Pojmy z teorie a dějin médií I
(teorie mediální produkce)
Petr Szczepanik
(jaro 2011)
plán přednášky
1.
2.
3.
4.
Kariéra a projekt
Autorství
Mody produkce
Filmové studio jako místo,
podnik, pracovní svět
5. Produkční kultura
Lekce 1+2:
Kariéra a projekt v dějinách filmu
• bezbariérová kariéra (boundaryless career) a filmový
projekt: 2 organizační modely filmové výroby
disciplíny:
• production studies
• political economy of media
• cultural/creative industries theory
• organizational and management studies
• sociology of media work
• ethnography of media work
• cultural and economic geography of media
industrial context: vertical
disintegration, flexible specialization
(Susan Christopherson – Mark Storper: The City as studio; the world as backlot)
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•
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vertical disintegration: production is carried out primarily by independent production
companies which subcontract direct production activity to small specialized firms. The
industry is vertically disintegrated and its production process is nonroutinized and
designed to maximize variability of outputs and flexibility with respect to inputs. The
numerous transactions required to produce the film product now take place on the
market rather than within a firm. As vertical disintegration has proceeded, those firms
providing services to producers have become smaller and more specialized. These
specialized subcontractors reduce their own risk by marketing their services to other
entertainment industries, including recording and television. As a result of these
combined processes of vertical disintegration and cross-industry subcontracting, an
entertainment industry complex has developed.
flexible specialization: firms produce specialty goods with relatively short production
runs. They spread risk by serving a variety of clients, with different final outputs They
are capable of responding quickly to changing market conditions. They are connected to
the market via contractual relationships with other firms; production via
“subcontracting linkages”. They specialize in certain generic functions (props and
scenery, editing, sound mixing), but are able to work on a broader range of product
outputs (only small minority concentrates exclusively on film and TV)
disparities in access to work hours: core and peripheral work force: core work force:
very successful search and rehire processes, continuous employment x peripheral: the
same high hourly wages (but: without premiums for overtime etc.), but loses work
easily in downturns, unemployed for long periods
(Christopherson and Storper: The effects of flexible specialization on industrial politics and the labor market:
the motion picture industry)
• changing skill requirements: a) above the line: skills of actors,
writers, and directors have expanded to include collaborative and
transaction skills” (to acquire “property” or solicit investors):
“industry-specific rather than occupation-specific skills in
conceiving, packaging, and financing”: the roles they play have
multiplied; often work for a share in the profits rather than solely
for a wage
• b) below the line: skill flexibility and specialization: functional
separation of talent and craft: increasing gap between above
(involved in production as a speculative venture) and below the line
(hourly pay for specific tasks): in contrast to talent, craft workers
developed more specialized skills (but: used in variety of products,
to a wider range of situations: e.g. particular make-up effect, not
standard tool kit as before), have less influence on the content and
pacing; = qualitative redefinition of skills, rather than de-skilling or
up-skilling
temporary organizations for project-based work
(Robert J. DeFillippi – Michael B. Arthur: Paradox in Project-Based Enterprise: The case of film making)
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•
•
•
•
•
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project-based enterprises (companies formed to pursue a specific project
outcome) and project-based careers (careers habitually moving from one project
to another) → where complex, non-routine tasks require the temporary
employment and collaboration of diversely skilled specialists
independent film industry: producing company is essentially disbanded once the
film is released
the project-based enterprise inherits its strategic vision, rather than shapes its
own, moreover, the vision is temporary, and geared to one specific product rather
than multiple related products
structure/staffing are temporary
short-term, project-specific capital investments
enterprise dissolution precedes outcomes
idleness is necessary: alternating between frenetic activity and enforced idleness ,
vigilant readiness to be mobilized on a moment's notice → learning-by-watching
phenomenon, to observe how tasks outside one's current role are performed by
other members of other specialized crews, those returns to learning will
principally benefit a new enterprise formed for a subsequent project
...
inconsequential jobs are sought-after:
• senior crew member explicitly provide opportunities for the interns to
closely observe the performance of their well-practiced craft → "learning
by watching" among the most junior members
• performance of the mundane tasks of getting coffee or tea is a timehonored socialization ritual for new crew members and both their
performance and attitudes are duly noted → the neophyte's behavior is
incidental to the current project, but is seen as indicative of his or her
commitment and compatibility for performing more demanding tasks in
future projects
• the most junior role on any film project: a "runner" who literally runs
around the set to deliver information or material (e.g., script revisions,
stage props) as needed → becomes exposed to the complex, chaotic
interconnections among specialized film crew activities
• low responsibility, inconsequential jobs assume a delayed importance in
film making → sought after because of the career benefits they offer the
job-holder; in turn, they also make the prospective learning benefits
available to other, later, enterprises; neophytes are socialized into the
shared values and uncodified tacit knowledge of their community of
practice.
...
career mobility drives industry stability
• producers and directors are not permanently employed by any studio
• instead, the studios had regular access to talented producers and
directors from whom-to pick for their next investments.
• the studios' access to directors and producers gets mirrored in the two
principals' further access to artistic and business talent → able to draw
on their range of personal contacts to appoint principal lieutenants →
those lieutenants in turn filled out the rest of the crew.
• film industry = a small, socially interconnected network → it is through
inclusion in that network that future project opportunities are identified
• each film project sustains or enhances each project member's network
of industry contacts, any one of whom may provide the lead or
recommendation for future project opportunities
reputation:
• producer and director go to their separate networks, using social capital
to locate further human capital resources to build the film crew
• in turn, principal lieutenants did the same thing with their crews
• the system works through reputation, which may be viewed as an
estimate of human capital conveyed over social capital channels.
• continuing nature of this interplay between skills (human capital) and
work relationships (social capital)
...
• knowledge and its sources are not necessarily contained within
organizational boundaries but instead reside within the tacit knowledge
and practices of professionally and occupationally based communities of
practice → these communities interpenetrate the boundaries of large
and small organizations and of temporary and durable organizations → it
is the mobility of human capital and its attendant tacit knowledge across
these boundaries that are responsible for the creation of flexible forms
of organizing, including the project-based enterprise form
• a project-based enterprise cannot accumulate core competencies → core
competencies for the project are embodied in the human and social
capital of the project participants → the project team as a locus for
knowledge capital accumulation and learning
• project-based enterprise represents a flexible, temporary form for
organizing human and social capital → such temporary enterprises are
supported by some combination of geographic proximity, network ties
from prior associations, and by electronic and web infrastructure
linkages → each project becomes a learning episode for each participant
and for their respective industry and occupational communities → drivers
in these project-based enterprises are the career aspirations and
competency accumulation practices of project participants, who leverage
and extend.
project
(Candace Jones: Careers in Project Networks: The Case of the Film Industry)
• project network: film industry = network organization: constantly
created and recreated (new projects = new participants);
• type of network: project network (film, music, construction
industry); projects = organizing mechanism; teams are comprised of
diversely skilled members who work for a limited period to create
custom and complex products or services; organization producing
the product: involves multiple firms and subcontractors, neither
formally nor legally defined, temporary and constructed around the
product, usually involving pioneering endeavors;
• 2 main characteristics of project networks: a) task is complex and
nonroutine, team interdependence: requires many individuals, high
level of mutual responsibility; emphasis on horizontal information
flow: fast sharing, complex tasks; b) uncertain and dynamic
environment (shifting consumer demands); independent producers
to facilitate product adaptation and innovation; resources easily
reallocated among members (thus: adaptive)
projects as temporary total institutions
(Beth A. Bechky: Gaffers, Gofers, and Grips: Role-Based Coordination in Temporary Organizations)
•
Two important structural characteristics of film projects provide the organizational context within which
coordination takes place: interorganizational career progression and projects as temporary total institutions →
context, in which members are isolated in a work world that strongly socializes them to enthusiastically embrace
their roles, provides participants with an understanding of general role structures on film sets. However, such role
structures are provisional, influenced and maintained by participants’ behavior on each set.
•
temporary organizations are not unstructured (from workers’ perspective): team-based organizational structures:
although self-managed teams lack the controls of bureaucracy and hierarchy, they tend to develop alternative
control mechanisms. With these less centralized control tactics, normative control constrains and structures the
behavior of team members → their value-based work ethic turned gradually into a strong source of normative
rules.
•
Temporary organizations are in fact organized around enduring, structured role systems whose nuances are
negotiated in situ [= on the film set].
•
The career progression provided the continuing context for crew members to understand and generalize the role
structure, while the institutional nature of film sets enabled strong social pressures that guided role enactment.
