Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity

Front matter

ANTHROPOLOGY, FILM INDUSTRIES, MODULARITY

Duke University Press Durham and London 2021

ANTHROPOLOGY, FILM INDUSTRIES, MODULARITY

Introduction

RAMYAR D. ROSSOUKH AND STEVEN C. CATON

As world economies in the last half century have moved away from manufacturing to communication and information technologies, film industries have concomitantly become more important and more prevalent than at any time in cinema history. “Globally, more than 3,000 feature films reached movie theaters in 2006, bringing in $23.8 billion in box-office revenues. And total global annual revenues across all distribution channels such as video and DvD, cable, television, and mobile sources were forecasted to be at $450 billion by the end of 2007, according to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The largest distributors of feature films in 2006 were India with 800, the US. with 599, and China with 255” (Young, Gong, and Van der Stede 2008, 28). These figures reflect the prerecession (2006-2007) economy, but not even the recession could dint the upward spiral in film production that we have seen since. Nigeria has one of the most dynamic and profitable film industries in the world (known as Nollywood) and produces more films per week than Hollywood and is second only to Bollywood. According to Fortune magazine, “in 2014, the Nigerian government released data for the first time showing Nollywood is a $3.3 billion sector, with 184.4 movies produced in 2013 alone” (Bright 2015). Other thriving film industries are to be found in Turkey, Iran, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and in several Central and Latin American countries (Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina). In China, super magnate Wang Jianlin built Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis, a vast entertainment center whose movie-production facilities are intended to rival Hollywood’s (Shih and McGee 2015). However, not all national film industries are successful, and some that may at one time have been dominant have now greatly diminished (arguably this is the case, for example, for the Egyptian film industry). And with the shift from analog to digital media, film industries are facing a major challenge, the exact nature and impact of which has yet to be determined but which is bound to be profound. It is anybody’s guess which film industries will survive, let alone prosper. Making films may be big business, but it’s also risky business. We address these changes and challenges in this introduction.

Not just making money, though, is at stake in film industries; they are also about power and influence. As political agents from nation-states to social movements realize the potential of films for drawing large publics into their political projects, they too have shown increasing interest in creating, supporting, and controlling or otherwise tapping into film industries. “Motion pictures aren’t only a significant source of revenue for many countries—they’re also instrumental in shaping worldwide impressions of a country’s intellectual, historical, and cultural environment” (Young, Gong, and Van der Stede 2008, 28). One need only think of South Korean, Iranian, or Chinese cinema to support this claim. Their respective governments are willing to financially underwrite or in other ways support national film industries because of their symbolic capital, especially when their films win international film festival awards. Social movements are also known to use films for their political purposes. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) shaped public awareness about climate change and reenergized the environmentalist movement. Feature films can also have that kind of influence. One need only consider the movie Se/ma (2014) or, in an earlier civil rights era, the 1970s television miniseries Roots, which was remade in 2016 for television audiences: both are concerned with injustices to African Americans that have spurred today’s Black Lives Matter movement. The documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987) also mobilized the Asian American community into forming its own social movement. In another part of the world, less high-profile perhaps yet nonetheless very potent, is the example of Christian evangelicals in West Africa (Meyer 2015) who produce feature films that communicate Christian messages to their born-again audiences. Film industries are being used the world over for political projects of all kinds.

