InMedia The French Journal of Media Studies

1 | 2012 Global Film and Television Industries Today

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/105 DOI: 10.4000/inmedia.105 ISSN: 2259-4728

Publisher Center for Research on the English-Speaking World (CREW)

Electronic reference InMedia, 1 | 2012, « Global Film and Television Industries Today » [Online], Online since 12 February 2012, connection on 24 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/105 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/inmedia.105

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial Divina Frau-Meigs

Global Film and Television Industries Today An Analysis of Industrial and Cultural Relations

Global Film and Television Industries Today: An Analysis of Industrial and Cultural Relations Nolwenn Mingant and Cecilia Tirtaine

Global and Local Hollywood Ben Goldsmith, Susan Ward and Tom O’Regan

The Impact of Runaway Productions on Hollywood Labor Organizations Daniel Peltzman

The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, 2009): An American Independent Movie or a European Film? Céline Murillo

Sharing the Joke? ‘Britcom’ Remakes in the United States: A Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective Amandine Ducray

Interview

Documenting Fiction – An Interview with Dan Starer, Researcher, “Documentalist” Dan Starer and Georges Fournier

Critical Perspective

Media Studies: A French Blind Spot François Cusset

Conference and Seminar Reviews

Landscape as the Locus for Artistic Transfers Between Ireland, Northern Ireland and Great Britain (1968 - Present Day) 25 November 2010, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris Charlotte Gould, Caroline Hancock and Sophie Orlando

Lights! Tystnad! Azione! Practices, Sites and Careers in European Film Production 7-8 April 2011, Department for Cinema Studies, Stockholm University, Stockholm Melis Behlil

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Book and Website Reviews

Alexis Blanchet, Des Pixels à Hollywood. Cinéma et jeu vidéo, une histoire économique et culturelle Joël Augros

Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits New York: W.W. Norton, 2009, 536 pages Hélène Quanquin

Edgar Morin, Pierre Nora, Michel Onfray, et al., Des Intellectuels jugent les médias Paris : Mordicus, 2010, two volumes Nolwenn Mingant

Stéphane Hugon, Circumnavigations : l’imaginaire du voyage dans l’expérience Internet Paris : CNRS, 2010 Mathieu O’Neil

Ars Industrialis, arsindustrialis.org Association internationale pour une politique industrielle des technologies de l’esprit / International association in favour of an industrial policy for the technologies of the mind Frédérique Mingant

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Editorial

Divina Frau-Meigs

1 These are exciting times for media scholars, in light of the increasingly diverse range of productions, representations and social interactions available for study in the present media environment. As well-established media such as the printed press, radio, cinema or television reinvent themselves, through high-definition quality standards or through 3D, new and emerging media such as the Internet and mobile telephony explore the connecting potential of digital technologies with social networks and online video games.

2 The English-speaking world plays a particular role in this media environment, as a market-driven laboratory for technical and social innovations and as a producer of compelling media content. Due to the increasingly trans-national nature of the technologies and the markets that sustain them, such innovations and contents not only affect their own cultural area but other areas in the world as well. Currently, the success of television series, the dissemination of reality programming and the extension of social media all testify to this media-driven dynamic, often initiated in the United States. Some may consider this directional flow to be cultural imperialism; others consider it to be a form of competitive enrichment; others see it as a complex process where acculturation brings new forms of hybridization and cultural dialogue.

3 Making sense of the new abundance of cultural goods in circulation worldwide poses a challenge to anyone trying to avoid simplistic polarizations. Media Studies have developed in the English-speaking world to address such complexity. They have emerged as a trans-disciplinary field, close to cultural studies and visual culture, combining a rich web of tools, notions, concepts and authors, some of whom can be considered propagators of an extended “French theory” (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel De Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, etc.). Media Studies are less well established in France where local intellectual tradition and investigative potential are anchored in specific disciplines such as Sociology, French Literature or British and American Civilization, making it difficult for a trans- disciplinary field to find legitimacy. Even the field of information and communication sciences, that emerged at the end of the 1970s, has hesitated to embrace issues such as

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gender, post-colonialism or trans-national markets, which initially were at the margins of the field’s concerns in the French context.

4 InMedia places itself in this dual context, at the interface between French and English scholarship. It proposes to make a contribution to French Media Studies as a proper scholarly project. It also stems from the perceived need to include French researchers in the newly globalized academic scene and its theoretical debates. By publishing research results from French research centers on media production and representation in the English-speaking world, InMedia's aim is double: to promote the field of Media Studies in France and to provide visibility to French research at the international level. The intention is not so much to present the specificity of a “French” analysis. The perspectives taken by this journal will be much more heterogeneous. Rather, the purpose is to engage in international debates and to foster critical exchanges among researchers from different parts of the world.

5 In this first issue, the “themed section” on the global cinema and television industries is emblematic of such an attempt at trans-disciplinary combinations. Researchers from Australia and France combine history, political economy and cultural studies to provide insights on the economic and artistic back-and-forth movements between different film and television industries, insisting notably on the interconnection and diverse interests at work. “Runaway productions” and the adaptation of TV series are examples of this movement. The various contributors explore how this new division of cultural labor affects local identities and how it reflects the ideological process of representation, as the national labeling of such productions (American, British, Spanish) reveals the complexities of the retooling processes at work in cultural exchanges.

6 The editors are very excited to include a “critical perspectives” section dedicated to contradictory debates, where scholars, willing to be polemical, will raise awareness and motivate research. We start with François Cusset, well-known for his analysis of how French researchers were incorporated into American universities to the point of creating a “French theory” that developed independently of its conception or reception in France. He has accepted the challenge by proposing a critical and stimulating analysis of the state of Media Studies in France. He considers it to be a “blindspot” and denounces the fact that there is not a single curricular program in the French university devoted to Media Studies per se and outlines the reasons for such French resistance to interdisciplinary crossovers.

7 InMedia also features other recurring spaces and formats for scholarly expression, that will contribute to the elaboration of an online archive while highlighting the latest research produced in the field. The “interview section” contains the testimony of Dan Starer who draws attention to the role of a specific profession, “documentalists”. They occupy an interesting position in relation to media representations that play on the porosity between fact and fiction. Their task is critical in connection with fact-based narratives that require finding and interpreting materials such as diaries, minutes of trials or testimonials. As for the “conference review section,” focusing on “Landscape as the Locus for Artistic Transfers Between Ireland, Northern Ireland and Great Britain, from 1968 to the present,” it notes, among other important cultural exchanges between Ireland and the United Kingdom, the rise of “locational” modes of art and curatorial practice. It emphasizes the rich relationships between space, site, setting and location within the political economy of image production.

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8 InMedia will also endeavor to be a multimedia project, featuring books and website reviews and offering video extracts and streaming of interesting events. This first issue notably presents the website of “ars industrialis,” a French association that reflects the work of philosopher Bernard Stiegler and his followers. They propose a political analysis of the “technologies of the mind,” most of them connected to media goods and services. They aim at reclaiming these mental tools by media education to regain the critical capacity to decode information and fiction. They promote an “economy of contribution” to oppose the commercial use of ICT-driven media.

9 The InMedia editorial team thus invites you to join them in this academic adventure and will welcome proposals, from France but also from all around the world, to initiate or consolidate the international dialogue on Media Studies.

AUTHOR

DIVINA FRAU-MEIGS

Editorial Director

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Nolwenn Mingant et Cecilia Tirtaine (dir.) Global Film and Television Industries Today An Analysis of Industrial and Cultural Relations

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Global Film and Television Industries Today: An Analysis of Industrial and Cultural Relations

Nolwenn Mingant and Cecilia Tirtaine

1 Globalization has led to an increase in contacts between the film and television industries of different countries, particularly within the English-speaking world. The aim of this set of articles is to highlight specific issues brought about by globalization through different methodological approaches. The internationalization of film and television industries, linked to globalization, has had far-reaching consequences, from an industrial point of view, notably with the development of “runaway productions,” as well as a cultural point of view, with an increased blurring of national frontiers and identities.

2 The phenomenon of “runaway productions,” that is to say “movies that will be exploited in the United States but whose shooting has taken place outside Hollywood or abroad” (Peltzman), although not new, has become more prominent in the past two decades. Most runaways are motivated by economic reasons. The host countries – or, in the US, host states outside California – supply a workforce who is generally skilled, cheaper and less unionized. Local authorities and national governments also offer very attractive incentives, which, overall, dramatically bring down production costs. When studios, shooting or post-production facilities, did not exist in the host areas, the Hollywood majors have often participated in their setting up, as was the case on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia (Goldsmith, Ward, O’Regan). The other runaways are “creative runaway productions” (Peltzman). The production team chooses specific foreign locales for their “exoticism,” their foreignness. Although the runaway phenomenon is usually associated with the major Hollywood studios, independent filmmakers have also relocated some of their productions abroad–see, for example, Jim Jarmusch, who shot The Limits of Control (2009) in Spain, or Woody Allen, who shot Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006) and Cassandra’s Dream (2007) in Britain, Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) in Spain, and Midnight in Paris (2011) in France, to name but a few. In those films, the location serves the narrative and, in some instances, is a character

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(Murillo). Unsurprisingly, the ties are closer between countries sharing the English language, as the historically strong relationship between the US and the British film industries has shown. In the past two decades, Australia and New Zealand have also become important centers for runaway productions. However, English-speaking productions have looked for runaway opportunities well beyond this sphere, notably in Eastern Europe.

3 The recent runaway trend has had deep consequences. In Global Hollywood,1 Miller et al. described the “international division of cultural labor” with a production labor force spanning the globe. In The Film Studio,2 Goldsmith and O’Regan underline the increased competition on a global scale between production centers in different parts of the world. The articles in this issue draw attention to other consequences. Peltzman, for example, shows how fierce competition within the USA is, with several states trying to dethrone California as a major production centre. Besides, competition does not affect all the workers equally. The hardest hit by the consequences of the employment flexibility entailed by the runaway trend, are not the “above-the-liners” (actors, directors, etc.), but the “below-the-liners” (extras and technicians), who work locally, in Hollywood.

4 The internationalization of the film and television industry also raises cultural issues. The internationalization of capital, labor and shooting locations makes it difficult to determine the nationality of a film. Murillo’s article, for example, questions the nationality of The Limits of Control, a film by a US director, shot on location in Spain, with an international cast and produced by US companies. The fact that Hollywood has been producing an increasing number of “French,” “British,” or “Australian” movies in recent years has further complicated the issue of how to pinpoint a film’s “nationality.” The blurring of cultural identity and of nationality is also at stake in film remakes and adaptations of TV series from one country to another, such as Till Death Us Do Part (1966) or The Office (2001)3. Defining the nationality of a film and program may, in some cases, be further complicated by the cultural identity they convey. There can be a discrepancy between the shooting location and the location it stands for (such as Vancouver posing as New York, for example). The blurring can be due to the use of several different languages by the characters in the film–and the characters’ native language is not always that of the actors impersonating them. The phenomenon of the multilingual film is currently gaining importance in Hollywood blockbusters and Murillo shows that independent auteur Jim Jarmusch pushes this to the extreme.4

5 The following articles also point to the fact that nationality and cultural identity lie very much in the eye of the beholder. It is less something which exists per se than something constructed by the filmmaker, and re-appropriated by the audience. Jarmusch thus seems to favor a quasi-documentary approach to the Spanish landscape, in order to dissociate his films from the Spaghetti Westerns shot in the same locations in Andalucía. Both Murillo and Ducray also underline the issue of audience expectation in cultural terms. What US critics view as Spanishness is not the same for Spanish critics. What US and British audiences consider funny and “politically correct” (or not) in a sitcom is–in most cases–very different. Cultural representation is therefore strongly linked to cultural perception.

6 Despite a context of internationalization and recurrent back-and-forth inter-cultural contacts, films and television shows are thus still received and perceived very much locally. A program is decoded according to the standards of the community it is played

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to–hence the importance of tailoring programs for local audiences. The British example developed by Ducray brings to mind recent cases of Hollywood film and TV producers adapting the series The Nanny, Desperate Housewives or High School Musical to cater to Latin American audiences. Reflecting on cultural identities and their representation is also an ideological process, as the “un-American” label given to The Limits of Control by US reviewers shows, or the compliance with “political correctness” in The Office US highlights. In the same way, as cultural and industrial issues are clearly intertwined, local considerations are very much in the minds of politicians, be they the American politicians called upon to devise protective legislation for Californian workers, or Australian politicians collaborating with film professionals to attract foreign film and television productions in their region–the same goes for any host country or region enticing productions with attractive deals (subsidies, tax breaks, etc.).

7 The global and local issues currently intersecting in the film and television industries can be approached in different ways. The articles in this themed section first insist on the necessity of a historical perspective to understand current phenomena and the reader will be taken back to the creation of Hollywood unions in the 1930s and to the birth of British television series in the 1940s. Different approaches are then used to depict these phenomena, from industrial to aesthetic analyses, from empirical descriptions to reception theories. But the articles also aim at foregrounding important concepts which will enable the development of reflection on these issues, such as Goldsmith, Ward and O’Regan’s, which differentiates between “design interest” and “location interest,” or Murillo’s, which questions the term “independent.”

8 The articles also approach the internationalization of the film and television industry in an innovative way, introducing alternative points of view, by choosing to show the positive consequences of Hollywood’s involvement in production abroad, rather than only the negative, by deciding to interrogate the consequences on Hollywood itself and not only on the foreign locations, by opting for concentrating on independent cinema and not only Hollywood blockbusters, and by analyzing a British sitcom adapted for the USA and not one of many American formats exported abroad.

9 By challenging reflection with their different approaches, the articles underline that, as opposed to what is conventionally believed, the movement is not unidirectional, with Hollywood imposing its vision on foreign countries. From the very start, Ducray questions the relevance of the cultural imperialism theory in a globalized era. Her article foregrounds the necessity to re-conceptualize international relationships as cultural products (but also production teams) move back and forth. There seems to be less of a deterministic imposition from one center than a constant flow of influences and counter-influences. On the industrial level, Goldsmith, Ward and O’Regan’s article on the Gold Coast insists on the way local interests take control of the development process and turn US involvement to their advantage. Although certain observers consider that some countries are little more than “niche-servicing industries” (see, for instance, Christie, for Britain),5 Goldsmith, Ward and O’Regan contend that Hollywood- built studio sets on the Gold Coast enabled regional economic development. Those positive economic consequences are the reasons why more and more countries (but also American states, as explained by Peltzman) set up attractive deals and incentives to lure US productions. Hollywood is not the only driving force behind the phenomenon of internationalization, and it is not the only beneficiary.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christie, Ian. “Will Lottery Money Assure the British Film Industry?.” New Statesman, 20 June 1997.

Miller, Toby et al.. Global Hollywood. London: BFI Publishing, 2001.

Mingant, Nolwenn. Hollywood à la conquête du monde : Marchés, stratégies, influences. Paris : CNRS Éditions, 2010.

Moine, Raphaëlle. Remakes : Les films français à Hollywood. Paris : CNRS Éditions, 2007.

Goldsmith, Ben, O’Regan, Tom. The Film Studio: Film Production in the Global Economy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, 2005.

NOTES

1. Toby Miller et al., Global Hollywood (London: BFI Publishing, 2001). 2. Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan, The Film Studio: Film Production in the Global Economy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, 2005). 3. Raphaëlle Moine, Remakes : Les films français à Hollywood (Paris : CNRS Éditions, 2007). 4. Nolwenn Mingant, Hollywood à la conquête du monde : Marchés, stratégies, influences (Paris : CNRS Éditions, 2010). 5. Christie, Ian, “Will Lottery Money Assure the British Film Industry?,” New Statesman, June 20, 1997.

AUTHORS

NOLWENN MINGANT

Nolwenn Mingant is an Associate Professor in American Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3. She has published Hollywood à la conquête du monde : Marché, stratégies, influences (CNRS éditions, 2010), in which she explores the way Hollywood has exported its films around the world over the past 40 years and analyzes the current relationship between Hollywood and its foreign market. She is a co-founder of research group CinEcoSA (http://www.cinecosa.com) and of online journal InMedia. Her current research areas are the presence of foreign languages in contemporary Hollywood films and the relationship between Hollywood and the Arab world. (For more detailed information: http://anglais.u-paris10.fr/spip.php?article1742) Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3

CECILIA TIRTAINE

Cecilia Tirtaine is a Senior Lecturer in British Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3. She has published several articles on the British film industry. The identity of British cinema, film policy in Britain and the relationships between cinema and television are some of her

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current research interests. She is a co-founder of research group CinEcoSA (http:// www.cinecosa.com) and of online journal InMedia. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3

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Global and Local Hollywood

Ben Goldsmith, Susan Ward and Tom O’Regan

1 The concept of ‘Global Hollywood’ is extremely useful.1 It emphasises the coordinating and controlling role of the major studios in the international system of film production and consumption. It emphasises Hollywood’s place in the system as a design centre, and it highlights the factors encouraging the international dispersal of production, including fluctuating currency exchange rates, differences in labour costs, and incentives offered by governments. Our argument here is that while the concept is useful, the term ‘Global Hollywood’ can obscure the initiative and involvement of individuals and organisations outside Hollywood in facilitating film production. Our interest is not in the actions and motivations of the Hollywood majors, but rather of those organisations, companies and people who intersect with Hollywood and work to bring production to particular places around the world. We argue that ‘Global Hollywood’ can best be understood as simultaneously global and local. We test some assumptions about the value and character of international production, and some of the underlying myths about ‘runaway production’ (the commonly used term to describe international production by Hollywood studios) and why production travels to particular places.2 In the process, we will show how Hollywood in the contemporary era is only properly intelligible as a global phenomenon with particular local instantiations or iterations.

Global Hollywood

2 ‘Global Hollywood’ does not only refer to those films made in southern California; rather it points to the fact that ‘Hollywood’ is a space of relations and flows, as much as it is a physical place. Global Hollywood not only means the production, distribution, and consumption of Hollywood films around the world, it also encompasses the money, people, companies and places from all over the world which are now involved in film production with Hollywood partners.

3 In the financing of films, the money for the majors’ films and for international English language cinema–indeed much of all filmmaking–is drawn from around the world. For example, the Lord of the Rings trilogy was financed in part by German media funds, with

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substantial subsidy from the New Zealand government and taxpayers.3 Investment mechanisms known as ‘hedge funds’ often based outside the US in places like the Cayman Islands, provided $11 billion in production finance for Hollywood films between 2004 and 2007. And in 2009, $325m of the $825m in production finance raised by Dreamworks came from the Indian company Reliance Big Entertainment.4 The internationalisation of film financing is of course by no means new. In the early 1970s, Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis working with Dutch banker Frans Afman pioneered the system of using international pre-sales to finance De Laurentiis’s production in the United States.5

4 The financing of Hollywood productions today does not only come from film distributors or “rich Europeans seeking tax advantages.”6 It also comes from governments around the world which are increasingly providing a key part of the budget of films through various incentives and tax credit schemes to encourage production in their state or nation. Such incentives are now a global phenomenon; they are seen by industry players such as Andrew Smith, Group Corporate Affairs Director at Pinewood studios in the UK to be “essential for any territory to compete these days.”7 And a web of incentives now covers most states of the US, much of Europe and increasingly some Asian countries, and has spawned consultants to help producers navigate through what has become a complex subsidy landscape. Places, investors, companies and governments inside and outside the US, are increasingly involved in the development of film and TV production. Drawing finance from a variety of international sources is a norm for international English language cinema in the mid- budget range, like Australian director Peter Weir’s 2010 film The Way Back. The $30m budget of this film came from a fund controlled by National Geographic, and from the Abu Dhabi based production group Imagenation.

5 In terms of personnel, Hollywood has always attracted talent from around the world, both onscreen and off. Screen actors, directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, costume, set and sound designers, composers and editors from around the world are now involved in international production. And these are not only Hollywood productions as international collaboration is becoming a regular part of British, French, Korean and Chinese film production, to name just a few. It is most obvious in Hollywood cinema. Take the example of the Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Walden Media/20th Century Fox, 2010). This film has a British director, Michael Apted, a producer from New Zealand, Andrew Adamson, an Italian cinematographer, Dante Spinotti, and many Australians in various roles.

6 Global Hollywood is also evident in the terms of film settings and the locations of production. Weir’s film The Way Back (Exclusive Films/National Geographic Films, 2010) is about seven men who escape from a Siberian gulag and travel overland through the Himalayas to India during the Second World War. The film was shot in India, Morocco and at the former Bulgarian national film studio now known as Nu Boyana, with post- production undertaken in Australia.

7 Post production is another area of filmmaking that is now routinely an international process. One of the Australian digital effects companies that is working on The Way Back is Rising Sun pictures, based in Adelaide. This company, along with others based in the United Kingdom, and the United States, has worked on several of the Harry Potter films, among many others.

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8 The first of the Chronicles of Narnia films, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Walden Media/Walt Disney Pictures, 2005), was shot in New Zealand, Poland, the UK and the USA. The second film in the series, Prince Caspian (Walden Media/Walt Disney Pictures, 2008), was shot in New Zealand, Poland, the UK, and at Barrandov Studios in Prague. The third film, Voyage of the Dawn Treader was shot over 8 months on the Gold Coast, in Australia, including some work at the Warner Roadshow Studios. These Gold Coast studios are in competition with Barrandov, with Nu Boyana, as well as with Fox Studios in Sydney, Central City Studios in Melbourne and many other facilities around the world. These places are involved in what Peter Dicken has called ‘locational tournaments,’ a global competition to host Hollywood and other production.8

Design and Location Interests

9 Our interest in the development of a Local Hollywood requires attention not only to the ‘design interest’ of Global Hollywood, but also to the ‘location interests’ that help to prepare and maintain a place for production that is often conceived and designed elsewhere.9 Those working in the location interest are not only concerned about ensuring the production of particular projects, but also are determined to ensure regular flows of production to a particular place.10

10 Decisions about story ideas, casting, crew and location–those things that affect the design of the project–will be determined by a combination of creative and economic concerns. All those involved in the creative development and planning of a film or television program share the ‘design interest.’ Their concern is to make the film or program to its full potential as cost-effectively as possible.

11 This is the view of production that informs much scholarly work on the phenomenon of so-called ‘runaway productions,’ a term that is commonly used to describe films and television programs made outside California by companies based in Los Angeles.11 The emphasis tends to be on what influences or affects the design interest. We felt that this view, while useful, does not properly account for the motivations of people and organisations in particular places whose principal purpose is to facilitate production in that place often (but not always) by pitching for projects that could be made in a number of locations. These people and organisations–which we term “agents of the location interest”–will often coordinate the assets and resources of a place for filmmakers.

Local Hollywood on the Gold Coast

12 We have been particularly interested in the Gold Coast because it is a place which, before a state-of-the-art film studio was built there in the late 1980s, had only a very limited history of production, and no existing crew base (Goldsmith, Ward and O’Regan 2010). It was what we call a ‘greenfields location,’ meaning a place with no or little prior experience of production. The Gold Coast was one of the first of the new wave of ‘satellite production centres,’ or Local Hollywoods. And in common with places like Murcia in Spain, Rosarito in Mexico (where Titanic (20th Century Fox/Paramount, 1997) was made), and Cape Town in South Africa, the Gold Coast has had an irregular history of production, subject to cycles of boom and bust. The Gold Coast is Australia’s sixth

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largest city, and one of the country’s major tourist destinations. It is located about a thousand kilometres North of Sydney, in Queensland, on the East Coast of Australia.

13 Since the Warner Roadshow Studios were built there in the late 1980s, over a hundred productions have been made on the Gold Coast.12 Many have not been widely seen in Australia, and apart from a number of high profile productions, most are largely invisible in critical and scholarly work. Where there is critical attention to them, or public discussion of the Gold Coast industry, it has often been negative, derogatory or derisory. Much of this criticism seems to take as a given the inherently inferior status of the international projects made on the Gold Coast compared with the valid and laudable Australian productions made elsewhere, usually in Sydney (New South Wales) and Melbourne (Victoria).

14 The diverse range of productions made on the Gold Coast since 1988 includes blockbuster-scale feature films like Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Walden Media/20th Century Fox 2010), Nim’s Island (Walden Media 2008) Peter Pan (Universal Pictures/Columbia Pictures 2003) and Scooby Doo (Warner Bros. Pictures 2002). In addition, the Gold Coast has hosted prime-time television series for American network television like Mission: Impossible (Paramount Television 1988-89), American cable television series like Lost World (Coote Hayes Productions 1998-2001) and Beastmaster (Coote Hayes Productions 1998 and 2001), and Australian television series like Sea Patrol (McElroy All Media 2006-2010) and The Strip (Knapman Wyld Television 2008). Two long-running daytime soap operas were made there in the mid 1990s–Pacific Drive (New World Television/Village Roadshow Pictures, 390 half-hour episodes between 1995 and 1997) and Paradise Beach (New World Television/Village Roadshow Pictures, 260 half-hour episodes between 1993 and 1994). And over 50 films and mini- series for television have been produced on the Gold Coast, most by incoming, international production companies.

15 In addition to this variety of drama production, the Gold Coast has since 2001 been a centre of reality-programming television production, with nine series of the Australian version of Big Brother (Southern Star Endemol 2001-2009) produced at the Dreamworld theme park including a weekly eviction special with a large, live audience. The Gold Coast hinterland and the luxury beachside hotel the Palazzo Versace have played host to ten series to date of the British version of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here (Granada/ London Weekend Television 2002-2011), and five series of the German version of the format, Ich Bin Ein Star–Holt Mich Hier Raus (Granada 2004-2011).

16 The history of international production on the Gold Coast is instructive for analysis of the emergence over the last two or three decades of a global system of production with Hollywood at its centre. Over the last twenty years, the film industry based on the Gold Coast has not only helped to transform Hollywood, it has also expanded the range and types of films and television programs that have been produced in Australia. The studio was the brain child of an ambitious independent producer-distributor and a local government (the Queensland state government) that was keen to diversify the economy of the Gold Coast and to establish the region as a leisure, entertainment and tourism centre. Ultimately it would be an Australian company with global ambitions that would build the studio and the industry to the position it occupies today, although the real roots of this development lie in the events and trends that transformed Hollywood in the 1980s.