Interorganizational Career Progression: generalized role structure
•
job roles in the film industry evolved through longtime convention and the establishment of union rules: historical
conventions institutionalized by union rules served to establish the basic role structure in the film industry (in
1946 the Hollywood below-the-line production unions negotiated a “Basic Agreement” with the Association of
Motion Picture Producers that set the basis of employment for production workers ; late 1980s, a shift to
nonunion production on independent films increased flexibility)
•
role structure strictly organized by department, with a thin upper hierarchy, and a pool of production assistants
at the bottom;
•
above-the-line → more fluid in tasks: members are dependent on the skills and personalities of the individuals on
each set; the roles of the production assistants are also more fluid;
definition of career
• Arthur: ‘the evolving sequence of a person’s work experiences over time’
→ passage of time, history: career histories, career episodes; career vs.
job, work, profession; parallel work experiences, and successive sets of
experiences in apparently disconnected fields of employment, be
considered part of the same career (x idea that parallel or successive jobs
are unconnected → ‘multiple careers’ → interferes with the holistic view
of the career) → focus on one person, one career, and one lifetime in
which that person can work, learn, make friends, start a family, etc.
• Candace Jones: an individual's career, objectively, involves a series of roles
or offices with associated statuses which are typically revealed through a
sequence of jobs or work experiences
• careers as property: prevailing roles – their relationships and
understandings – of a time period → career histories as a repository of
individual experiences and knowledge or of a social era's prevalent
structures, relations, and practices that become encoded into the person;
• careers as process: how the sequences of roles may reinforce or alter
prevailing roles, relationships, and understandings → are shaped by or
reshape an organization, occupation, or field → how careers unfold within
organizations, occupations, and institutional fields
advantages of “career” for film
studies
• filmmakers don’t just create films and styles → they also build careers
(credits, reputations, social capital, networks); they don’t just earn money,
or financial capital, they also earn career capital → accumulate credits,
contacts and knowledge
• careers interconnect creative and strategic (managerial) thinking, work
and learning, technical knowledge and social capital, individual and
institution (careers link persons to institutions through organizations and
occupations), freelancer and project network, artists and producers on the
market, personal and occupational life; helps to understand collaborative
networks and alliances, reputation (similar cumulative career profiles,
career capital).
• “career” allows us to reconceptualize some traditional issues of film
studies: authorship (as career path), creative choice (as strategic career
choices), unique individual and collective style (‘technologies of the self’,
strategies of self-governance), creative collaboration (social networks),
talent (as reputation, or cumulative credit)
boundaryless careers
• Arthur: boundaryless careers (the term introduced 1993; vs. bounded or
employer defined career: loyalty, skills and value attached to the firm) = ‘a
sequence of job opportunities that goes beyond the boundaries of any
single employment setting’
• Jones: boundaryless careers in project networks: short-term projects,
informal personal networks, interfirm careers: move across firms (x within
firms), validation from the market rather than the employer, crossorganizational networks of information
• typical career patterns: a) individual free agent, moving among many
different subcontractors and firms (most common); b) member of
production team (highest status if works in the elite core of the industry)
• advantages: varied opportunity, development potential, access to exciting
projects among myriad firms, enhancement of skills and reputation due to
increased experience in different work settings; disadvantages: high
demands on time, energy, lifestyle
• alternative terms: kaleidoscope careers (Mainero & Sullivan, 2006),
protean careers (Hall, 2002), ‘portfolio careers’ (McRobbie)
careers as repositories of knowledge
(Candace Jones – Robert J. DeFillippi: Back to the Future in Film: Combining Industry and Self-Knowledge to
meet the Career Challenges of the 21st Century)
• what: knowing of what type of career system (culture,
rules of game) one is entering;
• why: knowing why one is pursuing a particular career
• where: knowing where to gain entrance, training, and
advancement
• whom: knowing with whom to initiate contact and
relationship
• when: knowing when to stay or leave an employment
situation
• how: knowing how to perform the tasks and roles
needed for capturing opportunities
boundaryless career stages
(Candace Jones: Careers in Project Networks: The Case of the Film Industry)
• 1. getting access → identify gatekeepers, seek successful
subcontractor who will place the newcomer in his/her first
project and getting foot in the door;
• 2. learning technical skills and being socialized into the
industry culture → intense socialization creates common
understanding, routines, conventions, values, goals among
different parties that guide behavior (x written rules,
regulations), so that rules for working together do not have
to be re-created for each film;
• 3. navigating the career: building reputations and creating
contracts; status within industry: being associated with
commercially successful films;
• 4. maintaining the career: extending the profession and
balancing it with personal needs
who works with whom
(Faulkner – Anderson: Short-Term Projects and Emergent Careers: Evidence from Hollywood)
• markets (as differentiated structures of roles and ties) and careers:
procedures for matching jobs to jobholders: career = a two-sided
affair, sustained by entrepreneurs making distinctions among
qualified artists; on the other side of the market, artists are making
distinctions among film productions
• who works with whom (individuals and types): high densities of
market transactions among persons with similar cumulative career
profiles (or, accumulative productivity values – APVs → the pattern
of credits and economic return);
• continuous monitoring and evaluating;
• career attributes are accumulated as people move from credit to
credit → sustained participation in this structure of contracts,
credits, and attributes is the requirement for continued success
cores and peripheries (Jones)
• tightly knit relations in the core, loosely woven
interactions on the peripheries; peripheries:
open to newcomers, inner cores: restricted;
only small percentage enter and remain within
the core for most of their careers
• those in the core: have rich informal
communication networks; periphery: poor
comm. networks, rather occasional, incidental
contacts, not solid ties.
contact types and semi-permanent work groups
(Helen Blair: ‘You’re Only as Good as Your Last Job’: the Labour Process and Labour Market in the
British Film Industry)
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semi-permanent work groups = uncertainty reducing mechanism for employer, heads of
department and ‘technical grades’;
are commonly configured around departments and so a camera, art or sound department may
move from project to project as a unit; group leader or head of department recruiting his/her
‘gang’ and taking them with them when moving jobs, the skill hierarchy, and skill reproduction and
socialisation within the group;
recruitment for film projects proceeds by the producer and director appointing heads of each
department (e.g. camera, art, sound). The heads of each department then stipulate the people
who will fill the grades within their department. These will tend to be people who are known to the
head of department through a previous working relationship or relationships, or recommended to
him/her by someone else who has experience of their work
Such a system provides flexibility to meet rapid fluctuations in demand without large overhead
expenditure, provides a path of upward mobility for key groups of workers, by-passes employers
lack of technical knowledge and assists in stabilising effort and task allocation. [...] For members,
being in such a group reduces if not removes the need for job searches as the head of department
does it for them; members of groups viewing their head of department as their employer, rather
than the production company (their legal employer)
contact types: family-members, friends, ex-colleagues : directly offering a job opportunity,
informing the entrant of a potential job, or recommending the entrant to third parties . After
entering the industry, family-type contacts become much less significant in securing ongoing work.
Friends remain important in serving a recommendation and information provision function
(although an individual’s group of friends may alter). However, ex-colleagues, as those people in a
position to comment on the quality of an individual’s work, become the dominant form of contact
used to secure either direct work offers, recommendations or general job information.
movie clips
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIyg2a72uV4&feature=related
(Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe - a career in telly)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lql7Iwf7M6A&feature=related
(NATPE, National Association of Television Program Executives)
Lekce 3+4: Autorství
John Caughie „Authors and
auteurs: the uses of theory“ (2007)
• vanishing from academic debate, the auteur is
everywhere else – in publicity, in journalistic reviews,
in TV, in film retrospectives, in the marketing of
cinema → authorial branding.
