"This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Petr Szczepanik provides an in-depth study of the history and contemporary landscape of screen media industries in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. Drawing on first-hand research in the world of the various producers who operate in the "digital peripheries" of Central and Eastern European, he offers broad insights into the ways the screen industries of small nations are positioned in and respond to globalization and digitalization. Szczepanik's shows how film, television, and online video are industries with still distinct structures and professional cultures, but which have nevertheless been converging, affected by the same globalizing forces such as transnational video on demand services and platforms, and whose producers move across inter-industry boundaries with increasing ease. The book explores small media markets through attention to the role of producers as key cultural mediators, looking closely at how their agency is circumscribed by the limited scope and peripheral positioning of the markets in which they operate, and how they struggle to overcome these obstacles through their professional identities, business models, and adaptations to technological change and transnational competition"--
The continued interest in the social and cultural life of the former Warsaw pact countries – looking at but also beyond their socialist pasts – encompasses a desire to know more about their national cinemas. Yet, despite the increasing consumption of films from these countries – via DVD, VOD platforms and other alternative channels – there is a lack of comprehensive information on this key aspect of visual culture. This important book rectifies the glaring gap and provides both a history and a contemporary account of East Central European cinema in the pre-WW2, socialist, and post-socialist periods. Demonstrating how at different historical moments popular cinema fulfilled various roles, for example in the capacity of nation-building, and adapted to the changing markets of a morphing political landscape, chapters bring together experts in the field for the definitive analysis of mainstream cinema in the region. Celebrating the unique contribution of films from Hungary, the Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia and Poland, from the award-winning Cosy Dens to cult favourite Lemonade Joe, and from 1960s Polish Westerns to Hollywood-influenced Hungarian movies, the book addresses the major themes of popular cinema. By looking closely at genre, stardom, cinema exhibition, production strategies and the relationship between the popular and the national, it charts the remarkable evolution and transformation of popular cinema over time. The continued interest in the social and cultural life of the former Warsaw pact countries – looking at but also beyond their socialist pasts – encompasses a desire to know more about their national cinemas. Yet, despite the increasing consumption of films from these countries – via DVD, VOD platforms and other alternative channels – there is a lack of comprehensive information on this key aspect of visual culture. This important book rectifies the glaring gap and provides both a history and a contemporary account of East Central European cinema in the pre-WW2, socialist, and post-socialist periods. Demonstrating how at different historical moments popular cinema fulfilled various roles, for example in the capacity of nation-building, and adapted to the changing markets of a morphing political landscape, chapters bring together experts in the field for the definitive analysis of mainstream cinema in the region. Celebrating the unique contribution of films from Hungary, the Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia and Poland, from the award-winning Cosy Dens to cult favourite Lemonade Joe, and from 1960s Polish Westerns to Hollywood-influenced Hungarian movies, the book addresses the major themes of popular cinema. By looking closely at genre, stardom, cinema exhibition, production strategies and the relationship between the popular and the national, it charts the remarkable evolution and transformation of popular cinema over time.
Conceptualizing production studies from a European perspective, the book evaluates the history of European thought on production: theories of practice, the languages, grammars, and poetics of film, practical theories of production systems such as film dramaturgy, and the self-theorizing of European auteurs and professionals.
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.
This book provides an overview of the growing field of screenwriting research and is essential reading for both those new to the field and established screenwriting scholars. It covers topics and concepts central to the study of screenwriting and the screenplay in relation to film, television, web series, animation, games and other interactive media, and includes a range of approaches, from theoretical perspectives to in-depth case studies. 44 scholars from around the globe demonstrate the range and depths of this new and expanding area of study. As the chapters of this Handbook demonstrate, shifting the focus from the finished film to the process of screenwriting and the text of the screenplay facilitates valuable new insights. This Handbook is the first of its kind, an indispensable compendium for both academics and practitioners.