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17 From the 1980s it became routine for the majors, following the early lead of independent producers and aspiring mini-majors, to produce regularly overseas and to partner with companies located outside the United States.13 Hollywood has always travelled, of course, but in the 1980s as the major studios were swallowed up by media corporations with global ambitions, money, talent, locations and markets outside the United States became fundamental to Hollywood’s business. The larger independent distributors and production companies played their part too; they drew finance and experience from outside Hollywood and, without the burden of the majors’ fixed costs in Los Angeles, were more adventurous in seeking new locations whether for cost or story reasons.14

18 One of the most important of these was the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG), run by Italian-American producer Dino De Laurentiis. Over the course of his career De Laurentiis had on numerous occasions taken enormous gambles based on little more than the strength of his faith in his instincts as a filmmaker and entrepreneur. As well as producing a number of Fellini’s films in the 1950s and 1960s, he had acted as a fixer or intermediary between Hollywood producers and the Italian industry. He set up a studio, modestly named Dinocitta in Rome in the early 1960s, before moving to the US and becoming an American citizen in the early 1970s.

19 De Laurentiis hoped to build up DEG to compete directly with the majors, but a string of high-profile failures plunged the company into trouble by the mid-1980s. He began to seek new opportunities outside the United States. De Laurentiis had built a long and successful career producing films with international stars and crews both in major industry centres and in places with limited infrastructure and experience like Wilmington in North Carolina. In the early 1980s, De Laurentiis built a film studio there and in the process helped the city become one of the largest production centres in the United States.

20 In the mid-1980s, the profile of Australian films and filmmakers in Hollywood was higher than it had ever been following several Academy Award nominations and the critical and commercial success of a number of films made by Australian directors or starring Australian actors. When De Laurentiis visited Australia to assess potential locations for a film studio in August 1986, global buzz about local phenomenon Crocodile Dundee (Rimfire Films 1986) was deafening, even before the film was released in the US. Australian director Bruce Beresford, who made Crimes of the Heart (DEG 1986) for De Laurentiis in 1986, and Terry Jackman, broker of the distribution deals for Crocodile Dundee and former head of Australian cinema chain Hoyts, convinced De Laurentiis that Australians were capable of making the films he needed to trade his way out of trouble. De Laurentiis was also excited by the size of the Australian theatrical and video markets, and by the potential to draw on new sources of capital and new partners in the production of content for international distribution through his network of companies and associates. A deal was soon brokered with the Queensland state government, which had been considering building a film studio since the late 1970s.

21 The move into Australia fitted De Laurentiis’s history of international engagement and innovation, and was consistent with his approach to film business. As Dinocitta and Wilmington demonstrated, he had built successful production facilities from scratch before. A new company, De Laurentiis Limited (DEL) was set up in Australia, and the stage was set for Beresford to make Total Recall with Patrick Swayze on the Gold Coast. But De Laurentiis’s American company DEG’s 1986 slate of releases in the US all failed,

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the company’s share price plummeted, and senior executives departed amid an investigation by the US Securities and Investments Commission. De Laurentiis himself would ultimately be forced to stand down as President. These financial troubles forced his withdrawal from Australia just before the official opening of the studio in 1987.

22 Fortunately for the studio, an Australian media company took over the development. Village Roadshow had begun life as an operator of drive-in cinemas in the 1950s, growing to become Australia’s largest production, distribution and exhibition company.15 The company’s management saw the studio as a key part of an ambitious plan for global expansion.

23 After considerable lobbying in Hollywood, Village Roadshow managed to persuade Warner Bros to become a partner. Through the use of the Warner’s name, the studio gained instant attention, reputation by association, and entry to the majors’ network of contacts and projects. Another major studio, Paramount, became the Gold Coast’s first client in 1988, with the revival of the television series Mission: Impossible and a new series Dolphin Cove. Mission: Impossible moved to Melbourne for a second series, while Dolphin Cove only lasted a single season.

24 Over the years Village Roadshow has adopted a variety of strategies to pull production to the Gold Coast. Mission: Impossible represented the first strategy to develop the Gold Coast as a location for international production. Village Roadshow targeted opportunistic international producers looking for cheap production services, favourable exchange rates, and local financial incentives to minimise production costs. Later strategies involved making its own feature films for international distribution, producing series for Australian television while retaining an eye to international markets, and co-producing international series. The studio’s slate of productions and prosperity were closely tied to Village Roadshow’s corporate ambitions as it transformed from a private family company focused on Australian production, distribution and exhibition, to a publicly listed company with diverse media holdings in Australia and around the world. Warner Bros, the other partner in the studio, was honoured first in the studio’s title (Warner Roadshow Movieworld Studios), but was always far more interested in the prospects and fortunes of the Movieworld theme park which was built next door to the studios and opened in 1991.

25 This focus on the theme park was still highly significant for the future of the Gold Coast film industry, as it demonstrated the synergies that could be developed between film and television production, and other leisure industries and infrastructure.

26 The Gold Coast is a place in a constant state of transformation. One of the keys to its success as a film and television production location is that from an early stage the Gold Coast seemed to understand the importance of private investment and transnational corporations in mediating the development, governance and future of the city. This made it an especially welcoming place for De Laurentiis and later Village Roadshow and Warner Bros. The city has been defined by large-scale, entrepreneurial developments often as part of public-private partnerships reliant on sympathetic planning regulations and soft loans from public coffers. Successive local and state governments have fostered the image and practice of the Gold Coast as a ‘yes’ place prepared to do almost anything to accommodate particular industries and developments. The origins of this ‘can do’ culture lie in the ways this “frontier city” understands itself and projects itself to the world (Breen 2004).16

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27 Throughout its history, the Gold Coast’s abiding curse and advantage has been a readiness to change in order to accommodate the desires and fantasies of waves of visitors and new residents. The city has been developed, remodelled and (re)named to invoke and juxtapose other places–there are parts of the Gold Coast called Southport, Miami Beach, Sorrento, the Isle of Capri–or to evoke images of idyllic luxury and exotic exclusivity–Surfers Paradise, Sanctuary Cove. The city survives and thrives on its capacity to produce new ideas and new experiences for tourists and prospective investors. It is relentlessly present- and future-focused, attuned to the fulfillment and anticipation of desire.

28 The city’s willingness, or rather need, to be in a state of constant transformation and change is a critical condition for any place with ambitions to host Hollywood production. Over the last two decades, many places around the world have sought to profit from Hollywood’s new mobility, but few have convincingly replicated the Gold Coast’s blend of attitude and ambition because few have been so committed to the kinds of constant change that international film production consistently requires.

29 The Warner Roadshow studio complex literally opened up new territory for Australian filmmakers and for filmmaking in Australia. It was the cornerstone of the infrastructure necessary to create an industry on the Gold Coast. It was built to service and facilitate international production, and to establish a commercial cinema in a country where since the revival in the early 1970s filmmaking had relied on support from the public purse. On the Gold Coast, as in Vancouver, Canada, where a similar satellite industry had been established in the mid-1980s, Hollywood was not considered an obstacle to the development of a film industry, but rather a means to build local production capacity through the development of a range of services to film production. While the industrial and financial situation forced strategies for the studio to change, and while the facility would struggle for a number of years, a critical mass of crew and ancillary services began to grow and the Gold Coast gradually established itself as an important site of Australian and international film and television production. In the process it transformed film and television production in Australia, and contributed to the creation of “global Hollywood.”

30 The Global Hollywood thesis has been useful in understanding the internationalisation of Hollywood over the last couple of decades. But we found in our research on the Gold Coast that the Global Hollywood approach did not entirely account for the variety of motivations and interests at work in the Gold Coast development. Indeed, the Gold Coast has become since 1988 an important satellite centre for Hollywood originated or designed films and television programs, but to look at the evolution of the industry on the Gold Coast solely from the perspective of migrating productions or of Hollywood is to miss much of what has happened on the Gold Coast. Instead, if we look at the particular local circumstances which led to the studio development we find a different picture that is also instructive for thinking about other places in the world that like the Gold Coast seek to compete to host and service some of the high profile and highly mobile international film and television production.

31 It is increasingly the case, as it was on the Gold Coast, that agents of the location interest including government ministers and departments as well as local business interests will work to establish production infrastructure such as film studios in order to draw production to that place. Often this will be done in conjunction with a major film industry figure or firm. In the Gold Coast’s case, that was Dino De Laurentiis, and

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later the Hollywood major studio Warner Bros. Their role was undeniably important, but just as critical was the role and ambitions of local players: the Queensland government and Village Roadshow.

32 The Gold Coast was the first place in the southern hemisphere to host production by Hollywood majors on a regular basis, something that is now actively sought by other major Australian centres just as it is the subject of competition between locations around the world. The pursuit of the Gold Coast location interest over the last twenty years has much to teach other centres in both its successes and failures. The partnership between Village Roadshow and Warner Bros that enabled the studios and as a result the industry itself to survive the drama of Dino De Laurentiis’s departure is instructive for ambitious production companies that seek to internationalise or diversify their business. The ways in which the Gold Coast contributed to the development of the split location production system that is now the norm around the world provide valuable precedents for aspiring and established centres. The experience of building and growing this “greenfields location” and especially the synergies that have developed with other industries and services, particularly tourism and theme parks, are enormously useful to the many places now seeking to participate in the lucrative market for international production. In short, the Gold Coast story has much to teach industry practitioners, policymakers and scholars about the workings of contemporary film and television production, about the need for and consequences of particular types of policy settings and attitudes to production, about the approaches we must take to the study of locating international film and television production, and about the local aspects of Global Hollywood.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Breen, Sally. “Future Frontier.” PhD thesis, Griffith University, 2004.

Dicken, Peter. Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007.

Goldsmith, Ben. “‘The Comfort Lies in All the Things You Can Do’: The Australian Drive-in, Cinema of Distraction.” Journal of Popular Culture, 33 1 (1999): 153–64.

Goldsmith, Ben. “If You Build It … Film Studios and the Transformative Effects of Migrating Media Production.” In Locating Migrating Media, eds. Greg Elmer et al. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010) 103-27.

Goldsmith, Ben, Susan Ward and Tom O’Regan. Local Hollywood: Global Film Production and the Gold Coast. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2010.

Grant, Peter S., Wood. Chris Blockbusters and Trade Wars: Popular Culture in a Globalized World. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004.

Kezich, Tullio, Levantesi, Alessandra. Dino: The Life and Films of Dino De Laurentiis. New York: Miramax Books, 2004.

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Miller, Toby, et al. Global Hollywood. London: British Film Institute, 2001.

O’Regan, Tom, Ward, Susan. “Experimenting With the Local and the Transnational: Television Drama Production on the Gold Coast.” Continuum, 20 1 (2006): 17–31.

O’Regan, Tom, Ward, Susan. “Managing Uncertainty: Defining the Location Interests of a Greenfields Location.” In Cross-Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalization? eds. Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson. Ithaca, NY: Cambria Press, 2008. 155–86.

Prince, Stephen. A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow 1980–89, History of the American Cinema vol. 10. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Roxborough, Scott. “The Price is Right.” Hollywood Reporter, September 25-27, 2009, 21-27.

Szalai, Georg, Bond, Paul. “Queasy Money.” Hollywood Reporter, August 28-30, 2009, 26-27.

Tzioumakis, Yannis. American Independent Cinema: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

United States International Trade Administration (USITA). The Migration of US Film and Television Production: Impact of ‘Runaways’ on Workers and Small Business in the US Film Industry. Washington, D. C.: US Department of Commerce, 2001.

Ward, Susan, O’Regan, Tom. “The Gold Coast Movie-of-the-Week: A North American Form in its Australian Context.” Metro, 143, (2004) 100–9.

Wasser, Frederick. “Is Hollywood America? The Trans-Nationalization of the American Film Industry.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12 (1995), 423–37.

Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

NOTES

1. Toby Miller et al., Global Hollywood (London: BFI, 2001). 2. United States International Trade Administration, The Migration of US Film and Television Production: Impact of “Runaways” on Workers and Small Business in the US Film Industry (Washington, D.C.: US Department of Commerce, 2001). 3. Peter S. Grant and Chris Wood, Blockbusters and Trade Wars: Popular Culture in a Globalized World (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004) 292. 4. Georg Szalai and Paul Bond, “Queasy Money,” Hollywood Reporter, August 28-30, 2009, 26. 5. Frederick Wasser, “Is Hollywood America? The Trans-nationalization of the American Film Industry,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12, (1995): 423–37. 6. Georg Szalai and Paul Bond, “Queasy Money,” Hollywood Reporter, August 28-30, 2009, 26. 7. Scott Roxborough, “The Price is Right,” Hollywood Reporter, September 25-27, 2009, 22. 8. Peter Dicken, Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007) 238. 9. Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan, The Film Studio (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) 2-7, 41-62. 10. Ben Goldsmith, “If You Build It … Film Studios and the Transformative Effects of Migrating Media Production,” in Locating Migrating Media, eds. Greg Elmer et al. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010) 103-27.

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11. United States International Trade Administration, The Migration of US Film and Television Production: Impact of “Runaways” on Workers and Small Business in the US Film Industry (Washington, D. C.: US Department of Commerce, 2001). 12. Tom O’Regan and Susan Ward, “Managing Uncertainty: Defining the Location Interests of a Greenfields Location,” in Cross-Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalization?, eds. Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson (Ithaca, NY: Cambria Press, 2008) 155-86; Susan Ward and Tom O’Regan, ‘The Gold Coast Movie-of-the-Week: A North American Form in its Australian Context,’ Metro, 143, (2004): 100-9. 13. Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow 1980-89, History of the American Cinema vol. 10 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 14. Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); Yannis Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). 15. Ben Goldsmith, “‘The Comfort Lies in All the Things You Can Do’: The Australian Drive-in, Cinema of Distraction,” Journal of Popular Culture, 33 1 (1999): 153–64. 16. Sally Breen, “Future Frontier,” PhD thesis, Griffith University, 2004.

ABSTRACTS

The term ‘Global Hollywood’ describes the international reach of the major Hollywood studios, and the internationalisation of financing, production, distribution and exhibition of films made by the majors, or by their subsidiaries and partners. In this article we describe how one place, the Gold Coast in the Australian state of Queensland, became a ‘Local Hollywood’ or a regular location for such international film and television production.

INDEX

Keywords: Global Hollywood, Local Hollywood, film production, design interests, location interests

AUTHORS

BEN GOLDSMITH

Ben Goldsmith is a research fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. Susan Ward is a researcher with the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, Australia. Tom O’Regan is a Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Australian Television Culture (1993) and Australian National Cinema (1996). Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan published The Film Studio: Film Production in the Global Economy in 2005. With Susan Ward, they are also the co-authors of Local Hollywood: Global Film Production and the Gold Coast (2010). University of Queensland

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SUSAN WARD

Susan Ward is a researcher with the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, Australia. With Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan, she is the co-author of Local Hollywood: Global Film Production and the Gold Coast (2010). University of Queensland

TOM O’REGAN

Tom O’Regan is a Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Australian Television Culture (1993) and Australian National Cinema (1996). Tom O’Regan and Ben Goldsmith published The Film Studio: Film Production in the Global Economy in 2005. With Susan Ward, they are also the co-authors of Local Hollywood: Global Film Production and the Gold Coast (2010). University of Queensland

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The Impact of Runaway Productions on Hollywood Labor Organizations

Daniel Peltzman

1 In line with relocations which have restructured US manufacturing, the Hollywood motion picture industry has suffered from the impact of runaway productions. By definition, a runaway production is a movie that will be exploited in the United States but whose shooting has taken place outside Hollywood or abroad. There are two basic types of runaway productions: creative runaway productions are justified by the artistic choice to use a natural setting to enhance the plot; economic runaway productions on the other hand, by far the most common, are justified by lower production costs than those practised in Californian studios. There is also a political dimension which may infringe upon global trade: foreign government can offer incentives in the form of subsidies or substantial tax credits.

2 The number of economic runaway productions has soared thereby creating an immediate impact on Hollywood labor organizations. This study focuses on Hollywood’s oldest labor union: the International Alliance of Stage and Theatrical Employees (IATSE). First composed of stage hands and projectionists, IATSE members today include craftsmen and a wide variety of technicians.1 In 1936, IATSE was the first Hollywood union to obtain the union shop, thereby making union membership a prerequisite of employment. Affiliated with the AFL-CIO the IATSE has always practiced a collective bargaining policy, regularly negotiating contracts with the producers. This has contributed to establishing the bureaucratic and hierarchical structure within which the union now operates–a structure which largely excludes the rank and file from the decision-making process.2 The situation for talent guilds such as the Screen Actors’ Guild, the Screen Directors’ Guild and the Writers’ Guild of America is less problematic in so far as the impact of economic runaway productions is less significant than for IATSE members. For obvious reasons, American actors, directors, and writers can work on a foreign project whereas technicians and craftsmen crews are generally drawn from the local workforce. And while runaway productions certainly create problems for guilds’ members, for their IATSE counterparts rising unemployment is inevitable. A screen writer can easily work for a runaway production from his own

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home; this alternative is clearly impossible for technicians and craftsmen employed in a Hollywood studio.

3 The historical structure of Hollywood labor organizations such as the IATSE further complicates these challenges. After many years of fierce struggle their members obtained the right to collective bargaining and union shop agreements with Hollywood producers.3 For decades, the Los Angeles region offered US film producers the best economic conditions and a plethora of natural landscape settings. This status gradually evolved over time as the state of New York, while never matching Hollywood, imposed itself as an important production center in its own right. Today, in the United States alone, more than thirty states offer American motion picture companies tax credits, further reinforcing the runaway production process. The issue is further complicated by the fact that labor law varies significantly from one state to another and hence its impact on IATSE members. The problem is therefore twofold as runaway productions function on both international and domestic levels.

4 This all comes down to a number of essential issues. Do runaway productions have the same repercussions on workers’ rights when they take place in Canada or Utah? How have unions reacted to the problem? By way of response, this paper will start with a brief historical overview of economic runaway productions before focusing in greater detail on current issues and analyzing their effects on Hollywood labor organizations.

Historical Background

5 Economic runaway productions are by no means a new phenomenon. Such productions have existed to a greater or lesser degree depending on the historical context, with their number increasing significantly from the 1950s onwards. But producing offshore may often have created at least as many problems as it aimed to solve. The movie adaptation of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur provides a noteworthy example from as early as 1925. The film was produced first by Samuel Goldwyn, then by his new company, the soon renowned Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Fred Niblo was named director and the decision was made to shoot the film in Italy for artistic reasons. This second adaptation of Wallace’s novel represented a capital investment hitherto unheard of. Yet the budget notwithstanding, the shooting turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. During the famous naval battle scene, the galleys caught fire: many extras, their costumes ablaze, had to dive into the water. Unfortunately, some of them were unable to swim and a dozen of them perished. Adding to this tragic event, technical constraints forced the operation back to the United States in Hollywood, where new sets had to be built. Even if the audience was impressed by the chariot race, the company never recouped its colossal expenses. In fact, the movie would become the epitome of how unprepared the company had been for the artistic, financial and technical challenges of such runaway productions.4 Though Italy already boasted a powerful motion picture industry at that time, Hollywood producers would henceforth be reluctant to relocate their production abroad for fear of uncertain costs. International runaway productions would be extremely rare in the decades to come.

6 By the mid-1950s, however, the number of economic runaway productions rose so dramatically that Hollywood labor organizations began to heed, all the more so as the period itself was particularly trying for the industry. While the country enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, Hollywood was facing the worst crisis of its history. A

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number of reasons help to explain this downturn. First, the famous Paramount case dissolved the Hollywood trust forcing the producers to sell the vast majority of their movie theaters.5 Second, middle-class Americans, lured by newly built suburbs, were progressively leaving inner cities where movie theaters were chiefly situated. Finally, the advent of television resulted in a dramatic drop of movie attendance. This new vulnerability of studios helps explain the sudden increase in economic runaway productions. Thus, while in 1946, only 19% of all films in the United States were foreign productions, by 1956 this figure had more than doubled. That year, 43% of all American-produced films had been made abroad. In 1966, the figure was 65% and 70% a year later.6

7 In 1957 the Hollywood American of Labor Council, composed of all the Hollywood industry locals affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), asked labor historian Irving Bernstein to study the situation of the labor force in Hollywood studios. The AFL was concerned about rising unemployment rates and the vulnerability of unionized workers. Bernstein provided a clear and complete report, highlighting the link between the unemployment rate at home and the frequency of runaway productions. It became patently obvious that studios were hardly hiring any new workers.7

8 Runaway productions also contributed to the diversification of Hollywood studios abroad. In 1956, Warner Brothers owned 37% of the voting stock of Associated British Picture Corp. Ltd., which operated studio, laboratory and distribution network facilities on the other side of the Atlantic. At this time, Twentieth Century-Fox was investing in movie production in Europe and Africa. Diversification had obvious consequences on employment of IATSE members. For example, when Warner was producing a film in England, IATSE laboratory technicians, who developed films, would find themselves unemployed. Likewise, IATSE carpenters and electricians employed on Hollywood sets would not be sent on location in Europe.

9 Italy was among Hollywood’s favorite offshore locations for a number of reasons. After his visit in 1956 to study the country’s motion picture industry, producer Dore Schary reported back in the US: “I visited the Cinecitta studios, a thoroughly modern and complete lot, but the only two pictures shooting at the time were David Selznick’s production of Farewell to Arms and Joe Mankiewicz’s production The Quiet American.”8 With evident bitterness Bernstein questioned rhetorically where the American motion picture industry was. In Hollywood or in Rome? The labor historian explained the phenomenon by underlining the appeal of tax credits that many European countries were offering at the time. More recently, the number of countries hosting Hollywood productions has continued to grow for the very same reasons–with the lower standard of living and labor costs also contributing to this trend.

Economic Runaway Productions Today

10 In 1970, AFL leaders publicly denounced the production of American films abroad, which literally left thousands of unemployed at home.9 According to union leaders, the trend was accelerating and this has since proven to be the case. Several surveys illustrate this surge. Between 1993 and 2001, US production budgets decreased by 17%. During the same period, costs in Canada increased 144%. In 1998, 28% of all the movies shown in the United States were runaway productions representing a direct economic

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loss of over $2.8 billion in wages. With additional losses linked to derivative activities such as housing, transportation and catering, the figure rose to $10.3 billion.10 In California alone, 182 movies were produced in 2004 while just four years earlier Hollywood studios had produced 212. In 2003, however, their number had plunged to 151.

11 There are many causes for the spectacular increase in runaway productions. First the quest for profit coupled with the advent of neoliberalism that encourages free trade has tended towards worldwide integration of economic activity. Even in Europe, the comparatively low standard of living more than counterbalances the strength of the euro against the dollar. It is thus hardly surprising that Hollywood studios should have succeeded in making substantial profits thanks to runaway productions. If making pictures abroad is more profitable, producers will not hesitate to do so. This should be understood within the context of soaring production costs. Between 1990 and 2000, average price costs rose from $26.8 million to $51.5 million. One obvious conclusion is that the labor costs have to be taken into account.11

12 Secondly, technical innovations are also partly responsible. In the late 1980s, it was extremely expensive to move a crew from Hollywood to a foreign country. Today, however, a film can be shot abroad and rushes (the first prints made of a movie after shooting) immediately transmitted to California, where, for instance, the film is then edited. Countries such as Britain, New Zealand, and Canada have greatly improved their technical facilities and offer trained local labor forces in situ. In the United States, states such as New York, Louisiana, and New Mexico have followed suit. It has been estimated that across the US, 20,000 of the total of 270,000 industry jobs were lost in 1998 alone due to runaway productions.12 IATSE members in Hollywood are among those who have lost their jobs – most notably craftsmen such as carpenters, prop men, decorators and many others whose tasks can be carried out on the production set.13

13 Thirdly, most of the Hollywood studios have been offered tax relief by other countries or states mostly in the form of tax credits or deductions. In the US alone, Arizona offers a 20% tax credit for a $3 million movie conditioned upon the number of state workers employed. Respectively, 32 states have passed laws offering such tax credits.14 The situation is comparable in other countries. The South African government offers a 15% tax credit on profits if at least half the movie is shot there. Production costs are therefore 25% lower.15

The Impact on Hollywood Trade Unions

14 Before analyzing the impact of runaway productions upon trade unions, some data about motion picture industry employment should be provided. In 2002, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) organized a census covering the United States and Hollywood. Among other findings, the census detailed the wages paid by the MPAA. In the United States, 353,076 people were employed in the industry including 245,900 in Hollywood alone. Film workers collectively earned $21.2 billion nationwide, $17.2 billion of it in Hollywood. In other words, Hollywood is still the heart of the industry. Yet this apparent asset for California also has its drawbacks, for it is the state that has consequently been the hardest hit by runaway productions.16

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15 When a studio relocates its production outside California many workers find themselves forced to leave the state or the country for fear of irrevocably losing their jobs. Job loss figures speak for themselves: between 1988 and 1998, the number of full- time film industry jobs plummeted from 76,000 to 12,000.17 The consequences are serious since unemployed workers are generally deprived of pension benefits and see their health care removed.

16 Also, when a studio budgets a movie, it must consider both “above the line” costs that include actors and directors and ‘below the line’ costs of supporting actors, makeup artists, craftsmen, and others. It is clearly the latter who are more vulnerable to employment flexibility brought about by runaway productions as producers take advantage of cheap labor costs outside Hollywood.18 This phenomenon has become increasingly commonplace even if, when the runaway production is in the United States, many IATSE workers are given the option of following the crew or risk losing their jobs. Following the crew means leaving Hollywood, sometimes for months.19

The Unions’ Response

17 For most IATSE officials the only solution is to obtain the intervention of Congress or state legislatures. This is not new. In 1949, Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors’ Guild and actor Kenneth Thompson with IATSE president Richard Walsh, met President Truman to inform him about the problems raised by runaway productions. Later, as Governor of California, Reagan would advocate a laissez-faire policy based on the idea that governments should not interfere, yet he asked the federal government to improve the situation of Hollywood workers facing runaway productions.20

18 Today, the IATSE represents a powerful lobby that continues to push for political intervention. The California Coalition for Entertainment Jobs, a coalition of Hollywood labor unions and guilds, has recently put pressure on the legislature to obtain job- saving tax credits and wage-based tax incentives. 21 IATSE lobbyists have been ever- present in congressional hearings and endeavored to convince California state elected officials to pass legislation to this effect. Edward Brown, business agent of IATSE Local 44 (prop men), has testified several times before the California legislature. In 2007 he openly favored the voting of tax credits:

19 Incentives absolutely could be helpful…. We’re really being affected by a loss of jobs that traditionally have been located here in Southern California but which have been exported to other states…. Our members are forced to chase jobs being shifted to other states…. Other states are aggressively pursuing our tax dollars by going after our productions. In effect, they’re stealing our money.22

20 Meanwhile, some IATSE locals have launched campaigns against foreign countries that grant substantial tax credits. How effective is such lobbying on politicians? On the one hand, union solidarity between the Screen Actors’ Guild and IATSE leadership succeeded in the New York state Congress passing a 2006 law that increased tax credits for productions shot in the city:

21 The new legislation significantly increases the state 10% credit from $25 million to $60 million; allows New York City to more than double its 5% tax credit from $12.5 million per year to $30 million per year for production shot within the city…. SAG lobbied aggressively…. The guild worked in concert with IATSE.23

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22 On the other hand, Hollywood workers have paradoxically been unable to benefit from any similar law. IATSE members in Hollywood have been struggling for years to prevent runaway productions, whether domestic or international, while their leadership has won what is perceived as a victory in New York. If other states follow this example, Hollywood will continue to lose jobs.

