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increasingly possible ‘a polycentric imagining of the world, where no single centre monopolises the production and circulation of audio-visual images’ (257), Yoshimoto argues that such dispersal or decentring is not reflected in film studies itself. Instead, the discipline is prone to a ‘false universalism’ (260), applying unduly to multiple cinemas around the world the commentary it generates on the single case of Hollywood. Thus to begin a discussion of film industries with Hollywood, rather than with a different example from globally scattered production, would seem to
In this interview with Mia Bays (Birds’ Eye View), we discuss the recent Reclaim The Frame project, a UK-wide touring programme that showcases female-directed or -scripted films, usually new or recent releases. The interview explores the idea that this kind of curation is a necessary feminist intervention in the contemporary British cinema circuit, one that offers audiences agency and acknowledges that initiatives in film production alone are not sufficient to shift structural inequalities in the film industry. The piece begins with some contextual detail before turning to my discussion with Bays.
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.
In contrast to the canonical history of cinema and film theory, often dominated by academic texts and Western and/or male voices, this article presents a casual conversation held in 1961 between four of the most influential women in the post-war Japanese film industry: Kawakita Kashiko,,Yamamoto Kyōko, Tanaka Kinuyo and Takamine Hideko. As they openly discuss their gendered experience in production, promotion, distribution and criticism, their thoughts shed light on the wide range of opportunities available to women in filmmaking, but also on the professional constraints,and concerns which they felt came along with their gender. Their conversation reveals how they measured themselves and their national industry in relation to the West; at times unaware of their pioneer role in world cinema. This piece of self-reflexive criticism contributes to existing research on both womens filmmaking and the industry of Japanese cinema, and invites us to reconsider non-hegemonic film thinking practices and voices.
Cecil Court is a small pedestrian passageway in the London Borough of Westminster. Under its more famous name of Flicker Alley, it is also the mythic birthplace and romantic heart of the early British film industry. This essay sets aside romantic myths and adopts the economic theory,of agglomeration, using the film businesses moving in and out of Cecil Court as a case study to demonstrate the changing patterns within the industry. In doing so it charts the growth patterns and expansion of the British film industry from 1897 to 1911. It shows its development from its origins,in equipment manufacture, through to production and finally to rental and cinema building and outfitting, marking the transition from its small-scale artisan-led beginnings into a large and complex network of distinct but interlocking film businesses.
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.
Zygmunt Bauman, internationally known and revered as the sociologist of postmodernity and of ‘liquid’ society, was for about a decade a serious and dedicated photographer. This book presents his black-and-white photographs from the 1980s, together with a range of essays, by colleagues, friends and family, about his work with images. The importance of his wife, Janina Bauman, in his life and work is acknowledged, with essays on photographs he took of her and also on her work in the film industry in Poland.
Anti-Communist hysteria had a wide-ranging impact on Hollywood across the postwar period. As writers, directors and stars came under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) due to the content of their films and their political activities, careers were interrupted indefinitely and Hollywood‘s ability to promote cultural change in the new era following World War II was severely hampered. Frank Sinatra‘s heavy involvement in liberal politics during this period illustrates the problems confronting the American film industry as it attempted to address the country‘s imperfections.
This article reveals how screenwriter Stephen Volk‘s idea for a sequel to The Innocents (1961, Jack Clayton) became, over the course of fifteen years, the British horror film The Awakening (2011, Nick Murphy). It examines practitioner interviews to reflect on creative labour in the British film industry, while also reorientating the analysis of British horror film to the practices of pre-production, specifically development. The research reveals that female protagonist Florence Cathcart was a major problem for the project and demonstrates how the Florence character changed throughout the development process. Repeatedly rewritten and ultimately restrained by successive male personnel, her character reveals persistent, problematic perceptions of gender in British horror filmmaking.
In studio publicity, trade papers, reviews, articles, and educational materials, Joseph L. Mankiewiczs Julius Caesar (1953) was described and accepted as a faithful and mostly pleasing adaptation of Shakespearean drama to the Hollywood screen. As Variety accurately predicted, it achieved four Oscar nominations, one award for art direction and set decoration, high grosses, a hit soundtrack album, and several subsequent revivals. With the content more or less given, contemporary discussion focussed closely on how the verbal had been visualised, on how theatre had been turned into cinema – in short, on the film‘s style. It is with contemporary and subsequent readings of the film‘s style that this article is concerned, where, following David Bordwell, style is taken to mean ‘a films systematic and significant use of techniques of the medium’. But whereas Bordwell analyses film style directly in terms of an aesthetic history he considers to be distinct from the history of the film industry, its technology, or a films relation to society, I explore interpretations of one film‘s style that are heavily invested with socio-political meaning. If, in Bordwell‘s organic metaphor, style is the flesh of film, these readings of style explicitly dress that flesh in socio-political clothing. This analysis of Julius Caesar, then, is not another contribution to debates about adaptation, theatre on film, or Shakespeare on screen, but about the politics of film style.