• the significance of authorship theory for Film Studies
lies in its productivity: its production and
institutionalization not simply of a ‘knowledge field’,
but also of a community within which that field could
be shared and contested: a field on which sides could
be taken, theoretical battles fought, and solidarities
formed and reformed
theories and practices of
authorship
Janet Staiger: „Authorship approaches“ (2003)
1. authorship as origin
2. authorship as personality
3. authorship as a sociology of production
4. authorship as signature
5. authorship as reading strategy
6. authorship as site of discourses
7. authorship as technique of the self
1. authorship as origin
• religious hermeneutic tradition: „what (godly) sources
produced this writing?“
• film = a direct expression of the author´s free agency
• strategy: evaluation on the basis of the biography of the
author: films must display the morality of author´s life
• techniques: interviews, memoirs, etc. used to support
ascribed meanings
• author´s intention (see „intentional fallacy“ – intencionální
klam)
• “the biographical legend created by the author” mediates
between text and reader (Boris Tomaševskij)
2. authorship as personality
• personal idiosyncrasies in historical circumstances
• intention, self-awareness and free agency not assumed
• ideology: Romanticism: expressive realism → film as a
projection of the feelings or personal identity of the author
• auteurism: Cahiers du cinéma, 1950s
prehistory of auteur theory
• early theories: evolutionary development of techniques which
allow cinema to move from the photographic reproduction of
reality to its creative representation, from a technology to an
art
• film artist ‘distorts’ the unmediated photographic reality →
expressiveness (Russian montage theory and German
expressionism)
• example: Rudolf Arnheim’s Film als Kunst (1932)
• critical tradition of impersonality + educational approach
(educating the public to a better, more critical appreciation of
the films) → the theoretical context for the offensive of
Cahiers
French auteurism:
• allows films to be treated as art: directors reveal themselves through their
work (like painters or writers) → cinema is – self-evidently – an art which
can be discussed in the same way as the great monuments of European
culture
• but: confusing the category of art: Hollywood directors as artists and
rebels against the system (against studio pressures, genre conventions,
star demands, story requirements)
• director → unified personal vision to be found in repetitions of themes
and stylistic choices from film to film
• the value of the auteur was guaranteed not by the seriousness or moral
purpose of the film’s content but by the audacity of its style, especially in
mise-en-scène (spacial relations)
• the best film of a metteur en scène, a director without a consistent
signature, is less interesting than the worst film of an auteur:
emblematically, Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) is less interesting than
Wee Willie Winkie (John Ford, 1937)
• politique d’auteurs = a policy of favoring particular directors: e.g. Truffaut's
1954 attack on the cinema of quality, Rohmer's admiration for Hitchcock,
Rivette's celebration of Hawks and Lang and Preminger
legacy of auteurism
• a legacy of debate, of reading and of the omnivorous
appetite of the cinephile
• an attention to mise en scène, not simply as a set of
techniques for the representation of reality but as a
language of creativity with which an auteur
transformed material
• analysis of mise en scène = a method of detection,
finding there rather than in subject matter the
signature of the director
• breaking down high/low cultural distinctions
• politique d’auteurs: establishing canons or pantheons
criticism of auteurism
• Bazin: does not consider circumstances of
collaboration, of genres and formulas
• Pauline Kael: stereotyping, narcissistic male
fantasies, ignoring cultural determinants,
3. authorship as a sociology of
production
• creation of film requires creativity and ingenuity as well as efficiency and
routine work patterns → artists as workers, collaborative processes, work
teams
• studying the working arrangements and hierarchies of individuals within
firms and society
• structural-functional (liberal) approach: socialization to norms and values
of the industry
• critical (Marxist) approach: modes of production, division of labor,
hierarchies of power by which the mode extracts surplus value from
workers → exploitation, alienation, but also resistance
• strategy: to shift authorship to another worker in the system (to producer,
scriptwriter), firms: sources of innovation (product differentiation)
• criticism: workers still as subjects with coherency and free agency
• examples: J. Staiger (on Hollywood management system and its division of
labot), Robert L. Carringer: The Making of „Citizen Kane“
4. authorship as signature (auteur
structuralism)
• follows from the insistence of the politique on thematic consistency and
wholeness as a mark of the auteur’s signature.
• moves away from agency for an individual within a mode of production
• structural anthropology: director´s oeuvre as a myth (personal myth)
• recurrence of authorship traits through various films as determined by
historical contexts
• repetition = unconscious because of the place of the individual within
historical structures (cultural, social, political)
• Peter Wollen: director making the same narrative over and over, with
variations → director has „preoccupations“ (hl. myšlenky, zaujetí), script
affects those preoccupations as a „catalyst“
• Wollen’s famous distinction between ‘Fuller or Hawks or Hitchcock, the
directors’ and ‘“Fuller” or “Hawks” or “Hitchcock”, the structures named
after them’
• director as structure (created by the critical act) vs. director as
5. authorship as reading strategy
• reader produces a representation of the
author and uses it as a reading strategy
• authors = viewers´ fictional constructions
participating in viewers´ interpretation of films
• reception studies → influence of Roland
Barthes´ „The Death of the Author“: reader
replacing the author
6. authorship as site of discourse
• author = effect of the text, one of several textual subcodes to be decoded
→ directorial subcode interacting with other subcodes
• author = a poststructuralist subject → a historically constituted subject
that is a locus of social, psychological, and cultural discourses and
practices
• author further devoid of agency, knowing intention, coherence, continuity
and, potentially, of significance
• Foucault: discourse can exist without agency → author = a tablet through
which culture writes its historical discourses
• Barthes: text as a fragtmented tissue of quotations → author: mixing
writings, not expressing himself
• strategy: what subject positions are available in the text?
• examples: Stephen Heath, Paul Willeman
Roland Barthes: „Smrt autora“
(1968)
• Reacting against an interpretative criticism which seeks in the personality
of the author the truth of the fiction and the guarantee of the
interpretation
• The tyranny of the author is attributed to an ‘ordinary culture’, hungry for
the biographical and psychological background which fleshes out the
‘image of literature’, and to a tradition of criticism which finds in
Baudelaire’s work ‘the failure of Baudelaire the man’, in Van Gogh’s ‘his
madness’
• The author does not precede the text, but is ‘born simultaneously’ with it.
He or she does not stand behind the text as its truth, authorizing a correct
reading, but is written in the text, identical with the writing
• Without the author as the ultimate guarantee, the analysis is never final
and complete, but remains partial.
7. authorship as technique of the
self
• feminism, identity politics, queer theory → re-theorization of agency
within poststructuralist theory, to rescue the expression of the self as a
viable act, significant for political action, i.e. resistance
• authoring = repetitive assertion of „self-as-expresser“ through culturally
and socially laden discourses of authoring → individuals author by
duplicating recipes and excersises of authorship
• authorship as a mode of self-fashioning (applying Michel Foucault, Judith
Butler) → by conceptualizing authoring as a technique of the self, as a
citational practice, an individual person "authors" by duplicating recipes
and exercises of authorship within a cultural and institutional context that
understands such acts as agency and repetition of such acts as signs of
individuality
• a directorial choice is performative only as it is given that directors may
make a choice → firms hire directors to make these choices, and the
division of labor places them into a work structure with specific authority
to make authoring statements
• contingencies of agency and cultural conceptions of what
constitutes making one's self into an author → what
performatives might work for authoring to happen in a
historical moment?
• granting limited agency through speech acts which do have
effects of producing statements our culture recognizes as
authorship → potential political efficacy for minorities
struggling for expression as subjects → minority authorship
• agency as rearticulatory practice, immanent to power (not
external to power) → rebellious authorship = particular kind
of citation asserting agency against the normative
• performative tactics (x strategies) that researchers have
ascribed to minority authors include: 1. creation of alter egos,
2. silence, 3. repetition: from mimicry to parody or camp, 4.
recombination, 5. inversion, 6. accentuation
• = citational practices that have an outcome of differing from
dominant expressions
research prospects and challenges:
Denise Mann, „It´s not TV, It´s Brand Management TV:
The Collective Author(s) of the Lost Franchise“ (2009)
• today´s post-network, 2.0 TV (convergent, conglomerated, globalized,
interactive): high-concept, high-profile, multi-platform „TV
blockbusters“→ „transmedia franchises“: mobilize many ancillary revenue
streams, engender merchandising opportunities, and spawn a multitude
of spin-offs (digital content, promotions on the web, new participatory
platforms like ARG – Alternate Reality Game, blogs, podcasts, fan
conventions, webisodes, mobisodes)
• expanded role of showrunners (= writer-producers) → „brand
managers“→ steering global, corporate TV empires like Heroes or Lost
(Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof), navigating „the mothership“
• transmedia TV in the age of internet altered the practices of collective
„authorship“ (though industry discourses publically adhere to the singular
auteur paradigm): corporate fabrication, story construction coming out of
a corporate ethos inherent in creating and selling a multiplatform TV
brand (story/business model: „Gillian meets X-Files“)
• traditional TV author (showrunner/head writer): a single person focused
on running writers´ room and overseeing postproduction, an independentminded showrunners at odds with the network´s corporate agenda
• x today : showrunners (= „six pack“ of (co)executive producers/cocreators) also oversee promotional 2.0 content and other platforms
related to the story and characters → multitasking within a highly
bureaucratized environment (J. J. Abrams: launching and overseeing
several franchises at once)
• plus: an army of production personnel in networks, studios, talent
agencies, advertising agencies, freelance production companies, etc.
