Abstract
The working conditions and production cultures of Hollywood are tightly and interactively woven together with film and television working conditions in many other parts of the world. In Production Culture, I argued that the de facto mission of Hollywood production’s “race to the bottom” in the new millennium and the age of user-generated content has been “to acquire content for little or nothing and to get everyone to work for free.”1 Consider how this mantra resonates with the following recent disclosure by an Indian worker, who describes current working conditions for VFX “artists” in South Asia:
There is a disturbing trend in India for the past couple years … where VFX artists are forced to work for “experience” or “goodwill” … in “apprentice” or “training” positions. These apprenticeships usually last for a period ranging between 3–9 months and are generally unpaid. Some companies at the end of the term of these apprenticeships cut loose the interns stating reasons of “insufficient quality” or the more popular “We just don’t have any projects going on right now… We’ll call you.” OR They might consider extending your training to an extra three months or more, if you choose to remain unpaid for the duration … You will have to repeat the whole process when you join another studio, because experience certificates and references are non-existent here (unless the studio exec is your close personal friend/relation). It appears that cheap labor isn’t good enough, now the labor is required to be free … The end result being that the companies, get an almost inexhaustible pool of FREE Labor, allowing them to turn essentially a profit without Cost of production overhead in terms of labor.
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Notes
For extended discussion of these principles, see John Caldwell, “Hive-sourcing Is the New Out-sourcing: Studying Old (Industrial) Labor Habits in New (Consumer) Labor Clothes,” Cinema Journal 49, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 160–167; for a different context, see also my chapter “Conclusion,” in Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008).
see Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds, Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95 (London: BFI Publishing 2003).
On this point, see especially Mette Hjort, Small Nation, Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Mette Hjort, “The Conditions under Which Small Cinemas Thrive,” Mediascape (Winter 2012), accessed October 9, 2012, http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2011_SmallCinemas.html.
In addition to the Andrejevic article cited above, see also Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internetls Doing to Our Brains (London and NewYork: W. W. Norton & Cornpany, 2011); and Carr’s website: http://www.nicholasgcarr.com, accessed October 9, 2012. For a discussion of “prosumption” and “prosumerism,”
see 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. 1 (March 2010), 13–36,
and Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
While Carr uses the benign term “leveling up” in his essay “Workers of the World, Level Up,” Vicki Mayer and Stahl deliver withering critiques of the erasure of labor under transnational capitalism in the digital era in Vicki Mayer, Below the Line (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)
Matt Stahl, Unfree Masters: RecordingArtists and the Politics of Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 174;
and Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control;” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7.
See Ross Perlin, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy (London: Verso, 2012).
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© 2013 Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau
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Caldwell, J.T. (2013). Stress Aesthetics and Deprivation Payroll Systems. In: Szczepanik, P., Vonderau, P. (eds) Behind the Screen. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_7
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