Working in the Global Film and Television Industries

Creativity, Systems, Space, Patronage

Andrew Dawson, Sean Holmes, Andrew Dawson, Sean Holmes

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781780930237
• eBook ISBN: 9781780930213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Like many other cultural commodities, films and TV shows tend to work in such a way as to obscure the conditions under which they are produced, a process that has been reinforced by dominant trends in the practice of Film and Television Studies.
This collection places the workplace experiences of industry workers at centre stage. It looks at film and television production in a variety of social, economic, political, and cultural contexts. The book provides detailed analyses of specific systems of production and their role in shaping the experience of work, whilst also engaging with the key theoretical and methodological questions involved in film and television production. Drawing together the work of historians, film scholars, and anthropologists, it looks at film and television production not only in Hollywood and Western Europe but also in less familiar settings such as the Soviet Union, India, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Chronologically wide-ranging, interdisciplinary and international in scope, it is a unique introduction, critical for all students of the film industries and film production.

chapter 1
New perspectives on working in the global film and television industries

ANDREW DAWSON AND SEAN P. HOLMES

Introduction

This collection is the first of its kind to grapple with the diverse experiences of women and men who work in the many film and television production centres scattered across the globe. The essays it contains, all of them specially commissioned, offer unique insights into the lives of media workers.¹ They focus on different groups of workers at various points in time and at a range of geographical locations, shedding new light on their experiences in an industry characterized by a complex spatial and hierarchical division of labour and assessing the imprint they have made, both individually and collectively, on the creative process. They also explore broader shifts in the organization of production and the changing role of the state. From its inception in 1895, film-making has straddled national boundaries and crossed continents. Though Hollywood has long dominated the global marketplace, its hegemony has not gone unchallenged and, in terms of total output, it now lags behind both the Indian film industry and the Nigerian film industry. Unlike most of the existing scholarship, our collection acknowledges this and harnesses the expertise of scholars working in a range of national and transnational contexts – Africa and India as well as North America and Europe.

Film and television as cultural commodities have tended to work in such a way as to obscure the conditions under which they are produced and thereby to deny the various groups involved in the production process an identity as workers. Film and Television Studies as a discipline has generally reinforced this tendency by defining films and television shows as cultural texts and, as such, something that can be studied largely without reference to the workers who produce them. This collection of essays takes as its starting point the premise that film and television are the products of human labour and that a full critical review of the operation of the film and television industries must, as film historian Michael Nielsen put it almost thirty years ago, ‘merge dispassionate analysis of structures with the real-life stories of … the workers themselves’ (Nielsen 1983: 47–8). Multidisciplinary in its orientation and international in its scope, it explores the experience of working in the film and television industries in a variety of social, economic and political contexts. Not only does it provide detailed analyses of specific systems of production and their role in shaping the experience of work both above and below the line in the film and television industries, but it also engages with a number of important theoretical and methodological questions that attach to the study of working in the film and television industries.

Scope of the study

We have arranged the essays in such a way as to highlight what we see as the key themes that emerge out of them, each of which we will explore in greater depth later on in our introduction. Section I focuses on systems of production, juxtaposing Andrew Dawson’s work on ‘flexible specialization’ and the free-market paradigm as exemplified by contemporary Hollywood against Galina Gornostaeva’s examination of the Soviet film industry in the wake of the Khruschev-era thaw and Olof Hedling’s analysis of government sponsorship of the creative industries in contemporary Sweden. Section II brings together three articles that engage with the efforts of workers in the film and television industries to carve out what film theorist Barry King has termed ‘manoeuvrable space’ in the workplace: Sean P. Holmes’s piece on silent movie star Jetta Goudal, Richard Paterson’s examination of the experience of freelancers in the contemporary British television industry and Ikechukwu Obiaya’s overview of working practices in Nollywood. Section III is based around the theme of patronage and clientelism. It encourages readers to consider the parallels between the experiences of film workers in Kinshasa as recounted in Katrien Pype’s piece on the production of teleserials in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and those of female cinematographers in France as set out in the Alison Smith article on the contemporary French film industry. Section IV draws together two pieces of scholarship that look at the issue of creative agency in the context of film production from markedly different disciplinary perspectives: Linda Marchant’s historical study of stills photographers in the British film industry in the 1950s and Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber’s anthropological analysis of hairdressers and make-up artists in contemporary Bollywood.