• despite this: industry discourse paradoxically adheres to the humanistmodernist concept of „singular voice“ of author(s) (for Lost: Abrams,
Lindelof, Cuse) → a hierarchy simplifying issues of credit and payment set
by WGA + publicity reinforcing the image of the TV author (e.g. D. Lynch) +
symptoms of workplace struggles among divergent members of the
production community (fears of overstepping one´s place within the rigid
workplace hierarchy)
• auteurism infiltrates and permeates the production community: writersproducers of primetime series holding a mysteriously powerful and
revered place within the organizational hierarchy
industrial authorship
(John Caldwell: Production Culture, 2008)
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collective (writers´room → „cumulative pitching“)
contested
institutional (house style, rationalization of writing, „giving notes“)
producer vs. director, pre-production vs. production
management / creative (showrunners)
rituals of appropriating and manifesting authorship
authorship as branding and brand management
authorship/ownership → intellectual rights as corporate property rights
systematic idea theft
credits and awards
repurposing content (internet) → residuals
cultural remixing
movie clip: auteurism and
Hollywood
•
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJf0cLrumY4&NR=1
Lekce 5-8: Modes of production
Modes of production
Janet Staiger: The Hollywood Mode of Production. In: David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson: The
Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (1985)
• Hollywood as a mode of film practice: narrative and stylistic norms (=
collective style) + mode of production (= industrial conditions) → „an
integral system, including persons and groups but also rules, films,
machinery, documents, institutions, work processes, and theoretical
concepts“
goal of the analysis:
1. to link the history of style (and technology) to the history of industry, to
understand their mutual influencing and reinforcing: a) mode of
production as a condition of resemblance among films (a historically
defined group style), creating, shaping and supporting stylistic norms →
the mode of production leaves structural marks in films; b) at the same
time: stylistic aims shape the mode of production
2. to understand Hollywood filmmaking (1917-1960) as a unified mode of
film practice = to understand the conditions of the existence of this
practice and their changes: what and why is changing (changes in
technology, stylistic norms and industrial conditions) and what remains
constant
• how the capitalist system of production changed over time → 6 kinds of
management structures which emerged with developments in a) division
of labor, standardization of product for efficient and economic mass
production, simultaneous differentiation of product to compete for
consumers´ attention, and, b) ideological/signifying practices
• the dominant mode of production was not the cheapest one (!) → stylistic
and ideological practices proved to be more important determinants of
the mode than economic ones
• changes in the mode of production → attributed to its conditions of
existence: a) economic, b) ideological/signifying practices → standards of
systems of representation established by industry discourses: classical
style → primacy of narrative, „realism“, causal coherence, continuity,
spectacle, stars, genres (→ they influenced the emphasis on certain job
tasks or even made studios to create new jobs: research staff in mid
1910s, continuity clerk in late 1910s)
• material nature of practices and the ways how they were distributed:
institutions+discourses formalizing and spreading the practices→ guilds
and unions, advertising, handbooks
mode of production – a basic
definition
• m.o.p. = set of production practices (x industry as the economic structure
and conduct of companies)
• 3 mutually influencing elements: 1. labor force (workers as certain work
functions, their hierarchy and structure of control, interrelation of
management and labor), 2. means of production (physical means,
technology implying certain techniques), 3. financing (capital, ownership
which can differ from management)
• factory mode of production: 2 features:
1. mass production → interchangeability (of parts), standardization
(uniformity, quality), assembly (detailed division of labor: work processes
broken into discrete segments; serial manufacture: connected phases of
development, craftsmen collectively and serially producing a commodity,
dependent on one another → different from the assembly line)
2. detailed division of labor → conception separated from execution of the
work → managers from workers
division of the work
• increasing subdivision of the initial work functions and order (example:
cameraman → DOP, assistants, laboratory technicians, continuity person)
• causes: economic (increased production rate, technological complexities),
ideological/signifying practices (demands for certain stylistic qualities)
management systems
2 modes:
1. social division of labor: workers still know and perform an integral series
of tasks, from conceiving to completing (early cinema: „cameraman“
system)
2. detailed division of labor: workers lose the overall knowledge of the
craft → alienation; faster and more predictable product output, but
never to the level of assembly line (dominant after 1906, with narrative
films) → 5 systems: director (1907-1909), director-unit (1909-1914),
central producer (1914-1931), package-unit (started in the early 1940s,
dominant 1955-today)
add 2.: 2 levels of management: a) strategic management: long-range
decisions directly affecting the economic operation of a capital
(investment decisions, financial calculations) → highest power, but low
knowledge of the lower-level work processes and technology; b) tactical
or technical management (subordinate, middle management): day-today planning, co-ordinating, supervising, still partly involved in execution
(decisions about types of production process, level of production,
integration of the phases of production, maintenance of performance,
etc.)
script
• early 1910s: script as a blueprint for the efficient film production, from
which all the work was organized, meeting certain standards of quality
(defined by the industry´s discourse)
• multiple-reel narrative film → precise pre-shooting planning necessary
standardization and differentiation
• explain the uniformity and stability of production and stylistic practices
throughout the industry
standardization: 2 coexisting meanings:
a) regularity, uniformity (in terminology, dimensions, simplification in
types, sizes, grades, rules of practice, product specifications, testing
quality, rating),
b) criterion, norm, excellence
• certain tolerance permitted
• repetition of characteristics considered desirable in the film: narrative
dominance and clarity, verisimilitude, continuity, stars, spectacle
• industrial mechanisms facilitating standardization: advertising, industrial
interest groups, adjacent institution → dispersing standards (stylistic,
technological, business) via ads, writers' or cinematographers ' guilds,
how-to books, trade press, critics
• standards originally adapted from other media, but in the late 1910s:
systematic techniques to spreading them → condition for uniformity
differentiation
• = practices in which firm stresses how its goods are different
• changing products, search for novelty: also economic necessity →
difference between products as a competitive method, marketing
advantage: encouraging repeated consumption, more control over the
price (appearance of monopoly), enabling product cycles
• that´s why filmmaking never achieved the assembly-line uniformity
prevalent in other industries
• trade press, advertising, guilds, unions: stability based on small changes in
the norm: tensions between standardization and differentiation,
„formula“ and „showmanship“ →
a) encouraging and rewarding the innovative worker: industry encouraged
innovations, but they should support or at least not interfere with the
controlling standard, example: German-inspired spectacular camera
techniques of the mid 1920s : accepted if support the story → generally:
changes justified as improvements of standards (of verisimilitude,
narrative coherence, continuity, etc.): authorial touches (without
displaying „the hand of a worker“), technological novelties differentiating
products („showmanship“)
b) cyclical innovation of styles and genres: small innovation: successful only
when it becomes a new standard → cycles, series, repetition of
innovations; techniques periodically recovered and recombined within
more particular genres and styles (progress illusory)
the cameraman system (1896-1907)
• social division of labor: unified craft situation →
cameramen (W.K.L. Dickson, Edwin S. Porter)
performing all the production tasks from selecting
the subject matter and staging the scene to
photographing it and editing.
• the artisan-craftsman (or a small group) knows the
entire work process → conception + creation unified
• not predictable, rapid and inexpensive enough, as
the growing industry needed after 1906
the director system (1907-1909)
• more rapid, predictable, regular, centralized, mass-produced
• fictional narratives as a dominant output → could be made in a central
location and on a predictable (predictable cost per foot), mass basis, with
routine assembly processes → produced in a centralized studio-factory
and released on regular (weekly) basis
• first detailed division of labor (modelled on legitimate theater)
• cost advantages of dividing labor: only the most skilled workers get high
salaries
• separation of conception from execution: one person staged action
(conception), another photographed it (execution)
• director: most of the major + over financing, script development and
personnel including cameraman (= producer´s tasks)
• scripts: as just an „outline“ of the narrative
• less location shooting
• examples: D. W. Griffith, Sidney Olcott
the director-unit system (1909-1914)
• necessitated by increase in production, regularity of output → need to
hire more directors/producers → fully integrated, predictable sets of
employees
• winter weather: sending units to better climates from NYC and Chicago
• units for location shooting
• expanding stage areas: simultanous filming (multiple units within a studio)
• further subdivision of labor and separation of knowledge and functions:
work functions divided into departments, headed by technical specialists
(= middle-level, tactical managers) x upper-level strategic management:
long-term decisions about financing, type of products, hiring of middlelevel managers, assessing of market conditions and trends
• in such a hierarchy: information generalized as it moved up the hierarchy
• wage payment based on fast work and deadlines, most workers? straight
execution, no design contribution
• = departmentalization, specialization, structural hierarchy
• physical arrangement of the studio-factory → cooperation between
departments: logical processes from room to room, without waste of
time, enabling simultaneous shooting
• from outdoor stages to glass studios with electrical lights by 1916
• decrease of location shooting
• change in script writing: discontinuity shooting → breaking story into
shots to be taken in 1 setting
• script as a basis for quality standard of continuous, clear, logical, realistic
narrative
• script → checking the standard length (1 reel: 1.000 foot, 300 m)
• script → blueprint for filming, ensuring the standard of continuous action
will be met
the central producer system (1914-1931)
• detailed continuity script to plan and budget entire film shot by shot → a
shift to scientific management
• causes: standards of the classical Hollywood style and the feature length
(„multi-reeler“: 75 min. and more) required planning and budget control
• reasons for lengthening (by 1916: dominated the market): adaptations of
famous literary works as new quality products, movie theaters: increase in
prices and runs, copyrights (requirement to faithfully reproduce stories)
• special advertising focusing on 1 story, one individual, different film
(before: cheap entertainment)
• films distributed as individual products (before: as reels): higher prices
• „central producer“: modern manager of a well-organized, mass production
system, necessary to produce the quality multiple-reel films
• scientific management: planning and controlling all decisions and steps in
the work process so that any waste can be eliminated → written
instructions for each job, hierarchy
• producer´s office in the center of the studio → defining duties and
responsibilities for all the departments
• planning , budgeting , profit estimates on the basis of a carefully prepared
script, detailed sketches for all sets
• script: a blueprint detailing shot-by-shot breakdown of the film →
functioned as a paper record to coordinate shooting out of order, large
number of workers at various places while achieving clear, verisimilar and
continuous representation of causal logic, time and space
• improved regularity, speeed, use of materials, uniformity and quality of
the product
• changes in management organization: functions of the producer and
director split: director lost the position of a unit head → restricted to
shooting (directing actors and crew), still approving the script, casting,
sets, wardrobe, end editing, but his decisions subjected to producer´s
approval ; much actual creation done by departmental experts → director
as a head of another department, the producer chose him as he chose a
writer or a designer
• work of the producer split further: the producer took over the
management of the pre- and post-shooting work for all the films in the
studio, while the new manager of the production department coordinated
the studio facility´s planning, budgeting and accounting.
