"Production Cultures: Critical and Cultural Dimensions of Film/Video Labor"

John Caldwell, UCLA

Given media's increasing digitalization and the collapse of traditional producer-vs-audience distinctions, this presentation will examine why it is important to consider not just the traditional concerns of critical media studies (onscreen content, fans and viewers, studio/network organization, media technologies, etc.), but to take seriously the rich array of new cultural practices and unstable social relations on the production side of film and television as well (socio-professional interactions, liminal group rituals, trade narratives, visual self-representations and demos, craft identities and legitimation, mentoring, worker affect, etc.). The industry's critical self-disclosures, self-reflexive cultural activities, and conventionalized habits can at times provide a far more vivid picture of the current state film and television than either: 1) traditional top-down political-economic and industrial perspectives; or 2) popular ground-up research on audience agency and fan studies. I am particularly interested in new kinds of authorless authorship, distributed-and-harvested creativity, and the unruly impact that user-generated content has played in professional craft communities.
Sponsored by Film & Digital Media and the Arts Research Institute.
Free and open to the public