In their mature form, the global film and television industries have generally been characterized by a highly stratified labour force. This is a consequence – in part, at least – of the efforts of employers to control expenditures by establishing a clear distinction between creative talent and technicians, a project that found its clearest expression in the line that accountants in studio-era Hollywood inserted into their budget sheets to indicate where one set of labour costs began and another ended. Where precisely the line of demarcation is located has varied over time and according to national and institutional context, but it has played a central role in shaping employment practices in every major centre of film and television production. In most production centres in North America and Europe, there is a clear division between above and below the line, in addition to a well-developed job hierarchy extending from top to bottom. But in many newer centres of film and television production, especially in Africa, where the industry is not so well capitalized, the division of labour is not so minute, and the workforce draws upon religious and familial cultural traditions from outside the industry – the division is blurred and the hierarchy flatter. In its most common usage, the term ‘above-the-line’ is applied to workers who are able to exercise a degree of creative control over the production process (writers, directors, editors, cinematographers and leading actors, for example), differentiating them from ‘below-the-line’ workers, a large and amorphous group that might include technical specialists of one kind or another, craft workers, ancillary staff and supporting actors. This collection includes studies of workers in both categories. As editors, however, we have tried to problematise the practice of drawing rigid distinctions between the two, acknowledging its role in constructing workplace hierarchies but questioning its utility in terms of making sense of creative practices in the film and television industries.

Theorizing systems of production

Contributions to this volume range from studies of individual crafts to analyses of the wider political economy of film and television production. Underpinning them all is an assumption that work and the labour processes that create commodities lie at the heart of modern capitalism (including the Soviet Union, where the state assumed the role of capitalist). Making film and television programming is an arena of social conflict in which owners of media companies advance payment to workers who in return sell a capacity to work but actual production depends on the subsequent actions of the two parties. The quality and quantity of output is, therefore, the source of constant tension, sometimes in the open but mostly hidden. We are not the first to adopt this broad perspective: our claim to originality lies in the adoption of a global perspective. We draw upon the work of political economists, sociologists, industrial relations specialists, historians and anthropologists – all of it either American or European in its focus. While they do not all share our conclusions, they believe in the centrality of work and contribute to our understanding of cultural work in film and television. Hortense Powdermaker is doubly important: first, as a pioneering anthropologist of the movie industry and, second, in the ability of her book’s title, Hollywood, the Dream Factory, to sum up one of the contradictions at the heart of film production – the creation of imaginative cultural products under modern factory conditions (Powdermaker 1950). Michael Chanan and Michael Nielsen make early theoretical contributions, though they are sadly insufficiently recognized today (Chanan 1976; Nielsen 1985). Murray Ross offers a well-researched and sound institutional study of labour-management relations in the Hollywood film industry that still rewards attention (Ross 1941). Alan McKinlay and Chris Smith reassert the theoretical importance of the labour process and question wild claims as to the uniqueness of the creative industries found in some recent studies (McKinlay and Smith 2009). Richard Florida (2002) offers a thought-provoking assessment of the importance of creative communities which finds support among some contributors to this collection, although he does seem to believe that the hierarchical world of labour management has turned upside down as managers are forced to pursue creative workers who can pick and choose where they locate themselves.

In mapping the structures and processes that underpin global film and television production, we need to be aware of the social and political forces that help construct our theoretical perspectives. While we might want to believe that we are dispassionate observers of social reality and that there is a gap between us and the object of our study, reality is a good deal more complex. Dawson’s contribution to this collection draws attention to the continued influence of 1980s Los Angeles urban geographers upon how we understand the motion picture industry, identifying a false dichotomy between the labour system of classical-era Hollywood and new Hollywood which impedes clear understanding of the nature of work in motion pictures. Dawson contends that (like all theoretical constructs) the ‘flexible specialization’ model elaborated by urban geographers such as Susan Christopherson, Michael Storper and Allen Scott was influenced by the moment of its creation. At the time, the city’s older, mass production industries were on the wane, and the movie industry was threatening to leave town. The flexible specialization school addressed the anxieties of industrialists, planners and intellectuals facing the uncertainties of global markets and the dismantling of state regulation by envisioning a bright new future: highly productive movie businesses firmly rooted in Hollywood would offer socially rewarding jobs. Specialist small firms competing among themselves would enhance efficiency, improve working conditions and create closer bonds between capital and labour. Optimistic assurances about the future, at least in part, rested on the creation of a good/bad binary divide between classical and new Hollywood where all that was inefficient, rigid and discordant was associated with the earlier period.

Although the flexible specialization school subsequently modified its view of the industry in response to contrary evidence, the Fordist/post-Fordist dichotomy continues to exert a strong influence on film development agencies and city planning departments as well as film and media studies in higher education. The adoption of the flexible specialization model by regional planners during the 1980s alerts us to the intimate connection between, on the one hand, how we conceptualize the industry’s system of production and, on the other, the activities of government in regulating the industry and in pursuing regional development goals. While the state can be seen as a consumer of academic theory, government concerns also powerfully loop back to influence the way academics conceptualize the industry’s present, future and past. At the same time, the 2008 banking crisis and the collapse of the neoliberal world view offer us the opportunity to seize the moment and re-conceptualize work in the media industries on firmer ground. The thirty-year-old claim that unfettered markets deliver efficiency and social welfare is, at least for the moment, treated with widespread scepticism.