• producers = new kind of top managers, responsible for the whole output:
Thomas Ince, Irving Thalberg
• centralization: end of units, central scenario department supplied all
scripts, those were distributed to directors specialized in a given genre
• studio-wide pool of actors
• central property department
• manuals for work regulations and responsibilities
• product quality control assigned to management, not individual workers
→ superiors changing work of subordinates (famous lost case of Chaplin
vs. Essanay, 1916 for changing his film Charlie Chaplin´s Burlesque on
Carmen) → a firm, not employee controls the product, unless the contract
stipulates otherwise → managers at the top, as agents of the firm, with
varying degree of interest in individual parts of production; a talent with
prestige could demand a final control of a cut, etc. (only few)
• classical continuous style → techniques of achieving this continuity:
matching action, maintaining direction, crosscutting → greater demands
on the memory of the production mode: paper plans and records, more
elaborate scripts
• „continuity script“: list of titles, cast, 1-page synopsis, script itself: listing
all exterior and interior sites along with their shot numbers, intertitles,
technical instructions → a blueprint for workers
the division and order of production
under the central producer system
• physical plant of the studio: city within a city
• reasons for more and more detailed subdivision of labor: a) economic:
expertise, speed, efficiency, b) standards of quality films → standards of
quality caused by economic + ideological/signifying practices, not vice versa
• new specialized jobs (research cepartment, continuity clerk) → caused by
new design and quality standards (greater attention to continuity, narrative
clarity, spectacle, more complicated), competitive hiring of experts from
outside the film (theater, painting, architecture, fashion design, music) who
separated specialized roles even further, technological innovation (experts
on special effects)
• the causal links between industry and style: economic and signifying
practices (need for mass production + new standards of quality: continuity,
verisimilitude , narrative clarity, spectacle) → changed production practices:
new work division and subdivision (planning, continuity script, accounting,
scientific management), and professions (assistants, specialty staff: art
directors, costumers, researchers, continuity clerks, continuity writers,
planning department, casting, FX, etc.) → conditions for a group style
the conception of the production
• management: separated from ownership + sectioned to capital direction
(president and board members in NYC) /technical management (producers in
Hollywood)
• → yearly budget meetings in NYC: overall budget for the next season, based
on market analysis (opinions of exhibitors, distributors), precise number of
films, casting, stories, 2-3 cost levels (specials for roadshows, programs to fill
commitments to the exhibitors, after 1930: B-films for the second spot in
double-features), strategy (spread the risk across many films or to count on
fewer and more expensive), after the meeting: implement the directives in LA
• production department: assisting the producer with planning, day-to-day
management, cost estimates, records, paying workers by time (chief expense
became time → 70-80 % salaries and wages), script breakdown (→ assistant
director: director´s liason with people on the set and in the production office,
routine organizational work: checking locations, sets and costumes, hiring
extras, daily planning)
• new accounting procedures introducing greater pressure to control shooting:
charging as much as possible for individual films, the rest: overhead, dividing it
by feet of exposed material → discouraged re-takes, improvisation, rearranging of the script on the set, long takes
• encouraged re-cycling of sets and costumes
• focus on fast set construction (x real locations) → efficient use of limited
space
• elaborate daily routine reporting system: keeping track of all the
operations, tracing efficiency and cost of every stage of production
pre-shooting work
• standardized script writing: from 1911: story reading/writing departments,
mid 1920s: agents for non-studio materials, since early 1910s with multiplereelers: technical experts for translating a story into continuity script, only
then giving it to directors
• team writing: subdivision of labor (stories, gags, re-writing, title and subtitle
draughtsmen) + scripts travelled througg several writers or group of writers
• intermediary step between the original story and the final script: treatment →
special needs of the studio: notes of decision-makers, new versions, trial
cosntruction without expensive writing process
• research department (mid 1910s): details of accuracy, libraries, clippings
• art direction: art director/property manager, from painted backdrops to
increasingly comples 3D sets, planning: diagrams of sets with camera set-ups
• casting: files on character types, casting director: methods to nclassify actors
(indexing), while director chose only leads
• make-up: until mid 1920s: responsibility of indiv. actors, then: make-up depts
• costuming: 1915: fashion designers for leading female roles
shooting
• subdivision: mid 1910s: AD (seldom became directors → too
valuable), 2nd cameraman, around 1915: cameramen begun
purchasing their own equipment (→ invention of accessories),
studios bought them again after coming of sound
• rehearsals (after 1908)
• order of shooting: exteriors first, big sets in the end,
dangerous scenes last
• multiple-camera shooting: saving money: re-use, protection
against re-takes, European negative, different POVs
• continuity clerk: taking notes for editors on the set (late
1910s) → needed for continuity editing, matching of action,
lighting of stars, accuracy of mise-en-scene
post-production
• early 1910s: cutters: took over parts of director´s
responsibilities: rough cut following the continuity
script, later also continuity clerk´s notes, while
director still doing the final cut
• late 1910s: cutters became „film editors“: technical
experts who refined the film the rough cut to the
final cut
• around 1914: previews → revisions: rewrites, retakes
movie clip
• Jak se dělá film (Karel Melíšek, Jaroslav Mottl,
1936)
• 1:16
Producer-Unit System (1931-1955)
• a move away from the strong central producer toward greater
specialization in the upper management: a group of managers, each
supervising 6-8 films/year, concentrating on a particular type of films (x
central-producer 1914-1931: 50 f./year → example of the central
producer: Irving Thalberg: had 10 specialized associate supervisors)
• „unit production“: a number of (anonymous) producers will each make
one film at a time, following it through to the completion → saving
overhead and allowing for greater individual creativity of directors than
the strict factory-like central system, producer having closer control over
day-to-day production
• but: this was not decentralization or multi-divisional production → the
studios retained central control and planning
• ideology of individual creativity + tendency to typecasting and increasing
specialization: certain producers for certain categories, new departments
and positions → in scriptwiting, pre-shooting production, cinematography,
make-up, market research
• example of further specialization: story acquisition → worldwide
coverage; scouts gaining access to manuscripts; reading staff preparing
dozens of synopsis (10-75 pages) analyzed by editorial staff who wrote
summaries (1 page); extensive files with cross-checking by plot structure,
comic or tragic elements, etc., covered almost everything published; story
conferences (discussions of the possiblities of the stories before
treatments were written)
• sound → dialogue as a new element in the continuity script → script
format needed to be adapted: „master scene“ form combining the
theatrical and pre-sound script formats
• research library for music, searching for copyright sources
• late 1930s: loans of actors more common, agents started functioning as
producers (setting up contracts, personal representatives managing a
client´s career, packaging sets of actors for accross media) → slowly
moving into production activities
• early 1930s: more formal methods of market research: testing rough cuts,
titles, scripts, cast → testing useful to determine rential fees for actors
• mid 1930s: „production designer“ (William Cameron Menzies) → art
direction + sketching camera set-ups, involvement in directing → control
over the look of the film
all the studios: standard structures
and practices
• those stayed the same during central producer and producer-unit system,
uniform across the industry → because of the industrial discourse
emphasizing efficient practices, standardization of the product and
because of the unionization reinforcing a uniform subdivision of labor →
explains the stylistic similarities between films made in the 1930s and
1940s in different studios
• smaller deviations → innovations that become standard → controlled
stylistic change
• small variations in allocation of effective decision-making to work
positions → occured at the point of upper-level management structures
(beyond that: just standard procedures) → both between and within
individual studios (→ more attention to more expensive productions x
lower-cost A: quickly produced, B-product: hardly supervised at all by the
