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Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity

Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity

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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 The contributors to Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity take an anthropological and comparative approach to capturing the diversity and growth of global film industries, bringing into relief common film production practices as well as the local contingencies and deeper cultural realities at work in every film industry. Ramyar D. Rossoukh is Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program at Princeton University.
Steven C. Caton is Khalid bin Abdullah bin Abdulrahman Al Saud Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies at Harvard University. Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction / Ramyar D. Rossoukh and Steven C. Caton 1
1. “English is So Precise and Hindi Can be So Heavy!”: Language Ideologies and Audience Imaginaries in a Dubbing Studio in Mumbai / Tejaswani Ganti  41
2. The Digital Devine: Postproduction of Majid Majidi's The Willow Tree (2005) / Ramyar D. Rossoukh  63
3. Journalists as Cultural Vectors: Film as the Building Blocks of News Narratives in India / Amrita Ibrahim  89
4. “This is Not a Film”: Industrial Expectations and Film Criticism as Censorship at the Bangladesh Film Censor Board / Lotte Hoek  109
5. “This Most Reluctant of Romantic Cities”: Dis-location Film Shooting in the Old City of Sana’a / Steven C. Caton  129
6. Stealing Shots: The Ethics and Edgework of Industrial Filmmaking / Sylvia J. Martin  163
7. Making Virtual Reality Film: An Untimely View of Film Futures from (South) Africa / Jessica Dickson  181
8. The Moroccan Film Industry: Á Contre-Jour: The Unpredictable Odyssey of a Small National Cinema / Kevin Dwyer  213
References  243
Contributors  267
Index  269

“This field-framing book features eight exemplary case studies involving sophisticated fieldwork, comparative analysis, and provocative theorizing. It counters film studies' standard schemes, theorizing ‘modularity’ to explain production as simultaneously local and integral to ‘industries.’ Faulting media industries studies’ coherence and production studies for understating its anthropological debt, the book underscores the need for an interfield reckoning. Adding crucial Asian and African perspectives to the literature, this disciplinary boundary–making project pushes production studies to better explore its common ground with anthropology.”
“Ramyar D. Rossoukh and Steven C. Caton have put together an exciting collection of essays with a uniformly high level of excellence. Located at a variety of sites around the world, each is ethnographically rich, analytically insightful, and well written. This will be a go-to book for courses in the anthropology of media, visual anthropology, and production studies.”
"This volume shows us that film worlds are not constituted only by the film itself, the viewing experience, and the audience’s engagement with and interpretation of the content. Film creators work under complex conditions of creativity and constraint, local cultural expectations and understandings, and as part of teams, crews, and industries. Each chapter holds up a magnifying glass to different phases of filmmaking processes, analyzing their particular meanings, practices, and contributions to the actual film that audiences eventually watch."

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Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in