We distinguish analytically between the notion of cinema and film industry. We define cinema as the production of films associated with a certain political (usually national) agenda or a certain aesthetic or cultural movement. Consider in that light Italian Neorealism or the French New Wave or even American independent cinema with its attempt to examine unconventional topics and be culturally or politically edgy: they are all committed to making films in a certain way or to communicating a certain vision of the world. In practical terms, however, they are still dependent on a film industry or industries for their making. The burden of this introduction is to explain what we mean by film industries, but for the moment let it suffice that they get financing for their films and recoup investments through ticket sales (and/or government subsidies); they make their films in a standardized way, even though the content may be anything but standard or conventional, by hiring personnel skilled in those crafts; and that process involves what we call modules (script writing, on-location shooting, cinematography, etc.) that may be outsourced to sites equipped to carry them out anywhere in the world. Empirically speaking, the study of any one film will in all likelihood require both analytical frameworks. The term “cinema” has been used in film studies literature to cover both senses that we wish to distinguish analytically. In the above discussion of various independently produced films, for example, a film like An Inconvenient Truth may be analyzed in relation to a transnational environmental movement cinema, but that does not, in and of itself, help us understand how it was made within the parameters of film industries, which is another question altogether. One might ask, if one wants to understand the influence of Gore’s film, is there any need to understand the process through which his film was made, watched, and commented upon? We claim that there is. Gore’s film could not have been made, let alone seen by millions of viewers, had there not been an industry that produced, marketed, exhibited, and reviewed it, not to speak of movie theaters in which it was shown and a global cable television network that broadcast it.

With this distinction in mind, in the following pages we look at film industries in a way that privileges the notion of modularity. Without getting into details here, we argue that modularity has emerged as the key concept for understanding film industries today, after the collapse of the studio system and the outsourcing of filmmaking tasks around the world. But before we explain in more detail what we mean by “film industries,” we provide a brief history of work done in anthropology on film industries that has either been ignored in film studies or is not known. It is important for anthropologists and film studies scholars to be aware of this history. We wish to create a voice for anthropology and its research on film industries in order for it to be better heard by other disciplines that also work on this subject, disciplines with which we wish to be in dialogue about our mutual interests. There are several such disciplines, and again we cannot be exhaustive in our coverage of them, so we have selected two that we sense are closest to the ethnographic work of anthropologists on film industries: production studies and world cinema.’ At the end of the introduction, after some thoughts on the profound impact of digital media on contemporary film industries that raise the questions of what remains of our objects of study, film and film industries, we summarize the chapters in the volume and their contributions to an anthropological understanding of film industries, and in particular of the ethnography of modularity.

A Brief History of the Anthropology of Film, Television, and Media

Our volume carries the key word Anthropology in its title for a reason. Anthropology has studied film industries for over seventy years, and in the last twenty years the number of anthropological works devoted to research on film industries has grown exponentially, thus warranting the claim that it has become a significant subdisciplinary field within the anthropological study of mass media (Spitulnik 1993; Dickey 1997; Mahon 2000; Askew and Wilk 2002; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002; Mazzarella 2004; Ruby 2005). And yet, what is striking is how few scholars outside of anthropology seem to be aware of the depth and breadth of this field of film industries. Therefore, the introduction reviews the depth and scope of this field, without attempting to be exhaustive (a thorough overview would require a chapter in itself). The aim is to draw attention to the fertility of this field and to argue that it has something distinctive and important to offer the study of film with its emphasis on film industries.

Anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker was very much ahead of her time in studying film industries, not only in her book Hollywood, the Dream Factory (1950), for which she did fieldwork in Hollywood on the personnel of the producer and the writer in film production, but also in Copper Town: Changing Africa (1962), which looks at the effects of what we call cinema on a segment of African society; in this instance, certain kinds of films that the colonial administration showed to African audiences. At the same time, however, she is concerned with the material or infrastructural side of this “mobile cinema” and how it exhibited its films, an aspect we call film industries. She reflected on how she did her pioneering fieldwork in her memoir, Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (Powdermaker 1966), which to this day remains a methodological guidebook for anthropologists of film. In her time, however, the study of cinema, let alone of film industries, was considered outré, and Powdermaker remained an exception, even an outlier within anthropology. For one reason or another, film was not considered a scientific object of study, if indeed an object of study at all.

It was not until the 1980s—thirty years after Powdermaker’s groundbreaking work—that anthropologists began to take up the study of film in a serious way, informed by many theoretical studies of film that had developed in the intervening years.” The anthropological approaches tended to reflect the prevalent focus at the time of film theory on the filmic text that offers a window on a cultural world or as a powerful form of representation that can construct that world (a wonderful example being Elizabeth Traube’s [1991] Dreaming Identities; see also Dickey [1993] and Armbrust [1996]).

