Never Done Hill, Erin
2016, 20161005, 2016-10-05
eBook
Histories of women in Hollywood usually recount the contributions of female directors, screenwriters, designers, actresses, and other creative personnel whose names loom large in the credits. Yet, ...from its inception, the American film industry relied on the labor of thousands more women, workers whose vital contributions often went unrecognized.
Never Doneintroduces generations of women who worked behind the scenes in the film industry-from the employees' wives who hand-colored the Edison Company's films frame-by-frame, to the female immigrants who toiled in MGM's backrooms to produce beautifully beaded and embroidered costumes. Challenging the dismissive characterization of these women as merely menial workers, media historian Erin Hill shows how their labor was essential to the industry and required considerable technical and interpersonal skills. Sketching a history of how Hollywood came to define certain occupations as lower-paid "women's work," or "feminized labor," Hill also reveals how enterprising women eventually gained a foothold in more prestigious divisions like casting and publicity.
Poring through rare archives and integrating the firsthand accounts of women employed in the film industry, the book gives a voice to women whose work was indispensable yet largely invisible. As it traces this long history of women in Hollywood,Never Donereveals the persistence of sexist assumptions that, even today, leave women in the media industry underpraised and underpaid.For more information:http://erinhill.squarespace.com
One of the country’s most picturesque cities and conveniently located just a few hours’ drive from Hollywood, San Francisco became the most frequently and extensively filmed American city beyond the ...production hubs of Los Angeles and New York in the three decades after World War II. During those years, the cinematic image of the city morphed from the dreamy beauty of Vertigo to the nightmarish wasteland of Dirty Harry, although San Francisco itself experienced no such decline. This intriguing disconnect gives impetus to Hollywood in San Francisco, the most comprehensive study to date of Hollywood’s move from studio to location production in the postwar era. In this thirty-year history of feature filmmaking in San Francisco, Joshua Gleich tracks a sea change in Hollywood production practices, as location shooting overtook studio-based filming as the dominant production method by the early 1970s. He shows how this transformation intersected with a precipitous decline in public perceptions of the American city, to which filmmakers responded by developing a stark, realist aesthetic that suited America’s growing urban pessimism and superseded a fidelity to local realities. Analyzing major films set in San Francisco, ranging from Dark Passage and Vertigo to The Conversation, The Towering Inferno, and Bullitt, as well as the TV show The Streets of San Francisco, Gleich demonstrates that the city is a physical environment used to stage urban fantasies that reveal far more about Hollywood filmmaking and American culture than they do about San Francisco.
In what kind of state is the European film business? This study is the first in a series that provides an accessible understanding of how the world's contemporary screen industries function. It looks ...at all the factors in play, from government regulation to the marketing strategies behind an international success like 'Run Lola Run'/'Lola Rennt'. Anne Jackel evaluates how Europe's film industries operate, their working practices and the region's place within the global business of cinema. Exploring trends in production, distribution and exhibition, the book considers a range of national and pan-regional developments. Key areas of critical debate are highlighted, including private and public financing, co-production, film policy, links between the film and television industries, and the threats to 'art cinema' from within and without Europe.
The 21st century has seen a growing awareness of the serious impact of film and television production on the natural environment. The film industry pollutes our environment in many ways, including ...carbon dioxide emissions, waste production, and energy and water consumption. The initiatives for sustainable development undertaken in many sectors of the economy have also reached the film industry. In Europe and the United States, various organisations and institutions have developed a number of recommendations in the field of sustainable film production. This paper, set in the film studies trend known as production culture, presents the global context as well as the nascent Polish practices of green filming. These initiatives, based on European examples, have so far been mainly bottom-up and dispersed or in the form of non-binding recommendations. The handful of producers and authors who have undertaken them are not in any way encouraged to be eco-friendly. Driven by their concern for the environment, however, they show the forward-looking way of thinking that should be followed by the entire industry.
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.
Gaze Regimes is a bricolage of essays and interviews showcasing the experiences of women working in film, either directly as practitioners or in other areas as curators, festival programme directors ...or fundraisers. It does not shy away from questioning the relations of power in the practice of filmmaking and the power invested in the gaze itself. Who is looking and who is being looked at, who is telling women’s stories in Africa and what governs the mechanics of making those films on the continent?
The interviews with film practitioners such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Jihan El-Tahri, Anita Khanna, Isabel Noronhe, Arya Lalloo and Shannon Walsh demonstrate the contradictory points of departure of women in film – from their understanding of feminisms in relation to lived-experiences and the realpolitik of women working as cultural practitioners.
The disciplines of gender studies, postcolonial theory, and film theory provide the framework for the book’s essays. Jyoti Mistry, Antje Schuhmann, Nobunye Levin, Dorothee Wenner and Christina von Braun are some of the contributors who provide valuable context, analysis and insight into, among other things, the politics of representation, the role of film festivals and the collective and individual experiences of trauma and marginality which contribute to the layered and complex filmic responses of Africa’s film practitioners.
In Indigenous North American film Native Americans tell their own stories and thereby challenge a range of political and historical contradictions, including egregious misrepresentations by ...Hollywood. Although Indians in film have long been studied, especially as characters in Hollywood westerns, Indian film itself has received relatively little scholarly attention. In Imagic Moments Lee Schweninger offers a much-needed corrective, examining films in which the major inspiration, the source material, and the acting are essentially Native. Schweninger looks at a selection of mostly narrative fiction films from the United States and Canada and places them in historical and generic contexts. Exploring films such as Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Skins, he argues that in and of themselves these films constitute and in fact emphatically demonstrate forms of resistance and stories of survival as they talk back to Hollywood. Self-representation itself can be seen as a valid form of resistance and as an aspect of a cinema of sovereignty in which the Indigenous peoples represented are the same people who engage in the filming and who control the camera. Despite their low budgets and often nonprofessional acting, Indigenous films succeed in being all the more engaging in their own right and are indicative of the complexity, vibrancy, and survival of myriad contemporary Native cultures.
Entertainment Industrialised was the first study to compare the emergence and economic development of the film industry in Britain, France and the United States between 1890 and 1940. Gerben Bakker ...investigates the commercialisation and industrialisation of live entertainment in the nineteenth century and analyses the subsequent arrival of motion pictures, revealing that their emergence triggered a process of incessant creative destruction, development and productivity growth that continues in the entertainment industry today. He argues that cinema industrialised live entertainment by automating it, standardising it and making it tradeable, a process that was largely demand led, and that a quality race between firms changed the structure of the international entertainment market. While a hundred years ago, European enterprises were supplying half of all films shown in the US, the quality race resulted in today's industry, in which a handful of American companies dominate the global entertainment business.
The German scenographer Sigfrido Burmann introduced and systematized the profession of artistic director in the Spanish cinema, inexistent from the beginnings of the cinema in our country. He applied ...innovative methods to the sets that he created during his thirty-five year career in film scenery in Spain. The first twenty years (1940-1960) coincided with the period of greatest splendour in the Spanish film industry, thanks to the Valencian production and distribution company CIFESA, with which he collaborated on most of the films as head set designer. His collection of drawings and sketches, which he drew up as part of his scenographic work, is kept in the Collection--Film Museum department of the Filmoteca Espanola. Through these drawings, we have been able to analyze the scenography he created in his films and the translation of the drawing's flat layout into three-dimensional film space. This is an extraordinary legacy of the non-filmic film heritage, which is essential for studying the artistic direction of our country.
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