23 What is striking here is how little has been done to encourage producers, who are plainly responsible for the situation, to review their practices. IATSE has been reluctant to go on strike in recent years even if such a decision is hard to make given the numerous legal obstacles that prevent workers from taking this step. It is also obvious that internal bureaucratic procedures and the lack of autonomy within IATSE local unions act to dissuade the rank and file from launching such movements. In addition, actors’ or writers’ strikes have already demonstrated how weak solidarity between Hollywood unions actually is. In 1960, the Screen Actors’ Guild went on strike over television residuals. As soon as the movement began, IATSE president Richard Walsh was concerned about possible unemployment among his members. He did not hesitate to order IATSE workers to cross actors’ picket lines.24

24 How runaway productions will evolve in the future is difficult to predict. With foreign crews coming to work in the US, attracted by an attractive currency exchange rate, even a weak dollar is not enough to stem the phenomenon of international runaway productions. American federalism is also a problem. If many states have the union shop system in their laws, Utah, for instance, does not and it is no coincidence that it is drawing more and more productions with its offer of a cheap labor force.

25 Many countries can now compete with the technical innovations that were initiated in Hollywood. Foreign motion picture companies have at their disposal facilities that once made Hollywood world capital of the movie industry. Also, globalization that keeps on crossing more borders and the World Trade Organization and its neoliberal approach are set to encourage movie production outside Hollywood. It will be up to Hollywood labor unions to cope with this problem by themselves.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker Roberts, Osborn. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Operators in the United States and Canada. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1933.

Berstein, Irving. Hollywood at the Crossroads: An Economic Study of the Motion Picture Industry. Hollywood: Hollywood AFL Film Council, December 1957.

Center for Entertainment and Data Research. The Migration of Feature Film Production From the US to Canada and Beyond, Year 2001 Production Report. Los Angeles, 2002.

Conant, Michael. Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry: Economic and Legal Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.

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Diorio, Al. “Politicians Focus On Runaway Production.” Hollywood Reporter, June 25, 2007. http:// democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/filmproduction/articles/20070625Art001.htm .

Free Library, AB 2747 Was Voted One Dissenting Vote. http://www.Thefreelibrary.com/ AB+Passes+California+Stae+Assembly%3B+Anti-Runaway+Production .

Freeman, Gregory, Kyser, Jack, Sidhu, Nancy, Huang, George, Montoya, Michael. What is the Cost of Runaway Production? Jobs, Wages, Economic Output and State Tax Revenue at Risk When Motion Picture Production Leaves California. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, August 2005.

Hearings Before the General Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Labor and Education, House of Representatives, Ninety Second Congress, First Session on Unemployment Problems in American Film Industry, Hearings Held at Los Angeles, California, October 29 and 30, 1971. Printing Government Office.

Lovell, Hugh, Carter, Tasile. Collective Bargaining in the Motion Picture Industry. Institute of Industrial Relations, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955.

McDougal, Dennis. The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood. New York: Crown Publishers, 1998.

Monitor Company. The Economic Impact of U.S Film and Television Runaway Production. Cambridge, June 1999.

Perry, Louis B., Perry, Richard S. A History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement, 1911-1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963.

Ross, Murray. Stars and Strikes: Unionization of Hollywood. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941.

Schulberg, Budd. Moving Picture: Memoires of a Hollywood Prince. London: Penguin Books, 1984.

Screen Actors’ Guild. SAG Worked with Coalition of Unions on Tax Incentive Bill worth $400 million, April 27, 2006, http://www.sag.org/content/guild-victory-big-apple-takes-another-bite-out-of- runaway-production .

Ulich, Pamela Conley, Simmons, Lance. “Motion Picture Production: To Run or Stay Made in the USA.” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review, Vol. 21:357, 2001.

NOTES

1. IATSE locals include: laboratory technicians, make-up artists, scenic artists, stagehands, property craftsmen, grips, studio carpenters, costumers, sound technicians, etc. 2. Hugh Lovell and Tasile Carter, Collective Bargaining in the Motion Picture Industry (Institute of Industrial Relations, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955) 18. 3. Roberts Osborn Baker, The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Operators in the United States and Canada (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1933). 4. Budd Schulberg, Moving Picture: Memoires of a Hollywood Prince (1981, London: Penguin Books, 1984) 206-7. 5. Michael Conant, Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry: Economic and Legal Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960) 107-153.

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6. Hearings Before the General Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Labor and Education, House of Representatives, Ninety Second Congress, First Session on Unemployment Problems in American Film Industry, Hearings Held at Los Angeles, California, October 29 and 30, 1971, Printing Government Office, 37. 7. Irving Bernstein, Hollywood at the Crossroads: An Economic Study of the Motion Picture Industry, Hollywood, Hollywood AFL Film Council, December 1957, 30-7. 8. Irving Bernstein, Hollywood at the Crossroads: An Economic Study of the Motion Picture Industry, Hollywood, Hollywood AFL Film Council, December 1957, 25-6, 45. 9. Hearings Before the General Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Labor and Education, House of Representatives, Ninety Second Congress, First Session on Unemployment Problems in American Film Industry, Hearings Held at Los Angeles, California, October 29 and 30, 1971, Printing Government Office, 37, 44. 10. Monitor Company, The Economic Impact of U.S. Film and Television Runaway Production, Cambridge, June 1999, 2-3. 11. Pamela Conley Ulich and Lance Simmons, “Motion Picture Production: To Run or Stay Made in the U.S.A,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review, 21:357 (2001): 358. 12. Pamela Conley Ulich and Lance Simmons, “Motion Picture Production: To Run or Stay Made in the U.S.A.” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review, 21:357 (2001): 367. 13. Gregory Freeman et al., What is the Cost of Runaway Production? Jobs, Wages, Economic Output and State Tax Revenue at Risk When Motion Picture Production Leaves California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, August 2005, 17. 14. Al Diorio, “Politicians Focus on Runaway Production,” Hollywood Reporter, June 25, 2007, http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/filmproduction/articles/20070625Art001.htm. . 15. Monitor Company, The Economic Impact of U.S Film and Television Runaway Production, Cambridge, June 1999, 4. 16. Gregory Freeman et al., What is the Cost of Runaway Production? Jobs, Wages, Economic Output and State Tax Revenue at Risk When Motion Picture Production Leaves California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, August 2005, 2. 17. Monitor Company, The Economic Impact of U.S Film and Television Runaway Production, Cambridge, June 1999, 15-6. 18. Monitor Company, The Economic Impact of U.S Film and Television Runaway Production, Cambridge, June 1999, 18-8, 28. 19. Al Diorio, “Politicians Focus On Runaway Production,” Hollywood Reporter, June 25, 2007, http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/filmproduction/articles/20070625Art001.htm. . 20. Hearings Before the General Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Labor and Education, House of Representatives, Ninety Second Congress, First Session on Unemployment Problems in American Film Industry, Hearings Held at Los Angeles, California, October 29 and 30, 1971, Printing Government Office, 53. 21. Free Library, AB 2747 Was Voted One Dissenting Vote, http://www.Thefreelibrary.com/ AB+Passes+California+Stae+Assembly%3B+Anti-Runaway+Production. . 22. Al Diorio, “Politicians Focus On Runaway Production,” Hollywood Reporter, June 25, 2007, http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/filmproduction/articles/20070625Art001.htm. . 23. Screen Actors’ Guild, SAG Worked with Coalition of Unions on Tax Incentive Bill worth $400 million, April 27, 2006, http://www.sag.org/content/guild-victory-big-apple-takes-another-bite-out-of- runaway-production. .

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24. Dennis McDougal, The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998) 263.

ABSTRACTS

This study tries to show the impact of runaway productions on Hollywood labor unions. In the context of globalization, and also of US federalism used to lower labor standards, the unions’ response towards the producers has generally been weak despite some successes in recent years, notably of the screen writers in 2007. Among all the unionized in the motion picture industry, members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and members of the Screen Actors’ Guild are some of the most vulnerable.

INDEX

Keywords: Hollywood, motion picture industry, Hollywood labor organizations, talent guilds, runaway productions, International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), Motion Picture Association of America (MPPA)

AUTHOR

DANIEL PELTZMAN

Daniel Peltzman is an Associate Professor in American Studies at the Université de Franche- Comté, Besançon, France. His research area is Hollywood trade unions, as well as McCarthyism. Université de Franche-Comté

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The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, 2009): An American Independent Movie or a European Film?

Céline Murillo

“That’s all we have, accents” For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood, 1943)

1 Although The Limits of Control is considered a US film, it was shot in Spain, partly in Almeria, where many other English-speaking films, such as Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), 2001 A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), 100 Rifles (Tom Gries, 1968) or Conan The Barbarian (John Millius, 1981), to quote but a few, were shot. 1 Moreover, Jarmusch gathered money worldwide to finance it. Indeed, the film’s two production companies are American, Point Blank Films, and Japanese, Entertainment Farm, which funded such projects as Nine Lives (Rodrigo Garcia, 2006) or Tokyo Sonata (Kyoshi Kurosawa, 2008). On site, Jarmusch worked with Spanish units, and cast actors from many different countries. French-Ivorian star Isaac de Bankolé is the main character. Two other Frenchmen play in the film: Jean-Louis Stévenin and Alex Descas, who comes from the French West Indies. Luis Tosar and Oscar Jaenda are Spanish, while Gael Garcia Bernal is Mexican. Yuki Kudoh is Japanese; Hiam Abbas, Palestinian; Tilda Swinton and John Hurt are British. Bill Murray is the only American actor.

2 The aim of this article is to find out whether the film is indeed American, first by explaining why it is institutionally considered so. To that end, we will use the economic and aesthetic criteria that define an American film-maker, or even an American author. Second, comparing American and Spanish press reviews will lead us to see how reception depends on a national stance. By taking into account these reviews we rely on context-activated reception theory. We will proceed to link the reviews with the “historical context” and find “meaning or significance” in “that contextual intersection.”2 Studying reception leads us to consider the film’s viewing as an “event” related to other historical events, according to H. R. Jauss’s theory.3 To do so, we will consequently ground our discussion on the analysis of the film itself, moving from the film as event to the film as text, and from “context-activated” to “text-activated”

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interpretation. Both interpretative methods will again be relevant to grasp our third point where we will come to terms with the very notion of national identity in the film, since aesthetic, economic and geographic factors are entangled.

3 Before moving on to the study itself, let us sum up the plot. A main character who remains nameless for the spectator (Isaac de Bankolé, credited as Lone Man), leaves from a French airport for a mission whose goals are left unsaid but whose operating methods depend on philosophical principles such as “use your imagination and your skills,” “everything is subjective,” or “he who thinks he is bigger than the rest, will go to the cemetery.” By meeting several people who exchange matchboxes filled with coded instructions or diamonds, the main character progresses to the south of Spain, where he murders the boss of an unknown organization.

An Independent American Film

4 In the opening sequence the man who explains the mission (Alex Descas) mainly speaks Creole peppered with a few sentences in Spanish. Meanwhile his assistant translates as much as he can into English to Lone Man, who is diegetically an English speaker. The snag is that neither Stévenin, who plays the translator's role, nor Bankolé are native English speakers. They are both French. The confusion of idioms–which does not imply a confusion of meanings–sets the tone of the film. Is this multilingual film really an American indie movie?

5 Director Jim Jarmusch owns an American passport and also owns the negatives of all his films. These possessions make him American and independent, technically speaking. Yet “technically” does not have the same value in both cases, whereas it is relatively easy to be an American citizen, it is extremely difficult to be independent de facto. Indeed cinematic independence is both hard to define and hard to get. It is linked to several levels of filmmaking that are financial (being independent from the major studios), aesthetic and ideological (being able to “depart from some or all conventions associated with classical narrative and film style”), and symbolic (being labeled as an independent and bringing added symbolic value as such). 4

6 On the financial level, the independence of Jarmusch’s film appears to be somehow tricky as its distributor in the US is Focus Features–NBC Universal’s classics division. However he has two production companies that are unrelated to the majors.

7 Apart from economic criteria, aesthetic ones define The Limits of Control as an independent American film since it is located “in the space that exists between the more familiar-conventional mainstream and the more radical departures of the avant- garde and the underground.”5

8 Above all, it is “foregrounding form,”6 while narrative claims remain in the background. Spectators can easily point out some of Jarmusch’s distinctive features in this film, for example his taste for repetition.7 First there are numerous lateral travelling shots: this way Jarmusch frames countryside and urban landscapes so as to emphasize their repetitive features, be it a row of white cisterns or simply lampposts. He thus creates a visual rhythm, a technique he had already used extensively in Down by Law (1986), where rows of graves and the void among them were included in the same travelling shot that displayed shingle houses. The Limits of Control also relies on an episodic structure. This first encounter, just like all the others, begins with the very

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casual sentence “You don't speak Spanish, do you?” or in Spanish “¿Usted no habla español, verdad?,” a password that enables Lone Man to identify those he is working for. He receives minimal instructions, “Go to the towers, go to the café, look out for the violin.” He is finally given keys and a matchbox containing a coded message. After this programmatic sequence and throughout the film, Lone Man/Bankolé will follow a sophisticated personal routine, practicing Tai Chi every day, sleeping with his clothes on, drinking two espressos at a time (yet in separate cups) and going to the museum to see just one painting per visit. The people he meets to advance his mission also respect a set protocol. They monologue for a few minutes about philosophical, cultural or scientific topics, exchange matchboxes with Lone Man and give him instructions that remain obscure for the spectator. Meanwhile, Lone Man remains silent the whole time. Each meeting works as an episode. The main character’s routine as well as the meeting’s protocol bring about a series of repetitions that are already found in other episodic movies by Jim Jarmusch such as Night on Earth (1990) or Coffee and Cigarettes (2003). Eventually, Jarmusch takes the liberty to show the same event twice, successively (he repeats the moment when Lone Man removes the pistols in the hand of his aptly named contact, Nude)–a deliberate stylistic ornament he resorts to for the first time.

9 The emphasis laid on style goes hand in hand with a narrative where causality is kept minimal. The film’s summary fits in a five-line paragraph where crucial pieces of information are lacking. We do not know the name of the main character, the goal of his mission, nor the nature of the organization he is fighting against in the end. Stylization and pared down causality make Jarmusch an American “auteur,” a title formerly reserved to French film-makers, but which took American citizenship thanks to Andrew Sarris in the 1950s.8 And there again, on the level of independence as a discourse, Jarmusch is seen as the arch independent, his name functioning as a selling argument–it is impossible to open a book on American Independent Cinema without reading about Jarmusch, and more particularly about his second film, Stranger than Paradise (1984), which appears as a case study for “ideal” independence as defined by Emmanuel Levy: “an indie is a fresh low-budget movie with a gritty style and offbeat subject matter that express the filmmaker’s personal vision.”9

Jarmusch's Spanish film

10 While the director’s nationality is not difficult to establish (compared to his independence), the film’s nationality is not that obvious. In order to assess it, we will turn to US and Spanish reviews and find out whether they reject or praise it, whether they deal with its nationality directly or through the film-maker’s, and how they comment on the representation of Spain. A study of US reviews reveals a lukewarm or even negative reception. The harshest criticism paradoxically offers the most detailed analysis. The film is seen as quintessentially Jarmuschian, even to a fault. It may be viewed as going far beyond “the limits of artistic self-indulgence”10 or boiling down to “the narrow inventory of Jarmusch’s thematic concerns.”11 Spain appears in two ways, indirectly, as the reviews refer to the deserts of the last third of the film, not to Andalucía, but to the shooting locations of the Spaghetti Westerns, and directly, when they comment on the city sequences.

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11 First, for Jim Hoberman, “[Lone Man] travels to a forsaken town in the middle of nowhere; he might be wandering through the afterlife. The landscape goes through cosmic changes en route to a pueblo that looks like it was last inhabited by the cast of a Spaghetti Western.”12 Here film enthusiasts’ references erase all documentary perception. Even if Jarmusch shot those sequences in the deserts and hills that were used for the setting of Spaghetti Westerns, he takes pains, contrary to Leone and his counterparts, to clearly locate these landscapes in southern Spain. The itinerary leading there is shown step by step, in a nearly didactic effort to localize places that had been purposefully disembodied by European and American films in the 1960s and the 1970s, namely all the James Bond films and Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), or The Three Musketeers (Richard Lester, 1973).

12 In the case of the Spaghetti Westerns, any Spanishness of the landscape was erased by the overwhelming power of the American Western mythology. On the contrary The Limits of Control labels the landscape as Spanish and even re-creates it thanks to an inventive cinematography. For example, as Lone Man travels by train from Seville to Almeria, the dull grey and brown tones of a sun-scorched countryside are seen through the train window in a lateral travelling shot that shows again and again the unspecific features of such an environment. Suddenly, this environment is replaced by an obliquely lit hub of highways under a very cloudy sky; the image becomes monochrome under this twilight, and silvery surfaces are surrounded by dark shapes that are like holes on the screen. The following shot cuts to a bi-chromatic landscape where the sky is blue and the hills are made of exceedingly contrasted patches of bright green and grey, the picture is deprived of depth and appears utterly bi-dimensional. These last two shots are accompanied by a saturated guitar chord that prevents one from hearing any other sound. For one moment we get the sense that it is a landscape seen in a dream, yet though a minimal color transformation, as the travelling shot continues, we discover quite realistic powdery hills. The change in colors creates an expectation in the spectator, who is then prone to reflect on what he is watching. The spectator’s attention is further directed to these uncommonly desert hills since the main character points towards them as he practices Tai Chi, designating them more as the subject of the shot than as its background. This is an invitation to re-envision the Spanish landscape, but American critics cannot follow the clear and new path designed by Jarmusch and cinematographer Chris Doyle.13

13 Second, the US critics value the quasi-documentary stance taken in the urban sequences shot in Madrid and Seville. However, some diminish Jarmusch’s work by making it into a mere holiday film which does not admit to being one. For example, Roger Ebert claims Bankolé could quote Gene Siskel: “I ask myself if I would enjoy myself more watching a documentary of the same actors having dinner.” Still speaking for Bankolé, he adds: “We all sat and thought about that, as the night breeze blew warm through the town, and a far-away mandolin told its tale”– a worn out, cheaply romantic sentence that reveals Ebert's contempt towards the film.14

14 Harsher criticisms reproach the film with its lack of meaning, namely because of a reductive ending which relies on “art, music, literature, cinema, sex and hallucinations banding together to provide the instruments by which the evil of soulless American capitalism can be destroyed.”15 All the complexities and inventions in the film would only boil down to the following erroneous, simple equations: ‘art = good,’ ‘commerce = bad’.

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15 Such an analysis reflects a marked rejection of the film and is tantamount to considering it as un-American (in the sense of the House Un-American Activities Committee). Subsequently, US reviews see the film as unlikely to break out of a very small art-house niche (and maybe they do not look forward to this), or alternately pretend to wonder how the film managed to get funding with those arguments. Putting these two items together suggests that the picture was able to get funding since it is confined to its American auteur niche, where it is harmless. But it can also more radically be seen as non-American, as if shading off its national identity, and catering to an audience that is not American either, but rather international.

16 The figures show that the film relied heavily on foreign grosses. In the U.S. it was screened from May to August 2009 in a limited number of theatres (there were only 27 copies). It grossed $427,000 nationally and in September 2010 foreign grosses amounted to $1,539,883 with a measly $95,120 in Spain16 that might also be attributed to the generally poor performance of cinema in Spain in 2010.17 Incidentally, according to the production notes costs for this film were higher than in any previous Jarmusch film.18

17 If the U.S. figures are consistent with the depreciative reviews, the Spanish ones do not reflect the opinion of the press. In other terms, positive reviews failed to attract viewers, even if the Spanish journalists reacted enthusiastically, responding positively to the elements which the US critics disapproved of.

18 First, instead of seeing the film’s stylization as excess of Jarmusch’s aesthetics, for them it brings new evidence that Jarmusch is “the master of independent cinema”19 or even its “guru.”20 Second, they profusely applaud the way Jarmusch describes their country: “bravo for the dry, disembodied, not at all touristy view Jarmusch is giving of the landscapes of Madrid, Seville and Almeria.”21 The adjective “dry” points to the need to bare Spain of its representative ornaments. The adjective “disembodied” rejects the Spanish tendency to represent itself and to be represented through what US academic Marsha Kinder names “Blood Cinema,” which she defines as “national cinema that is frequently described as excessive in its graphic description of violence and obsessive in its treatment of incestuous relations.”22 The third adjective “touristy” criticizes the accretions of clichés exaggerating Spanish idiosyncrasies. One of the articles denounces the tortillas contests, Scottish dances (an adulterated form of Flamenco) or decorated balconies,23 in other words the “Españolada,” a trend that had “originated in France during the period of romanticism,” “which cultivated the exotic nature and the local color of an underdeveloped part of southern Europe” and that Spain promoted as its self-image under the impulse of Franco.24

19 These reviews oppose tourism–a string of activities that form an organized tour–to Jarmusch’s proposed encounter with Spain. The film’s structure depends on the repetition of a ritual, which allows the plot to move on in a constantly unexpected way. Unlike in a tour, we never know beforehand what the itinerary will be, yet we can tell the main character will practice Tai Chi every morning and meet somebody who will trigger a new move.

20 Thirdly, the ending, much criticized in the US reviews, here elicits critical approval. It is seen as a worthy attempt to rebel against the Establishment, thanks to “a criticism of the American political class with a realist–that is to say, depreciative towards people– vision of things.”25 If we read the film as a comment on the film industry, then Jarmusch by shooting in the same locations as many super-productions, and by restoring the suppressed representation of Spain, does not directly attack capitalism

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but rather the filmic text it produces. In other words it deals a blow to Hollywood formula films by using Bill Murray's extremely short and helpless part to debunk the stereotype of the all-powerful “villain” protected by his bunker. Thus the critics rally Jarmusch’s cause since they wish to defend their national cinema against Hollywood’s hegemony.

21 Moreover Spanish critics repeatedly translate Jarmusch’s sentence, “You can kill people, you cannot remove their ideas,”26 which seems to find its source in Miguel de Unamuno’s famous speech during the civil war: “You will win [venceréis], because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince [pero no convenceréis]. In order to convince it is necessary to persuade, and to persuade you will need something that you lack: reason and right in the struggle.”27

22 Unamuno's sentence fits the film’s arguments even better than Jarmusch’s. It underlines the need for a true discourse (“reason”) and for an action (“the struggle”). In the film such a discourse is built as the various characters’ monologues progressively add up in the spectator’s mind. One talks about musical instruments memorizing every tune played on them, another sees old films as testimonies of the past, yet another explains the possibility to reconfigure objects thanks to their molecular structure, and eventually a fourth dwells on the subjectivity of perception and on hallucinations as a source of knowledge. Besides, even if the main character does not speak, his behavior corroborates the same theories by making imagination a tool and an art, a means for understanding the situation at hand.

23 If this is correct, then Lone Man's itinerary becomes a struggle to foster this system of thought, and the killing of the character called “American” is an action to defend it. Fighting for the right to develop an alternative philosophical system, which amounts to proposing an alternative apprehension of the world, is reminiscent of anti-Franquist action. This remains a vivid memory for Spanish people, when their country still bears the stigmata of a very long dictatorship (Franco only left power in 1975).

24 Altogether the interest of the film rests on its manifold links with Spain, including the representation of landscapes, cityscapes and the expression of anti-establishment thought. Analyzing US and Spanish receptions acutely shows how much one’s opinion depends on where one speaks from. The Limits of Control is a successful Spanish film, since it opposes Hollywood and helps a local cinema of sorts, while its alternative discourse resonates with still recent historical events. As an American film, it is a failure. The Americans cannot perceive the description of Spain; they are content with referring the film back to an American genre, the Western, and to the style of its American filmmaker. In addition to this, the underlying radical discourse opposing the existing power at best feels like a “tired and recycled”28 ideology–redolent of the sixties and seventies, which still retains the immaturity of “sophomoric koans.”29 At worse, it goes unnoticed, the film becoming an aimless accumulation of non-sequitur remarks whose trivial conclusion verges on the absurd: art is better than business. The national perspective on the film can either create or erase its merits, a case envisioned by the film itself through one of its mottos: “everything is subjective.”

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Doing away with nationality

25 Yet the Spanish critics rather focus on their own national identity than on the idea of national identity as a generic concept. We will now, proceed to show how the film deconstructs this concept.

26 First, thanks to an international cast, Jarmusch underlines nationality only to better negate it later. Indeed, the actors' nationalities are nearly never mentioned (except for one character who announces “Mexican will find you, he has the driver”). The characters do not dwell long on the screen, they are mainly defined by the ideas they express in their monologues in which nationality is irrelevant. The only occasion when the characters deal with national identity is when they are trying to make sense of the word “Bohemian”. Since the former links of the word with the Czech region are not valid anymore, “Bohemian” has referred since the nineteenth century, as in Puccini’s opera La Bohême (1896), to a transnational chosen identity–an identity that signifies both internationalization and exclusion, from wealthy upper class elites, particularly in America. A first character positively sees “Bohemians” as a source of artistic creation, while, on the contrary, at the end of the film the character called ‘American’ uses the term to exclude and despise all those who work with Lone Man.

27 Second, the role of language as a factor for national cohesion does not apply. The characters speak various idioms that correspond: • to the language spoken by the main character, i.e. English; • to the language of the place where the film is located, that is Spanish; • to the actors’ nationalities.

28 French, Creole, Spanish, Japanese, English and Arabic are subtitled for the spectator, but we guess that the main character cannot speak these languages, hence he is able to understand his interlocutors’ meanings beyond the linguistic barriers.

29 Here Jarmusch reworks a theme he first developed in Ghost Dog (1999). Ghost Dog is an English-speaking African-American killer who has conversations with a French- speaking ice-cream man (who cannot understand a word of English). Yet both friends seem to understand each other beyond words. One repeats what the other has just said, which shows they have developed a common mind.