This book is a comprehensive study of peripheral locations in contemporary European TV crime series. Ambitiously, it covers the complete geography of Europe, and offers a nuanced image of a changing, dynamic, and unfinished continent. The chapters include analyses of the practical, creative approach to producing crime series in European peripheries and rural areas, evaluating a continent marked by an internal crisis between urban and rural Europe. The study includes readings of crime series such as Shetland, Bitter Daisies, Trom, Pagan Peak, and The Border, but presents such representative cases within broader tendencies on the European TV market, including challenges from streaming services, the influence of Nordic Noir, and changes within the cognitive geography of Europe. The authors position peripheral European crime series in a complex relationship between universal appeal and local recognisability and offer a comprehensive theoretical approach to the aesthetics of peripherality. Grounded in desktop production studies, the book presents an original scholarly approach to analysing European crime series from a continental point of view. Despite local differences, the spatio-generic orientations scrutinized in the book – Nordic Noir, Mediterranean Noir, Country Noir, Eastern Noir, and Brit Noir – show remarkable aesthetic similarities in series from territories otherwise normally unconnected in television production. Consequently, television crime series reveal a common tongue and voice for dialogue on a continent in a deepening crisis.
Why were Hollywood producers eager to film on the other side of the Iron Curtain? How did Western computer games become popular in socialist Czechoslovakia's youth paramilitary clubs? What did Finnish commercial television hope to gain from broadcasting Soviet drama? Cold War media cultures are typically remembered in terms of an East-West binary, emphasizing conflict and propaganda. Remapping Cold War Media, however, offers a different perspective on the period, illuminating the extensive connections between media industries and cultures in Europe's Cold War East and their counterparts in the West and Global South. These connections were forged by pragmatic, technological, economic, political, and aesthetic forces; they had multiple, at times conflicting, functions and meanings. And they helped shape the ways in which media circulates today—from film festivals, to satellite networks, to coproductions. Considering film, literature, radio, photography, computer games, and television, Remapping Cold War Media offers a transnational history of postwar media that spans Eastern and Western Europe, the Nordic countries, Cuba, the United States, and beyond. Contributors draw on extensive archival research to reveal how media traveled across geopolitical boundaries; the processes of translation, interpretation, and reception on which these travels depended; and the significance of media form, content, industries, and infrastructures then and now.
This is an open access book. Media industry research and EU policymaking are predominantly tailored to large (and, in the latter case, Western) European markets. This open access book addresses the specific qualities of smaller media markets, highlighting their vulnerability to global digital competition and outlining survival strategies for them. New online distribution models and new trends in the consumption of audiovisual content are limited by, and pose new challenges for, existing audiovisual business models and their legal framework in the EU. The European Commission’s Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy, which was intended e.g. to remove obstacles to the cross-border distribution of audiovisual content, has triggered a heated debate on the transformation of the existing ecosystem for European screen industries. While most current discussions focus on the United States, Western Europe, and the multinational giants, this book approaches these industry trends and policy questions from the perspective of relatively small and peripheral (in terms of their population, language, cross-border cultural flows, and financial and/or symbolic capital) media markets.
This book maps the landscape of contemporary European premium television fiction, offering a detailed overview of both the changes in the digital production and distribution and the emergence of specific national and transnational case histories. Combining a media-production approach with a textual and audience analysis, the volume offers a complex, stratified, systemic view of ongoing aesthetic, sociocultural and industrial developments in contemporary European TV. With contributions from leading experts in the field, the book first offers an overview of the industrial, policy and cultural context for the renaissance of European television drama over the past decade, based on original comparative research. This research is then supported by case study chapters from the key contexts within which quality European television is being produced, offering a complex and complete picture of the industry’s strengths and limitations, its traditions and trends, its constraints and future perspectives. A European Television Fiction Renaissance is a must-read book for TV scholars working across Europe and beyond in the areas of media studies, international communications and television studies, media industries studies, production studies, European studies, and media policy studies as well as for those with an interest in television drama, Netflix, globalisation, pay TV and on demand.
