Three Canadian Film Policy Frameworks

Author(s):  
Ira Wagman

This chapter focuses on the role played by governments in Canadian film production, distribution, and exhibition. It starts by situating Canadian cinema in relation to other “middle producer” nations. Then, it characterizes Canadian film policy within three broad frameworks. The first focuses on the institutions and policy measures that supported the development of films for educational purposes. The second explores the various policies that established filmmaking in Canada as an industrial activity. The third details how films in Canada engage with policies that impact on other media in Canada, with television serving as the illustrative case. It concludes by suggesting that rather than being understood in “cultural” or “industrial” terms, Canada’s film industry should be understood as bureaucratic in nature. Thinking about Canadian cinema in this way draws attention to the day-to-day interactions between artists and the state that continue to characterize the Canadian artistic experience.

Author(s):  
Ian Robinson

This chapter investigates the development of the commercial feature film industry in Toronto from the 1980s. It considers policy frameworks that have supported and regulated film production and the representation of Toronto to argue that the city’s image in film culture can be read as a complex mediation of Toronto’s self-crafted image as a city of film production and culture. The chapter begins by historicizing Toronto’s rise to prominence as a leading center of film production in North America. The second section contemplates how films have rendered, both thematically and aesthetically, the city’s placeless identity. Third, the chapter turns to policies and projects since the 2000s that have sought to redefine Toronto’s cultural policy and reinvigorate its status as a global creative city. The final section considers Toronto’s visibility on screen in a number of post-2000 films and examines how the city’s official image is mediated on screen.


Author(s):  
Sarah Atkinson

From Film Practice to Data Process critically examines the practices of independent digital feature filmmaking in contemporary Britain. The business of conventional feature filmmaking is like no other, in that it assembles a huge company of people from a range of disciplines on a temporary basis, all to engage in the collaborative endeavour of producing a unique, one-off piece of work. The book explicitly interrogates what is happening at the frontiers of contemporary ‘digital film’ production at a key transitional moment in 2012, when both the film industry and film-production practices were situated between the two distinct medium polarities of film and digital. With an in-depth case study of Sally Potter’s 2012 film Ginger & Rosa, drawing upon interviews with international film industry practitioners, From Film Practice to Data Process is an examination of film production in its totality, in a moment of profound change.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ya-Feng Mon

This book uses the potent case study of contemporary Taiwanese queer romance films to address the question of how capitalism in Taiwan has privileged the film industry at the expense of the audience's freedom to choose and respond to culture on its own terms. Interweaving in-depth interviews with filmmakers, producers, marketers, and spectators, Ya-Fong Mon takes a biopolitical approach to the question, showing how the industry uses investments in techno-science, ancillary marketing, and media convergence to seduce and control the sensory experience of the audience-yet that control only extends so far: volatility remains a key component of the film-going experience.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
Heqiang Zhou ◽  
Lei Que

With the in-depth influence of 5G technology on film art, the postmodern culture contained in it is also becoming more and more obvious. Understanding the context of the 5G era and clarifying the origin of film postmodernism culture will help us deeply analyze the cause of the rise of postmodernism film culture, especially the important influence of the expansion of film application scenes, the innovation of the whole industry chain and the evolution of film aesthetics on the rise of postmodernism film culture. In addition, we should also think deeply about the film culture under the post-modernism of 5G era, and explore the way to stick to the benign development of film creation and film industry. To enhance our cognition and appreciation of post-modern film culture, to give play to the positive factors of post-modern film culture, and to promote the healthy and prosperous development of Chinese film production, creation and industry.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 100-117
Author(s):  
Kingsley Chukwuemeka Anyira ◽  
Divine Sheriff Uchenna Joe

The art of video film directing is all encompassing as the director deals with virtually all aspects of film production. This comes with herculean challenges that tend to mar the efforts of directors if not properly addressed. Film scholars cum critics have done a lot of work investing the challenges of the Nigerian Video Film industry with little or no effort to directly ascertain the peculiar challenges of each sector of the industry. To this effect, the paper seeks to source from the directors what these challenges have been over the decade in view and as well through the affected, proffer plausible suppositions asmeasure to ameliorate the identified challenges. In doing so, this paper adopts the view point that the director is the author of the film and thus engages the Survey research method wherein Personal interviews are employed as data collation tool and later analyzed with inferences made from the responses. Conclusively, it anchors on the directors’ views of possible ways to improve/enhance the director’s art in future productions.