30 In The Limits of Control, if Lone Man cannot speak Spanish, it is not to promote a form of linguistic imperialism that makes English the only worthy language, but because he does not pay attention to nor does he trust foreign languages, or even, language in general for that matter – an idea that stems from the essay by William Burroughs, which gave its title to the film. The core idea in this text is that language is the ultimate control tool.30 Indeed, such power derives from what Claude Lefort calls “the enigma of language–namely that it is both internal and external to the speaking subject, that there is an articulation of the self with others, which marks the emergence of the self and which the self does not control.”31

31 In the same way, the building where the Madrid sequences are shot, is a metaphor of Jarmusch’s rejection of language as a control tool. Its name, Torres Blancas, contradicts what it really is: “torres” means “towers” in the plural, yet we can only see one single tower, and “blancas” means “white” whereas it is grey. The building, which lacks straight angles, was designed by architect Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza to be “a tree,” that is, a vegetal instead of an artefact, and thus to transform a “goats’ landscape into a

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men’s landscape.”32 In other words, the open conception of categories that are usually clearly separated in language such as mineral, vegetal or artifact is the key to designing a humanist abode. This makes it all the more significant that Jarmusch chose Spain as a general location partly because he wanted to shoot some sequences in Torres Blancas. Spain, in the film, thus does not answer anymore to the “Españolada” clichés, but becomes the country where there are buildings that negate the controlling power of language. In this film, where people communicate beyond linguistic barriers, Torres Blancas could be seen as an attempt to erase the myth of the Tower of Babel and promote free global human communication.

32 Moreover, when Jarmusch explains his creative process in interviews,33 he mentions picking up Spain right in the middle of choosing actors, as if Spain were an actor among others. This subtly yet deeply alters the common idea of Landscape as Character, into Country as Actor. We may draw the logical conclusion that Jarmusch directs rather than represents Spain, which makes the notion of Spanish national identity no more important than the nationality of any other actor.

33 Jarmusch’s film opens up the notion of national identity, putting it into perspective by foregrounding the figure of the stranger–the main character does not even speak the country’s idiom. Moreover Jarmusch constantly considers himself an alien, partly because of his European roots, but also because he has always felt estranged in the conservative town of Akron, Ohio, where he was born.

34 In all his films, estrangement has been an ideological tool to attack mainstream tenets. The sense of belonging nationally to a country always appears frail and irrelevant. From his training with Nicholas Ray, he has appropriated the sentence his master used as the working title for all his movies: “I am a stranger here myself” (which is the title of a Kurt Weil song). The main character in Permanent Vacation (1980), who feels distant from his own country, moves to France where he still experiences the same feeling. He thus voices the director’s creed: “a stranger’s always a stranger.” In his second film, Stranger than Paradise (1985), Jarmusch continues his reflection on American identity by portraying Hungarian immigrants who are trying to figure out linguistic and behavioral customs. In Night on Earth (1991), a young Japanese couple visits Memphis where they are, as the intertitle, “Lost in space,” puts it. They speak little English but they want to erase cultural differences by, for example, explaining that the only difference between Yokohama and Memphis comes from the number of houses. Then Night on Earth (1991) features a series of dialogues taking place at night in taxis driving through different cities around the world. It tends to unify the various countries it represents thanks to identical narrative and aesthetic choices and repeated conversational themes. Only a couple of anti-touristic shots at the beginning of each episode ironically point at the notion of national identity while the persona of the actors is so powerful that individual identity comes to the forefront. From then on, Jarmusch did not tackle the topic directly any more. However, he has continued his reflection on estrangement in the last episode of Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), where the notion of national identity is entirely absent and the characters nevertheless experience nostalgia in their own country. Taylor Mead declares: “I’m divorced with the world.”

35 Altogether Jarmusch’s standpoint corresponds to Julia Kristeva’s rhetorical question: “How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one's own country, language, sex and identity?”34

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36 While production conditions make The Limits of Control an American independent film, the film critics in this country reject the anti-free-trade ideas in it that eventually make it un-American. But all depends on one’s point of view and for Spanish critics the film offers an innovative vision of their own country, a vision that remains altogether invisible to their American counterparts. To the Spanish, the film’s ending is liberating and anti-fascist. Paradoxically, this national appraisal depends on a reading that grants nationality little importance. Hence Spain finds a restoration of its identity in a text whose aims are to dissolve this very notion. Jarmusch seems to be using one of Bryan Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards he loves,35 to foster ideas that have been his own ever since he was a filmmaker. The freedom he shows in his filming techniques–his creative independence–should be a means to help the spectator see this question from a different angle. However, his discourse, for the moment, only reaches a limited audience.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Los limites del control, El profesional.” Decine21. http://www.decine21.com/ Peliculas/Los- limites-del-control-18058 .

“Press Conference The Limits of Control (OV).” Tuesday, September 22, 2009. http:// www.sansebastianfestival.com/in/tv2.php .

Berardinelli, James. Reel Views. April 28th 2009. http://www.reelviews.net/ php_review_template.php?identifier=1614 .

Burr, Ty. “The Limits of Control, an artful dud from Jarmusch.” Boston Globe, May 10, 2009. http:// www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2009/05/08/an_artful_dud_from_Jarmusch .

Burroughs, William. “The Limits of Control.” In Word Virus, editors James Grauerholz & Ira Silverberg, 339-341. New York: Grove Press, 1998.

Ebert, Roger. “The Limits of Control.” Chigago Sun Times, May 6, 2009. http:// rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090506/REVIEWS/905069987 .

Fernandez Santos, Elsa. “En la azotea de Jim Jarmusch : un recorrido por los escenarios españoles de la última película del cineasta.” El Pais, August 12, 2009. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/ revista/agosto/azotea/Jim/Jarmusch/elpepirdv/20090812elpepirdv_1/Tes .

Gubern, Romàn. “1930-1936: II Republic.” In Spanish Cinema 1896-1983, ed. Roger Mortimore, 34-37. [trans. E. Nelson Modlin III]. Madrid: Ministerio de la cultura, 1986.

Hoberman, Jim. “Jarmusch's Mythic Limits of Control His Best Since Dead Man.” Village Voice, April 28, 2009. http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-04-29/film/jarmusch-s-mythic-limits-of-control-is- his-best-since-dead-man/ .

Jauss, Hans Robert. Pour une Esthétique de la réception. Paris : Gallimard, 1972.

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Kinder, Marsha. Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain. Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1993.

King, Geoff. American Independent Cinema. London: IB Tauris, 2005.

Kristeva, Julia. “A New Type of Intellectual: the Dissident.” In editor T. Moi. The Julia Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

Lefort, Claude. The Political Forms of Modern Society. Cambridge: Polity, 1986.

Levy, Emmanuel. The Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Cinema. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Litch, Alan. “The Jim Jarmusch Unedited.” The Wire, Issue 309, November 2009. http:// www.thewire.co.uk/articles/3253/ .

Lopez, Sergi. “Los límites del control, el camino del samurai.” Canal TCM, October 9, 2009. http:// www.canaltcm.com/estadocritico/post/2009/10/12/los-limites-del-control-camino-del-samurai .

Márquez Úbeda, José. Almería, plató de cine. Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, 2009.

McCarthy, Todd. “The Limits of Control.” Variety 414 11 (April 4, 2009): 15. http:// www.variety.com/review/VE1117940105.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 .

Murillo, Céline. “L’Esthétique des films de Jim Jarmusch : répétition et référence.” PhD diss., Université de Toulouse, 2008.

Prado, Benjamín. “Volver atrás en busca del futuro.” El Pais, August 13, 2009. http:// www.elpais.com/articulo/madrid/Volver/busca/futuro/elpepiespmad/20090813elpmad_15/Tes .

Prieto, Dan. “Jim Jarmusch y su película de espías 'a la Malasaña'.” El Mundo, September 23, 2009. http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/09/22/cultura/1253646133.html .

Sarris, Andrew. “Citizen Kane, The American Baroque.” Film Culture, 9 (1956): 14.

Smith, Gavin. “Altered States.” Film Comment, May-June 2009. http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/ mj09.htm .

Staiger, Janet. Interpreting Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Tobias, Scott. “The Limits of Control.” The Onion AV, April 30, 2009. http://www.avclub.com/ articles/the-limits-of-control,27390/ .

Tzioumakis, Yannis. American Independent Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

NOTES

1. José Márquez Úbeda, Almería, plató de cine (Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, 2009). 2. Janet Staiger, Interpreting Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 3. Viewing the historical event as a construction, he is able to link Art History with History at large. Hans Robert Jauss, Pour une Esthétique de la réception (Paris : Gallimard, 1972). 4. Yannis Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) 7. 5. Geoff King, American Independent Cinema (London: IB Tauris, 2005) 10. 6. King, American Independent Cinema 137-164.

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7. Céline Murillo, L’Esthétique des films de Jim Jarmusch : répétition et référence (PhD diss., Université de Toulouse, 2008) 147-314. 8. Andrew Sarris, “Citizen Kane, The American Baroque,” Film Culture, 9 (1956): 14. 9. Emmanuel Levy, The Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 1999) 9. 10. Todd McCarthy, “The Limits of Control,” Variety, 414 11 (April 4, 2009): 15, http:// www.variety.com/review/VE1117940105.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 . 11. Scott Tobias, “The Limits of Control”, The Onion AV, April 30, 2009, http://www.avclub.com/ articles/the-limits-of-control,27390/ . 12. Jim Hoberman, “Jarmusch’s Mythic Limits of Control His Best Since Dead Man”, Village Voice, April 28, 2009. http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-04-29/film/jarmusch-s-mythic-limits-of- control-is-his-best-since-dead-man/ . 13. Chris Doyle is better known as Wong Kar Wai’s cinematographer. He also shot Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (2007). 14. Roger Ebert, “The Limits of Control,” Chigago Sun Times, May 6, 2009, http:// rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090506/REVIEWS/905069987 . 15. James Berardinelli, Reel Views, April 28, 2009, http://www.reelviews.net/ php_review_template.php?identifier=1614 . 16. “Box Office Mojo.” http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&id=limitsofcontrol.htm/ . 17. “El Cine en Datos y Cifras.” http://www.mcu.es/cine/MC/CDC/Evolucion/MercadoCine.html . 18. Access to the official production notes was granted to us by Carter Logan, Jim Jarmusch’s assistant and associate producer for The Limits of Control. 19. Benjamin Prado, “Volver atrás en busca del futuro,” El Pais, August 13, 2009 [“el maestro del cine independiente”]. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/madrid/Volver/busca/futuro/elpepiespmad/ 20090813elpmad_15/Tes . 20. Dan Prieto, “Jim Jarmusch y su película de espías 'a la Malasaña',” El Mundo, September 23, 2009 [“el gurú del cine independiente americano”]. http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/ 2009/09/22/cultura/1253646133.html . 21. Sergi Lopez, “Los límites del control, el camino del samurai,” Canal TCM, October 9, 2009 [ “Bravo por la visión seca, descarnada, nada turística, que Jarmusch da de los paisajes de Madrid, Sevilla y Almería”]. http://www.canaltcm.com/estadocritico/post/2009/10/12/los-limites-del- control-camino-del-samurai . 22. Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1993) 1. 23. Prado, “Volver atrás en busca del futuro,” http://www.elpais.com/articulo/madrid/Volver/ busca/futuro/elpepiespmad/20090813elpmad_15/Tes . 24. Romàn Gubern, “1930-1936: II Republic,” in Spanish Cinema 1896-1983, ed. Roger Mortimore [trans. E. Nelson Modlin III]. (Madrid: Ministerio de la cultura, 1986) 34-37. 25. “Los limites del control, El profesional,” Decine21 [“una crítica a la clase política estadounidense con una visión 'realista' - o sea, despreciativa hacia las personas- de las cosas”]. http://www.decine21.com/ Peliculas/Los-limites-del-control-18058 . 26. Transcribed from San Sebastian Film Festival. “Press Conference The Limits of Control (OV)” Tuesday, September 22, 2009, http://www.sansebastianfestival.com/in/tv2.php . Translated into Spanish as “Puedes eliminar físicamente a la gente, pero sus ideas

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quedarán ahí,” Prieto, “Jim Jarmusch y su película de espías” http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/ 2009/09/22/cultura/1253646133.html. 27. Miguel de Unamuno, speech delivered on October 12, 1936 [“Venceréis, porque tenéis sobrada fuerza bruta. Pero no convenceréis. Para convencer hay que persuadir. Y para persuadir necesitaríais algo que os falta: razón y derecho en la lucha”]. 28. McCarthy, “The Limits of Control,” http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117940105.html? categoryid=31&cs=1 . 29. Ty Burr, “The Limits of Control, an artful dud from Jarmusch,” Boston Globe, May 10, 2009, http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2009/05/08/an_artful_dud_from_Jarmusch . 30. William Burroughs, “The Limits of Control,” in Word Virus, eds. James Grauerholz & Ira Silverberg (New York: Grove Press, 1998) 339-341. 31. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1986) 212. 32. Quoted in Elsa Fernandez Santos, “En la azotea de Jim Jarmusch : un recorrido por los escenarios españoles de la última película del cineasta”, El Pais, August 12, 2009 [“transformar un paisage de cabras en paisage de hombres” ]. http://www.elpais com/articulo/revista/agosto/ azotea/Jim/Jarmusch/elpepirdv/20090812elpepirdv_1/Tes . 33. Gavin Smith, “Altered States,” Film Comment, May-June 2009, http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/ mj09.htm . 34. Julia Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual: the Dissident,” in ed. T. Moi, The Julia Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 298. 35. Alan Litch, “The Jim Jarmusch Unedited,” The Wire, Issue 309, November 2009, http:// www.thewire.co.uk/articles/3253/ .

ABSTRACTS

The Limits of Control is considered an American film, although it relies on funding coming from foreign countries and on a multinational cast. The analysis of American reviews shows a rejection of the movie that is seen as un-American; American critics fail to focus on the film maker’s original depiction of Spain. Conversely, Spanish critics warmly welcome Jarmusch’s film. Their interest centers on the new vision of Spain it offers, and on the ideological criticism expressed by the various characters. Such a national approval paradoxically stems from a filmic text where nationality is voluntarily deconstructed through themes that are cut off from any references to nationality, and from a general defiance towards language, which undermines the role of national idioms in the building of national identity.

INDEX

Keywords: independent movie, Spain, nation, language, Jim Jarmusch

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AUTHOR

CÉLINE MURILLO

Céline Murillo is an Associate Professor at the Université Paris 13, France. In 2008, she defended her thesis on aesthetics in Jim Jarmusch’s films. Her current research area focuses on the redefining of independent cinema in the United States. Université Paris 13 - Nord

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Sharing the Joke? ‘Britcom’ Remakes in the United States: A Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective

Amandine Ducray

1 Since the publication of Herbert Schiller’s Mass Communications and American Empire in 1969, theories of North American ‘cultural imperialism’ have been seminal in the fields of transnational broadcasting and cultural studies. As Jeffrey Miller underlines, however: “At the very moment Schiller was identifying […] the role of American media in creating ‘its emergent imperial society,’ the domestic producers and consumers of those media were themselves experiencing a new flow of messages and texts from Britain.”1 In 1964, NBC blazed a trail when it remade the BBC satirical show That Was the Week That Was (1962-63).2 This was soon followed by another ‘entertainment’ transfer, the Bond-inspired series The Avengers (ITV, 1961-69), broadcast on ABC (1965-69) in its original version, and, a few years later, by All in the Family (CBS, 1971-79), adapted from Till Death Us Do Part, launched on BBC1 in 1966. The latter represented a further landmark in television history; it was the first British sitcom–or ‘Britcom’ as they are called in the United States–to be remade for American viewers.3

2 As illustrated here, in the US, British formats can either be broadcast in their original versions or retooled to meet an American audience’s tastes and expectations. Regarding comedy, the alignment of ‘encoding’–i.e. how messages are produced by the television institution–and ‘decoding’–how they are received–appears paramount given the idiosyncratic nature of humour.4 For if joke-telling implies a tacit ‘contract,’ situation comedy, through ‘canned laughter’ and constant repetition, tends to institutionalise such community bonding. This must be the reason why most American mainstream broadcasters choose the remake option. Due to national specificities in terms of characters, settings and cultural references, as well as to the general feeling of shared knowledge conveyed in British sitcoms, these are often precisely deemed ‘too British’ by American viewers, not to mention the accent, which, though sometimes a

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selling point, may also deter some from watching a programme.5 All elements therefore need to be adapted, or ‘Americanized,’ for viewers to be able to share the joke. “You can laugh about everything,” French humorist Pierre Desproges once said, “but probably not with everyone,” he added.6

3 Following a historical approach, in this article, I shall first examine the birth of situation comedy in the US and in Great Britain. After observing how different types of humour have been constructed, I shall study what motivated American producers to adapt ‘Britcoms’ from the 1970s onwards. Through a sample of case-studies, this development should allow me to map out what determined the success, or failure, of these remakes, before moving on to the latest hit in such cross-cultural translation, the NBC version of the BBC’s The Office.

American and British situation comedies: contrasted origins (1930s-1960s)

4 Coined in the United States in the 1930s, the term ‘situation comedy’ was first applied to Amos ’n’ Andy, launched in 1926, on a Chicago radio station–originally as Sam ’n’ Henry –and brought to television by CBS, in the early 1950s. Following the tribulations of two African-Americans who had moved from Atlanta to Chicago, the programme was influenced by sundry forms of contemporary entertainment, including minstrelsy, slapstick, and variety theatre. Another influence was newspapers comic strips, such as The Gumps (1917-59), from which Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the scriptwriters of Amos ’n’ Andy, were specifically asked to draw their inspiration.7 Based on a short narrative structure with little plot development allowing the weekly repetition of a fixed situation, comic strips were a formidable asset in building up audience loyalty. The technique was then replicated on the radio, where Amos ’n’ Andy itself was designed as ‘appointment programming,’ i.e. “a show around which families tended to structure their domestic arrangements [so as not] to miss an episode.”8 As such, the series soon caught the attention of sponsors, notably Pepsodent, which used the black heroes’ smiles as a foil for its dental hygiene products.

5 In turn, the advent of television in the 1950s boosted the commercial value of sitcoms as American households were increasingly seen as HUTs (‘Homes Using Television’) and viewers as consumers. On moving to the small screen, the genre underwent two changes, in terms of format and situation. To this day, the length and time slot assignment of sitcoms are strongly codified; most are weekly half-hour programmes broadcast prime-time and the plot is written to run a total of 22 minutes in length, leaving 8 minutes for commercials. As for the situation, tying the new medium to advertising produced a focus on middle-class domesticity; the decade saw the birth of ‘dom-coms’ and of the archetypal “WASP sitcom family.”9 The Burns and Allen Show (CBS radio and TV, 1936-58) and My Favorite Husband / I Love Lucy (CBS radio, 1948-51; CBS TV, 1951-60) were exemplary in this respect. The latter even served as a template for the genre on television; the first to be shot in front of a studio audience, whose reactions were recorded as a ‘laughter track,’ it also pioneered the use a three-camera- set-up–a technique still central to most sitcoms.

6 Meanwhile, in Great Britain, the BBC’s monopoly had created a completely different landscape. Initially established as a state-funded body, the BBC did not carry

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advertising, as the 1923 Sykes report had made clear.10 Moreover, under the long- lasting Directorship of John Reith (1922-38), it was committed to ‘Public Service Broadcasting’ through a tripartite mission “to inform, to educate and to entertain.” Comedy consequently came last on the list of priorities of the BBC, which, in the early years at least, tended to equate entertainment strictly with light band music. During the Second World War, however, British listeners enjoyed more and more European stations like Radio Luxembourg and Radio Normandie, which did not hesitate to tap into American-style entertainment. Combined with John Reith’s departure from the BBC in 1938, such competition fostered the appearance of the proto-sitcoms Mr. Muddlecombe, JP (1937-53), starring Robb Wilton, and Band Waggon (1938-39), in which Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch played an eccentric couple living on the roof of the ‘Broadcasting House,’ i.e. the official headquarters of the BBC. First influenced by music hall, where their comedians came from, over the years, both shows gradually abandoned the variety model to embrace a US-inspired sitcom format. The same can be said of It’s That Man Again (1939-49), the first deliberate attempt “to produce British programmes with American-style quick-fire patter,”11 and of Life With The Lyons (1951-61), which, like The Burns and Allen Show, for instance, featured real-life couples of comedians in a domestic environment.

7 In both countries, the advent of television thus marked a turning point in the history of a genre imported from the US to Great Britain. Yet, at the same time, the decade saw the birth of two distinctive types of sitcom humour: “If I Love Lucy represented a defining moment in US sitcom, Hancock’s Half Hour [BBC radio & TV; 1954-61] […] played a similar role in the UK. The programme, scripted by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and starring Tony Hancock, adopted the domestic setting of its contemporaries but was marked by a decisive shift away from gag-based humour towards character and environment as the defining features of its comedy.”12 Casting regular actors instead of music hall or stand-up comedians indeed exemplified a change from both US and British comedies. From then on, in Britain, the emphasis was less on fast-paced comedy, songs and wisecracks, than on the sometimes static observation of life with a socio-realistic perspective.

8 In Hancock’s Half Hour, Tony Hancock played a down-at-heel actor living at 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, a place regularly depicted as a council house (a form of social housing). From his position on the margins of society, the character occasionally commented on the political realities of life in Britain, including the 1956 Suez crisis and the railway strikes of the 1950s and 1960s. The feeling of thwarted upward mobility conveyed by this dysfunctional ‘hero’ thus stood in sharp contrast with its US counterparts, which, given the commercial structure of radio and television, were rather “committed to harmony and consensus.”13

9 Retrospectively, a second influence of Hancock’s Half Hour in Britain is the use of a limited number of scriptwriters, one or two, contrary to the United States, where most sitcoms are still based on team or table writing. Famous British names include Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, notably with The Likely Lads (BBC2, 1964-66), which presented two Northern blue-collars; Johnny Speight, with his working-class bigot Alf Garnett, in Till Death Us Do Part (BBC1, 1966-68; 1972-75); and Ronald Wolf and Ronald Chesney’s workplace sitcoms, including On the Buses (ITV, 1969-73). Following Hancock’s show, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson themselves collaborated on Steptoe and Son (BBC,

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1962-65; 1970-74), itself based on a very down-to-earth, prosaic situation, that of two hapless rag and bone men, father and son, stuck in Shepherd’s Bush, London.

10 Contemporary to the appearance of ‘kitchen sink’ dramas, the emergence of working- class sitcoms was somehow emblematic of Hugh Greene’s BBC Directorship (1960-69).14 Facing competition from ITV–the first British commercial network, created in 1954 to promote regional specificities–Hugh Greene encouraged a spirit of ‘mischief’ on the channel. But apart from its broadcast on ‘Auntie Beeb,’ such material was actually nothing new to the British public. From the comic strip drunkard Ally Sloper (1884-1923), to the saucy post-war postcards of Donald McGill and the long-running Benny Hill Show (BBC/ITV, 1955-89), Britons had long been enjoying this quintessentially British mix of social satire and broad farce.15 Yet, for all their British traits, two of the most popular working-class sitcoms of the time were soon exported to the US.

Exporting ‘Dear Old Blighty’ to across the pond: from ‘special relationship’ to ‘dangerous liaisons’ (1970s-1990s)16

11 In May 1961, Newton Minow, the Federal Communications Commission Chairman (1961-63), made a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters which was a turning point in US television history. Decrying the lack of overall quality in the American broadcasting landscape, he famously described it as “a vast wasteland,” calling for an alternative, free from advertising, and with a mission to uplift, rather than distract, masses. From then on, “national intervention in television [was] spurred by the realization that ‘Americans were making an enormous mistake to let the law of the least common denominator set the sights of broadcasting.’”17 Launched in 1970, the Public Broadcasting Service aimed at balancing a generally consumerist ‘mass’ culture with BBC-inspired ‘quality’ programming. Indeed, one of the first shows PBS aired was an adaptation of The Forsyte Saga (BBC2, 1967), a historical drama based on John Galsworthy’s novels. Though criticized for appealing mostly to high-brow audiences, the new service had opened a debate on the role of American television.

12 This debate must have been closely followed by US comedy writer, director and producer Norman Lear, who began his career in the mid-1950s, when home-made ‘dom- coms’ were thriving. A decade later, Norman Lear, also a civil rights movement activist, was calling for a more realistic portrait of American society on television. Taking the opposing view of PBS elitist programming, in 1971, he tried to sell the idea of a blue- collar sitcom to ABC, which rejected it, arguing it would not suit its viewers’ tastes. Norman Lear then changed strategy and approached CBS with an adaptation of Till Death Us Do Part (BBC1, 1966-68; 1972-75).

13 Besides being able to watch footage of the sitcom, what prompted CBS into giving him the go-ahead was its large success in Britain; five weeks into the first season, the series had already toppled its competitor in the viewing ratings war, the soap opera Coronation Street (ITV, 1960- ). Last but not least, its lower-middle-class environment provided a new means of entering the marketplace. The deal proved a winning bet: All in the Family (CBS, 1971-79) reaped the Prime-Time Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1971; it ranked number one in the viewing ratings five years in a row,

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and resulted in three CBS spin-offs, Maude (1972-78), The Jeffersons (1975-85), and Archie Bunker’s Place (1979-83).

14 All in the Family is an interesting case of “absorption and domestication.”18 As obvious in the title, CBS preferred to promote a familiar format–domestic comedy–than to appeal to the public with the feeling of entrapment and social satire conveyed in the original. From the British series, though, Norman Lear kept the truculent holier-than- thou father figure. Like the character Alf Garnett, Archie Bunker was a loud-mouthed racist and sexist bigot who regularly insulted his wife. Yet by adding “cultural elements with embedded significance” to the plot, the writer skilfully assimilated the British working-class situation and tailored it to match American norms and beliefs.19 This included transposing Canning Town, in the East End of London, to a similar post- industrial and minority-populated area, the Astoria section of Queens, New York City, and turning the Tory cockney football fan into a Republican soccer lover. More importantly, in both versions, the father systematically opposed his more left-wing son-in-law. Together with a blue-collar environment, the narrative pattern repeated a ‘comedy of frustration’ central to many British situation comedies of the late 1960s, while giving a US sitcom an unprecedented political dimension. All in the Family discussed a whole range of controversial contemporary issues, including the Vietnam War, women’s rights and race relations.

