Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity

Ramyar D. Rossoukh, Steven C. Caton, Ramyar D. Rossoukh, Steven C. Caton

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781478014904
  9781478013969
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478022190
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

From Bangladesh and Hong Kong to Iran and South Africa, film industries around the world are rapidly growing at a time when new digital technologies are fundamentally changing how films are made and viewed. Larger film industries like Bollywood and Nollywood aim to attain Hollywood's audience and profitability, while smaller, less commercial, and often state-funded enterprises support various cultural and political projects. The contributors to Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity take an ethnographic and comparative approach to capturing the diversity and growth of global film industries. They outline how modularity—the specialized filmmaking tasks that collectively produce a film—operates as a key feature in every film industry, independent of local context. Whether they are examining the process of dubbing Hollywood films into Hindi, virtual reality filmmaking in South Africa, or on-location shooting in Yemen, the contributors' anthropological methodology brings into relief the universal practices and the local contingencies and deeper cultural realities of film production.

Contributors. Steven C. Caton, Jessica Dickson, Kevin Dwyer, Tejaswini Ganti, Lotte Hoek, Amrita Ibrahim, Sylvia J. Martin, Ramyar D. Rossoukh

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction / Ramyar D. Rossoukh and Steven C. Caton
• 1. “English Is so Precise, and Hindi Can Be So Heavy!”: Language Ideologies and Audience Imaginaries in a Dubbing Studio in Mumbai / Tejaswini Ganti
• 2. The Digital Divine: Postproduction of Majid Majidi’s The Willow Tree / Ramyar D. Rossoukh
• 3. Journalists As Cultural Vectors: Film as the Building Blocks of News Narrative in India / Amrita Ibrahim
• 4. “This Is Not a Film”: Industrial Expectations and Film Criticism as Censorship at the Bangladesh Film Censor Board / Lotte Hoek
• 5. “This Most Reluctant of Romantic Cities”: Dis-location Film Shooting in the Old City of Sana’a / Steven C. Caton
• 6. Stealing Shots: The Ethics and Edgework of Industrial Filmmaking / Sylvia J. Martin
• 7. Making Virtual Reality Film: An Untimely View of Film Futures from (South) Africa / Jessica Dickson
• 8. The Moroccan Film Industry À Contre-Jour: The Unpredictable Odyssey of a Small National Cinema / Kevin Dwyer
• References
• Contributors
• Index