Author(s):  
Michael Ahmed

Eric Schaefer, in his exploration of the American exploitation industry, has argued that exploitation cinema developed in opposition to mainstream Hollywood products. Furthermore, the topics and subject matter presented in early American exploitation films dealt with subjects Hollywood were unwilling to produce. As a result, the production, distribution and exhibition strategies developed by exploitation filmmakers differed markedly from the American mainstream film industry. However, in Britain (amongst critics and scholars) the exploitation film has no similar defining characteristics and is a term that has been applied to a wide variety of British films without regard to their industrial mode of production, distribution or exhibition. As a result, the cultural currency of the British exploitation film, as it is now understood, has no connection to the films they now describe, and often fails to take into account how these films were originally produced, marketed, distributed and exhibited. In the British film industry during the 1960s, the term ‘exploitation’ was used by the industry to refer to a wide variety of films which are now viewed differently by contemporary critics and academics. In other words, the currency of the term exploitation has changed from its original meaning. Therefore, this article is an attempt to reframe the debate around the meaning of the British exploitation film from the 1960s onwards, and to re-evaluate our understanding of the development of British cinema during this period.


Author(s):  
Catriona Kelly

This book examines cinema in the Brezhnev era from the perspective of one of the USSR’s largest studios, Lenfilm. Producing around thirty feature films per year, the studio had over three thousand employees working in every area of film production. The discussion covers the period from 1961 to the collapse of centralized state facilities in 1986. The book focuses particularly on the younger directors at Lenfilm, those who joined the studio in the recruiting drive that followed Khrushchev’s decision to expand film production. Drawing on documents from archives, the analysis portrays film production “in the round” and shows that the term “censorship” is less appropriate than the description preferred in the Soviet film industry itself, “control,” which referred to a no less exigent but far more complex and sophisticated process. The book opens with four framing chapters that examine the overall context in which films were produced: the various crises that beset film production between 1961 and 1969 (chapter 1) and 1970 and 1985 (chapter 2), the working life of the studio, and particularly the technical aspects of production (chapter 3), and the studio aesthetic (chapter 4). The second part of the book comprises close analyses of fifteen films that are typical of the studio’s production. The book concludes with a brief survey of Lenfilm’s history after the Fifth Congress of the Filmmakers’ Union in 1986, which swept away the old management structures and, in due course, the entire system of filmmaking in the USSR.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Durham Peters

The contributors to Assembly Codes examine how media and logistics set the conditions for the circulation of information and culture. They document how logistics—the techniques of organizing and coordinating the movement of materials, bodies, and information—has substantially impacted the production, distribution, and consumption of media. At the same time, physical media, such as paperwork, along with media technologies ranging from phone systems to software are central to the operations of logistics. The contributors interrogate topics ranging from the logistics of film production and the construction of internet infrastructure to the environmental impact of the creation, distribution, and sale of vinyl records. They also reveal how logistical technologies have generated new aesthetic and performative practices. In charting the specific points of contact, dependence, and friction between media and logistics, Assembly Codes demonstrates that media and logistics are co-constitutive and that one cannot be understood apart from the other. Contributors Ebony Coletu, Kay Dickinson, Stefano Harney, Matthew Hockenberry, Tung-Hui Hu, Shannon Mattern, Fred Moten, Michael Palm, Ned Rossiter, Nicole Starosielski, Liam Cole Young, Susan Zieger


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-197
Author(s):  
Llewella Chapman

From the early 1960s, the British film industry was increasingly reliant on American studio financed ‘runaway’ productions. Alexander Walker identifies United Artists and Universal Pictures as two of the major players in the trend he dubbed ‘Hollywood England’. This article offers a close examination of the role of two studios in the financing of British film production by making extensive use of the Film Finances Archive. It focuses on two case studies: Tom Jones (1963) and Isadora (1968), both of which had completion guarantees from Film Finances, and will argue that Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz, two of the key British New Wave directors, lost their previous ability to direct films to budget and within schedule when they had the financial resources of American studios behind them. It will analyse how, due to a combination of ‘artistic’ intent and Hollywood money, Richardson and Reisz separately created two of the most notorious ‘runaways’ that ran away during the 1960s.


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