Hanan Al-Cinema Marks, Laura U
2015, 2015-09-25, 2015-10-16
eBook
An examination of experimental cinema and media art from the Arabic-speaking world that explores filmmakers' creative and philosophical inventiveness in trying times.
Preparing independent or guerrilla filmmakers for the legal, financial, and organizational questions that can doom a project if unanswered, this guide demystifies issues such as developing a concept, ...founding a film company, obtaining financing, securing locations, casting, shooting, granting screen credits, distributing, exhibiting, and marketing a film. Updated to include digital marketing and distribution strategies through YouTube or webisodes, it also anticipates the "problems" generated by a blockbuster hit: sound tracks, merchandizing, and licensing. Six appendices provide sample contracts, copyright forms and circulars, Writer's Guild of America definitions for writing credits, and studio contact information.
From Bombay to Bollywood analyzes the transformation of the national film industry in Bombay into a transnational and multi-media cultural enterprise, which has come to be known as Bollywood. ...Combining ethnographic, institutional, and textual analyses, Aswin Punathambekar explores how relations between state institutions, the Indian diaspora, circuits of capital, and new media technologies and industries have reconfigured the Bombay-based industry's geographic reach. Providing in-depth accounts of the workings of media companies and media professionals, Punathambekar has produced a timely analysis of how a media industry in the postcolonial world has come to claim the global as its scale of operations. Based on extensive field research in India and the U.S., this book offers empirically-rich and theoretically-informed analyses of how the imaginations and practices of industry professionals give shape to the media worlds we inhabit and engage with. Moving beyond a focus on a single medium, Punathambekar develops a comparative and integrated approach that examines four different but interrelated media industries--film, television, marketing, and digital media. Offering a path-breaking account of media convergence in a non-Western context, Punathambekar's transnational approach to understanding the formation of Bollywood is an innovative intervention into current debates on media industries, production cultures, and cultural globalization.Aswin Punathambekaris Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He is the co-editor ofGlobal Bollywood(NYU Press, 2008).In thePostmillenial Popseries
From starry-eyed fans with dreams of fame to cotton entrepreneurs
turned movie moguls, the Bombay film industry has historically
energized a range of practices and practitioners, playing a crucial
...and compelling role in the life of modern India. Bombay
Hustle presents an ambitious history of Indian cinema as a
history of material practice, bringing new insights to studies of
media, modernity, and the late colonial city. Drawing on original
archival research and an innovative transdisciplinary approach,
Debashree Mukherjee offers a panoramic portrait of the
consolidation of the Bombay film industry during the talkie
transition of the 1920s-1940s. In the decades leading up to
independence in 1947, Bombay became synonymous with marketplace
thrills, industrial strikes, and modernist experimentation. Its
burgeoning film industry embodied Bombay's spirit of "hustle,"
gathering together and spewing out the many different energies and
emotions that characterized the city. Bombay Hustle
examines diverse sites of film production-finance, pre-production
paperwork, casting, screenwriting, acting, stunts-to show how
speculative excitement jostled against desires for scientific
management in an industry premised on the struggle between
contingency and control. Mukherjee develops the concept of a
"cine-ecology" in order to examine the bodies, technologies, and
environments that collectively shaped the production and
circulation of cinematic meaning in this time. The book thus brings
into view a range of marginalized film workers, their labor and
experiences; forgotten film studios, their technical practices and
aesthetic visions; and overlooked connections among media
practices, geographical particularities, and historical exigencies.
Abstract
In this article, we explore the relationship between soft power projection and public opinion, specifically investigating how cinema as a soft power resource can shape people's positive ...perceptions about a country. While soft power has been defined as a form of persuasive power associated with intangible resources such as culture, ideology, and institutions, the link between these resources and public opinion has received limited attention in previous research. This study aims to fill this gap by using the film industry as a proxy for soft power projection. We compare the United States’ and China's soft power sources and projections through an online survey with 908 participants in Brazil. Our findings indicate that exposure to soft power via films can shape people's positive perceptions of countries. However, some dimensions of soft power appear to be more challenging to activate than others, such as patriotic films’ association with admiration for US military power. The study also discovered that soft power activation may be context dependent, with greater knowledge of a country's soft power resources in a particular context leading to increased soft power projection/activation. We contribute to research by empirically expanding our understanding of soft power dynamics and how power resources can be converted into public opinion in world politics.
The outsized influence of Jews in American entertainment from the early days of Hollywood to the present has proved an endlessly fascinating and controversial topic, for Jews and non-Jews alike. From ...Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood takes an exciting and innovative approach to this rich and complex material. Exploring the subject from a scholarly perspective as well as up close and personal, the book combines historical and theoretical analysis by leading academics in the field with inside information from prominent entertainment professionals. Essays range from Vincent Brook’s survey of the stubbornly persistent canard of Jewish industry “control” to Lawrence Baron and Joel Rosenberg’s panel presentations on the recent brouhaha over Ben Urwand’s book alleging collaboration between Hollywood and Hitler. Case studies by Howard Rodman and Joshua Louis Moss examine a key Coen brothers' film A Serious Man (Rodman) and Jill Soloway’s groundbreaking television series Transparent (Moss).
In Hollywood, we hear, it's all about the money. It's a ready explanation for why so few black films get made-no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff. But what if the money itself is ...color-coded? What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns? This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case. In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films.How does history come into it? Hollywood's reliance on past performance as a measure of potential success virtually guarantees that historically underrepresented, underfunded, and undersold African American films devalue the future prospects of black films. So the cycle continues as it has for nearly a century. Behind the scenes, the numbers are far from neutral. Analyzing the onscreen narratives and off-screen circumstances behind nearly two thousand films featuring African Americans in leading and supporting roles, including such recent productions asBamboozled, Beloved, and Tyler Perry'sDiary of a Mad Black Woman,Ndounou exposes the cultural and racial constraints that limit not just the production but also the expression and creative freedom of black films. Her wide-ranging analysis reaches into questions of literature, language, speech and dialect, film images and narrative, acting, theater and film business practices, production history and financing, and organizational history.By uncovering the ideology behind profit-driven industry practices that reshape narratives by, about, and for people of color, this provocative work brings to light existing limitations-and possibilities for reworking stories and business practices in theater, literature, and film.
From popular and 'New Wave' pre-revolutionary films of Fereydoon Goleh and Abbas Kiarostami to post-revolutionary films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the Iranian cinema has produced a range of films and ...directors that have garnered international fame and earned a global following. Golbarg Rekabtalaei takes a unique look at Iranian cosmopolitanism and how it transformed in the Iranian imagination through the cinematic lens. By examining the development of Iranian cinema from the early twentieth century to the revolution, Rekabtalaei locates discussions of modernity in Iranian cinema as rooted within local experiences, rather than being primarily concerned with Western ideals or industrialisation. Her research further illustrates how the ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity of Iran's citizenry shaped a heterogeneous culture and a cosmopolitan cinema that was part and parcel of Iran's experience of modernity. In turn, this cosmopolitanism fed into an assertion of sovereignty and national identity in a modernising Iran in the decades leading up to the revolution.
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