A different type of study from this era is Steven Caton’s (1999) Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology. While Traube looks at a whole set of films made in roughly the same period and asks how they construct identities such as class, race, and gender, Caton focuses on a single film and the process of its transnational production and exhibition; in other words, he asks how the film was exemplary of a film industry at a particular moment in its history. The process entailed what we call modules in film production. These were location scouting (in Jordan); script writing (there were two writers for this film in the end) that looked critically at the story of colonialism in the Middle East (through the adventures of its colonial agent); on-location shooting in “exotic locales” (which included Jordan, Morocco, and southern Spain), in order to draw audiences away from studio television programming; and cinematography that involved special-effects lenses to capture mirages on camera, not to speak of heavy, bulky equipment needed for large-format film stock and lighting equipment to lighten shadows, because high-contrast desert sunlight made shadows appear black, if not opaque. Sound was another important module in this production. Special sound recording equipment captured nuances of sound that were heard in wraparound theater speakers, which gave an immersive aural experience to match the visual one. Personnel were no less important to the film’s commodity value. There were highly trained international crews and actors that made the film appear international and a famous director who was making the shift from national to international cinema and from a smallscreen to the large-screen Super Panavision format; and finally, transnational marketing and exhibition were crucial modules in the film’s ultimate financial success (i.e., investment could not be recouped on domestic ticket sales alone).

The point of an anthropological analysis is to show that what we call the film is in myriad and sometimes profound ways the product of this complex industrial process and attendant technologies, which are missed if we focus only on the filmic text and its reception by different publics. Take, for example, the filming of the desert in which T. E. Lawrence campaigned: in order for it to be seen at all on the wide screen, each frame had to be artfully filled with visual details, not only so the viewer's eye would be pulled laterally across the wide screen but so that depth of field could be created to provide visual perspective. The technology of wide-screen filming required special lenses and rather large, bulky equipment, which had to be made mobile through tracks on sand dunes so that the camera could move fluidly with the actors in the mise-en-scéne. Such filmmaking translated into a more dynamic and sensuous or embodied image on the screen and turned it into a more competitive commodity with audiences used to watching television screens. What Caton could not do was carry out fieldwork on this industrial process of filming, which he had to reconstruct by working in the archives on the film and by research on the nature of the film industry in its day; yet what was provided was an anthropological framework nonetheless for studying the industrial side of film production.

While anthropologists like Faye Ginsburg (1991) did pioneering work on indigenous peoples’ media practices such as video filming that were used for cultural programming or in identity politics movements, it would be difficult— and probably inappropriate—to place such practices within the industrial framework developed in this volume. The process of filmmaking was less about standardization and production values, let alone commodification, than about utilizing small, easy-to-operate, and mobile media for largely political-cultural aims. Fieldwork was based not so much on the making of such films, as in Powdermaker’s earlier pioneering study, as on film reception by publics and critics, and explaining those in terms of specific cultural and historical contexts or in terms of class, gender, race, and other cultural identities constituting film-viewing publics.

At roughly the same time that Ginsburg was doing her work on indigenous media, the anthropological investigation of media expanded to television (Kottak 1990; Naficy 1993; Rofel 1994; Dornfeld 1998; Mankekar 1999; Abu-Lughod 200s) and to different national television programming and its publics, especially melodramas, and of late attention has also turned to television news as well (see chapter 3, this volume, for example). The question of industry has been kept in the background of most of these anthropological inquiries, if not occluded entirely, with emphasis instead on the politics of reception in the public sphere. Yet with television, the question of industry is inescapable, unlike the smaller-scale, artisanal mode of production that has marked indigenous media, and it behooves us to bring this framework into sharper focus. For example, writers, directors, and actors move across film and television industries, working in both media, and many movies are made for television or, if they are not made for television, are broadcast on television, broadening their reception.

