Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity
Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity

Author: Ramyar D. Rossoukh

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2021-09-08

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 1478022191

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

Indian Cinema Today and Tomorrow
Indian Cinema Today and Tomorrow

Author: S. V. Srinivas

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-22

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1040049877

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Cinema has been, and is, a powerful tool for social mobilisation. The political importance of cinema was of course always well-known and has continued to evolve and grow. However, with innovations in modern technology, there has been the exponential growth of television alongside the movies, with content made especially for TV, as well as social media. This volume covers developments in Indian Cinema over the last decade. It explores an array of changes which has dramatically changed cinema — a surge of new filming and broadcasting technologies, from the camera phone to the most sophisticated digital equipment; an avalanche of talent, from trained to completely untrained actors; and a volume of content difficult to document and categorise. It also studies cinema growth and reactions to the onslaught of home entertainment and discusses its changing formats over the years, from TV to satellite, to VCRs and DVDs, serials to OTT streaming platforms. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in film studies, performance studies, cultural studies, media studies, and popular culture. It will also interest professionals working in media and entertainment industries.

Supply Chain Cinema
Supply Chain Cinema

Author: Kay Dickinson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-02-08

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 183902464X

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Why are big budget films typically made across an array of seemingly dissociated sites? Supply Chain Cinema shows how the production journeys of such films exemplify the principles of the supply chain, whose core imperative is to nimbly and opportunistically manufacturing wherever is most amenable and efficient. Through extensive on-site investigations and in-depth interviews with film professionals, Kay Dickinson delivers nuanced insight into working practices in the UK and the UAE. Among the sites she examines is Warner Bros' permanent base at Leavesden Studios near London. From tax breaks designed to attract foreign projects to infrastructures, logistical support and expertise offered, she considers why Hollywood giants elect to make more of their films in Britain than in the USA. Dickinson goes on to show how the UK's ambitions to enlarge its creative economies has opened up a host of competitive advantages with British higher education increasingly fashioned to conform to the needs of border-hopping enterprise, thus generating a workforce keenly adapted to the demands of blockbuster moviemaking.

Onscreen/Offscreen
Onscreen/Offscreen

Author: Constantine V. Nakassis

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2022-12-01

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1487541805

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Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Onscreen/Offscreen is an exploration of the politics and being of filmic images. The book examines contestations inside and outside the Tamil film industry over the question "what is an image?" Answers to this question may be found in the ontological politics that take place on film sets, in theatre halls, and in the social fabric of everyday life in South India, from populist electoral politics and the gendering of social space to caste uplift and domination. Bridging and synthesizing linguistic anthropology, film studies, visual studies, and media anthropology, Onscreen/Offscreen rethinks key issues across a number of fields concerned with the semiotic constitution of social life, from the performativity and ontology of images to questions of spectatorship, realism, and presence. In doing so, it offers both a challenge to any approach that would separate image from social context and a new vision for linguistic anthropology beyond the question of "language."

Listening with a Feminist Ear
Listening with a Feminist Ear

Author: Pavitra Sundar

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2023-08-14

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0472903667

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Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries. Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.

The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas
The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas

Author: Zhen Zhang

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-04

Total Pages: 723

ISBN-13: 1040038077

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Balancing leading scholars with emerging trendsetters, this Companion offers fresh perspectives on Asian cinemas and charts new constellations in the field with significance far beyond Asian cinema studies. Asian cinema studies – at the intersection of film/media studies and area studies – has rapidly transformed under the impact of globalization, compounded by the resurgence of a variety of nationalist discourses as well as counter-discourses, new socio-political movements, and the possibilities afforded by digital media. Differentiated experiences of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have further heightened interest in the digital everyday and the renewed geopolitical divide between East and West, and between North and South. Thematized into six sections, the 46 chapters in this anthology address established paradigms of scholarship and viewership in Asian cinemas like extreme genres, cinephilia, festivals, and national cinema, while also highlighting political and archival concerns that firmly situate Asian cinemas within local and translocal milieus. Underrepresented cinemas of North Korea, Bangladesh, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, and Cambodia, appear here amidst a broader cross-regional, comparative approach. An ideal resource for film, media, cultural and Asian studies researchers, students, and scholars, as well as informed readers with an interest in Asian cinemas.

In the Land of the Unreal
In the Land of the Unreal

Author: Lisa Messeri

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2024-02-02

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1478059222

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In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.

Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema
Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema

Author: A. Cameron

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-07-11

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0230594190

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Since the early 1990s there has been a trend towards narrative complexity within popular cinema. This book examines a number of contemporary films that play overtly with narrative structure, raising questions of chance and destiny, memory and history, simultaneity and the representation of time.

Exploring Movie Construction and Production
Exploring Movie Construction and Production

Author: John Reich

Publisher: Open SUNY Textbooks

Published: 2017-07-10

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781942341475

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Exploring Movie Construction & Production contains eight chapters of the major areas of film construction and production. The discussion covers theme, genre, narrative structure, character portrayal, story, plot, directing style, cinematography, and editing. Important terminology is defined and types of analysis are discussed and demonstrated. An extended example of how a movie description reflects the setting, narrative structure, or directing style is used throughout the book to illustrate building blocks of each theme. This approach to film instruction and analysis has proved beneficial to increasing students¿ learning, while enhancing the creativity and critical thinking of the student.

Production Studies
Production Studies

Author: Vicki Mayer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-09-10

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1135840164

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Production Studies is the first volume to bring together a star-studded cast of interdisciplinary media scholars to examine the unique cultural practices of media production. The all-new essays collected here combine ethnographic, sociological, critical, material, and political-economic methods to explore a wide range of topics, from contemporary industrial trends such as new media and niche markets to gender and workplace hierarchies. Together, the contributors seek to understand how the entire span of "media producers"—ranging from high-profile producers and directors to anonymous stagehands and costume designers—work through professional organizations and informal networks to form communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world.