketable commodity can be traced to a persistent American futility at the sport on the international level, but it evinces as well a larger American cultural problematic, one in which ethnocentrism and isolationism is disguised, as it often is, as American exceptionalism.