In our view, one work on the television industry needs to be singled out because it has been ignored or underappreciated, and that is Barry Dornfeld’s extraordinary ethnography published in 1998, several years ahead of the curve in the scholarship on television. It is a major ethnography of a production unit within public television that created the seven-hour television series Childhood, which aired in the United States and England in 1991-1992. He was hired as a researcher for the series and throughout the production process had access to the television program’s producers, writers, and directors. Through his extensive prior experience as an independent filmmaker, he also had an insider's perspective on the television and film industries. Dornfeld situated his contribution within the then-burgeoning field of anthropology of media studies. Yet there are clear overlaps between Dornfeld’s seminal study and what would later become production studies, launched by John T. Caldwell’s (2008) celebrated Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, which we talk about in detail below: for example, the focus on the production process (in dynamic interaction with reception), analysis of this process in terms of film industrial constraints—especially the bottom line—as well as their creative possibilities, and going beyond the technical issues of production to include its social aspects, especially the way the creators are constantly trying to imagine how audiences might respond to their message. Finally, Dornfeld looks at the cultural production of public television as an agent within American public culture at large, an especially urgent question given the large audiences its flagship series usually attracts, and one that is of particular interest to anthropologists. The result was a pioneering work, and yet Dornfeld’s study is hardly ever cited in the production studies literature, let alone discussed.

Despite Dornfeld’s pioneering work, attention to film industries was not entirely absent in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as evidenced, for example, in the work of anthropologist Brian Larkin (2008; see also Acland [2003] on mid-1980s commercial movie business). He shifted the problem of understanding film industries away from commodification to one of materiality and specifically of urban infrastructure (which becomes central in the work of Jacobson [2015]); nonetheless, his is still an ethnography of the Nigerian film industry under colonial rule for the most part, or how films were made and exhibited within that system and as impacted by certain infrastructural materialities.

By the early 2000s, the anthropological analysis of film industries took off, in terms of the numbers of such works as well as their empirical richness and theoretical sophistication. Kevin Dwyer’s (2004a) Beyond Casablanca: M. A. Tazi and the Adventure of Moroccan Cinema is in many ways seminal in this regard. To be sure, he uses the term “Moroccan cinema” rather than Moroccan film industry to describe the object of his study, the oeuvre (rather than a single film) of Moroccan film director M. A. Tazi, whom Dwyer knew and proceeded to have a long-term conversation with (building on his theoretical and procedural notion of dialogue; see Dwyer 1982); yet we would claim that its concerns are about film industries nonetheless. Some of the main questions he poses of Tazi and his oeuvre are: What are the conditions—economic, social, political— under which he, as a filmmaker, had to work, within both Moroccan and global film industries? And given such conditions, how can a filmmaker like Tazi be creative according to his own artistic lights?

At this historical moment in the field, one might have expected a return to Hollywood, Powdermaker’s earlier terrain, but it was instead non-Western hegemonic film industries that came to the forefront of ethnography, most notably Bollywood in trail-blazing works by Rachel Dwyer and Jerry Pinto (2011) and Tejaswini Ganti (2012a). Fieldwork since then has been done on other regional powerhouses such as the Tamil industry known as Kollywood (Pandian 2015), the Nigerian film industry or Nollywood (Jedlowski and Santanera 2015; Miller 2016), the Bangladeshi film industry (Hoek 2014), the Hong Kong film industry (Martin 2017), the Ghanaian video film industry (Meyer 2015), and many others. Independent cinema, under the shadow of Hollywood's hegemonic production forces, also became the object of ethnographic inquiry at this time, most notably in Sherry Ortner’s (2013) investigation of US. independent filmmakers and how they view their themes and filmmaking practices as an alternative to Hollywood. Young-a Park’s (2015) study of a collective of independent South Korean filmmakers and their efforts to change society through their filmmaking is a non-US.-based example of independent cinema, and another instance of how anthropology’s cross-cultural and comparative approach contributes to a broader understanding of independent film outside the US. and Europe.