John Caldwell and the ‘production studies’ school have offered an exciting new approach to studying media labour that seeks to occupy the intellectual space provided by the collapse of the banking system. In so far as they focus on the practices and beliefs of film and video workers, ‘not just the prestige producers and directors but also those of the many more anonymous workers, such as gaffers and grips, in Hollywood’s lower castes and crafts’, the school shares many of our concerns (Caldwell 2008: 1). Like the scholars whose work is brought together in this collection, Caldwell and his associates assert that media workers are producers of cultural meaning and that creativity is not the preserve of an elite. They draw upon new sources of information – material that is not secreted away ‘behind the scenes’ but hidden in plain sight, such as the ‘making of’ additions to DVD releases of movies and the rituals of industry gatherings. As a reflective fieldworker sceptical of industry spin, Caldwell is well aware of his own problematic location as he teases out the meanings of workers’ stories and trade customs.² For the moment, production studies focuses narrowly on an Angeleno or, at best, Anglo world, although this could easily be remedied. Nevertheless, as far as we are concerned, the production studies model is ultimately flawed. This collection of essays – which looks at the changing division of labour and workers’ experiences, beliefs and actions – parts company with production studies at the point where it pursues the study of cultural meaning beyond the industry, wage labour and the social relations of work. ‘[E]ven the objects of consumption are sites of cultural production as consumers adopt, modify, and re-purpose the cultural meaning of domestic tools and media technologies’, declare the editors of Production Studies (Mayer, Banks and Caldwell 2008: 3). Blurring the real distinction between production and consumption means that for scholars in the field of production studies, media workers, fans and audiences are all producers of culture. But if we are all producers of culture, what makes media workers distinctive? While media workers do author texts – at least collectively – they have many other social relations not shared by fans or by audiences. They deploy varying degrees of skill, struggle to stay in an industry with a superabundance of labour, work closely with colleagues, and have cooperative or antagonistic relations with their managers. For the moment at least, production studies has little to say about management-labour relations, conflict and conciliation, and collective action. As theorists from Marx onwards point out, workers are alienated from that which they produce, neither owning the tools of the trade nor the finished article. This is as true of hula-hoop manufacture as it is of Hollywood, despite the latter’s glittering visual attractions. Production studies, with its emphasis on tracing the meaning of cultural products, runs the risk of fetishizing films and television programmes by obscuring the social relations of production in the film and television industries behind an analysis of the meaning of commodities in circulation.

Methodologies

To engage fully with the past and present of movie workers’ lives, and to explore the interplay between the shifting division of labour and work culture and creativity, this collection needs to draws upon a wide range of disciplines and methodologies. Holmes uses his historical training to dissect the career of 1920s star Jetta Goudal in an industry only just assuming its modern shape. He draws upon popular magazines, newspapers and hitherto largely ignored archival sources in Los Angeles to explore Goudal’s efforts to wrest control over her star image from her employers. Dawson, also a historian, deploys a reflexive historiographical approach in his assessment of the impact of 1980s Los Angles urban geographers upon our understanding of Hollywood’s labour process since the 1920s. Most contributions to this volume deal with the modern period and look to the disciplinary traditions of anthropology, sociology and film studies. Wilkinson-Weber and Pype, building upon a scholarly tradition established by Hortense Powdermaker in the early 1950s, craft finely detailed anthropological studies of media workers based on extensive fieldwork in Mumbai and Kinshasa. Other contributors locate themselves within the discipline of sociology, or draw upon its methods. Gornostaeva frames the careers of leading Soviet directors Grigori Chukrai and Andrei Tarkovsky within Soviet political and bureaucratic structures. Paterson’s study of the attitudes of freelancers in the British television industry utilizes a major longitudinal industry study carried out between 1994 and 1998, while Hedling’s essay on Swedish workers and regional policy harvests invaluable information from interviews with business leaders and policy makers. Ikechukwu Obiaya similarly conducted invaluable interviews with Nigerian film workers. Even Film Studies, a discipline that has rarely concerned itself with the issues raised in this volume, offers ways of exploring the interrelationship between creativity and the social division of labour. Marchant combines an aesthetic assessment of the artistic achievements of studio photographer Cornel Lucas with a clear analysis of the 1950s British studio system. Smith’s familiarity with the artistic achievements of French women directors and editors drew her attention to the glaring absence of women cinematographers in the film industry in contemporary France.

Systems of production

Contributors to this volume point to the range of systems of production under which media workers are employed. D...

Table of contents

• Working in the global film and television industries: Creativity, systems, space, patronage
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• chapter 1: New perspectives on working in the global film and television industries
• section I: Systems of production
• section II: Manoeuvrable spaces
• section III: Patronage and clientelism
• section IV: Creative agency
• Appendix
• Index