first-string managers)
• Did management structures influence standard work practices and stylistic
techniques? Zanuck (at 20th-Fox): wanted medium shots and plenty of
close-ups to play with them in editing (x long takes). WB: many angles so
that there would be a choice (x cutting with camera) → desire of
management for control of the film´s look and sound
• = favoring certain alternatives within the classical paradigm to sustain the
classical style
• criteria of quality: guiding individual decisions, no matter what position or
which worker
• serial manufacture if a standardized product → collaboration of a group of
craftsmen, collaborative work situation → many workers felt positive
about it
The Package-Unit System (1955-)
• after WW2: end of mass production and the diffusion of independent
production → the production sector made fewer films, chiefly through
independents
• the industrial structure ≠ the mode of production → definition of
commercial independent production: not based on its organization of
production (can use any of the systems)
• „package-unit system“: a new method of organizing labor
• package: a producer organizes a project: secures financing and combines
workers + means of production (narrative „property“, equipment, physical
sites of production) → transitory combination, film-by-film arrangement (x
producer-unit system: a producer commited to make 6-8 films per year)
• from firm to film → disappearance of the self-contained studio;
employment: based on a film, not on a firm; the entire industry becomes
the pool for labor and materials
• production unit: leases components of a project (means of production) for
a project from support firms
what continues from the previous systems
• each new system retained much of its predecessor´s organization (despite
cyclical development from looser control of deadlines and hierarchy to
more rigid and back)
• directors of capital assigned control of production to a powerful worker:
cameraman, director, producer, star
• still an instance of detailed division of labor
• labor pool still unionized → labor structure: subdivision of work and
management hierarchy
• craft specialization continued to increase
• professional associations: standardizing mechanisms, easing the
introduction of new equipment and securing interchangeability of the
parts and technicians
• the tension between standardization and differentiation → what did it
mean for workers: a) a standard of making a quality film, b) the
encouragement to innovate and redefine the standard
what changed:
• part of the postwar industrial shift: instead of the mass production of
many films by a few manufacturers: the specialized production of a few
films by many independents
• external economic and social causes: decreased attendance and income
losses, demographical changes, advent of TV, consent decree (reduction of
blind selling and block booking) , divorcement of exhibition from
distribution, growth of talent´s bargaining power
• resulting new practices: shift to independent deals and packages →
reduced fixed costs, flexible limited output (with no regular-release
schedules), concentration on fewer big-budget films and elimination of Bmovies, location shooting and runaway production, longer runs, new
distribution practices (targeting population segments), intensified need to
differentiate the product (innovations, story, stars, directors → branding
by talent names, not studio names which further increased certain
laborers´power)
• majors: financiers and distributors
• increased role of talent agencies: packaging casting + material (MCA:
bought Universal in 1959)
• advantages of one-time packages: reduced fixed costs, flexibility, aiming
films at 1st-run theaters only
• foreign investment and runaway production → foreign laborers (on
middle and lower level) → altered standard US production practices by
foreign production cultures: number of crews, labor responsibilities,
general work conditions → but: these variations were only on location
shooting, did not change Hollywood practices
• paying some workers by profit-shares rather than time → middle and
upper levels: attractive only for the most powerful workers: stars,
directors, sometimes writers → this encouraged more flexible and
cooperative pre-shooting planning with less strict division of certain labor
functions and more flexibility relating deadlines (profit-sharing workers
controlling their own time)
• combining creative and management functions: in certain parts of the
middle- and upper-level management (producing, writing, directing,
acting): individuals combining positions: writer-director (Billy Wilder for
Sunset Boulevard, 1950), producer-director (Stanley Kramer for The
Defiant Ones, 1958), star-director-producer (John Wayne for The Alamo,
1960)
• they had to take over some business functions and spent a lot of time
negotiating new deals
• but: the old system unchanged in other departments and on lower levels
of labor hierarchy (union contracts → continuance of the detailed division
of labor)
conclusions: the historical logics of the
Hollywood mode of production
• it changed continually as the conditions of its existence changed: the
economic and ideological/signifying practices → conceptions of efficiency
and quality developed the subdivisions of the execution of the work
• economic conditions: new jobs (AD, unit managers, production
department workers)
• narrative coherence and clarity → movement of star personalities to the
foreground and their directors toward the top of the management
pyramid
• verisimilitude → researchers, art directors, specialized set-construction
crews, composite photography experts
• continuity techniques → continuity writers, continuity clerks, expert
editors, make-up artists
• spectacle → technological innovations
• reasons for adopting subdivisions of work: a) to increase output and
insure predictable quality, b) imitating methods of advanced capitalism in
related work areas, c) to achieve a particular look and sound, c)
technological change , d) unionization
the classical style and the mode of
production
• classical style (narrative logics to control space and time) → reinforces
both economic practices (e.g. cost efficiency) and ideological/stylistic
practices (e.g. the standard of the quality film)
• stylistic norms influence the directions and functions of technological
changes (how new technology is introduced and used)
• tensions of standardization and differentiation, the increase of
specialization, and the tendency toward a controlled uniformity →
dependent on the norms of the classical style
• economics alone doesn´t explain the mode of production: films could be
made more cheaply without conventions of narrative construction,
spectacle, verisimilitude, continuity, etc.
contemporary film production
• still retains the same mode of production and classical style, despite
minor changes in trade practices (four-walling /renting a movie theater
for a period of time and receiving all of the box office/, platforming,
saturation booking, platforming, extensive market analysis, year-round
biding, recutting and re-releasing)
• conglomerate structure → doesn´t change the mode of production
• strategic management at the level of conglomerate ownership doesn´t
influence tactical management in individual branches
• majors as financiers and distributors → allowing individual package units
to operate on their own once a deal is set
• „clout“: more power of the worker´s perceived value (based on the
grosses of his last film) to determine his share of the next project → some
top talent even decide whether or not a project is financed
• talent agencies continue as producers, putting together packages
• still detailed DOL, classical quality standards, script as blueprint,
work/management, conservative use of technological innovations in the
name of classical norms and efficiency
contemporary style: conservatism, classical
norms continue to dominate
• stylistic assimilation: the „old“ Hollywood selectively
incorporating and refunctionalizing devices from international
art cinema and merges them with classical norms → looser
causal links, motivation by realism and authorial expressivity,
ambivalent characters, explorations of pychological states,...
• absorbing art-film techniques and taming their disruptiveness
within a coherent genre frameworks and expectations and
boundaries of classical style
Aplikace Staigerové na čs. film
Co to byla socialistická dramaturgie
• Plánování produkce celého studia nebo
dokonce národní kinematografie na základě
politické a kulturní agendy KSČ (tematické
plány, dramaturgické plány, výrobní plány
částečné a souhrnné).
• Dozor, posuzování a schvalování práce
jednotlivých skupin v rámci studií.
• Dramaturgická praxe těchto skupin (literární
příprava, etc.)
modus státní filmové výroby:
systém dramaturgických jednotek
• Zestátnění a vznik výrobních skupin na půdorysu protektorátních výroben
(1945–1947)
• První zásah do profesní hierarchie: umělečtí šéfové místo šéfů produkčních
(1947–1948)
• Tvůrčí kolektivy: odloučení dramaturgie od realizace (1948–1951)
• Kolektivní vedení: vrcholná centralizace (1951–1954)
• Tvůrčí skupiny: podmínečná decentralizace a liberalizace (1954–1959)
• Banská Bystrica, oficiální zavedení přímé kontroly ÚV KSČ a historický
význam tvůrčích skupin (1959–1962)
• Tvůrčí skupiny jako kvazi-nezávislá producentská centra (1963-1969)
• Dramaturgické skupiny opět odloučeny od výroby (1970-)
praxe skupin v nejširším rozsahu
1.
