Abstract
What do we mean by speaking of “production”? According to Etienne (and Anne) Souriau’s posthumously published Vocabulaire d’esthétique,1 there are three meanings of the word, derived from the original Latin term producere, the first one broadly referring to the resulting work of human labor, while the second being the equivalent of a famously influential Marxian theorem describing an ensemble of operations that facilitate, by way of combination and transformation, a reproduction and adjustment of existing, yet imperfectly usable goods. But there is also a third definition, and it is this one that, according to Souriau, ultimately gives historical meaning to the aforementioned two—the now obsolete idea of creatio ex nihilo, of solitary origination and individual agency, as contained in the romanticist image of the artist.
Keywords
- Production Community
- Creative Industry
- Public Service Broadcasting
- British Media Education
- Creative Labor
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Notes
Etienne Souriau, Vocabulaire d’esthétique. Publié sous la direction de Anne Souriau (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990).
See, for instance, Douglas Gomery, “The Centrality of Media Economics,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 3 (1993): 190–198;
Benjamin M. Compaine and Douglas Gomery, Who Owns the Media? Competition and Concentration in the Mass Media Industry (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000); and Janet Staiger and Douglas Gomery, “The History of World Cinema: Models for Economic Analysis,” Film Reader, no. 4 (1979): 35–44.
Janet Wasko and Eileen R. Meehan, “Critical Crossroads or Parallel Routes? Political Economy and New Approaches to Studying Media lndustries and Cultural Products,” Cinema Journal 52, no. 3 (2013): 150–157.
Manuel Alvarado, “Authorship, Organization and Production,” Australian Journal of Screen Theory 6, no. 9/10 (1981): 15.
See also Manuel Alvarado and John Stewart, Made for Television: Euston Films Limited (London: BFI, 1985).
See, among others, Janet Staiger and David A. Gerstner, eds, Authorship and Film (New York: Routledge, 2003), especially Staiger’s “Authorship Approaches” (27–60);
and Janet Staiger, ed., The Studio System (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
Peppino Ortoleva, “Historiographie et recherche cinématographique,” Hors Cadre 7, no. 1 (Winter 1988/89): 151–161;
Francesco Casetti, “I ferri del mestiere. Metodico, anti-metodico e post-mestodico nello studio della produzione cinematografica,” in Dietro lo schermo. Ragionamenti sui modi di produzione cinematografici in Italia, ed. Vito Zagarrio (Venice: Marsilio, 1988), 159–166;
Pierre Sorlin, Sociologie du cinéma. Ouverture pour l’histoire de demain (Paris: Aubier, 1977), 77–113;
Michèle Lagny, De l’histoire du cinéma. Méthode historique et histoire du cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), 168–69, 221.
Ibid., 161. For a critical account of Braverman’s influence, see, for example, Paul S Adler, . “Marx, Machines, and Skill,” Technology and Culture 31, no. 4(1990): 780–812.
Francesco Casetti, “Theory, Post-theory, Neo-theories: Changes in Discourses, Changes in Objects,” Cinémas: revue d’études cinématographiques/Cinemas: Journal of Film Studies 17, no. 2–3 (2007): 33–45.
John T. Caldwell, “Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (Television),” Cinema Journal 45, no. 1 (2005): 90–97.
See, for instance, Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, eds, Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), and for a film studies application, Anna Sofia Rossholm and Jon Viklund, “Verkets förvandlingar. Ekelöf, Bergman och den genetiska konflikten,” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, no. 1 (2011): 5–24.
Kristin Thompson, “Early Alternatives to the Hollywood Mode of Production: Implications for Europe’s Avant-gardes,” Film History, no. 5 (1993): 386–404; Colin Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Maria Belodubrovskaya, “Politically Incorrect: Filmmaking under Stalin and the Failure of Power” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011).
See Chris Mathieu and Sara Malou Strandvad, “Is This What We Should Be Comparing When Comparing Film Production Regimes? A Systematic Typological Scheme,” Creative Industries Journal 1, no. 2 (2008): 171–192.
See, for example, Paul Kerr, “Babel’s Network Narrative: Packaging a Globalized Art Cinema,” Transnational Cinemas 1, no. 1 (2010): 37–51.
Mike Wayne, “Mode of Production: New Media Technology and the Napster File,” Rethinking Marxism 16, no. 2 (April 2004): 137–154.
George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson, “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer’,” Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 13 (2010): 13–36.
See, for example, Anthony Slide, The Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996);
Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006);
Mark Cooper, Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Emily Susan Carman, “Independent Stardom: Female Stars and Freelance Labor in 1930s Hollywood” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2008). Only few publications of this kind focus on Europe;
see, for example, Roy Perkins and Martin Stollery, British Film Editors: The Heart of the Movie (London: British Film Institute, 2004);
Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris, and Sarah Street, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007);
Laurent Le Forestier and Priska Morrissey, eds, Sue Harris, and Sarah Street, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007); Laurent Le Forestier and Priska Morrissey, eds, “Histoire des métiers du cinéma en France avant 1945”; 1895, no. 65 (Winter, 2011).
Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
Sylvia J. Martin, “Fantasy at Work: The Culture of Production in the Hollywood and Hong Kong Media lndustries” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2009).
A recent exception is Beata Hock, Gendered Creative Options and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema and the Visual Arts in State-socialistand Post-socialistHungary (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013).
Georgina Born, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (London: Vintage, 2005).
Georgina Born, “The Social and the Aesthetic: For a Post-Bourdieuian Theory of Cultural Production,” Cultural Sociology 4, no. 2 (2010): 171–208;
see also Born, “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity,” Twentieth Century Music 2, no. 1 (2005): 7–36.
See Georgina Born, “Reflexivity and Ambivalence: Culture, Creativity and Government in the BBC,” Cultural Values 6, nos 1 & 2 (2002): 65–90.
Janet Staiger, “The Pleasures and Profits of a Postmodern Film Historiography,” Norsk medietidsskrift 2, no. 2 (1995): 7–17.
Lillian Ross, Picture (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1952);
Herbert J. Gans, “The Creator—Audience Relationship in the Mass Media: An Analysis of Movie-making,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, eds Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White (New York: Free Press, 1957), 315–324;
Robert E. Kapsis, “Hollywood Filmmaking and Audience Image,” in Media, Audience, and Social Structure, eds Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach and Muriel G. Cantor (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1986), 161–173;
Nathaniel Kohn, Pursuing Hollywood: Seduction, Obsession, Dread (Lanham, MD/New York: Altamira Press, 2006);
John T. Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2008).
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© 2013 Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau
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Szczepanik, P., Vonderau, P. (2013). Introduction. In: Szczepanik, P., Vonderau, P. (eds) Behind the Screen. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_1
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