15 Over the course of its second season, Norman Lear decided to develop the race relations theme by adapting a second ‘Britcom,’ Steptoe and Son (BBC, 1962-65; 1970-74). In Sanford and Son (NBC, 1972-77), he used the same ingredients as in his first remake, i.e. transposing foreign cultural motives into local ones to produce an endemic situation. A significant novelty was introduced: the white English junk dealers had become African-Americans. The choice seemed to imply certain limits in humour transferability: “In the English version the father is very caustic, almost vicious. For a lot of reasons we didn’t think that attitude was right for [comedian] Redd Foxx, so we made him gentler.”20 Besides the sardonic nature of the white hero, what appeared problematic must have been the ‘situation’ chosen as the US programme was released only a few years after the 1964-67 summer race riots, which had started in Harlem, New York City, and in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles, where the fictitious Sanfords themselves lived. Following the troubles, the Kerner Commission was appointed to investigate their causes; published in 1968, its report mentioned the responsibility of television, especially of the news, in black rebellion.21

16 Pronounced a year after Sandford and Son’s final season, Norman Lear’s keynote address at the 1978 Edinburgh International Television Festival seems enlightening in that respect: “Those programmes which do not deal with the real problems of life […] are, by omission, saying: ‘You have no race problems; there is no economic concern in the nation, we are not in trouble in Vietnam; everyone does have an equal crack at medical attention; there are no problems with the poor or elderly or the uneducated–and all mothers and fathers and children live in absolute harmony.’”22 Well-received in Britain, this statement came as a blow to the somewhat happily-ever-after vision of most contemporary US sitcoms.

17 But even if his adaptations fostered sitcoms with a woman’s or a black perspective, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970-77) or The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984-92), for instance, remained committed to a classic conception of the genre, both in their titles and in the celebration of shared family values. Twelve years after Sanford and Son was launched,

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the latter was its exact opposite: the Huxtables’ brownstone in Brooklyn Heights highly contrasted with the scruffy Watts dwelling of the Sanford junk dealers, as did their professions – the father was an obstetrician; the mother an attorney.23 Again partly implied by the commercial structure of American network television, the commitment to the preservation of the ‘American Dream’ seems to have accounted for such socio- cultural differences between US and British comedy.

18 In Britain, meanwhile, the incessant viewing ratings battle between BBC and ITV to reach a mass working-class audience had produced such sitcoms as Are You Being Served? (BBC1, 1972-85) and Man About the House (ITV, 1973-76), which gradually abandoned socio-realism for ribaldry. Key to the popular Carry On film series (1958-78; 1992), such comedy expectedly entailed the casting of buxom ‘dolly-birds’. As for US commercial networks, following Norman Lear’s success, they were now seeing great potential in ‘Britcoms’ and Man About the House even led to a tug-of-war between ABC and CBS. Eventually broadcast on ABC, Three’s Company (1977-84) ranked second twice in the yearly viewing ratings, and led to several spin-offs. Penned and produced by Don Nicholl, Michael Ross and Bernie West, who had worked on All in the Family, the series was but loosely based on the original. Being quite basic–a young man shared a flat with two single female students–its situation was easily transferable and, besides the United States, it was remade in the Netherlands, Poland, in Norway and in Sweden. Though still echoing changing global cultural trends, including cohabitation before marriage, like in Britain, the American sitcom mainly appealed to the ‘average viewer’ for its on- going sex plots and for Chrissy, a sexy, ditzy blonde.

19 Looking at successive remakes, Three’s Company nevertheless seems to have somehow tolled the knell for ‘Britcoms’ in the USA. Are You Being Served? (BBC1, 1972-75) was adapted too, by the English writers themselves, David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, as Beane’s of Boston. Aired on CBS in 1979; its pilot never developed into a full series. The original, however, was shown on PBS, along with Fawlty Towers (BBC2, 1975; 1979), a US adaptation of which has been attempted thrice so far, in 1978, 1983, and in 1999. As for the NBC remake of the self-explicit Men Behaving Badly (ITV/BBC1, 1992-98), it was dropped in 1998, after just one season, which led the newly-launched BBC America to broadcast the original. Similarly, Absolutely Fabulous (BBC2, 1992-96), aired on BBC America and Comedy Central, has known an ‘absolutely disastrous’ fate as an adaptation. Roseanne Barr bought the rights in the late 1990s; not even a pilot was shot. A decade later, in 2009, Fox announced another attempt. As the original’s executive producer Jon Plowman had predicted, dropping the characters’ drinking, smoking, and swearing habits–deemed too controversial for an American audience–crucially deprived AbFab of its comic raison d’être.24 Having shared a similar experience with Men Behaving Badly US, British producer Beryl Vertue explains that, from the 1990s onwards, the rejection of ‘politically incorrect,’ or un-PC, contents has led Britain to turn to other, mainly European, partners, like Germany, Poland or Italy, instead of the US.25

20 Combined with increased accessibility to the originals on alternative channels, this diverging conception of comedy, of offensiveness and decency, undoubtedly accounted for the remake flops of the 1980s and 1990s. A decade after Norman Lear had started remaking ‘Britcoms,’ the “absorption and domestication” of British situation comedies now seemed doomed to fail.26 A third reason must have been the success of innovative home-made productions like Cheers (NBC, 1982-93), shot in a Boston bar, and spin-off Frasier (NBC, 1993-2004), but also of blue-collar sitcoms, like Roseanne (ABC, 1988-97) or

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the animated The Simpsons (Fox, 1989- ). Over the decades, US professionals had thus not only moved away from the conventional ‘dom-com’ of the 1950s and the ‘Britcom’ remakes of the 1970s and 1980s, they had learnt to copy a foreign programme and turn it into a genuinely American one.

Global perspectives and local idiosyncrasies in the twenty-first century: the case of The Office (BBC2, 2001-2; NBC, 2005- )

21 Several ‘Britcoms’ had been tentatively remade in the United States at the turn of the century, including The Royle Family (BBC1, 1998- ), as The Kennedys (CBS, 2001), or the eponymous Coupling (BBC2, 2000-4 / NBC, 2003). Again, all failed, continuing to reveal clashing perceptions of propriety. Commenting on a clean-up trend increasingly known as ‘pasteurization’ in the US television and film industry, Maya Forbes, the head writer of The Kennedys, explained: “You can’t even say ‘Jesus Christ!’ on American network TV. There’s smoking only if one of the characters makes a responsible comment about how bad it is. […] We also have to think of a replacement for Jim’s ‘my arse’ catchphrase. It’s difficult to find something with bite that you can actually say.”27 Given such politically correct television environment, NBC’s launch of The Office, in 2005, could have been either a breakneck decision or a bold one.

22 Created, written and directed by Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais, who also played the main character, The Office (BBC2, 2001-2) was as much a ‘mockumentary’, i.e. a ‘mock-documentary,’ as a sitcom.28 Despite the “circular narrative closure” emblematic of the genre–meaning every conflict was solved as the episode ended–the fly-on-the- wall approach entailed the absence of any studio audience or laughter track, and the replacement of a generic triple-camera-set-up with a single, hand-held, one.29 Like in a documentary, editing was slow-paced and included blank stares or direct glances at the camera. As Ricky Gervais explained, reality-TV was a further influence on this hybrid format, which incorporated talking-head interviews, or ‘confessionals’.30 Its situation was simple: The Office follows the 9-to-5 lives of the employees of Wernham Hogg, a fictional mid-sized paper merchant based in Slough trading estate, in the South East of England, focusing on general manager David Brent (Ricky Gervais), who considers himself as “a boss first, a friend second, and probably an entertainer third,” where he is in fact ignorant, rude and not funny–at least to his employees. The deadpan humour of the show proved a hit. The 2003 ‘Christmas Special’ recorded a 30% audience share with 6.5 million viewers and The Office not only won three British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards in three years, but also–through BBC America in 2004– two Golden Globes for ‘Best TV Series: Musical Or Comedy’, notably outranking Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004).

23 A year later, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant met NBC for an adaptation. Covering a vast range of work-related topics, the original used situations that had been experienced by the ‘global’ public, either directly or by proxy. Thus easily exportable, besides the United States, the BBC series was remade in Canada, in France and Germany, but also in Brazil, Chile, Russia, and in Israel. In the US, while the British creators acted as executive producers, the remake was developed, and occasionally directed, by Greg Daniels and penned through table writing. Despite good ratings on its

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début on NBC–11.2 million viewers–The Office US pilot was thrashed by critics for being “a passable imitation of a miles better BBC.”31 In turn, ratings dropped to 5.4 million viewers for the first season and it was not until season two that the show found a sustained audience of 8 to 9 million. Meanwhile, it had found its own style too, less of a mock-documentary and more of a workplace sitcom.

24 Like Norman Lear’s adaptations in the 1970s, The Office US integrates cultural references; the firm has for instance been transposed to Scranton, Pennsylvania, itself on the outskirts of the buzzing capital, and the show discusses the ‘issues of the day,’ which, in twenty-first century corporate America, include ‘Sexual Harassment,’ ‘Performance Reviewing,’ and ‘Business Ethics,’ to give but a few episode titles. In 2006, only two years after Ricky Gervais had received his Golden Globe, Steve Carrell, who played the American boss, received the same award, for the same programme, in its US version.

25 Away from an extensively verbatim pilot, the second episode, ‘Diversity Day,’ already suggested the retooling central to season two. Interestingly enough, its situation overlapped a theme developed in the BBC version–race relations. But where the latter focused on David Brent’s latent racism; the NBC adaptation explored diversity in the workplace, a topic which, in the United States, had been given greater attention with the 2002 No-FEAR Act (the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act). A classic example of the English boss crossing the line is to be found in episode 1, series 2, which attracted the most viewers’ complaints about the programme. The issue was a sequence known as “the black man’s cock joke” and which involved Camilla Parker-Bowles and the Queen. Having heard the joke from his assistant Gareth, David Brent shares it with his employees only to freeze mid-sentence when a black man walks within earshot. When the latter recognises the joke, adding he thinks it is funny, the boss concludes: “harmless, well done!”, then, in an attempt to change subject, David Brent turns to a wheelchair-bound female employee and asks: “Have you met this little lady?”, plunging even deeper into un-PC talk. Following David’s blunder, his supervisor Jennifer has a private conversation with him and concludes on a very pragmatic note: “You could save this joke for your free time and not say it in the workplace.” In a single five-minute-sequence, the notorious joke has been shared twice with the public, widely circulated among the characters, and its title repeated ad nauseam. Meant to denounce racism in a humorous way, this ‘in-your-face’ approach was obviously not appropriate for American network television, which, since the advent of Political Correctness, was treading cautiously on such potentially offensive ground.

26 Though also discussing race relations, The Office US’s ‘Diversity Day’ indeed opens under completely different circumstances: Michael Scott’s impersonation of black comedian Chris Rock having precisely stirred up a controversy, the whole team has to follow a seminar on diversity and racial tolerance in the workplace. Whereas management did not take any measure against David Brent, the US remake thus brings diversity policies into the centre of the episode. Considering himself as “The World’s Best Boss,” Michael Scott insists on coaching his team himself, only to prove his incompetence. Assigning each staff member a post-it note with a different race, he then launches a role-play: “I want you to treat other people like the race that is on their forehead,” which, of course, produces the exact counter-effect of discourses on tolerance. Similarly to the BBC episode, much fun is derived from the presence of a black man, Stanley, who incidentally picks up the “Black” card. As opposed to the

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British joke, however, the character serves to illustrate the absurdity of ethnic stereotypes, not a bawdy, possibly offensive, comedy. Being bound to trigger a series of prejudices, the sequence even introduces a very ‘politically correct’ statement. When questioned by a colleague, Pam, the receptionist, declares: “Okay, if I have to do this. Based on stereotypes that are totally untrue and that I don’t agree with […]”. While pointing, again, to the absurdity of the situation, the answer also anticipates potential viewers’ complaints. The reaction of a South Asian-American woman who ends up slapping her boss in the face for his vision of her ‘community’, i.e. cookie-shop owners with a thick accent, obviously serves the same end. Contrary to that of the BBC episode, this closing scene shows that in the US, such comments are neither “harmless” in the workplace nor on television.

27 In The Office US, adapting to tastes of decency has further been accompanied by an aesthetics change. By opting for opening credits, NBC first explicitly revealed the fictional nature of the programme, as opposed to the BBC, where leaving them until the end was a token of its supposedly documentary quality so that viewers might take the series at face value. To avoid “generic discomfort” for an American audience, Greg Daniels even doffed some of the original mockumentary elements, such as the dim-lit setting: “In the British version […] they made some decisions to really go very bleak with the production […] and it matched what they were trying to do which was to be very satiric […]. We had an aim to be more of a character comedy,” he declared.32 Dating back to the television developments of US and British sitcoms in the 1950s, the distinction already noted between ‘satire’ and ‘character comedy’ therefore still appeared paramount to The Office. Commenting on the two traditions, Ted Harbert, then President at NBC Studios, indeed explained that “the smaller and smarter joke[s]” had to be replaced with “bigger and more obvious comedy.”33 Casting gagman Steve Carrell as the American boss undoubtedly contributed to replacing a satirical look on a static, dull office life with fast-paced slapstick comedy.

28 A third change occurred on a narrative level: whereas the original ran for two six- episode seasons (2001-2), the US version has approximately 25 episodes per season, and NBC is currently working on the seventh. As for episode length, The Office US has produced what, from food to television, appears like a local idiosyncrasy: regular 40- minute ‘supersizes’, twice the length of any BBC episode apart from ‘Christmas Specials’. Generic to American television programming, such difference in format implied more character development in the US version. As in drama series, writers developed secondary characters from one season to the next, or introduced new ones, as in a real office. Similarly, to ensure plot longevity, love relationships between employees, including Jim and Pam–a transposition of Tim and Dawn–were given greater attention than on the BBC. As in soap operas, Jim and Pam’s first kiss is for instance constantly postponed in the early seasons, which creates suspense meant to keep viewers tuned in. By retooling The Office both culturally and generically, aesthetically and narratively, Greg Daniels has thus managed to create what reviewers eventually praised as “that rarest of anomalies: a remake of a classic show that both does right by its source and carves out its own strong identity.”34

29 Though born in the United States, in the 1930s, and exported to Great Britain, the situation comedy genre has therefore experienced a long history of adaptations from Britain to the US. The launch of ITV, the first British commercial and regional network, in 1954, marked a turning point in that respect. Its influence was felt not only at home,

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where it contributed to the development of working-class sitcoms, including on the BBC, but also across the pond. Following the debate on the role of national television in the US in the early 1960s, a decade later, American producer and comedy writer Norman Lear pioneered the adaptation of blue-collar ‘Britcoms’. While remade to match an American audience’s expectations, especially in terms of environment and cultural references, and to echo the US political issues of the time, his comic productions were the first to discuss what he considered as “real problems” and to propose a socio-realistic perspective clashing with the oft-idealistic ‘American Dream’ representation of most contemporary US situation comedies.

30 With increased access to the originals on PBS and on digital channels, however, the 1980s and 1990s put a hold on ‘Britcom’ adaptations. Given the appearance of ‘Political Correctness’ in the United States in the late 1980s, the contemporary rise of ‘politically incorrect’ British sitcoms further hindered their transferability to American network television, thus dramatically changing industrial relations between both countries. Despite successful exports in the game-show category, like The Weakest Link or Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, over the last decade, Britain has consequently turned to Europe to sell its comedy, while North America is increasingly looking to South America, for instance with ABC’s dramedy Ugly Betty (2006-10), a remake of Columbian telenovela Yo Soy Betty, la fea (RCN, 1999-2001), to give but one example.

31 Judging from the scandal around MTV’s adaptation of edgy youth-oriented British Channel Four programme Skins, which, in early 2011, faced questions of child pornography laws, the success of The Office US therefore appears as an exception in the new millennium. While having kick-started the Anglo-American collaboration, the programme further seems to illustrate how television is now “simultaneously shaped by the globalization of media economics and the pull of local and national cultures.”35 For if popular television formats can easily be exported–sometimes leading to a standardization of contents where media industries worldwide use the same idea–such industrial process nevertheless almost systematically implies the adaptation of contents to suit local preferences. Based on a marketing strategy known as ‘glocalization,’36 in the case of comedy, the technique would thus tend to show that humour remains strongly national in the global twenty-first century.

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NOTES

1. Jeffrey Miller, Something Completely Different: British Television and American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 2. 2. Also known as TWTWTW or simply TW3, the show used current events to lampoon the establishment, including the Profumo scandal, in 1963, when Secretary of State for War John Profumo’s affair with Christine Keeler, the mistress of an alleged Russian spy, was disclosed to the British publish. In turn, the US version poked fun at contemporary political leaders, notably John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. First hosted by Elliott Reid, in 1964, NBC’s TW3 took advantage of the BBC’s decision to cancel the show due to upcoming elections to ask David Frost, the original British presenter, to replace him. 3. A contraction of ‘situation comedy,’ “the term ‘sit-com’ describes a short narrative-series comedy, generally between twenty-four and thirty minutes long, with regular characters and

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setting.” Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, Popular Film and Television Comedy (1990; London: Routledge, 1995) 233. 4. See for instance Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall et al., Culture, Media, Language (1980; London: Routledge / Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham, 2004) 107-117. 5. Fox’s medical drama House (2004- ), starring English actor Hugh Laurie–who notably appeared in BBC1’s historical sitcom Blackadder (1983-89)–provides an interesting example in that respect: “After watching hours of casting tapes for the pilot […], House executive producer Bryan Singer refused to see any more British actors due to their imperfect American accents. ‘Luckily Bryan had no idea who Hugh was,’ [said] the show’s creator David Shore, who played Laurie’s audition tape […] for Singer. ‘Bryan said, ‘That’s what we want, a terrific American actor.’’” Rebecca Winters, “Television: Doctor Is in... a Bad Mood,” TIME Magazine, September 4, 2005. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101308,00.html 6. Pierre Desproges, interviewed in Télérama, November 24, 1982. 7. Arthur Wertheim, Radio Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) 31. 8. James Baker, Teaching TV Sitcom (London: British Film Institute, 2003) 17. 9. Paul Wells, “‘Where everybody knows your name’, Open convictions and closed contexts in the American situation comedy,” in Because I tell a Joke or Two, Comedy, Politics and Social Difference, ed. Stephen Wagg (London: Routledge, 1998) 191. A notable exception was Beulah (CBS radio, 1945-54; ABC TV, 1950-52), the second US black sitcom after Amos ’n’ Andy. 10. In 1923, the government appointed the Sykes Committee to inquire into the organisation of broadcasting in Britain. Commenting on the potential of the system, the Committee concluded that broadcasting should be defined as a “public utility”: “We attach great important to the maintenance of a high standard of broadcast programmes […] and we think that advertisements would lower the standard.” Broadcasting Committee Report (Sykes Report), Cmd. 1951 (London: HMSO, 1923), par. 41. 11. Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Golden Age of Wireless, vol. 2 (1965; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 118. 12. James Baker, Teaching TV Sitcom (London: British Film Institute, 2003) 19. 13. David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (New York: Blackwell, 1989) 118. 14. ‘Kitchen sink drama’ is “a rather condescending title applied from the late 1950s onwards in Britain to the then new wave of realistic drama depicting the family lives of working‐class characters, on stage and in broadcast plays.” Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 3rd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 179. On the spirit of ‘mischief’ encouraged by Hugh Greene during his BBC Directorship, see Frank Pike, ed., Ah! Mischief: Writer and Television (London: Faber & Faber, 1982). 15. As Laraine Porter observes: “Comic stereotypes which transgress sexual binaries and ‘normality’ abound in the history of popular carnival and comic performance. In twentieth- century theatrical farce, radio and music hall, sexual disguise, cross-dressing and sexual innuendo have formed a basis for a substantial proportion of popular British comedy.” Laraine Porter, “Tarts, Tampons and Tyrants. Women and Representation in British Comedy,” in Because I Tell a Joke or Two, Comedy, Politics and Social Difference, ed. Stephen Wagg (London: Routledge, 1998) 83. 16. “Blighty [is] an informal and often affectionate term for Britain or England, chiefly as used by soldiers of the First and Second World Wars […]. The term was first used by soldiers serving in India, and is an Anglo-Indian alteration of Urdu bilāyatī ‘foreign, European’, from Arabic wilāyat, wilāya ‘dominion, district’.” Elizabeth Knowles, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 120.

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17. Laurie Ouelette, Viewers Like You? How Public Television Failed the People (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) 23. 18. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media and the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) 256. 19. Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch, “Television as Cultural Forum,” in Television: The Critical View, 6th edition, ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) 562. 20. Norman Lear quoted in Jeffrey Miller, Something Completely Different: British Television and American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 155. 21. Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968). 22. Norman Lear quoted in Mick Eaton, “Television Situation Comedy,” Screen, 19 4 (1978-1979): 80-81. 23. As Darrell Y. Hamamoto explains, however: “Bill Cosby had originally conceived a show [where] he was to have played the part of a janitor and his wife […] a construction worker.” Darrell Y. Hamamoto, Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology (1989; New York: Praeger, 1991) 136. In addition, see Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences and the Myth of the American Dream (Boulder: Westview, 1992). 24. Jon Plowman quoted in Sarah Hughes, “America is a foreign country; they view things differently there,” The Observer, March 29, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/ 29/ustelevision-television 25. Beryl Vertue quoted in Ed Waller, “When Hollywood killed the Kumars,” The Independent, December 9, 2003. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/when-hollywood-killed-the- kumars-576013.html The term ‘political correctness’ was first used to describe “an influential movement on US campuses beginning in the late 1980s [and] appealing to the principle of affirmative action and multiculturalism […]. It promoted anti-sexist and anti- racist speech and behavior codes, which opponents denounced as illiberal.” Ian McLean and Alistair McMillan, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 414. 26. See note 18 of the present article. 27. Maya Forbes quoted in “Royles Cleaned Up for US TV,” BBC News, April 8, 2001. http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1264199.stm 28. The term ‘mockumentary’ is commonly applied to fictional films and TV programmes which appropriate the aesthetics of the documentary genre or other reality-based media with the aim of producing parody or satire. For further details, see for instance Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) and Craig Hight, Television Mockumentary: Reflexivity, Satire and a Call to Play (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 29. The term “circular narrative closure” is borrowed from Mick Bowes, “Only When I Laugh,” in Understanding Television, ed. Andrew Goodwin and Garry Whannel (1990; London: Routledge, 2001) 132. 30. Ricky Gervais interviewed by Valerie Howes, “Ricky Gervais: From World’s Worst Boss to Employee of the Year,” Ukula, http://www.ukula.com/TorontoArticle.aspx?SectionID=3&ObjectID=1665&CityID=3. 31. Robert Bianco, “NBC copy machine misfeeds at ‘The Office’,” USA Today, March 23, 2005. http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/reviews/2005-03-23-the-office_x.htm 32. “Greg Daniels and Rainn Wilson Conference Call,” The Office Tally, March 24, 2008. http:// www.officetally.com/greg-daniels-and-rainn-wilson-conference-call The term “generic discomfort” is borrowed from Shannon Wells-Lassagne, “Crossing the

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Pond: Adapting The Office to an American Audience,” paper given at the Contemporary American Television Series: Between Fiction, Fact, and ‘The Real’ Conference held at Institut Charles V, Université Paris-Diderot, on June 8, 2010. 33. Ted Harbert quoted in Kim Masters, “British TV Crosses Over the Pond,” NPR News: Morning Edition (NPR, March 24, 2005). http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4558607 Nathan Rabin, “Inventory: Eight Sure-Fire Fiascoes That Unexpectedly Succeeded,” The A. V. Club, March 29, 2006. http://www.avclub.com/articles/inventory-eight-surefire-fiascoes-that- unexpectedl,1532/ 34. Nathan Rabin, “Inventory: Eight Sure-Fire Fiascoes That Unexpectedly Succeeded,” The A. V. Club, March 29, 2006. http://www.avclub.com/articles/inventory-eight-surefire-fiascoes-that- unexpectedl,1532/ 35. Silvio Waisbord, “McTV: Understanding the Global Popularity of Television Formats,” Television and New Media, 5 4 (2004): 359. 36. A combination of “globalization” and “localization,” the term is used to describe a product or service that is developed and distributed globally, but tailored to match the specifics of a local market. It is said to have been first used by sociologist Roland Robertson, who, in 1997, defined ‘glocalization’ as “the simultaneity–the co-presence–of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies.” Roland Robertson, “Comments on the ‘Global Triad’ and ‘Glocalization,’” ‘Globalization and Indigenous Culture’ Conference, Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics, Kokugakuin University. 1997. http://www2.kokugakuin.ac.jp/ijcc/wp/global/15robertson.html

ABSTRACTS

In an increasingly ‘glocalized’ world, the success of NBC’s still-running remake of the BBC’s The Office would seem to indicate the continuing vitality of ‘Britcom’ adaptations on American network television. Initiated by US producer and comedy writer Norman Lear in the early 1970s, such cross-cultural translation has nevertheless had a long history of hit-or-miss experiences over the decades. Following an analysis of how the early television developments of the situation comedy genre in both countries may have favoured the emergence of different types of sitcom humour, this article will introduce several case-studies of US ‘Britcom’ remakes so as to map out the socio-cultural specificities at work in the retooling process central to such exchanges from the British to the American television industry.

INDEX

Keywords: situation comedy, sitcom, Britcom, United States, television, cross-cultural, remake, adaptation, transposition, humour, transferability

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AUTHOR

AMANDINE DUCRAY

Amandine Ducray is an Associate Professor in British Studies at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France. In 2009, she published Les Sitcoms ethniques à la télévision britannique de 1972 à nos jours : jusqu’à ce que l’humour nous répare. Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

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Interview

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Documenting Fiction – An Interview with Dan Starer, Researcher, “Documentalist”

Dan Starer and Georges Fournier

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Skype interview conducted from the Université Jean Moulin – Lyon 3, on January 13th, 2010.

1 This interview with Mr Dan Starer was prompted by recent research on the porosity between fact and fiction that lies at the core of the dramatic treatment of topical and political issues. How much factuality is the fictional genre endowed with? How reliable is it? What are the incentives for scriptwriters and filmmakers to commit themselves to the revisiting of political events? These were some of the directions that this research took. There remained the question of how to make sense of the past in the absence of readily available material such as diaries, minutes of trials, biographical elements, interviews or testimonials. The necessity of substantiating fiction is made even more complicated when topics are geographically or temporally distant. A prominent figure, one that proves pivotal in such circumstances, is that of the ‘documentalist’ who is called upon to research history and whose expertise in finding documents from the past and making sense of them proves paramount.