We believe this is a good moment for an edited volume such as ours on the anthropology of film industries that captures the range and depth of this ongoing fieldwork, and we hope it will attract readers from a large number of disciplines concerned with visual and media studies, economics, culture, and politics. Anthropology raises to the fore the interesting question of whether the histories of cinema and film industries around the world are simply the same history (because of an industry that got its start in Hollywood and was exported globally) or whether we have to speak of histories (because of distinct national industries that were entangled in different economies as well as distinct political and cultural projects), or both (which is more likely the case). Dwyer’s chapter in this volume is an attempt to write a history of the current moment in Moroccan film industry and cinema that parallels research done on the history of film industries and of Hollywood in particular (Gubak 1969;

Schatz 1981; Balio 1985, 1993; Neale and Smith 1998; Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 2003; Gomery 2005; Scott 2005), but shows how the Moroccan film industry’s particular history (especially due to colonialism and nationalism) and specific cultural circumstances make it distinct. In this regard, it is closer to the work of film historian Priya Jaikumar (2006), who shows how the Indian film industry changed in the period 1930-1940, due not to the stimulus of cinema, whether national or global (like Hollywood), so much as the lure of colonial film markets. This comparative perspective is also what an anthropology of film industries can provide that is often lacking in other approaches mentioned above that focus on a single industry such as Hollywood or Bollywood (for an exception, see Curtin 2007; Govil 20158; Jin 2020).

To repeat, anthropology brings to the study of film industries a comparative perspective that allows one to see their differences or uniqueness as well as their commonalities by being part of global film industries. Anthropology also shows how film practices are grounded in other cultural practices that are not necessarily particular to film industries but shape them nonetheless; and vice versa, how film industries influence the sociocultural world they depict and at the same time operate within. All the chapters in this volume talk about one aspect or another of this grounding of film practice in local realities.

Our Dialogue with Other Film Studies Approaches Production Studies

As the anthropology of film burgeoned in the 1990s, another somewhat related approach, which had the virtue of doing fieldwork on film industries, came to fruition under the name of production studies, though its origins are in film and media studies programs rather than anthropology departments. In the 1990s, largely as the result of John T. Caldwell and his students at UCLA, production studies came into being that looked critically but also ethnographically at film (as well as other) industries. And yet, though it crisscrossed many of the theoretical interests and methodological practices of anthropology, it is surprising how muted, awkward, and even strained the conversation between the two has been to date. Production studies has tended to see its relationship to anthropology largely in terms of method (and to some extent also theory, especially that of Clifford Geertz), but it does not seem to acknowledge that anthropology too has been constructing film industries as an object of study for its own disciplinary sake for quite some time (reference to Powdermaker being the extent of its obligatory nod to that history).

Broadly put, production studies questions the assumption made by people in film industries that their practices are purely technical and aesthetic, or supposedly value neutral, by demonstrating that they are cultural or culturally constructed. Consider Caldwell’s (2008) Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, a major book on film and television, whose fieldwork took ten years to complete (1995-2005), which is a foundational text in production studies. It draws from the ideas of Clifford Geertz (1973) on culture as a text to argue that film industries (a singular and totalizing view is explicitly disavowed) produce a plethora of often conflicting views about the making of a movie that can be traced in promotional literature, documentary films about the making of a movie, and appearances on television by the film’s director and actors. The deeper point is that these commentaries are not only about a specific film but film industries at large, the roles of filmmakers in them, and the way they want others, including the general public, to view themselves and their artistic projects. He calls these “critical industrial practices” and suggests that they construct “a kind of indigenous cultural theory that operates outside of academia” (Caldwell 2008, 5).

