Abstract
The literature on film and television has been dominated by the study of films and TV programmes as either cultural texts (media studies) or as products for consumption (economics). The editors of this collection of essays set out to provide some corrective to this situation, taking as their starting point the premise that film and television are the products of human labour. Of the literature that does exist on production, much of it takes as its subject stars or well-known directors; Dawson and Holmes are unapologetic that their book is no exception in including a chapter on each. However, there is an absence of work in the literature as a whole that would give voice to the crafts and technical trades whose arcane job titles (focus puller, matte painter or dolly grip) cinema goers glimpse fleetingly as the credits roll. The importance of this text is that it makes a contribution towards filling this gap.
The book is described in its cover notes as ‘wide-ranging, interdisciplinary and international’ in addressing the experience of film and television production in ‘a variety of social, economic, political and cultural contexts’. In an 11-chapter book without a standardizing template this could easily translate as ‘eclectic’. To some extent it is so, but to be fair to the editors they recognize and explicitly state the book’s shortcomings, in particular the lack of comprehensiveness, both in terms of international coverage (Latin America, Australasia and the Far East are not represented) and in its coverage of the hierarchy of occupational roles in production, particularly of the many marginalized and lesser known crafts. However this is a welcome contribution to the literature on work in film and television production, indeed on work in the creative industries more broadly, offering a grounded and empirically informed insight into production cultures that have been ignored, or arguably worse, hyped as glamorous.
Following an introduction by the editors which works hard to integrate the collection, the 11 commissioned chapters are arranged into four sections, the first of which – Systems of Production – brings together Dawson’s article on flexible specialization and Hollywood with an examination of the Soviet film industry (Gornostaeva) and a regional case study of Ystad, home to Wallander, in Sweden (Hedling). A second section – Manoeuvrable Spaces – includes Holmes’s chapter on film stars in the silent era, an article drawn from a large tracking study of TV workers (Paterson) and a piece on technical workers in the Nigerian video film industry (Obiaya), of which we know little despite its total output now exceeding that of Hollywood. A third section – Patronage and Clientism – and a final one – Creative Agency – each contain two chapters. The former includes a piece on the social and economic dynamics in the production of television drama in Kinshasa (Pype) and another on female cinematographers in the contemporary French film industry (Smith). The final section includes a historical study of stills photographers in the British film industry (Marchant) and an anthropological analysis of hairdressers and make-up artists in contemporary Bollywood (Wilkinson-Weber).
Given the breadth of the disciplinary background of this collection of authors (history, anthropology, film and media studies, languages, sociology) it is perhaps unsurprising that there is a range of research methods underpinning their work, from the use of archival sources, aesthetic analysis, anthropological techniques and interviewing. Readers will make their own judgements about the relative robustness of the underpinning methodology in each case, but there is certainly variety.
Obiaya’s work on the Nigerian film industry, for example, is based on an unstated number of interviews, randomly selected through personal contacts and, somewhat surprisingly, attributes quotes to unanonymized respondents. The use of trade journals and journalistic sources and the absence of either reference to academic sources or government statistics suggests that we have some way to go before we can build a robust picture of the burgeoning Nollywood industry. In the meantime we have a fascinating insight into an industry at the emergent end of the development continuum which indicates both shared characteristics with its older siblings and stark differences. Sitting next to this chapter, but at the other end of the continuum, Paterson’s piece on working as a freelancer in UK television is based on a large scale longitudinal study (the BFI Television Industry Tracking Study) funded by the ESRC and is one of a stream of outputs. Together these have provided us with evidence of the impact of contractual changes in one of the world’s oldest and most established television industries.
This series of case studies – over time and across continents – of different moments in the production stage of film and television as told from the perspective of the producers, will be of significant interest and value to researchers and students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.