2 On either side of the Atlantic, film, television and even literature have witnessed a constant interest among audiences and readers for fact-based narratives.1 From the inception of television, British scriptwriters and filmmakers have offered viewers fact- laden productions on topical and politically challenging issues. Owing to the widely different situation of television in the USA, their American counterparts have often had to wait for news and current events to become sufficiently removed from the present before treating them fictionally.2 Conscious of the great impact on the population afforded by broadcasting, early British filmmakers used it to convey political messages

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meant to challenge governmental policies, whether in the field of social improvements3 or of national defence.4 At about the same time, US TV filmmakers were more politically timid and treated less controversially inspired topics5 as illustrated by Brian’s Song (1971), which tangentially dealt with ethnic issues in the 1960s. The end of the 20th century witnessed the revival of the genre, both on TV and among cinematic productions: Tony Blair’s premiership gave birth to fact-laden fictions from famous British filmmakers, once again concerning the British foreign policy or the failure of politics to fulfill social and political promises.6

3 Whether they deal with contemporary or historical facts, scriptwriters and filmmakers have in mind the substantiation of fiction with unchallengeable evidence that will give their work a journalistic dimension and political import, a concern already expressed by Leslie Woodhead in the 1970s when he declared: “Whenever there is a collision between dramatic values and the obligations of journalism, the latter should always win out.”7 The very same concern for the respect of the actual circumstances in which events occurred, for the exact words and phrases used by the protagonists was observed when, in the wake of the general outcry following the decision by the government of Tony Blair to align the British foreign policy in the Middle-East with that of the USA, several verbatim plays were staged in London and in the USA,8 reviving a dramatic and contentious genre made famous by Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop.

4 The examples mentioned above touch upon specific features of this form of representation which uses fiction to reprocess prominent and controversial news and current events so as to throw light on cover-ups, on neglected aspects of high profile cases or just to fuel the pressure built up by the press. They also testify to an unrelenting need among some scriptwriters and filmmakers to corroborate the controversial viewpoints they put forward with documented evidence. At this stage, the role of documentalists becomes decisive.

5 Although both ‘librarian’ and ‘archivist’ are attested lexical items with entries in most dictionaries−which is not the case of the term ‘documentalist’−the latter seems to be endowed with generic features, especially when referring to training and teaching courses. As for ‘librarian’ and ‘archivist,’ they refer to specific professional activities: librarians and archivists manage the information available, whatever the form, whether paper or digital. Conversely, documentalists search libraries and databases to collect information for future users, hence the implied association with the word “research” and the confusion between “researcher” and ‘documentalist.’ As regards professional remit, ‘documentalists’ are called upon when fiction requires to be supplemented with factual elements; their work offers the coherence required by readers and viewers to adhere to fictional worlds by identifying in them elements of the actual world they live in or apprehend through media. Finally, it is the creator who must show skill in choosing the right type of factual information to be used and the right dosage; too much factuality being likely to kill fiction by hampering the suspension of disbelief.

6 A prominent documentalist, Dan Starer makes explicit, right from the beginning of the interview, the link he feels exists between documentation and literature: looking back over his formative years, he remembers his desire to become a novelist. Brought up in Manhattan, Dan Starer holds a B.A. in English from Bowdoin College, Maine–USA, which he complemented with training courses in library and information science and

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online databases. His career took a decisive turn when John Updike entrusted him with research for the Rabbit series.9 Several other novelists have since followed, such as Nelson DeMille, Ed McBain and Mary Higgins Clark. Nevertheless, he owes his reputation as a researcher for fiction writers to Ken Follett, who has regularly commissioned investigations on history, geography and sociology to give factual accuracy to his novels. Dan Starer is also the author of various non-fiction books, Hot Topics,10 Who to Call?, 11 and Five Rings, Six Crises, Seven Dwarfs and 38 Ways to Win an Argument,12 to name just a few. A native of New York, where he still lives, Dan Starer often undertakes investigative assignments for the Stock Exchange for which he admits having developed great skill although he confesses to a preference for the documentation of fiction.

7 This interview, for which Mr Dan Starer kindly accepted to give some of his time, has provided vital information on how these professionals operate. What training do they have? What are the different types of tools they use? What impact has the Internet had on their work? What are their fields of research? It also gave Mr Starer the opportunity to lay emphasis on the conflict between personal fulfillment and financial imperatives. Thought-provoking answers were offered on how fiction is substantiated, on how participants in a fictional project envisage both their role and the resulting material. Finally, it has inspired further investigation into the varied forms of collaboration between researchers and writers.

8 I would like this introduction to be the opportunity for me to thank Mr Dan Starer for having agreed to a printed version of this interview, thus affording readers an insight into the documentation of fiction. Georges Fournier: How did your interest about documenting fiction come about? Were you originally working in the field? Dan Starer: No, not exactly. It all started when I was in high school, when I was about sixteen years old and I knew a writer who lived in Upstate New York. This is long before the time of online database researching and long before the Internet.13 She lived in Upstate New York and did not have access to good libraries. I grew up in Manhattan and I have spent all my life here. I was kind of an intellectual bookish child so that I knew New York City libraries quite well. I knew that she needed some information on some things, so I actually did a little research for her. It was just a onetime thing but it sort of stuck at the back of my mind for years. After I had finished university, I was interested in actually being a writer, I was interested in writing fiction. I was a teacher for a little while and then I decided to start this business. It was not really an existing field that I was aware of at the time, though I knew that this need possibly existed among writers who did not have access to good libraries. I also decided to start this business as a way of making connections in the publishing industry and then presumably writing my own novels and getting them published. But, as it turned out, I found that I was rather good at doing research and I very much enjoyed it and I was not so good at writing fiction and did not enjoy it so much, so it became my career. G.F.: How did you start? D.S.: I have always enjoyed reading history. I started writing some letters to some authors, you know: “Here I am, I am in New York, I am a university graduate and I can help you with your research”. It was before the days of so-called word- processors, the early days of computers. I wrote a lot of letters and, as it turned out,

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my first client was John Updike, so I thought that was a good start but it took many years, it slowly built up. Specifically, John Updike wrote a number of novels called the Rabbit series: his main character was nicknamed “Rabbit” and he had a fictional career as a car salesman and Mr. Updike needed to know what a car salesman does, what his daily life is like, the technicalities of running that business and what it felt like to do that profession and that is what I researched, strictly my first research, the first research of my new business. G.F.: I suppose that you didn’t know much about this topic yourself? D.S.: No, I knew nothing about this topic. What I knew was how to find information efficiently and I think that’s a separate skill. You know there are certain topics that I will not research because I feel it requires an expert to do it, very highly technical and scientific topics for example, or researching the law or genealogy. That sort of thing has to be done by specialists. But my feeling is that for most other topics if you are an expert at finding information, if you have a good sense for evaluating information and trying to really solve a client’s problems and answer his questions, then I think that is a valuable skill and that is what I do. I am sometimes asked to do things that I simply have no desire to research, I mean I am occasionally approached by someone who is on a different ... who has very different political leanings than I have and I am not interested in finding, supporting information for their points of view. So I will decline to do research occasionally, when a situation like that happens. G.F.: Was researching a hobby initially? D.S.: No, it was an attempt at making a living and I wanted to do something different and do something entrepreneurial, I guess, and I also went to a school for library science for a little while, when online databases started becoming available.14 The biggest online database company was called Dialog15 and in the old days, you know, the speed of information transmission was 300 baud,16 which was terribly slow. You could actually see the black and white letters slowly coming across your screen and I knew that this was going to be the future of research. So I went to a library science school and also to Dialog and took courses in online research database searching. G.F: How do you begin researching topics? D.S.: Originally, I would start with library research. You have to know something about the topic before you approach an expert because you do not want to waste the expert’s time, whether they are talking to you out of the kindness of the heart or whether you pay them to talk to you. Either way, you do not want to waste their time. Further, I have a sort of, a system which I use: I start almost all research topic with online research and then probably will follow it with library research for certain material that may not be available online and, once I have really narrowed down a set of questions, sometimes with consultation with my client, only then will I approach an expert.

G.F.: So, your very first step is online research. D.S.: It really depends on the topic of course, but what is really important is the order. What I usually like to do is online research followed by library research followed by talking to experts, if it is necessary to talk to experts. I do not need to contact experts for many of the topics; it really depends on what the topic is and how in-depth the client needs information. I first search the web and online databases. The web has wonderful value but there is also a lot of junk on the web, as you all

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know. Depending on the research, I will avoid what is on the web and go more towards more bibliographic databases or full text databases from well-known publications and well-known databases and find information there which is more reliable, in my opinion. It also depends on the nature of the research. For example I have done a lot of research for best-selling novelist Ken Follett and sometimes I would talk to experts while I did research for him, but once again it is later in the research process. Ken Follett wrote a book which involves earthquakes in California and I found a lot of published information on the topic that he wanted and he digested that and then wrote a first draft of his novel. Then I found a couple of experts who were top professionals, seismologists, who were earthquake experts in California, and we then hired those people to read the first draft of Mr Follett’s book, the sections that involved earthquakes actually, and then they provided a written report saying if there was any problem, whether there was anything that required authentication or improvement from a technological, professional point of view. G.F.: Did your researching business take off with the Internet? D.S.: It took a while, it took a number of years and it is still difficult sometimes. The Internet has made it very easy for people to find information obviously, and people can do a lot of the easier research topics on their own, they do not need a library. Many things became much easier to research, so I lost clients as a result of the Internet. So I would not say that it took off necessarily, it just became different.

G.F.: Are your clients from specific fields-fiction, science, etc.? D.S.: Both. And I don’t limit myself. I also do some work for screenwriters, I also do some work for business people. It’s not as much fun doing business research but it also helps pay the bills. G.F.: Are there topics which are harder for you to research? D.S.: Yes, of course. Generally speaking when you are doing historical research, the further back in time you go the more difficult the research is, simply because less is written about these things. I mean, a lot has been written about Ancient Rome, for example, but if you are asked to research, you know, 11th century France or things like that and, like me, you do not speak French or read French, it becomes more of a problem. And also, among more difficult topics, is the research I do for writers who write books about terrorism, who write thrillers and these books very often involve information on organisations, intelligence organisations, special forces, you know, the ones who go in and rescue people who have been captured and I am asked for very detailed information on how these organisations work and how they are organised and obviously they are top secret organisations. Not that much reliable information is published about them, so information like that can be difficult to find.

G.F.: Do you find that type of information on the Internet? D.S.: Yes. I mean, you find it on the Internet, but you also have got to be careful what you are looking at. Anybody can publish anything on the Internet and, once again, I try to rely more on sources that have been published by legitimate publishers, you know, known magazines, known newspapers, and books that have been published by real publishers, not self-published. G.F.: Do you also work for journalists? D.S.: I have worked for journalists who were writing books. I am never hired by a journalist who is doing an article because the economics of that doesn’t make sense,

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from their point of view. Occasionally, a journalist is writing a very in-depth book and he needs some additional research. They really want me ... they want me to research sources they do not have access to. G.F.: How far do you go into researching a topic and when do you stop researching? D.S.: An important part of that would be their budget. Many people have a set budget and I have to find the best information I can within that budget so that is the most important self-limiting factor. I have just been doing this for thirty years and I have a very good sense of what my clients need when I talk to them. I do it on a phased basis very often: I will give them a first batch of information and let them digest that and then see how they feel and they will give me feedback, you know “Topic A is done I think, I have enough there but topics B and C, I need a little bit more depth of information and here specifically is where I’d like some more information.” So sometimes it works that way but sometimes I just give them everything in one big batch. I just have a sense for it; I have a sense of how important the information is for them. I ask them questions like, “Is this information, you know, absolutely central to your book or is it just, you know, one chapter?,’’ “Is it for a main character or is it for a subsidiary character in the book?,’’ “Is it for the main setting or for a subsidiary setting?” Then I think you really have common sense ... you really have an understanding of when they have enough. G.F.: What is the longest period of time you have spent on researching a topic? D.S.: A specific project? Say about a month, yes. G.F.: Which means ... how many hours? D.S.: Forty hours a week. Most projects are much smaller than that. G.F.: Regarding your work with Ken Follett, can you tell us what kind of information he was looking for? D.S.: It really depends. I have done research for a lot of his books in the last thirty years. It really depends on the nature of the book that he is writing. There are some topics that are very new to him and he needs a lot more information than others. He has written quite a bit on European history. So when he is doing research on World War Two, for example−he already has a substantial library on World War Two topics and knows a great deal himself−the topic becomes much more specific. On the other hand, when he is researching a place that he does not know, for example Buffalo, New York−he is not an American and he does not travel to Buffalo regularly−there’s no need really for him to know much about that. Then he needs very broad information when he is writing on Buffalo, New York, in a certain year: he needs to know what the place looked like so he needs maps from the time, photographs from the time, video that is available, descriptions of various institutions, the news stories, what was going on that year or that month, or that week depending on how specific the story goes, so that he can be authentic in writing about that place at that time.

G.F: How far do you rely on the information provided by fiction? D.S.: I am occasionally asked for novels in addition to non-fiction information about certain topics, but I would never start with it. Many writers are scared of copying somebody, either intentionally or inadvertently, you know, no writer wants to be caught plagiarising which is a very serious sin in publishing and in academics, of course. So the writers are funny about this: some of them will actually read other novels on a similar topic and some of them will be a little bit scared to do that, they

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do not want to... they want to be original. They want to make up their own characters, their own milieu, their own world, and not even have their subconscious affected too much by what other people have done. The majority of them probably do read a lot of fiction on that time because they are just curious.

G.F.: Is being a professional from a specific field, rather than a general researcher, an advantage in terms of providing information? Is the approach different? D.S.: Yes, it is different. Some of my clients are specifically interested in interviewing experts on a topic and they ask me to find someone for them to interview. I mean, I have done research for an American crime novelist, a mystery novelist, and she is writing a book set in a certain city about thirty years ago. The main characters are police officers and my job is to find police officers who are now retired and who worked in that city as police at that time and I will set up interviews. I will never meet these people, it will all be done over the phone and I will set up interviews between them and her. I am already finding a lot of published information on that city in that year and information about the police department and its organisation. Once she has absorbed all that information, she will have a more specific set of questions for her to ask people who actually were police. I will set up these interviews and she will talk to them and that will probably be the end of the project, that will probably be as far as you can go. G.F.: Have you ever been asked to investigate the same topic twice and were you able to reuse the information you collected the first time? D.S.: Yes and no. When I do research for a client, they own it, it is theirs. In answer to the first part of your question, I have been asked for the same thing more than once. There are a couple of things I am asked for regularly. The thing I am asked most often is the workings and the daily life of the New York City police detectives. The crime genre is very popular in the United States and New York in particular creates a lot of interest. I have worked for some very famous crime writers in the US, Laurence Sanders, Evan Hunter−also known as Ed McBain−who wrote fifty novels on New York City police before he died. I did a lot of research for him. I have developed contacts in the New York City police department and I know some people to talk to and I do get requests from other writers on this topic. I do not keep photocopies that I have already made that answer the generic questions on this topic because all the copies that I made for prior clients belong to prior clients and it is out the door. However, since I have been down this road a number of times, I can be very efficient in researching, so I know exactly where to go to answer the new questions about New York City police detectives. G.F.: How can you use information collected during previous projects? D.S.: The questions are always a little bit different, I mean, every writer has a different scenario for their story, I mean there are some things that I can answer off the top of my head, a few simple questions but most of what they want is published information on the topic. They want really very detailed information and that changes all the time. The New York City police department evolves, changes and new things are published and older things become obsolete, so when I do the research on this topic the next time I am very efficient because, as I said, I know exactly where to look for information. But I will find them the current version of it, the current publications that answer their questions, or I will talk to someone at the New York

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police department who will answer their specific set of questions based on the current circumstances, as they are at the present day. G.F.: Do you keep a record of the work you do and update the information you have? D.S.: I do not keep the files that I then hand on to other clients. I do have big files of what I have done, but then they are very rarely useful for future clients and I just keep them as it is interesting for me. I research things anew.

G.F.: From your point of view, to what extent does fiction need to be documented? D.S.: The story has to come first and I think that the research is very important and adds a lot but if people wanted to read history they would buy the non-fiction history books. If people want to read fiction they need to have a strong story and read that. But you know, it really works both ways and if the research is not correct it may kill a book. If you read book reviews–you know, most newspapers and magazines will hire a reviewer who has some knowledge of the topic that the author’s book is about−and if they come up in the first paragraph of the review and say the authors did not do their homework, it will kill the book, even if it is a best-selling author. If the reader feels that the author does not take the trouble to do his homework, why should the reader buy the book? At the other end of the spectrum, if an author doesn’t have a really good story to tell that keeps the story moving and if he or she gets bogged down in endless and unnecessary details that don’t move the story forward, then I think that is also going to be critiqued by reviewers and present a problem. I think the author has to find his own balance. Language is also important but not every author wants to do that. It really depends on what the authors want to do and what is their perception of what the market will be interested in. If you want to write a historical novel and you want it to appear very old fashioned in all aspects, including the language, then that becomes a difficulty for the reader. I think that is really the authors’ decision that comes almost after they have finished with my assistance. So I think the authors have to find their own balance. G.F.: How different is working for cinema and television compared to working for literature? D.S.: It is pretty much the same because I am doing research for writers and screenwriters, and they want as much detail as I can find on their topic to make it real for their readers or for their viewers. I do not think there is a really big difference there at all.

G.F.: Are you often approached to confirm rather than research information? D.S.: Both. I am almost always hired to do the research myself. Occasionally people will call me up and ask for advice, people who cannot, you know, hire a researcher, then they will ask for advice, “How do you find the information on this and that?” Then I will just be nice to them and offer them my experience, but I am almost always hired to do the actual research.

G.F.: Are there fields which require more technical details, such as crime stories which need to be more accurately documented due to the public’s being so familiar with this genre? D.S.: I think so. People are fascinated by the genre and there is a whole genre in the US of what we call the police procedural and people are actually fascinated by this, I mean forensics, for example. Criminal forensics series are terribly popular in the US. I mean, if you watch ... if you turn on the evening television shows, there is CSI,17 which I worked for. It is a crime scene investigation series; it is a very popular series of television shows that take place in different cities, CSI Miami, CSI New York, CSI Las

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Vegas. And there is also a TV show called Bones. I mean there are endless TV shows finding dead bodies and figuring out who did it, because of the science involved. So, for this genre, the technology and procedures are almost central to the story and to what the audience is interested in.

G.F.: Are there kinds of research that you find frustrating because overly technical or because you do not have enough time? Are there fields you stay away from? D.S.: Yes, to all of that. Sometimes the budget is just not realistic for what they are looking for and I will tell them upfront. I will tell them that I will do what I can but this is not really enough, and they will do what they can with that. And sometimes it is just extremely difficult to research and there is not published information on some things, especially in the world of secret intelligence organisations and things like that. They understand that they are dealing with those kinds of limitations. If they are fiction-writers, the advantage is that they can make it up: they will take all the facts that are available and then fill in the blanks and write what they want to write. The only people who can tell them that they are wrong would be secret agents and intelligence officers working in that field, and they are not going to come out and complain that the book was not accurate. G.F.: What would you compare your work to? Detective investigation, journalism, ghost- writing? D.S.: I would not compare it to ghost-writing. I do not do ghost-writing. I would say that it is part detective, part journalist and part librarian; it is a fair part of what I do. It is sometimes ... the part of being a detective is tracking down people. There is a story and once again it is about Ken Follett. Ken Follett wrote only one non-fiction book and it was called On Wings of Eagles.18 It is a book ... it is before the Shah of Iran fell in 1979. Things were already going very badly. There was much anti-American sentiment in Tehran at the time. The Iranian government was essentially ... their computers were essentially being run by an American company called EDS, which is based in Dallas and the president of that company, H. Ross Perot, who was well- known in the US back then−he is a billionaire and he actually ran for president later19–had a number of his employees who ran the computers in Iran, taken prisoners in 1979, and they ended up in one of Tehran’s terrible prisons. And there was no government in control at the time that one could talk to, to try to get them out. So, H. Ross Perot hired a retired American soldier, colonel Bull Simons was his name, and he tried and get these fellows out of the Iranian prison and, to make a long story short, they created a sort of fake riot outside the prison and a big diversion and they sent a bunch of mercenaries into the prison and got these Americans out and successfully got them out of Iran. Ken Follett wrote a very good non-fiction book on this topic and I did a lot of research for one of the projects that was very important: there was an American citizen who was in Tehran at the time and he had acted in ways that might be considered treasonous. He acted in ways which were very much not in the interest of the US because he was getting paid by somebody to do it and Ken Follett wanted to interview this man who was very important. This man did not want to be found: he had since changed his life, he had changed careers, he had left Iran and moved back to the US. It took a long time but this is where being a detective, as part of my job, became important. I kept working at it and I finally found this guy−he is now working in the USA. No one knew about his past or what he had done and I got him on the phone and I could just hear his heart sink. I wanted to talk to

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him because I knew what he had done in the past and I told him I was not going to blackmail him or anything like that. I just wanted him to talk to Ken Follett to authenticate some information and I said that his name would never be used, we would not divulge his new life, his new world and he could remain safe. But would he be willing just to talk to Ken Follett and help authenticate some things, so that Ken’s non-fiction book would be correct? He agreed to that, he had no problem with that, they talked and I never told anyone who he was, what he had done or anything like that, so that it was like being a real detective to find this, and that is a long answer but ... G.F.: Do you work in teams or individually? D.S.: I do not delegate very much research to be honest with you, for a couple of reasons. I think one of the reasons that my clients hire me is−and I am not trying to brag here and I am just trying to tell you what I believe is the truth−my clients are best-selling authors, their next book is very important to them. It is also very secret to them; they do not want the world knowing what they are doing necessarily, maybe in vague terms but not in specific terms. They are interested in having a researcher that they know and that they can trust and who can also understand what their needs are specifically because, you know, different authors, different specificities, different requirements. So one thing I might do is−if I have a specific list of articles, or something like that, that looks particularly good, that is not available online, which can happen−I may have someone else go to the library simply to do the mechanical work of making the photocopies. But most of the research I do myself because my clients want me to; they want to know that the person they have given this request to is the person who does it. They know me, they have some trust in my judgment in not only finding what is true and what is real but also in deciding, among the very large mass of information that can exist on a certain topic, that the information that I choose is the best and will best help to answer their questions. G.F.: Your worst memory or experience as a researcher? D.S.: Worst experience or disappointment ... you know writers are creative people and sometimes a writer will write half a book and all of a sudden say: “I’ve lost this book because the characters aren’t working for me” or “The story isn’t working for me” or “Somebody else has published a book on this exact topic and my publisher has not told me” or even “You know, the interest in this topic is not so great and...” It is very disappointing to see that I have spent a block of time, the paperwork, you know ... I am doing this work and ... you know ... it’s not to work out. G.F.: Are you sometimes disappointed by the way the information you provided was used? D.S.: I do not think that happens too often. I think that there is a lot of intellectual honesty among writers and it is a sign of professionalism, it’s a sign of quality, but I do not think that people misuse things or decide not to use things. In fiction you can to some extent, you know, you are writing a story, you are making it up, so if the facts are inconvenient or do not really serve your story, there are some writers who will ignore some facts but they will very often write a little foreword at the beginning of the book admitting to doing so, probably for their own benefit, so that some critic doesn’t slap them for having done so. But that doesn’t happen very often. I do not think that there have been too many disappointments. Occasionally some topics can be very boring, I’ll admit to that. That is more often when I am doing research for business people, you know, doing statistical research for business people. I could

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probably make more money doing business research all the time, but I would cheat myself. There is demand. I mean, I live in New York and you know Wall Street is always interested in information of one kind or another. I tell you what: there are many companies in the US that do nothing but research on stocks; they do predictions for trends, predictions for products that will be popular and things like that. They do a lot of primary research. I am sometimes hired to do secondary research, which means companies will say, you know, “We are thinking of coming out with this new product. Tell us what is going on in this area, it’s not an area we are familiar with”, “What is being made here?”, “What products are going to come to market?”, “What is the market for a product like this?” Theoretically, it is not something that I do very often, you know, it is something that I have some skill at and I get hired to do it, but it is dull and I would much rather be researching twelfth century London.

G.F.: What is the research you are most satisfied with? D.S.: I do not know if it is a specific thing, but one thing that I love doing is see my clients’ books be published and then reading reviews in important publications, like The New York Times, and when the reviewer gushes over how authentic it seems, and how good the guy is, and you know, “This guy did his research ...” That makes me feel good to know that it made a difference to their book.

NOTES

1. While, in the 20th century, the USA witnessed the expansion of narrative forms of journalism with writers like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, for instance, the United-Kingdom largely benefited from the unparalleled influence of the BBC, which spawned generations of committed filmmakers using fiction to get their political messages across, from Ken Loach to Peter Kosminsky. 2. Owing to the unrivalled influence of Hollywood, the US television has often been pressured into being purely entertaining, as proved by the thinly-disguised criticism that follows: “The Council cannot, and does not wish to deprive television of this art form which has given rise to great plays, novels and movies. Nor is the Council in a position, since it deals only with journalism, to pass judgement. [...] Nevertheless, the Council expresses its concern and urges that the television networks take this matter under serious consideration, going beyond mere routine disclaimers, to assure a proper regard for factual and historical accuracy.” Tom W. Hoffer and Richard Alan Nelson, “Docudrama on American Television,” in Why docudrama?: Fact-Fiction on Film and TV, ed. Alan Rosenthal (Carbondale, Edwardsville, Il: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999) 64-77. 3. Cathy Come Home (1966), by Ken Loach, highlighted the defects and limitations of the Welfare State. 4. The War Game (1965), by Peter Watkins, dramatised the criticism levelled at the then government for contemplating the use of nuclear weapons.

