The Regional Rootedness of China’s Film Industry: Cluster Development and Attempts at Cross-Location Integration

China’s film industry has its historical roots across the four geographical divisions of northern, eastern, western, and southern China. Each of these four film-producing regions has their own characteristics with divergent historical heritages and cultural resources. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) the division of administrative regions included a territorially divided management policy of film enterprises. Such policies promoted the regional development of China’s film industry while simultaneously exacerbated the complex contradictions between and among the clusters produced. In the 1950s, four major state-owned film studios were established in Beijing, Shanghai, and Changchun. Under the planned economy model, films were purchased and sold exclusively by the state through these studios. Since the 1990s, China’s film industry has undergone deep institutional reform, with film distribution and exhibition gradually moving towards the market and private enterprises beginning to actively participate in film production and distribution. The film industry has since begun to actively explore the generative potential of the existing industrial clusters, experimenting with film co-production and cross-regional business operations across the regions. With the goal of constructing a film and television alliance, the film industry has sought to maximize the advantages of different regions to promote the integration of these historically and regionally distinct sectors in an open and tolerant manner, laying the foundation for Chinese films to leapfrog into the global film market.

How firms strategically navigate informal and formal copyright practices: insights from Nollywood

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explain how and why firms configure copyright practices when confronted with state-sanctioned laws and informal customs projected by local ethnic or religious communities. Design/methodology/approach A multi-case inductive study of four film-producing organizations within the Nigerian film industry (i.e. Nollywood) was conducted. Specifically considered were firms that started their operations around the same time with similar founding conditions, experiences, resources and technical competencies. Field observations and multiple rounds of in-depth interviews were conducted to achieve the research objectives. Findings The study found that firms adopted dominant or hybrid configurations when interacting with informality and formality. Dominant configurations represent the exclusive adoption of informal copyright practices while hybrid configurations refer to the blended use of informal and formal copyright practices. The second set of findings revealed that each firm’s strategic intent affected the type of interactional configuration that unfolded in the firm. Specifically, firms with social intents tended to adopt dominant configurations, whereas firms with socio-economic intents tended to adopt hybrid configurations. Practical implications The study implies that firms may profit from strategically focusing on when and in what circumstances to adopt informality. Strategic intents that blend social and economic rationales may secure more positive interactive outcomes from internal and external stakeholders promoting formality and informality. Social implications This study highlights the fact that firms embedded in local religious and ethnic communities use organizational practices to solve social and institutional problems of their members. The copyright practices of these organizations encourage apprenticeship, youth empowerment and entrepreneurship in Nigeria. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that goes beyond macro-level analysis to investigate the interactional dynamics between formality and informality at the firm, community, and state levels. The study is also first of its kind to use copyright practices as an analytical lens to explore the interaction between informality and formality.

Film Policies and Film Production in Spain during the Economic Crisis (2007–2017)

Europe’s leading film-producing countries are France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. They were all hit by the global economic crisis, which had a particularly severe impact on Europe in 2010–2012. The consequences of this crisis for film policies and the film industry are understudied. Spain is a unique case for this study because it had to ask the European Union for a financial assistance programme. What changes were made to State film policies as a result of the crisis? How did those changes reflect on the feature film production? This article aims to answer these questions. The method used includes an analysis of film-industry policy documents and official data, and in-depth interviews. The period studied is 2007–2017. The results refer to topics such as State aid for film production; tax incentives; value-added tax (VAT); the obligation to provide advance funding for European audiovisual production, and the number, genre, and mean cost of the feature films produced.

From the Cabaret Number to the Melodrama of Dance Reform

Chapter 4 focuses on two Bharatanatyam-trained stars in the 1950s and 1960s, Vyjayanthimala and Waheeda Rehman, analyzing changes in film dance alongside the canonization of specific classical and folk dance forms by the Sangeet Natak Akademi. By studying how dance training influences acting repertoires, this chapter calls attention to movement, gesture, and bodily comportment to enhance our understanding of virtuosity and technique, proposing a movement-based analysis of film acting grounded in kinesthetic performance and spectatorship. Rehman and Vyjayanthimala’s most ambitious production numbers speak to their own performative desires as trained dancers. Films featuring these A-list actresses as dancing protagonists evince a generic tendency, described here as the “melodrama of dance reform,” which combines the dance spectacular with the “social problem” film, producing in the process cinematic figurations riven with anxieties and aspirations around female sexuality, bodily movement, and economic independence.

Optimization of the conditions for producing soy protein isolate films

The soy protein isolate (SPI) is a biopolymer highlighted as a raw material for producing films and demands the investigation of the processing conditions that make it possible to obtain a film with adequate functional properties. The objective of this work was to evaluate the effect of the pH and concentration of SPI on the mechanical properties, water vapor permeability, solubility, and color of the SPI films produced by casting using a central composite rotational design (CCRD). In general, the films presented a yellow coloration with a continuous aspect, good handling, and no apparent glycerol migration. The linear effect of pH positively influenced the tensile strength (TS) and elongation at break (ELO) of the film (p <0.05) but negatively influence the solubility (SOL) and color parameter L* for which we obtained lower values ​​of SOL and L* at a high pH. This possibly occurred because of the denaturation of the soy proteins at an alkaline pH, far from the isoelectric point, resulting in their unfolding and solubilization which facilitated the interaction between the chains, forming a more compact structure. Considering the optimization by the desirability function, to obtain a film with high TS and ELO and low SOL, it is necessary to use 7.56 g/100 g of SPI film-forming solution and to adjust the film-producing solution to pH 10.54.

Documentary Horror: The Transmodal Power of Indexical Violence

This article reevaluates critical distinctions between so-called ‘art-horror’ and ‘natural’ or real-world horror to challenge larger modal distinctions between fiction and documentary film and their ostensibly divergent spectatorial practices. It focuses on images of animal slaughter, which traverse boundaries between fiction and documentary, art-horror and natural horror. The indexical force of animal slaughter may displace or undo the metaphorical in fictional horror film, producing a spectatorial wavering between the registers of the figurative and the literal. Shaun Monson’s documentary film Earthlings (2005) demands of viewers a mode of spectatorial discipline derived from the horror film experience. Earthlings and its viewer reaction videos reinvent the collective performance of terror among theatrical horror film audiences for a documentary context and for online media platforms like YouTube. Earthlings functions as a form of spreadable media in which viewers’ horrified reactions are harnessed in the production of knowledge and political commitment.

Growth Processes of AC Powered Micro-Arc Oxidation Ceramic Film on Aluminum Alloy

Micro-arc oxidation technique was studied on the surface of 2A12 aluminum alloy using AC power in this paper. The micro-arc oxidation process was divided into several periods to investigate the changes of thickness and surface morphology of oxide film that forms in different periods and record the voltage change between oxide film. The following conclusions have been found: The growth of oxide film can be divided into three stages, the first stage is the formation and disruptive discharge of amorphous oxide film, producing the ceramic oxide granules; the second stage is the formation of ceramic oxide film, the ceramic oxide granules turns into porous structure oxide film in this stage; the third stage is the growth of ceramic oxide film, the gas film forms in the oxide film’s porous structure is electric broken-down, leading higher energy discharged by micro-arc, which becomes a significant reason for promoting the growth of ceramic film.