2.
navrhují dílčí dramaturgický plán
vybírají náměty v reakci na centrální tematické nebo
dramaturgické plány
3. vybírají scenáristu
4. připomínky, posudky, schvalování povídek, synopsí a scénářů
5. zapracovávání připomínek horních pater dramaturgie a řízení,
včetně nejvyšší politické moci a cenzury
6. výběr režiséra a hlavních herců
7. dohled nad celým procesem realizace, včetně dekorací, denních
prací a sestřihů
8. zapracování připomínek ke konečnému sestřihu a jeho úpravy
9. dohled nad premiérovým a festivalovým uvedením
10. širší strategie: pěstování vlastního profilu a autorské stáje → typ
brandingu
the structure of dramaturgy
státní (ministerská)
dramaturgie
external influences:
ÚV KSČ
ústřední dramaturgie
2-10 dramaturgických
skupin
prezident státu a další
vlivní jednotlivci
ředitel státního filmu a
studií
státní cenzura
filmové štáby
dramaturgické skupiny
• složeny z uměleckého šéfa nebo hlavního
dramaturga a produkčního šéfa (v některých
obdobích), 3-5 dramaturgů a lektorů
• proměnlivá míra kontroly nad realizací (výběr
tvůrčích pracovníků, casting, kontrola denních
prací, hrubého a čistého sestřihu, atd.)
• proměnlivá míra autonomie vůči horním
patrům hierarchie řízení filmu, státní
dramaturgii, ÚV KSČ
vývojové proměny základních dramaturgických
jednotek
•
•
•
•
•
2-4 „výrobních skupin“ (1945–1948)
8-11 „tvůrčích kolektivů“ (1948–1951)
jedno „kolektivní vedení“ (1951-1954)
4-6 „tvůrčích skupin“ (1954–1970)
6 „dramaturgických skupin“ (1970-1977), na něž
dohlížel ústřední dramaturg s posílenými
pravomocemi
• 6 „dramaturgicko-výrobních skupin“ (1978-1983)
• 6 „dramaturgických skupin“ (1983-1990)
Geografie
tvůrčí práce
ve filmu:
A: Barrandov
B: centrum
Prahy (vzdálenost: cca
10 km)
Barrandovské
ateliéry
(dostavěny 1932,
arch. Max Urban)
Jan Werich
(1905-1980)
Ze scenáristické profese se
mělo stát zaměstnání s
pravidelnou docházkou,
ověřovanou píchacími
hodinami. Jan Werich, který se
stal vedoucím jedné tvůrčí
skupiny [správně: kolektivu], to
komentoval po svém: „Výkaz
práce - Ráno jsem přišel…
Píchnul jsem, sedl jsem si a
začal jsem přemýšlet… Nic mě
nenapadlo… Po obědě jsem
dostal nápad a začal jsem
psát… Večer se mi to zdálo blbý,
tak jsem to škrtnul… Píchl jsem
a šel jsem domů…” (rozhovor s
J. Krejčíkem)
„mazáci“
versus
„diletanti“:
filmové studio
jako továrna,
dramaturgie jako
„stroj na scénáře“
(foto z knihy, která
popisuje filmaře jako
součást pracující
třídy)
Dramaturgie dnes?
• the decline of film dramaturgy identified as the main cause of
poor scripts and script-development practices
• dramaturgical units dissolved, the practice largely moved to
public television which became the major (co-)producer of
feature films
• attempts to revive the „collective art of dramaturgy“→
“MIDPOINT: Central European Script Center”
http://midpoint-center.eu
conclusions: dramaturgical-unit
system of the socialist mode of film
production
1. the cultural interface between the Party and the actual
filmmaking practice, as well as between the broader
cultural-political trends and filmmaking
2. the locus of political struggle to transform the production
culture, change generations, and implement the ideological
and aesthetic directives top-down
3. at the same time: the sites of collaborative authorship
sheltering script development from the direct commercial or
political pressures
4. semi-independent producers in the state system where
there are no actual producers (the only producer is
ultimately the state itself)
5. dramaturgs as tactical managers
klipy
• Banksy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX1iplQQJTo
Lekce zrušená: Filmové studio jako
místo, podnik, pracovní svět
• samostudium: studijní materiály v IS
• Ben Goldsmith
• Edward Epstein
• Allen Scott: economic geography of the cultural economy
• space economy of modern capitalism: localized articulations of culturalproducts industries – industrial clusters scattered around the globe
• film studios after WW2: many of the activities previously carried on inhouse were steadily externalized, many small and medium-sized firms
linked together in flexible vertically disintegrated production networks;
many types of workers eliminated from permanent studio payrolls and
reemployed in smaller firms
• project-oriented mode of production: “flexible specialization”, “postFordism”, or the more neutral “new creative economy”
• the most successful of cultural-products industries concentrated in
cosmopolitan cities with extended global influence
• clustering of firms: economies of agglomeration +localized increasing
returns effects: economizing on spatial interlinkages, concentrated labor
markets, learning effects, information flows; result: complex institutional
arrangements, social conventions, innovative potential, magnet for
aspiring neophytes (= competitive advantage).
• spatial system of production, work, social life: permeated with symbolical
assets deriving from historical place-specific social traditions, mental
associations and icons, which will be embedded in goods and services
produced there; this is important for authenticating and differentiating of
cultural products by consumers
• industrial agglomeration: many units of production in one place + strong
functional interdependencies and overspill effects (i.e., externalities)
linking these units together
• managerial creativity, business experiments
• dense, many-sided local labor market
• idiosyncratic superstructure of institutions
• todayʼs Hollywood production system divides into 2 functional groups:
new Hollywood studios: “system houses”: large-scale production units
turning out limited numbers of extremely variable and complex products;
they are associated with smaller firms (subsidiaries and independents)
• + independent production companies and service providers, whose sphere
of operation doesn’t intersect with that of the majors: flexibly specialized,
narrow range of outputs in limited quantities and in ever-changing forms,
colonizing different production niches, pushing out organizational
boundaries of Hollywood (digital effects sector in the 1980s and 1990s)
• these firms interact with one another and with the majors
media conglomerates
• media conglomerates: attempts to internalize the
synergies found on the intersections between
different segments of the media and entertainment
(and hardware) industries;
• conglomerates = parallel in economic space to
industrial clusters in geographic space, i.e. organized
economic collective, with the difference that if in the
one case the relevant synergies are activated under
the umbrella of common ownership, in the other
they owe their genesis to geographic proximity.
Goldsmith, Ben and Tom OʼRegan. The Film Studio:
Film Production in the Global Economy. Lanham, Md.:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
• theory of industrial districts and regional development
• Hollywood production complex consists of 4 functional and
organizational features: a) overlapping production networks
(nodes: majors, independents, providers of specialized
services), b) local labor market (skills, sensibilities, forms of
habituation, migration), c) institutional environment, d)
regional milieu (traditions, proximity of other industries)
• these features are forming positive externalities, resulting in
competitive advantages (increasing returns to scale and scope
/i.e. size and diversity/, positive agglomeration economies);
they are major elements of an organizational-geographic
framework that functions as a hotbed of creativity and
innovation for the industry
Lekce 9+10: Produkční kultura
Production Studies → Production Culture
(Mayer – Banks – Caldwell /eds./: Production Studies, 2009)
• production as culture(s) → from production of culture to cultures of
production → „lived realities of people involved in media production as the
subjects for theorizing production as culture“ (Mayer – Banks – Caldwell
2009)
• „looking up and down the food chains of production hierarchies, to
understand how people work through professional organizations and
informal networks to form communities of shared practices, languages, and
cultural understandings of the world“ (Mayer – Banks – Caldwell 2009)
• filmmakers = particular kind of workers
• filmmakers and support personnel of all kinds = cultural actors → „they
shape and refashion their identities in the process of making their careers in
industries undergoing political transitions and economic reorganizations“
• media production as „creativity within constraints“→ unique from all other
forms of production? → the reach of mass media texts, the celebrity of
particular professionals, the infiltration of media commodities into daily life,
economic resources concentrated in a handful of global cities
disciplinary influences of production studies
• integrating cultural studies + political economy
• disciplines: cultural studies and cultural anthropology, production-ofculture theory, sociology of work, organizational studies, cultural and
economic geography, political economy of media, cultural economics,...
• methods: participant observation, oral history, textual analysis, grounded
theory, lay theory,...
• cultural turn in social sciences and ethnographic turn in the humanities:
everyday spaces where people actively make meanings through their
consumption habits, active bodies, and ritual activities, in the context of
their lived realities; interrelations of culture and power relations
• inspiration by audience studies: interpretative communities as „producers
of meaning“, organized along fault lines of class, gender, race, etc.;
scholars reflecting on their own position toward the communities they
analyze → studying media workers as interpretative communities and
contexts within which they produce meanings
• difference from audience studies: studying making of meaning not in
terms of the politics of pleasure (consumption), but political economy of
labor, markets, and policy → e.g. uncertainties, deskilling , outsourcing
and self-exploitation of media workers
sources and data
• empirical data: a) on routines, rituals of production processes, b) on
economic and political forces shaping roles, technologies, and the
distribution of resources according to cultural and demographic
differences
• sources: field research notes, semi-structured interviews, „behind-thescenes“, making-ofs, demos, (auto)biographies, publicity, manuals,
artifacts (technological equipment) + fiction films
• interchange between producer and scholar: problem of gaining access to
closely garded communities
roots of media production studies
Leo Rosten: Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (1941)
• Rosten: Chicago School tradition of positivistic sociology, but also attempted to
become screenwriter himself → this gave him an insider access to Hollywood
community
• 2-year grant to study Hollywood (with a group of assistants) → Hollywood of
the late 1930s as a social system (x geographical place) characterized by status
relationships, hierarchies, conflicts: like other social systems save for the
popular fascination
• primary focus on elites: on social and economic power, on contradictions
between creativity and commerce
• „I wanted to analyze the community that makes movies for the world the way
an anthropologist might study the Maori.“ (Rosten´s memoires)
• empirical data: both hard and soft: interviews, questionnaires (directors,
actors, screenwriters, producers), government statistics, casual observation of
media elites,...