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5. “The American system has always dominated economically, the British system being regarded as a model for responsible, non-commercial broadcasting." Derek Paget, No Other Way to Tell It (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) 141. 6. Among the most prominent productions were Warriors (Peter Kosminsky, 1999), The Project (Peter Kosminsky, 2002), The Deal (Stephen Frears, 2003) and It’s a Free World (Ken Loach, 2007). 7. Derek Paget, No Other Way to Tell It, op. cit., 197. 8. We can mention, among other plays: Called to Account (2002), Stuff Happens (2004), Embedded (2004) and What I Heard About Iraq (2004). 9. “John Updike published Rabbit, Run, the first of his four novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, in 1960. Rabbit Redux, the second installment in the series came out in the fall of 1971. The third and fourth installments, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, followed in 1981 and 1990, respectively. […] Each Rabbit novel is cast in the present tense and is set in the year or so just prior to its publication date. […] This tidy, decade-by-decade structure has served as one of the tetralogy’s most popular features: fans of the series can check their own experiences against that of Updikes’s gruff, hard-hearted Toyota salesman. In this regard, the Rabbit novels serve as a fictionalized time line of the postwar American experience.” Marshall Boswell, John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2001) 253. 10. Daniel Starer, Hot Topics: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Fifty Major Controversies Everyone Pretends to Know All About (New York, NY: Quill, 1995) 269. 11. Daniel Starer, Who to Call? (New York, NY: Quill, 1992) 654. 12. John Boswell and Daniel Starer, Five Rings, Six Crises, Seven Dwarfs and 38 Ways to Win an Argument (New York, NY: Galahad Books, 1997) 241. 13. “The time of online database researching […] the Internet” refers to the 1990s. For further information, see Harris M. Cooper, Larry V. Hedges and Jeff C. Valentine, The Handbook of Research Synthesis and Meta-Analysis (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009) 75. 14. “By the late 1970, publishers were creating electronic databases of citations used as the basis for their published indexes and abstracts; a few even made searching of these databases available for a fee. But these electronic databases were searched remotely by experienced searchers, who accessed reference databases through a vendor aggregator (a service provider who bought the database and sold access item to your library). So you took your request to a librarian who used a vendor such as Dialog to search available reference databases. By the early 1980s, some reference databases were available on CD-ROM that a library acquired from a vendor such as Silver Plater. By the 1990s, electronic versions of many databases became available online, with libraries subscribing to vendor aggregators such as EBSCO, Ovid or ProQuest.” Ibidem. 15. “Retrieval systems such as Dialog are capable of finding any natural-language terms of interest in any or all fields.” Harris M. Cooper, Larry V. Hedges and Jeff C. Valentine, The Handbook of Research Synthesis and Meta-Analysis, op.cit., 63. 16. “Baud [...] refers to the data transmission speed of a modem.” P.K. Singh, Introduction to Computer Networks (New Delhi: F.K. Publications, 2010) 231. 17. Crime Scene Investigation 18. Ken Follett, On Wings of Eagles (New York, NY: William Morrow & Co, 1984) 444. 19. “A maverick Texas billionaire and political populist, H. Ross Perot was a third-party presidential candidate in the 1992 and 1996 elections.” Roger Chapman, Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices, Volume 1 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2010) 724.

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AUTHORS

DAN STARER

Dan Starer is a prominent American fiction researcher, or “documentalist”. He has conducted research for numerous fiction writers such as John Updike, Nelson DeMille, Ed McBain, Mary Higgins Clark and Ken Follet who have entrusted him with investigations on history, geography and sociology to give factual accuracy to their novels.

GEORGES FOURNIER

Georges Fournier is lecturer of English in the Department of Information & Communication of the Université Jean Moulin − Lyon 3. He completed a PhD in media studies entitled “The Fictional Treatment of Current Events on British Television (1965-2005)” and he is currently doing research on the fictionalisation of political issues. Université Jean Moulin – Lyon 3

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Critical Perspective

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Media Studies: A French Blind Spot

François Cusset

1 Within the French university system, teaching or simply promoting Media Studies, according to the Anglo-American tradition, sometimes feels like teaching marketing in 1950s Soviet Union: an odd choice, both exotic and risky, going against the grain of dominant norms. Indeed there is not a single course Major or Minor, nor any full curricular program in Media Studies, within the realm of French higher education. The only attempt in this direction can be found in a few departments of “Information and Communication Science” (dubbed “Infocom” in the French academic lingo), but in the form of highly specific approaches of the media landscape, from reception studies to the sociology of journalists and to the stakes of new information technology, rather than the quintessential Media Studies comprehensive interdisciplinary approach. As if all there was in France was a scholarly and critical dead zone, an empty territory waiting to be explored, between France’s two dominant–and exclusive–takes on the subject: non-academic activism against media power and bias, and the purely technical professional training of journalists.

2 On the one hand, the French way of theorizing and investigating the media world consists in a deliberately biased and ideologically committed critique of dominant media, in the wake of the age-old critical paradigm (derived from the Frankfurt School’s totalizing and oppositional approach, developed first by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, as well as from various post-Marxist media watchdogs), but clearly removed from academic circles. What is at stake here is an adamant critique of mainstream media’s agenda-setting function and the banana-republic type of privileges enjoyed by the French media elite. This is indeed a sound and useful view, best represented by online watchdogs of the Leftist sort such as Acrimed or Indymedia, and by the best-selling polemical essays by various editors of the critical monthly Le Monde diplomatique, such as the 1997 Les nouveaux Chiens de garde by Serge Halimi (over 300,000 copies sold and ten reprints) and the recent L’Explosion du journalisme by Ignacio Ramonet, ten years after his successful and aptly titled La Tyrannie de la communication– but it is a view which is short on scholarship and the workings of interdisciplinary studies, to say the least, and which rarely appears in academic seminars and reading lists. Variations on such critical, non-academic approaches include former TV

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journalist Daniel Schneiderman’s Webtv talk show “Arrêt sur images” and his own best- selling essays, as well as more recent publications, aimed at journalists and lay people alike, on the rise of online media and the more accurate, interactive, citizen-supported newsmedia it is currently striving to bring to life.

3 On the other hand, when the media world is the object of curricular programs in France it is most often, if not exclusively, in journalism schools and graduate programs in communication, which all have in common a professionalizing and vocational bent largely incompatible with an exhaustive cultural and social interpretation of media apparatuses. With very few exceptions, such as University of Paris-Sorbonne’s CELSA, the said programs are not very well ranked, nor are they necessary to a successful career in these fields, and it comes as no surprise that a very small number of French professional journalists and communication experts hold such degrees. In a way, the difference between French and Anglo-American systems here is reminiscent of the situation prevailing in fine arts or architecture: a specific, almost exclusively professional and technical training in France’s schools of architecture and fine arts, which appears paradoxical in the country of prevalent intellectualism, and equivalent programs in the US and UK rich in art theory and urban philosophy, all the way to teaching Erwin Panofsky and Jacques Derrida to future painters and architects, in countries usually more easily associated with a pragmatic tradition.

4 A few reasons for such a state of affairs can be briefly delineated, although each of them would require longer developments to be fully relevant. As with many byproducts of Anglo-American academic innovation over the past decades in the social and human sciences, which all met with strong resistance in France, one should first remember that the French university system, with its age-old disciplinary bastions, hasn’t caught up yet on the many Anglo-American variants of inter- or trans-disciplinarity. Nor has it really joined a globalized academic field characterized by disciplinary crossings and interdisciplinary institutes–under whose auspices scholarly fields such as Women’s Studies, Film Studies, African-American Studies, and Cultural Studies have seen the light of day over the past three or four decades. Nothing of that ilk in France, at least for now. Since Media Studies require the simultaneous practice of several disciplinary paradigms, if not their more ambitious interweaving to constitute the media as a new scholarly object, a country still reluctant to embrace such basic interdisciplinary bridgings as connections between literature and philosophy, or history and the social sciences, is guaranteed to not constitute the best academic home for Media Studies.

5 In that same respect, the wider French resistance to Cultural Studies, which Media Studies originally belonged to (in the pioneering works of David Morley and Stuart Hall, during the early UK phase of Cultural Studies), is a case in point: while Cultural Studies have been nurtured from day one by, among others, the works of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau, they have never ‘made it’ in France, where most scholars still see them as a playful ‘American fad’ (oblivious of their British birth in Birmingham in 1964), and–more profoundly–where the very concept of Culture, still sacred and somehow untheorized, is hard to relativize in terms of power relations and symbolic games. Maybe the exact same thing could be said in France of the media: not that it is as sacred and worshipped as a cultural (or literary, for that matter) Graal, on the contrary, but it is also taken for granted, turned into a natural phenomenon as much as the air we breathe, unworthy of an analysis in terms of social construction and cultural representation. Neither culture nor the media can easily be conceived of in

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France as a representational apparatus, a symbolic construction, a battlefield for identity politics (this taboo of France’s colorblind ‘République’), nor as an instrument of domination or resistance, despite the great legacies in these areas of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. The case with culture might be a matter of religion (if one sees culture as France’s only religion), whereas the case with the media could be a matter of contempt and cynicism: according to many French academics, this combination of lies and pressures, of promiscuous elites and conflicts of interest that constitutes the media should not be a serious object of academic study, period. It is too real, too contemporary, too trashy or ‘pop,’ to be worthy of a serious academic attention. In the same way that Anglo-American academics have developed a tendency to apply very elaborate theoretical tools to ‘low’ objects, such as pop culture or mainstream media, many French humanists tend to keep applying the same, unchanged rough conceptual tools to more ‘noble’ objects, which they view as the only ones worthy of their expert gaze (high literature, general anthropology, or vast political signifiers such as freedom or equality).

6 To conclude on a more positive note, there are indeed a few signs indicating that a U- turn might be taken in the not so distant future. Not only has French publishing started to translate the best of non-French theory which it had refused to import for so long (even if media theorists are still quite rare in French catalogs), and not only have issues of minority representation and reception theory started to be raised within the French media world (even if they have not yet been raised in more academic circles), but the French university system has come to acknowledge its belatedness with regards to the major theoretical debates of the globalized academic scene–and to half-open its doors to initial experiments in this direction, as with Gender Studies or with a serious approach to popular culture. Let us only hope that we won’t have to wait for French media to improve its own standards of accuracy and professional rigor, and to become more hospitable to minorities and alternative views, before we finally see Media Studies taught in French universities. Because that might still take a long time.

AUTHOR

FRANÇOIS CUSSET

François Cusset lived in New York City for ten years, where he ran the French Publishers’ Agency in the United States. He is currently a professor of American Civilization and the author of several essays on French-American relations, from the perspective of intellectual history. French Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and The Inverted Gaze: Queering French Literary Classics in North America (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011) are among the most critically acclaimed. He is also a journalist, an editor and a translator and contributes his critical perspectives on both sides of the Atlantic. Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

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Conference and Seminar Reviews

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Landscape as the Locus for Artistic Transfers Between Ireland, Northern Ireland and Great Britain (1968 - Present Day) 25 November 2010, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris

Charlotte Gould, Caroline Hancock and Sophie Orlando

EDITOR'S NOTE

Conference organised by PRISMES–Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3–, research group on British art One Piece at a Time and the Centre Culturel Irlandais

1 This conference was the result of an observation: the violent events that occurred between the end of the 1960s and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 have often been a focal point in the artistic practices in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Great Britain. The study of Irish art has privileged work based on the political situation in Northern Ireland during and after the Troubles. Recently, the Holden Gallery at Manchester Metropolitan University presented the exhibition Archiving Place and Time: Contemporary Art Practice in Northern Ireland since the Belfast Agreement (2009). 1 The political and institutional context encouraged the affirmation of specific visual identities. Today, artworks are like imprints of cultural exchanges between these regions and countries. The exhibition “0044,” organised by the Crawford Municipal Gallery in Cork in 1999, presented Irish artists living in Great Britain, not only sharing a common national identity, but more importantly experiencing displacement, migration and an encounter with personal and collective history. The Peace Process and the economic development in the region led to great shifts in cultural policies, exhibition venues and artistic practices. The Celtic Tiger, alongside the rise of cheap travel, modified the field of possibilities, and the current recession, with the Republic being the hardest hit, will probably bring more transformations.

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2 The landscape tradition is a shared subject in British and Irish history of art. Luke Gibbons2 establishes a direct link between contemporary art, the terror myth and Edmund Burke’s writing about the sublime in the 18th century. As a genre as well as a place, it has come to embody different, and sometimes common, aspects of both British and Irish identities. Willie Doherty represents this relation between landscape, terror and language in a similar vain to British artist Hamish Fulton. Cultural exchanges between artists either side were contested for a long time but nevertheless they existed, being often due to individual efforts such as artists travelling to train in art schools in the UK, and to galleries like the Orchard in Derry or the Kerlin in Belfast and then Dublin. The work of British artist Paul Graham (Troubled Lands, 1987) and of his Irish student Paul Seawright (Sectarian Murders, 1988) are exemplary in their confrontation of documentary and photographic genres in order to deal with political murders and the intrinsic violence in Northern Irish landscapes in the 1970s. Could it be said that landscape is treated somewhat differently in Ireland? This question is often addressed from the angle of the painterly tradition of the 1950s, or associated with the emergence of the feminine in the 20th century. The aim of the conference was to look into possible new definitions of the concept, which might emerge from the observation of the exchanges between three art scenes.

3 Welcoming us at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, director Sheila Pratschke opened the conference, along with the Sorbonne Nouvelle’s Vice President, Carle Bonafous-Murat, who insisted on the way the poetical notion that “You say the word, I see the image” subtly introduces the possibility of shifts in perceived rootedness. Sophie Orlando, the founder of One Piece at a Time, introduced the proceedings by setting the notion of landscape, traditional in both British and Irish art, in a contemporary context.

4 Our first speaker, Maeve Connolly, art critic and senior lecturer at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, presented “On Location: Ireland, Artists’ Film and Problems of Representation in Contemporary Art.” She examined the significance of location as a point of view which exceeds representation. The past fifteen years have witnessed a renewed interest in the moving image, paralleled by the emergence of new contexts for the production of artists’ film and video both inside and outside Ireland, where this period was also marked by unprecedented levels of consumption, fuelled by property speculation and unregulated financial instruments such as derivatives, so complex that they exceed representation. During this same period, cities like Dublin were recast as ‘creative capitals,’ with the potential to attract desirable and mobile workers. Towards the end of the 1990s, various theorists sought to examine the role of art practice in these reconfigurations of place, labour and value. Some claim that artists exemplify the flexible self-managing worker, producing the self as ‘project’ while others (like Miwon Kwon, in One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity) note the rise of site-specific or ‘locational’ modes of art and curatorial practice, in which artists generate meaning through the ongoing discursive production of space as site. Commissioned artists are often expected to engage with geographical features that are in some sense recognisable. Yet artists working within these contexts are often acutely aware of the complex relationship between site, setting and location within economies of moving image production. In a 1997 October roundtable, George Baker noted that a number of prominent artists working with film originate from, or work in, places that have a particular relation to the film industry. For example, Stan Douglas is based in Vancouver, which is popular as a film location because of its capacity to ‘stand in’ for

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various other cities. Baker’s comments offer a counterpoint to Kwon’s critique and another way of conceptualising the relationship between location and site. Connolly illustrated this treatment of location by presenting Leisure Centre, 2005, by Desperate Optimists, itself a commentary on urban regeneration.

5 Gabriel Gee, the treasurer of One Piece at a Time and editor of online journal Pied-à- Terre then presented “Le paysage, une identité représentée et réinventée à la Orchard Gallery” (“The Landscape: an Identity Represented and Reinvented by the Orchard Gallery”). Led by Declan McGonagle, the Derry gallery, founded in 1978, emerged and flourished in the very problematic context of the Troubles, which its director wished to confront. McDonagle had insisted on the relevance of inviting English artist Richard Long in 1984 saying that the artists he invited in Derry were not necessarily political artists; Richard Long for example cannot be considered a political artist, but McDonagle invited him because he works with the landscape, and the landscape is a central notion when considering the feelings of identity in Ireland, as well as in Britain. The landscape thus expresses both identity and difference. Something Gee presented in the work of Diarmuid Delargy, Sean Fingleton, Catherine Harper and Patrick Ireland (Brian O’Doherty’s name from 72 to 2008). What emerges from the case-study of a Northern- Irish gallery, and which some questions from the audience came to highlight, is the tension between working on a sense of place and parochialism, the negative connotations of the notion of the “local artist.”

6 Fionna Barber is Professor of Contextual Studies at Manchester School of Art. She presented “The Specificity of Northern Space: Curating Post-Conflict Art from Northern Ireland” and demonstrated how, since the Good Friday Agreement, much of the work of artists in Northern Ireland has been preoccupied with the transformations that have taken place in a (largely) post-conflict society. A central theme has been the shifting significance of urban space. In Belfast in particular conflict zones have become redefined as tourist destinations, while working-class housing has been replaced by desirable real estate. Yet despite these processes of urban renewal the recent past has proved remarkably resistant to being over-written. In recent photographs by Paul Seawright urban space becomes the site of undisclosed trauma. In these reconfigurations of Northern space the meanings of the rural are also subject to question. Rather than functioning as a site of escape from urban experience, some versions of Northern Irish landscape continue to bear the emotional associations of conflict familiar also from art of the 1980s. She presented the experience of Archiving Place and Time, which, for her, embodied a sense of distance and cultural displacement from the outset; with Barber as originally from Northern Ireland but now living and working in the North of England. She noticed a shift in meanings of these works when exhibited outside Northern Ireland where spectators often begin to engage by situating the works within an awareness of other post-conflict situations on a global scale.

7 Artist Pauline Cummins then looked at the theme of landscape under the headings of sexuality and politics by presenting her own art practice: Inis’Oirr/Aran Dance (a slide- sound piece from 1985, an exploration of sexuality and landscape in relation to the patterns of Aran sweaters), Unearthed (1988, a multi-media performance in response to the build-up to Bloody Sunday) and concluded with her most recent work, The Still Centre (2010) that explores landscape through a performative use of video. All these works have been shown in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and England, with engagement of audiences in each situation. Cummins insisted on the transfers of the works of art

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themselves, since some have been shown internationally, allowing for the dispersion of issues.

8 Rachel Brown and Brighdin Farren, who set up Belfast curatorial project Brown&Bri, presented the new working model they have invented. The way Belfast has developed and now functions is their subject matter. Its artistic community has continuously adapted throughout a conflict which at once depressed and liberated it, providing both enough subject and enough external interest to take its artwork out of Northern Ireland and place it on an international platform. They see shifts and movements in practice being dependent on factors like availability of studio space, funding, representation and market, but also witness the power of art to make visible invisible landscape conditions, to shift things around and remap the city. Relating this to the current situation of large cuts in public funding for the arts, and a need to become more self-reliant, they presented their own practice. They collaborate with other organisations such as the Catalyst Arts Project to curate and deliver projects.

9 In “The Great Hunger: (Re) Visions of Irish Republican Martyrology,” Ronnie Close, a senior lecturer at the University of Wales, examined key depictions of Irish Republicanism, presenting two distinct uses of landscape and place: Steve McQueen’s film, Hunger (2008) and David Farrell’s photographic work, Innocent Landscapes (2001). Close discussed the formalist archaeology of the H.M. Maze Prison as imagined in Hunger, set against what he deemed a far more subtle pictorial romanticism in Innocent Landscapes. Although Farrell’s photographic work trades on recognised symbolic notions of the Irish rural idyll, the artist inverts these assumptions. Farrell makes authentic our presence at evidential search procedures by extending the medium outwards as a visual poetic form of witnessing. This is predicated by the absence of bodies, in a sense confounding the documentary tradition. In contrast, Hunger’s cinematic vision tends to reaffirm the myth of Irish Republicanism within a heroic framework by focusing on the body trapped in a subterranean landscape of conflict. The popularity of the film has established it as a significant cultural artefact of Republicanism. However this representation is a fictional one, trading on the lack of archival sources and exposing a blind spot in the visual landscape of the Northern Irish conflict. The film is an approximation, dependent on living Republican witnesses. Close finds Hunger perfectly controversial as it uses an uncomplicated template to understand the Hunger Strikers’ sacrifice while Innocent Landscapes reveals a dark stain in the landscape: Irish Republicanism.

10 Dublin-based curator Vaari Claffey presented festival-cum-curatorial project Gracelands, which she launched in 2008. The annual open-air art event attracts the Irish art world as much as the local community and introduces a shift towards the countryside. The presentation of past performances and installations provided a lively introduction to the latest developments on the Irish art scene and meant everyone was eager to save the date for the next instalment (September 2011, for more information check: http://www.gracelands.eu/).

11 Renowned Irish artist Anne Tallentire was our last speaker. She uses photography, film and video to chart movement and migrations and the itineraries they inscribe on urban landscapes. As an artist working in Britain, she has experienced first-hand the difficulty for Irish practitioners to be recognised as such abroad. She presented naming, translation and work as the three main themes in her work, using The Gap of Two Birds (1989), Nowhere Else and Field Study (both 2010) as examples. Her work was included in a

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later exhibition at La Galerie Noisy Le Sec (Le Monde Physique, 26 February-23 April 2011).

12 The day ended with "Very Dark Skies Over the Emerald Isle: Events in the Landscape", a screening of a selection of videos compiled by Caroline Hancock which included work by Willie Doherty, Sean Lynch, Rhona Byrne, Bea McMahon, Vivienne Dick, Seamus Harahan, Anne Tallentire, Martin Healy, Jaki Irvine, John Lalor, Grace Weir, Daniel Jewesbury and Mark Garry.

NOTES

1. Archiving Place and Time. Holden Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University, November 2009. Organised by Fionna Barber. 2. Luke Gibbons, « L’art et l’inimaginable », in L’Imaginaire irlandais (Paris : Hazan, 1996) 54.

AUTHORS

CHARLOTTE GOULD

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3

CAROLINE HANCOCK

Independent curator and writer

SOPHIE ORLANDO

Founder and president of the association One Piece at a Time, groupe d’Études Interdisciplinaires sur les Arts Britanniques : http://www.geiab.org/

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Lights! Tystnad! Azione! Practices, Sites and Careers in European Film Production 7-8 April 2011, Department for Cinema Studies, Stockholm University, Stockholm

Melis Behlil

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Conference organized by Patrick Vonderau, Petr Szczepanik and Dorota Ostrowska

1 Within the last decade, Production Studies has emerged as a new field of inquiry within cinema and media studies, going beyond traditional examinations of authorship, industry structure, or active audiences. A conference generously hosted by Stockholm University, and organized by Patrick Vonderau in collaboration with Petr Szczepanik and Dorota Ostrowska in April 2011, proclaimed itself as “the first European intervention into this burgeoning field of study.” Indeed, contributions to the field have almost exclusively been made by US American scholars so far, and to quote the organizers, explorations within European contexts “either have been confined to individual projects emanating from disciplines not specializing in film and media studies, such as organizational sociology, management studies, cultural economics, and cultural anthropology, or they have focused on particular fields, such as screenwriting or animation.” Thus, perhaps predictably, but also in an all-embracing manner that is seldom encountered at other film studies conferences, the Stockholm conference entitled “Lights! Tystnad! Azione! Practices, Sites and Careers in European Film Production” brought together academics from different fields.

2 There were many film scholars, mainly from Humanities faculties across Europe and the US, but also researchers from a number of Business Schools working mostly in Organizational Studies. During the opening speeches, Patrick Vonderau of Stockholm University remarked that one of the main aims of the event was “to make Humanities

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dialogue with Social Sciences.” Said dialogue was indeed established, giving a chance to scholars from both fields to peek into realms they are not familiar with. It was a small conference with clearly defined goals; consequently most attendees were more concerned with theories and methodologies than at most other conferences. This proved to be useful, as those in the field of Production Studies are still grappling with terminologies and concepts. Dorota Ostrowska’s presentation, “Filming Emotions,” drew attention to these questions, highlighting the importance of materiality and raising the question of suitable methodologies.

3 Nearly all papers addressed the question of methodology in one way or another and three approaches appeared throughout. Several papers largely documented historical research based on archival material. The very first panel of the conference brought together Daniel Steinhart’s research on Hollywood studios’ runaway productions in Europe in 1960s, Petr Szczepanik’s presentation on the function of the dramaturge in Czechoslovakian cinema and Alex Zons’s work on Hollywood’s talent agents as major actors within production culture. Malin Wahlberg later presented work on archival material: her study looked at a transnational collaboration between Sweden and the US for a series of documentaries about Sweden on American Public Television in the 1960s.

4 Participant observation was another frequently employed approach, more so by scholars with a background in Social Sciences. Anna Zoellner’s study of documentary production for television in Germany and the UK and Dimitrinka Stoyanova’s research in British independent production companies were clear examples of this. These presenters had also conducted interviews, which emerged as the preferred methodology across the board – for example Chris Mathieu’s study, which involved 57 interviews with the Danish cinema ‘élite.’ Interviews do provide a remarkable insight into the production process. But at the same time, one needs to be aware of their reflexive nature: it is a community dealing in the business of telling stories, their own stories. In one of the pioneering works in the field, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, John Caldwell of UCLA analyzes not only the act of production, but also the narratives and rituals through which media laborers in varying positions make sense of their work.

5 John Caldwell was also present at the Stockholm conference to deliver the keynote lecture. In his talk entitled “Distributing and Managing Production Knowledge: How Culture Leaks out of Production,” Caldwell suggested the messy discipline of Production Studies be seen as a toolkit. His speech was a valuable reminder of why Production Studies is performed largely within the Humanities; production conditions warrant research because they help author the text, which has traditionally been the primary subject of study by film scholars. Caldwell also provided a topical approach, presenting quite extensively the impact of new technologies on production and media employees. He first discussed how in addition to producing culture, the industry “leaks culture,” which supplies those within Production Studies with research material. This leakage can be done surreptitiously and virally (pertaining to the questions of reflexivity earlier mentioned), but also inadvertently. Caldwell also argued that the current changes create an environment of “stress aesthetics.” The new digital technologies spur disorder and contention, which in turn boosts creativity.

6 Creativity as a concept was one of the most significant themes throughout the 2-day conference. There were papers that aimed at theorizing creativity from different angles, such as Marja Soila-Wadman’s approach from organizational studies, or Eva

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Novrup Redvall’s presentation, “Production Practice as an Interplay between Individuals, the Domain and the Field: A Research Framework for Studying Feature Filmmaking,” which discussed how an idea is developed into a film. Similarly, Sara Malou Strandvad followed five film projects over a one-year period, at the end of which all projects ended up in a different stage of production. Other papers often returned to this subject, and the work of creation was discussed in relation to a number of different professions. In addition to the previously mentioned papers on dramaturges and agents, there were a number of case studies investigating transnational workworlds, such as Patrick Vonderau’s research on prop makers in present-day Babelsberg Studios. One professional occupation that received considerable attention was scriptwriting. It has been pointed out that this line of work provides researchers with more readily available material in the form of various script drafts. Scriptwriting also has a remarkable relationship with the creative process, bringing into discussion questions of individualism versus working in a community, a topic covered by Bridget Conor in her work on British screenwriters.

