Lavender Images and Poetic Landscapes: My Thirty Years in the Queer Film Ecosystem

This chapter by LGBT filmmaker and film historian Jenni Olson is a firsthand account of her thirty-plus years of work across the ecosystem of queer cinema. It covers her curatorial work in the late 1980s and early 1990s (she was codirector of the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival); her extraordinary efforts as an LGBT film collector and archivist over the decades (her collection was acquired by the Harvard Film Archive in 2020); her pioneering work in online queer-film exhibition, as cofounder of PlanetOut.com; her decade as director of marketing for the LGBT film distributor, Wolfe Video; and her work as a maker of digressive and contemplative 16mm essay films, such as The Royal Road (2015) and The Joy of Life (2005), which speak from a butch lesbian perspective and reflect on a wide array of preoccupations.

‘How to pack a hall’: Civic Film Culture in Wartime Britain and MoI Mobile Film Shows for the Women's Institute

In the 1930s, the documentary film movement had experimented with non-theatrical distribution and this was championed by John Grierson, who claimed that the ‘future of cinema … may creep in quietly by way of the YMCAs, the church halls and other citadels of suburban improvement’. This article explores the wartime evolution of this idea by expanding on the Ministry of Information's (MoI) organisation of mobile film shows in practice: uncovering archival evidence of Helen de Mouilpied's work organising the regional film exhibition scheme, and focusing on the programming of film shows for women, including those held on a regular basis for the Women's Institute (WI) in the ephemeral spaces of village halls. By taking into consideration records of de Mouilpied's distribution work at the Ministry and the often insubstantial, fragmentary and regional traces of film shows in Ministry records, the local press and the WI journal Home & Country, this article offers a new view of the non-theatrical operation's role as ‘useful cinema’ in the MoI Films Division's propaganda programme, and its encouragement of a civic film culture on the home front that has been overshadowed in histories of British documentary and wartime cinema.

Preservation after Exhibition: A Qualitative Study of TIFF’s Film Exhibition Documentation

This thesis argues for the importance of preserving film object exhibition documentation for the benefit of future research, using TIFF’s exhibition program as the dominant case study. Academic writing on film exhibition is discussed through works that focus on the physical film object/screening, the film exhibition institution, and the film object beyond celluloid. The thesis analyzes what constitutes strong documentation, using examples from professionals and other film exhibition institutions. TIFF’s film exhibition department history is listed as a form of preserving the full list of exhibitions that were housed at TIFF. The material preserved by TIFF regarding their exhibition history has been quite limited. The exhibition files are included and then analyzed to determine what is missing that may limit future study. Successes in preservation are also addressed. Lastly, potential steps to address gaps in documentation are detailed.

Preservation after Exhibition: A Qualitative Study of TIFF’s Film Exhibition Documentation

This thesis argues for the importance of preserving film object exhibition documentation for the benefit of future research, using TIFF’s exhibition program as the dominant case study. Academic writing on film exhibition is discussed through works that focus on the physical film object/screening, the film exhibition institution, and the film object beyond celluloid. The thesis analyzes what constitutes strong documentation, using examples from professionals and other film exhibition institutions. TIFF’s film exhibition department history is listed as a form of preserving the full list of exhibitions that were housed at TIFF. The material preserved by TIFF regarding their exhibition history has been quite limited. The exhibition files are included and then analyzed to determine what is missing that may limit future study. Successes in preservation are also addressed. Lastly, potential steps to address gaps in documentation are detailed.

OTT as New Platform of Cinema Exhibition: Opportunities and Challenges for Kannada Films

COVID-19 pandemic has affected many areas including cinema exhibitions. Due to non-opening of cinema theatres film makers found the platform that is over-the-top (OTT). Before COVID-19 OTT was not able to compete with theatrical release. However, the pandemic situations changed the way of movie release through OTT platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hot-star and others. The usage of OTT increased during the period of lockdown. According to Boston Consulting Group, subscriptions increased 60% and average watching hours increased to 14.5%. In the Kannada film industry, the well-known actor and producer Punith Rajkumar’s two films titled Law and French Biriyani were released on India's second largest OTT platform Amazon Prime during the lockdown period. In this context, this research tried to find prospects of Kannada film exhibition through OTT platform. The specific objectives are to explore the opportunities for releasing Kannada films through OTT, to study the challenges ahead in this way. The study used both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Online surveys conducted with structured questionnaires among 100 OTT users and in-depth interviews conducted among the people who are involved in film making from Kannada film industry to answer the research questions. This study would help filmmakers who are intended to release their film through OOT in future.

Inequalities in Regional Film Exhibition: Policy, Place and Audiences

This article questions the variety of film exhibition in four English regions. While a regional and national frame is the focus of cultural policy in relation to film audience development in the UK, our analysis examines relational, localised and sub-regional film cultures in order to understand how differing levels of film exhibition influence people's sense of place. This is framed within a discussion of cultural inequality more generally. In the UK, questions of engagement with different types of film exhibition have gained greater prominence recently, but there has been limited attention paid to how audiences understand their geographic relationship with film exhibition. Drawing on 200 semi-structured, qualitative interviews with a wide range of film viewers across four English regions, the North East, North West, South West and Yorkshire and the Humber, we assess perceptions of film exhibition in these regions. In doing so, we characterise five different modes of place in relation to the breadth of film exhibition, from distinctive film cities to mainstream multiplex towns. In particular, we focus on how access to film is simultaneously narrated through both localised proximity to cinemas of different types and virtual access to film through online platforms. This work provides further evidence of the uneven provision of diverse film in England but shows how film audiences relationally interpret their engagement within film as a cultural form.

Nigar Hai Toh Industry Hai: Notes on the Morale and Mortality of Pakistani Film

Combining archival and ethnographic fieldwork, this piece reflects on the scope of film publicity through the author’s conversations with the proprietor-editor of the oldest film magazine in Pakistan, The Nigar Weekly. Offering a larger view from post-colonial Karachi of political and national transitions, Nigar’s brand of film commentary in the 1950s and 60s, reveled in connecting and cohabiting the multiple film centers in South Asia: Karachi, Lahore, Dhaka and Bombay. Foregrounding the muhajir background of its founders and its self-styled relationship with the film industry, the piece draws attention to a distinctive characteristic of the publication: its satirical visual content. The magazine while borrowing select content from a Bombay film magazine in its early years, vividly commented on issues such as film trade with India, censorship and public morality in Pakistan, cross-border film intimacies, film exhibition practices, and local production strategies. The cartoons, while directly connected to the written content, could also exaggerate and provoke as can be expected of visual satire. And it is in this less restrained feature of Nigar that a cautionary critique and a calculated celebration of the Pakistani cinema emerges.