Description
Book SynopsisThe 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.
Trade Review“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.” -- John T. Caldwell, Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Los Angeles
“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.” -- Sherry B. Ortner, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
"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." -- Reighan Gillam * American Anthropologist *
“[
Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity] provides new and comparative insight on these industries’ differences as well as their similarities by being part of global cinema. This text will no doubt be a useful tool for researchers studying cinema and the ethnography and anthropology of film industries throughout the world.” -- Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi * Exertions *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