7 Individualism was debated largely along with professional positions, as reputations are the key capital owned by all in the field of cultural production. The old Hollywood adage, “you’re as good as your last job” was often repeated, yet challenged by the newer “as good as your next idea.” Philip Drake’s presentation, “‘Reputational Capital’ and ‘Talent Economy’: Useful Concepts in Understanding the UK Film Industry?” was for the most part concerned with this issue. At the same time, Drake brought forward another frequently referenced topic, namely the importance of location. Clusters and agglomerations of production have been examined within studies of media industries; they are also inevitably significant to Production Studies. Questioning locality was central to a number of papers. In addition to the historical accounts of runaway productions and collaborations, Isak Thorsen’s investigation of runaway productions in contemporary Denmark and Alessandro Jedlowski’s analysis of Nigerian video filmmaking in Italy were situated within the existing studies on transnational cinema.

8 All these different approaches demonstrated that there are many possibilities and research questions awaiting to be explored in the field of European Production Studies. This first illuminating and exciting European conference will surely not be the last. With the announcement of the creation of a European Production Studies Network, and the conference proceedings published in 2012, the organizers steered a clear course for establishing this burgeoning field of research in Europe.

AUTEUR

MELIS BEHLIL

Kadir Has Universitesi

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Book and Website Reviews

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Alexis Blanchet, Des Pixels à Hollywood. Cinéma et jeu vidéo, une histoire économique et culturelle

Joël Augros Translation : Thibaut Clément

REFERENCES

Alexis Blanchet, Des Pixels à Hollywood. Cinéma et jeu vidéo, une histoire économique et culturelle, Paris : Pix’N Love Editions, 2010, 450 pages

1 Alexis Blanchet’s book forms part of a larger body of research for which he was made a Doctor in Film Studies at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense in 2009.

2 The text under review revolves around “how these two major players [i.e. cinema and videogames] in the field of mass entertainment have developed intermittent economic, cultural and aesthetic ties over the course of the past forty years” (p. 13). Ever since the development of videogames in the 1970s, Hollywood’s major studios have developed a close interest in the industry, making Jaws the first – albeit unofficial – film-to- videogame adaptation in 1975.

3 As he writes in the opening of his book, Blanchet aims to address both avid videogame players–the so-called hardcore gamers–and students in the field of communication, journalism, or performance studies. He wishes to combine “the high standards of academic research with the ease of read of widely accessible texts” (p. 13). It is to the author’s credit that he has succeeded on both counts. The text is written clearly, while displaying a thorough understanding of the industry as well as a comprehensive knowledge of pioneering research by English-speaking scholars. The author’s command of the subject is most apparent in the exhaustive database presented in the book’s concluding chapter, which the author playfully entitled “bonus material.”

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4 The book’s overall organization is chronological, which seems a wise choice for a text intended for a wide audience. Blanchet’s work nevertheless manages to go beyond the purely day-to-day, anecdotal details, as his critical analysis of the history of videogames d emonstrates. Each chapter provides a detailed case study which illustrates and develops the evolutions under study. Throughout the whole book, the author continuously and skillfully combines aesthetic, sociological and cultural approaches—a versatility best exemplified by his discussion of the evolution of mainstream cinema, the development of mall theaters, arcade videogames or emerging patterns of consumption (p. 117).

5 This wide encompassing approach allows the author to reach beyond obvious and expected conclusions. Rather than simply keeping track of the film-to-videogame ratio over time, Blanchet discusses the gradual convergence of the two industries through a careful analysis of cross-investment and of patterns of organization common to both sectors. He clearly shows how the structure of the videogame industry was modeled first under the influence of Hollywood majors and, from the 1990s on, by the development of the consumer electronics industry (p. 314). In the same way, Blanchet demonstrates how, in the 1970s, Hollywood majors and the toy industry both defined children as their core target, at a time when videogames were making their first foray outside amusement arcades.

6 The book, whose main argument rests on the gradual convergence of both the movie and videogame industries, does not restrict itself to the sole discussion of their mutual adaptation – a pitfall common to many other such studies – but successfully explores the subject’s many ramifications. The author thus discusses the visual aesthetics of videogames, film sequences, the regional or global circulation of products, as well as the increasingly similar promotion of videogames and blockbusters, as both rely on short campaigns, while videogames now use promotional featurettes directly modeled on those found on DVDs.

7 This book is a valuable contribution to the field of videogames and mainstream cinema studies: it cleverly deconstructs both mass entertainment industries, whose structures and products are shown to closely reflect each other, despite distinct development strategies. The choice of discussing videogames with the tools originally developed for the comprehensive analysis of film – that is, considering its aesthetics, economic, sociological as well as technical aspects – allows for an extremely convincing cross- disciplinary analysis.

8 Despite minor misprints, the book is well edited and published in a convenient format with easy-to-read fonts. The tables are clear and the screenshots that complement the text are especially relevant. The book also features a useful appendix presenting the main results from the database as well as a lexicon of the most widely used terms in the industry.

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AUTHORS

JOËL AUGROS

Université Vincennes-Saint-Denis - Paris

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Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits New York: W.W. Norton, 2009, 536 pages

Hélène Quanquin

REFERENCES

Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, New York: W.W. Norton, 2009, 536 pages

1 In June 2007, the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University organized its first summer seminar on “Writing Past Lives: Biography as History,” which sought to investigate “how a focus on individual lives can further historical analysis.” One of the plenary speakers was Linda Gordon, who was invited to speak on her work on the biography of American documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. The first picture which she showed was neither “Migrant Mother” (1936) nor “White Angel Breadline” (1932), nor was it part of Lange’s most famous work in Depression-stricken rural America conducted for the Farm Security Administration from 1935 to 1939. Instead, Gordon chose a picture probably no one in the audience had ever seen, that of Lange’s polio-twisted foot, the closest to a self-portrait she ever came to. In the second half of the 1950s, when Lange was teaching photography at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, she gave her students an assignment which was to produce photographs in answer to the question “Where do I live?” Lange’s picture of her foot was her own version of this assignment and for Gordon, “[t]his is where she lived, she felt–imprisoned in this imperfect body” (p. 3).

2 The story told by Gordon sent a chill through the audience at the Schlesinger Library, but her choice to open both her lecture and her book with it is significant of her difficulty in writing the biography of a woman like Dorothea Lange, whose skill and art relied on her ability to become as invisible as possible, a woman on the move, who, with a few exceptions, did not document her life. Gordon’s approach to Lange and to biography itself is shaped by the fact that she is neither a practised photography

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specialist nor a biographer, but a historian of national policy issues – she is a Professor of History at New York University. The project also did not originate with her, but with another biographer, whose work she picked up after he died prematurely. For Gordon, making this project her own meant to try and connect her own practice as an historian with Lange and her work. In the introduction, she draws a potent parallel between history as she sees it and “documentary,” whose goal is “revealing the truth and promoting social justice” (p. xvi). Throughout Dorothea Lange, Gordon chose to make her voice heard and her challenges as a biographer visible to the reader.

3 Dorothea Lange was born on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her parents were well-to-do German Americans who valued culture and education. Lange experienced two “childhood traumas” (p. 4), which Gordon sees as crucial although they were never articulated as such by Lange: when she was seven, she was struck by polio, which left her with a distorted leg; five years later, her parents separated and she hardly ever saw her father again, accusing him of deserting his family, although it is more likely that he fled charges of embezzlement. Still living in Hoboken, Lange’s mother took a job in New York City, where Lange attended school and was frequently left by herself. Gordon makes of these years spent walking the streets of the big city Lange’s formative years, during which “she learned to see” (p. 24). A poor student, she dropped out of school and, in 1912 or 1913, was hired as an assistant by famous German-American photographer Arnold Genthe, who trained her, and eventually worked for seven other photographers. In 1918, Lange set out with a friend of hers on a trip around the world, which ended with their arrival in San Francisco. This was where she married her first husband, painter Maynard Dixon, and started her first career as a successful portrait photographer for the wealthy and the flourishing artists’ community there.

4 It is to Gordon’s credit that she managed to establish a sense of continuity between Lange’s seemingly very different, and sometimes lesser known and valued, phases in her work as a photographer. Lange’s most famous work was made between 1935 and 1945, photographing for various government administrations–documenting the effects of the Depression in the rural areas of the West and South of the United States for the Farm Security Administration, headed by Roy Stricker, then the internment of Japanese Americans for the War Department, and working for different projects for the Office of War Information during World War II.1 Gordon’s premise that historical evidence is to be found in Lange’s photographs more than in her words accounts for her choice to widen the scope of her analysis beyond Lange’s most famous body of work, articulating it with the portraits taken by Lange at the beginning of her commercial career in San Francisco as well as with the photographs she produced later in life in a series of trips outside of the United States–in Ireland in 1954, and in Asia and the Middle East between 1958 and 1962. For her biographer, Lange was “a photographer of democracy and for democracy” (p. xiii), whatever the subjects of her pictures. The commercial photography she engaged in early on helped her perfect the “powerful documentary technique” (p. 64) which she used in the more committed work she produced in the 1930s as a dialogue with her second husband, Paul Taylor, a left-wing economist and expert in agricultural reform. Lange’s goal was “to show people in their contexts” (p. 213), as individuals.

5 Gordon’s decision to show her subject as a woman “shaped by experience both individual and historical” (p. 425) echoes Lange’s own project. Although her photographs show sensitivity to the plight of women, Lange was not a feminist. But

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Lange was a pioneer, in the sense that she lived a life no woman had lived before her. The pages on Lange’s family life and her difficult relationships with her two sons and her stepchildren are significant, insofar as they help the reader explore the complexities of Lange’s choices as a woman in the face of unusual constraints and her relation to her craft. Because of the lack of reliable sources and because of Gordon’s caution toward what she saw as the possibly tainted testimonies of Lange’s relatives, however, this biography is more convincing in its analysis of Lange’s photographic experience and legacy than in the pages devoted to her personal life and the way it might have interacted with her art.

NOTES

1. In 2008, Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro published a selection of 119 of Lange’s never published photographs of the internment of Japanese Americans. See Impounded: Dorothea Lange and Japanese Americans in World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008).

AUTHORS

HÉLÈNE QUANQUIN

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3

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Edgar Morin, Pierre Nora, Michel Onfray, et al., Des Intellectuels jugent les médias Paris : Mordicus, 2010, two volumes

Nolwenn Mingant

REFERENCES

Edgar Morin, Pierre Nora, Michel Onfray, et al., Des Intellectuels jugent les médias, Paris : Mordicus, 2010, two volumes

1 Des intellectuels jugent les médias is a collection of interviews published in French magazine Médias over the past five years. The ‘intellectuals’ in question are renowned philosophers (Daniel Bougnoux, André Compte-Sponville, Régis Debray, Yves Michaud, Michel Onfray, the Spanish Fernando Savater), historians (Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Nora), sociologists (Edgar Morin), and essayists (Philippe Sollers, Paul Virilio). In publishing these interviews, Mordicus Editions aims to help people to ‘better understand the volatile world of information’ (p. 9), especially by giving a voice to people who do not belong to that professional sphere and are thus freer to express themselves. Indeed, these intellectuals do not hesitate to ‘judge the media’ very harshly.

2 Although Bougnoux insists that the media cannot be reduced to information (he alludes to sport, shows and entertainment, p. 17), it is mostly the processing of events and information which preoccupies the interviewees. For them, the media do not take the time to explore information in depth, abandoning topics as quickly as they had taken them up. Gauchet denounces the lack of continuity, which he considers ‘a condition of intelligibility’ (p. 72). The result is an ‘amnesic highlighting of only one facet of reality’ and a ‘strong and immediate emotional mobilisation’ (p. 72). The fact that events are constantly blown out of proportion and then immediately forgotten leads to more and more popular distrust towards the media (Gauchet, p. 75). For Morin, the media even,

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on occasion, make up ‘shallow sensationalism’ when there is no real event to feed their columns (p. 16). On the other hand, Michaud denounces a trivialization of shocking events and images through meaningless repetitions and lack of a critical distance (p. 91). The difficulty in expressing structured thoughts and arguments on TV, with the host always keeping an eye on the clock, is also strongly criticized (Michaud, Sollers).

3 The intellectuals interviewed are particularly critical of the journalists and their practices. On the one hand, journalists are presented as ‘failures’ who have ended up in this profession for want of talent (Onfray, Compte-Sponville). Thus, they treat with resentment successful writers and artists, and they mostly discuss topics they have no or little knowledge of. On the other hand, journalists have a very strong esprit de corps (Debray). They are a caste, belonging to the same social class, the same Parisian social circle (Michaud), trained in the same schools (Debray) and feeding on exclusive networks (Michaud). The result is a disconnection from the popular interest and an impression of collusion, notably with the political world (Gauchet). Gauchet however insists that journalists are not subject to pressure from newspapers’ owners. These intellectuals are all the more critical as they have a high opinion of what the media should be. The media are ‘the new agora’ (Savater, p. 71). Their mission is to inform, educate as well as entertain (Bougnoux, Morin). They play an ‘inter-communication’ role, to help us ‘better comprehend our condition as interplanetary humankind’ (Morin, p. 21). This is why journalists have a vital role to perform: they are – or should be – the educationalists, the go-betweens helping to make sense of the information communicated (Morin, Onfray).

4 As a new medium, the Internet is also discussed, first insofar as it participates and enhances the ‘dictatorship of immediacy’ (Virilio) and the reign of emotion (Bougnoux) already present in other media. But the Internet also gives birth to new logics. It marks the end of mass media as it leads to a degree of fragmentation (Bougnoux, Debray). The ambiguity of the Internet and its uses are particularly underlined. It is presented as a space of free expression. Michaud himself enjoys the possibility to ‘express in a less conventional way’ (p. 95), for example to be able to treat non-topical subjects on his blog. Blogs are identified as ‘the new means of influence, of power’ (Sollers, p. 88). However, all the authors underline the issue of hierarchisation and selection. Having access to a lot of information is not necessarily beneficial for democracy as putting facts into perspective remains a difficult operation still reserved to an intellectual elite (Michaud), an operation which requires the general public to be educated (Onfray). The proliferation of information also leads to the danger of ‘moral relativism’ (Savater, Nora, Onfray) as blogs ‘indeed encourage expression but also the illusion that all opinions are of equal value and interest’ (Savater, p. 79). As any person can declare himself/herself a columnist, the journalists have to reconsider their profession (Bougnoux, Michaud). Whether this ‘demediatisation,’ the fact that people practice ‘auto-information’ without the journalistic go-between, represents a ‘conquest of democracy’ (Bougnoux) or not is still a disputed point.

5 The philosophers also discuss political issues related to the media. They underline the strong link in the nature of politics and the media as based on influencing opinion. The politicians and the journalists thus operate within to the same sphere (Gauchet), though the latter seem more powerful, contrary to what is usually thought. As a politician’s job and career is based on his/her ability to be heard by voters, his/her presence in the media is essential (Bougnoux, Gauchet). The journalists are the

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gatekeepers who control access to the screen (Debray). Thus their power lies in the fact that they set the agenda (Debray): the media decide what should be talked about or not, and what is not represented does not exist (Sollers). This act of construction is not new (Bougnoux). However, it takes on a renewed importance for two reasons. First, because in a global world, media are the place where wars are fought. Virilio develops the concept of ‘infowar’, of ‘cybernetic wars’, with ‘computer bombs’ (pp. 98-9). Another example is the way the success of terrorist acts depends on their being mentioned in the media (Bougnoux), a point reminiscent of the Debordian critique of the ‘society of the spectacle’. Secondly, because as they are a way of constructing the real, media participate in a nation’s ideology. Debray explains: “The ideology of an era is defined by what it decides to accept as reality. And in that sense, the media globally define what should be considered as real at a given moment in a given place. And, obviously, it will not be the same reality depending if you are in Burma, India, Colombia or France” (p. 53). This strong ideological nature of the media should not be considered as a well- conceived program but more as zeitgeist, a ‘concert without a conductor’ (Debray, p. 46). So, the media are discussed by these intellectuals as they are the link between political power and the voters, that is they are at the very center of the democratic process. As Gauchet underlines, “One cannot imagine a democracy without media.” (p. 84).

6 Finally Des intellectuels jugent les médias adds an interesting reflexive twist as the intellectuals are all asked what their personal relationships to the media are, and notably if they are ‘des intellectuels médiatiques’ (media-friendly intellectuals), which has a slightly derogatory meaning in French. Most of them are ‘media-addicts,’ usually privileging the press, and they recognize that the media are necessary for intellectuals as a mode of communication (Onfray, Savater, Compte-Sponville). However, they also insist on the fact that ideas are not adequately conveyed, especially by television, where quick answers and polemics are more appreciated than in-depth arguments (Morin, Nora, Compte-Sponville). Most, like Debray, seem to try and maintain a cautious relationship to the media. They thus tend to designate other intellectuals as media-friendly, notably Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henry Levy. One would be curious to have Médias ask them the same question.

7 In the end, the format of Des Intellectuels jugent les médias is both a strong point and a weakness. The two volumes read very easily. But the collage of interviews does sometimes leave an impression of randomness. More editorial work would perhaps have been useful, in order to establish links between the interviews. With the same themes reappearing from one interview to the next, the reader is left with the impression of a consensus among French thinkers. The volumes’ main interest would thus be to provide a snapshot of the state of thinking in France on the media and their evolution. Besides a more detailed introduction, insisting on the differences as well as the shared ideas in the different interviews, one would have appreciated the inclusion of texts by thinkers more comfortable with the new media, intellectuals less influenced by the Frankfurt School, in order to present more contrasted viewpoints. As it is, the collection provides a lively account of the established thinkers’ cautious vision of media in France today. It can thus be viewed as a strong conceptual basis to explore the media. At a time when the widening global reach of media and the quick development of the Internet incessantly raises political, cultural and ideological issues.

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AUTHORS

NOLWENN MINGANT

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3

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Stéphane Hugon, Circumnavigations : l’imaginaire du voyage dans l’expérience Internet Paris : CNRS, 2010

Mathieu O’Neil

REFERENCES

Stéphane Hugon, Circumnavigations : l’imaginaire du voyage dans l’expérience Internet, Paris : CNRS, 2010

1 In Circumnavigations. L’imaginaire du voyage dans l’expérience Internet Stéphane Hugon proposes a sociology of practices and imaginings to uncover the workings of the online experience. The book was written under the auspices of Michel Maffesoli (who contributes an introduction) and emphasises Maffesolian tropes such as the way micro- events act as social glue, the importance of “consensus” understood as the sharing of feelings and sensitivities, and the return in a new guise of tribal forms. The book is divided in two main parts, dealing first with analyses of movement across space and then with the issues of technique and mediation.

2 Hugon’s main theme is that connections can be established between landscapes and sociality: a social relation can take a spatial form. The usage of terms such as “surf,” “site,” “superhighway,” and “cyberspace” indicates that spatial imagery plays a role online, and Hugon argues that the Internet is allowing people to reconnect to the age- old human interest in wandering through space by engaging in nomadism, flânerie, dérive: “people don’t use Internet; they go on it” (p. 248). Going online represents a reaction to boredom and to a disenchanted world (Weber) of disciplinary techniques (Foucault) which assign people a fixed place. In addition to these authors, Hugon invokes a wide array of thinkers, as when viewing the online experience through the lens of Simmel’s description of urban processes or of Bollnow’s distinction between different kinds of social spaces according to whether an experiencing subject is

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present. These citations, and the myriad others which appear alongside (Sloterdijk, Bachelard, Zizek, Heidegger...) have scientific consistency inasmuch as they represent a philosophical intention to account for the diverse and elusive aspects of existence, and particularly for the role which mental representations play in constructing the social.

3 At other times the author’s metaphorical approach shows its limits, as when an analogy between the communitarian sentiment and fractal images is detected because both exhibit traces of “echo and representation”, so that the partial appearance of the one “leads to total and infinite representation of the whole” (p. 140). This comparison, while not incorrect per se, would also apply to such a wide variety of synechdoches that its explanatory power is questionable. Another issue is that the book ignores some central aspects of today’s online experience. Hugon includes snippets of interviews with people who describe their various activities on the Internet,1 but these mainly support an understanding of online communities as elliptical, fragile, evanescent occurrences; according with a “postmodern” theoretical stance which rejects any systematic approach as constituting “master narratives” which impose a rigid reading on a multiple and contingent reality.

4 Similarly when Hugon mentions blogs, he emphasises their self-referential aspects, the importance of friendship and affect. This approach is certainly appropriate to describe the early social Internet of the 1990s, where non-programmers engaged in activities such as role-playing and chatting in forums. However this exclusive focus on communication or play does not mesh with more contemporary forms of mass Internet sociality (“Web 2.0”) such as organising political campaigns through community weblogs, building online free culture databases through wikis, or advertising different kinds of events and publications through social network sites. In peer production groups such as free software communities or Wikipedia for example, participants engage in a common project which is also a cause to be championed (promoting free culture over proprietary models, for example). Rules and norms are established; hierarchies and leaders emerge. A new form of organisation has been generated. An exclusive focus on intense and immediate events does not account for these organisational arrangements or for the ideological message which they convey. In spite of these reservations, the fact remains that Circumnavigations’ uniquely original approach of online sociality is sure to enrich the methodological portfolio of Internet researchers.

NOTES

1. No information as to the number and nature of these interviews is provided.

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AUTHORS

MATHIEU O’NEIL

Université Paris-Sorbonne

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Ars Industrialis, arsindustrialis.org Association internationale pour une politique industrielle des technologies de l’esprit / International association in favour of an industrial policy for the technologies of the mind

Frédérique Mingant Translation : Cecilia Tirtaine

1 The arsindustrialis.org website was created in 2005, when the association Ars Industrialis came into being. The association was founded by a group of philosophers and jurists, on the initiative of philosopher Bernard Stiegler, the former director of the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique–Institute of Research and Coordination on Acoustic/Music) and the current director of the Department of cultural development at the Centre Georges Pompidou (French National Arts Centre).

2 The main focus of the association–cultural and philosophical but equally political and militant–is to study and find new ways of fighting against what it sees as the new “technologies of the mind” (or “psychopower,” a concept which echoes Michel Foucault’s “biopower”). Its argument is that the life of the mind was, during the 20th century and due to the pressure of mass consumption, subjected to economic imperatives, and therefore to the imperatives of the cultural industries, by means of the computing and telecommunications industries. The “technologies of the mind” are thus composed of all the techniques which were set up, via telecommunications, in order to make people buy, and, at a deeper level, make them yearn for goods and services. This implies developing a whole battery of techniques which target people’s brains. Eventually, this has resulted in a shorter and shorter attention span, a lack of longing, an increasing difficulty in individuating (that is to say the process which makes us individuals, distinct from our neighbours), a growing disappearance of the caring about oneself, a way of addressing the short-term which is alarming, and continual promotion of impulse (immediacy, brutality, violence, non-memory) at the expense of libido (which implies time, construction, memory). This critique of consumer society was inspired by several authors: Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi- Gourhan, Bertrand Gille, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Kant, for its philosophical dimension,

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and Sigmund Freud (theory of impulses and impulsiveness), Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault, for the socio-critique of the media and marketing.

3 The struggle, as seen by Ars Industrialis, is to reclaim those new means of communication and to study the “technologies of the mind” pertaining to them, in order to develop new mental “weapons”–such as regaining one’s attention, the capacity to decode and analyse information, etc.–, but also develop other means of using those new tools and thus develop new ways of relating to the other, so that people–seen as thinking beings with longings–become human beings again and not unfulfilled consumers.

4 Media analysis is conducted in different ways by Ars Industrialis and has been evolving over the years as techniques were evolving. Bernard Stiegler has thus devoted several articles, lectures or books to the issue of television,1 particularly in relation to children, their development (their capacity to be attentive, to build shared knowledge, etc.) and to the notion of transmission. More generally, the association’s philosophical (philosophy of techniques, of individuation, of knowledge and of perception) and especially economic and social reflection is mostly based on the observation of new technologies (the Internet, social networks, nanotechnologies). A significant part of its work consists in studying these new technologies: What are they? What do they allow us to do? How are they used? How can they be used without being “psychopowers”? In what ways do they change our relationship to the other, to knowledge, to communication, to information?

5 The website, in addition to giving higher visibility to the association and its actions, aims to be a model of this new system which it advocates and which it calls “the economy of contribution” (as is the case, for example, with Wikipedia): its users are consumers but also contribute articles. They can benefit from everyone’s abilities. As a matter of fact, Ars Industrialis regularly calls for contributions from its members, on specific subjects.2 Three workshops currently exist, each respectively devoted to “technologies of the self”–a concept created by Michel Foucault, which includes all the technologies of self-writing–, “relational technologies”–i.e. writing, communication technologies, social networks, etc.–, and, precisely, the issue of the “economy of contribution.”

6 Ars Industrialis regularly proposes debates, which often take place at the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris. In the past four years, the association has organised seminars at the Collège International de Philosophie, under the broad title “Finding New Weapons–For a Polemology of the Mind.” And, in line with a real economy of contribution, the website has a wealth of textual as well as sound and video archives: many debates or lectures are filmed or podcasted. The website’s home page consistently gives the latest news about Ars Industrialis and has an inset video of the latest debates, such as the debate of 19 March 2011, which focused on relational technologies, or that of 15 January 2011, which dealt with the theme of “care and relationships.”

7 Contents of the website: • A calendar of the different events organised by Ars Industrialis (debates, thematic days, workshops and work groups, etc.) • The 2005 Manifesto, which led to the creation of the association, as well as the 2010 Manifesto, which reinterprets the former Manifesto, taking into account the changes which

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occurred since 2005. The two Manifestos are translated into several languages, including English. • Web pages devoted to Bernard Stiegler. In addition to a detailed biography and bibliography, these pages contain a wealth of archives, including many of the lectures delivered by Bernard Stiegler in the past five years: written texts, videos and audio pieces. Some texts are the transcriptions of conferences given by Bernard Stiegler in several European countries and in the United States and are thus available in English. • Generally, many textual, video and sound archives of events organized by Ars Industrialis. • A glossary which gives the definitions of the words often used by members of Ars Industrialis.

NOTES

1. Bernard Stiegler, Serge Tisseron, Faut-il interdire les écrans aux enfants ? (Paris : Mordicus, 2009) ; Bernard Stiegler, La Télécratie contre la démocratie – Lettre ouverte aux représentants politiques (Paris : Flammarion, 2006) ; Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler. Echographies de la télévision, entretiens filmés (Paris : coll. Débats, Galilée-INA, 1996). 2. The association currently has around 500 members, from different countries (mostly European). Membership is open to anyone, which means that contributions are not necessarily made by specialists – they can be, but this is not the association’s main aim.

AUTHORS

FRÉDÉRIQUE MINGANT

Compagnie 13/10e en Ut http://www.1310.fr/

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