• rather than documenting interactions with media producers: generalized
meditations on movies, celebrity, etc., written in a journalistic prose
• connections between political economy of media production (managementlabor relations, limiting pressures from the government and outside interest
groups, contradictions between creativity and commerce) and sociology of
media producers (not only occupational roles, but also social and relational
dynamics of Hollywood´s social scene)
• critical analysis of the film production, obscured to the public by the
celebrity culture, rags-to-riches stories
• Hollywood movie makers as regular workers, but: symbolic product shadows
the real processes of capital accumulation: workers anonymous, „in the
shadow“ of the product
• relationships between workers´ material conditions and their subjectivities
• content + production: economic and social conditions of production
influence the way how movies perpetuate damaging social stereotypes
• macrosocial perspective → Hollywood of the late 1930s was young (62%
under 30, 30% between 30 and 40), not so well paid as expected (except for a
small core elite) → H. as a mecca for eager young creatives, but satisfying
only small numbers
• 3 concentric circles of Hollywood : 1) all the 30 thousand movie workers,
2) the „movie colony“ (producers, actors, directors, writers), 3) the movie
elite (250 persons earning 75 000 USD or more a year) → Rosen´s focus:
the movie colony and the elite and their social dynamics as constituted
outside of the boundaries of the workplace
• Hollywood elites: on and off the studio lot, their sociodemographics and
social habits → a small group dictating terms of business but alsoof social
interaction
• a „nervous“ elite: constantly seeking validation for their financially
priviledged status from others in the elite, but the elite has no respect for
itself, feels inferior, accepts derision from others
• chronic economic uncertainty: volatility of fortune in Hollywood →
constant strain, but, at the same time: ignoring economic realities of the
business and focussing on the creative side of their work → „selffascinating quality“ of the environment
• cease to be individuals and become business institutions → the most
alienated class: self-objectification: promoting their own celebrity
through extravagant spending and highly public personal relationships,
unconscious need for anxiety, swinging between euphoria and despair,
assessing their value through income and status comparison: worked long
hours but still dissatisfied
• Hortense Powdermaker: Hollywood the Dream Factory (1950): ethnography
of Hollywood in the late 1940s
• workers motivated by profit + imaginary ownership (credits, authorship)
• more attention to lower positions of the labor hierarchies: workers as
property (similar to slaves, prostitutes, servants)
• lack of freedom that workers trade for success in the industry → workers
often accept exploitative conditions in exchange for a self-realization
through collaboration → collective modes of creative ownership that allowed
more control over the production process while embedding the workers
deeper in the system driven by alienated labor and profit motives
• team-based production: simultaneously liberate and harness creativity to
generate profit
• Todd Gitlin: Inside Prime Time (1983)
• 7 months of interviewing 200 prominent television employees, observing
operations of US networks and their role in TV production
• the forces that shape creation of TV series and schedules from the top
down: the processes by which executives evaluate content with regard to
advertisers and audiences, make programming decisions, negotiate with
producers, writers, actors, directors → intersection of many industrial
operations (advertising, audience research, program development,
scheduling, agent representation) → industrial norms, institutional
practices, reflecting prevailing social trends and affecting the programs
• reveals how economic and political forces led the networks to narrow
range of content with a consistent idology
• method: Clifford Geertz´s ethnographic „thick description“ of complex
processes, practices and players → operations of media industries as
ambivalent, contested, unpredictable → not an inevitable outcome of
ownership structures and regulatory norms
John T. Caldwell: Production Culture (2008)
• industrial reflexivity: a) self-representation , self-reflection of the
industry: „behind-the-scenes“, „authentic inside“ of the industry now
serves as onscreen entertainment → marketing dimension, b) expression
of lived realities of production communities
• = both corporate macrostrategies + human microstrategies → top-down
conglomerate power + human creative resistance on the local level →
trade communication + workers´ expression
• production cultures (in plural) → micro-social level: film and TV industries
as local cultures and local communities expressing themselves and their
self-understandings → production as a cultural text in itself
• interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz: not direct analysis of social
groups, but hermeneutics of cultures as texts by „looking over the
shoulder“ of of those who produce them as a sort of self-ethnography →
Caldwell: „indigenous“ interpretive frameworks of local production
cultures
• how collective lay theorizing („lay theories“) is animated in trade stories,
tools, artifacts, social behavior
• critical approach: self-reflexive producers not final guarantors of
authenticity and meaning → revealing self-interest, promotion, spin, selfcensorship (confidentiality agreements)
• trade talk x deep texts: contextualizing direct, explicit explanations of
producers by studying deep texts and practices: embedded theories
through tools, machines, artifacts, iconographies, working methods,
professional rituals and narratives → all of these contain embedded
reflections on theoretical questions we know from film studies: What is
film? How film works? How the viewer responds? How film reflects or
forms culture? → far richer variety of communicative registers and
formats to discusss, employ, explain, contest ideas about nature and
meaning of film and TV → to collectively examine and understand film
• cultural-industrial method → 4 modes of analysis: 1) textual analysis of
trade and worker artifacts; 2) interviews with workers; 3) ethnographic
field observation of production sites and professional gatherings; 4)
economic/industrial analysis → balancing, cross-checking between these
registers
• 6 features of industrial self-theorizing:
1. instrumental and inductive: concepts which „work“, providing a logic to
daily working practices and fitting to the long-standing índustrial mode of
production → work inductively, from the ground up
2. eclectic: use any solution (any aesthetic tradition, theoretical
perspective) providing a tool to overcome some obstacle or a key that fits
the film, e.g. editors: versatile and hybrid theorizers, required to render
someone else´s vision
3. unintentional, effacing: workers don´t impose their will upon filmed
material, the filmed scenes impose their will on workers → workers
responding with decisions appropriate to the material, creative work
discussed as craft or even physical work, practical problem-solving
(especially below-the-line)
4. reductive and proprietary: reducing the complexity of work processes to
the „magic“ of artists, hi-tech science masked as artists´ intuition and
personal vision
5. pre-emptive, real-time: part of marketing → precedes the product
6. commoncensical: hesitate to assert intellectual significance → pragmatic,
middle-level theorizing within the realms of the industry
embedded theory: 3 registers of artifacts and rituals:
1) fully embedded deep texts and rituals: intra-group; cut-off from the
public, circulated within proprietary work worlds, primary function: intracommunity (demo tapes, pitch sessions, machine interface designs,
equipment iconography, how-to manuals, trade and craft narratives and
anecdotes, on-the-set crew pedagogy and work behavior, union and guild
workshops, corporate retreats);
2) semi-embedded deep texts and rituals: inter-group; dialogues between
companies and associations; typically function to bring generalizing
discussion of the nature and meaning of film from one corporate media
company to another; cross the boundaries of the local professionals
community , reaching to media journalists, advertisers or affiliates, new
personnel(electronic press kits, trade shows, trade publications ,
internship programs, panels on „how to make it in the industry“)
3) publicly disclosed deep texts and rituals: extra-group (making-ofs, DVD
extras, studio-supported fan conventions, screening q+as, viral
marketing,...)
example for a critical analysis of
production culture: trade stories
• functions: rationalization, solidarity-making, career mobility, social
pedagogy, self-serving legitimation, marking professional boundaries,
negotiating one´s value on the job market, navigating tactics face to face
technological change and economic uncertainty
• genres: war stories, against-all-odds allegories, genesis myths, paths-nottaken parables,
• klip: Druhé filmové žně Zlín (1941)
mediální návyky: tipy
• InMediaRes: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/
• Antenna: http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/
• LA Times: Company Town:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/
• Henry Jenkin´s blog: http://www.henryjenkins.org/
• Jennifer Holt´s blog: http://profholt.blogspot.com/
• Alisa Perren´s blog: http://www.themediaindustries.net/
• Mark Deuze´s blog: http://deuze.blogspot.com/