One of the many impressive qualities of this book is the rich array of ethnographic practices Caldwell brings to bear on his study of film and television industries, including interviewing hundreds of industry personnel, attending countless industry meetings, and going to many film festivals, not to speak of extensive archival research to get a sense of the history of the practices he is studying. Another of the book’s achievements is its “studying up” (Nader 1974), or the ability of the investigator to contact people at the highest industry levels, access to whom is usually jealously guarded Another milestone in production studies is Vicki Mayer’s (2011) imaginative Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy, which concentrates on those laborers in media industries that are not the producers, writers, directors, and actors who were the subjects of research by scholars such as Rosten (1941), Powdermaker, Gitlin (1994), and Caldwell, but rather the mid-rung and even low-level workers whose contributions to film and television production frequently remain invisible and certainly unheralded. Such below-theline workers range from offshore laborers who assemble the television sets on which programs are watched back in the US. to reality-show videographers in the soft-core porn industry, and several other labor sectors in between. Unlike above-the-line workers like directors, producers, script writers, and actors, these film industry workers do not have the power to deny or restrict access to the investigator, and in fact often have powerful reasons and incentives to talk to him or her about their position in the industry and how they are

IO - ROSSOUKH AND CATON exploited by it. This shift to below-the-line was not only occasioned by the difficulties of studying industry higher-ups, however, but also by economic restructuring of both film and television industries from the 1990s onward. This was a time when production became more decentralized and transnational by being outsourced to offshore production facilities such as color labs, sound studios, and editing houses. What Mayer adds is an important political-economic analysis of media industrial labor that was either missing or underanalyzed in previous production studies research (for a similar critique of production studies, see Curtin and Sanson 2016, 9). In her ethnography we see how workers are often underpaid, have little job security, and usually do not have guilds or trade unions to protect them from abusive labor conditions.

Despite its affinity with anthropological field methods, production studies has not engaged very deeply with the anthropology of film and media. Caldwell (2008, 11) inexplicably states, “I do not consider this book [Production Culture] necessarily anthropological (in part because of the cross-sector, crossindustry scope of my project)” Why an anthropological approach might preclude an examination of such scope is not altogether clear. Instead, he offers, “I do hope that by attempting to describe new developments with more precise terminology this book may at least have some pre-anthropological and presocial science value” (11, emphasis added). Such an attitude may betoken either excessive modesty, or an unexamined discomfort with being closely associated with anthropology and the social sciences more generally, or an attempt to carve out a distinctive and separate field, or perhaps all of the above.

To anthropologists like ourselves, however, it seems apparent that Caldwell’s ethnographic gaze and theoretical framing are significantly connected to our own, whether production studies acknowledges this or not.

Since Caldwell’s and Mayer’s contributions to production studies, two edited volumes have been published (Mayer, Banks, and Caldwell 2009; Banks, Conor, and Mayer 2016), perhaps in an attempt to consolidate diverse research under one rubric (which, of course, our volume tries to do as well). Their essays attempt to extend the field’s theoretical insights, media industry coverage (besides film and television, also included are radio, comic strips, sports, and popular music), and to some extent production studies’ interdisciplinary reach (however, the work is still squarely situated within film and media studies). And though the transnational dimension has been expanded, it is significant that there are only two—albeit excellent—ethnographic essays on non- US. and non-European film industries (Jedlowski 2016; Lo 2016). As one of those ethnographers admits, “With a few exceptions, the emerging field of production studies has dealt mainly with the analysis of Western film industries, thus leaving out [sic] of its radar the wide range of experiences that has developed over the past few years around the African continent” (Jedlowski 2016, 176).

What is also telling about the above citation is its restriction of film industries to Africa when, of course, anthropological studies of film have now ranged across many regions in the world, including but not limited to the African continent. The need is to examine these industries in comparative perspective, as our anthropology of film industries calls for us to do. The comparison is not only a question of how Hollywood has dominated other national cinemas, or outsourced its production to media facilities abroad, as important as these trends continue to be; it is also a matter of understanding how states and private capital abroad are building their own film industries, whether successfully or not, which tap into local audiences as big as or even bigger than Hollywood's, and they do this within local contexts of labor and commodity markets, politics, and social organization, not to speak of distinctive local traditions of visual representation that are never quite the same across these burgeoning film industries. Furthermore, while film industries are emerging around the globe and to some degree share certain technological and aesthetic practices in common, they are nonetheless grounded in their own historical and cultural specificities that end up shaping their practices and products. This comparative perspective is what anthropologists have been investigating for some time now and offers a powerful corrective to the Euro-American focus in production studies.‘