Cinema As a Sensory Circuit: Film Production and Consumption In
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Cinema as a Sensory Circuit: Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan Ya-Feng Mon Submitted in total fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Media and Communications Goldsmiths, University of London January 2014 1 Declaration I, Ya-Feng Mon, hereby confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Signature Date 2 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to a number of people. Firstly, to Professor Chris Berry, for his incredible support and mentoring. To Dr. Pasi Valiaho, for the most valuable conceptual inspirations. To my interviewees Chun-yi, Linwx, Summer, Lan, Grace, Emolas, Black Black, Village, Sandwich, T. Sean, Peichen, Flyer, Aileen Yiu-Wa Li, Chen Yin-jung, Yee Chih-yen, Hsu Hsiao- ming, Chang Chi-wai, Chien Li-Fen, Leste Chen, Patrick Mao Huang, Cheng Hsiao-tse, Rachel Chen, Fu Tian-yu, Liu Weijan, Helen Chen, my thanks for joining me on this long research journey. To Zoe C. J. Chen, Lin Wenchi, all of my colleagues at Funscreen, for their assistance with the fieldwork. To Mathew Holland, who carefully read the first draft of this thesis. To Peter Conlin, for the vigorous discussions at the final stage of my writing. To Juan Chin and Marianne Damoiseau, for being my friends. To my beloved Frieda, Stanley and Charlie, for giving me the courage to get up in the morning. To my family, without whose patience and generosity I would not have chased my dream. 3 Thesis Abstract Using post-2000 Taiwan queer romance films as a case study, this thesis examines the relationship between the film industry and its audience. It revisits scholarly distrust of the culture industry to address how, and to what extent, the power of capitalism has privileged the industry at the expense of the audience’s freedom or personality. Ethnographically informed, the thesis deems political economy and cultural studies approaches to the research question to be unsatisfactory. Both neglect the sensory aspects of cinematic communication. Drawing inspiration from actor-network theory and the analysis of late capitalism by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, it approaches the film industry-audience relation as a volatile, affective (dis)connection mediated by physical entities, including media technologies. This (dis)connection reflects an era in which the film industry invests in technoscience, tie-in products, ancillary markets and media convergence in order to seduce the senses of the audience. Core arguments are pursued along two lines. The first revolves around film text and cinematic apparatus, the second around film marketing and computational- networked communication. Looking at productive and consumptive activities, the main chapters reconsider issues of cinematic embodiment, genre filmmaking, film value production, and the (un)productivity of the human body. They locate cinematic embodiment in object-refracted bodily citation of film content, and define genre filmmaking as body-inflected reiteration of formulaic language. 4 Due to the specificity of the Internet medium, which extracts value-generative labour from communicative actions by the audience and the industry, the thesis argues that Internet film marketing is a collaborative project of film value production. The productivity of such collaboration is, however, potentially hindered since bodily agency, manifested in the capability of action, retains an ultimate quality of unpredictability. 5 Table of Contents Chapter One Through the Nexus of Bodies and Things: Introduction 8 Chapter Two Radical Contextualism of (Dis)connection: Review of Literature 53 Chapter Three On Mediated Production of Knowledge: Methodology 102 Chapter Four Bodily Fantasy: Bodily Citation and Object Intervention 149 Chapter Five Sensory Linkage: Filmmaking and Generic Communication 193 Chapter Six Intimacy: Internet Marketing as Collaborative Production 246 Chapter Seven Indeterminacy: Control and the (Un)productive Body 297 Chapter Eight Connections in a Precarious Age: Conclusion 348 6 Appendix A Advertisement for the Recruitment of Audience Volunteers 359 Appendix B List of All Audience Volunteers 361 Appendix C List of All Interviewed Audience Volunteers 362 Appendix D List of All Focus Group Participants 364 Appendix E Questions Listed for Interviews on Film Scene Re-enactment 366 Bibliography 370 7 Chapter One Through the Nexus of Bodies and Things: Introduction Using post-2000 Taiwan queer romance films as a case study, this thesis examines the relationship between the film industry and its audience. It revisits scholarly distrust of the culture industry to address how, and to what extent, the power of capitalism has privileged the industry at the expense of the audience’s freedom or personality. It is a dissatisfaction with existing theories that has led me to this research. I believe that there is an imbalance of power between the culture industry and its consumers, and I have seen evidence of contestation. Notwithstanding this, I deem the political-economic analysis of power structures and the cultural studies approach to social resistance inadequate. This is because as a moviegoer and fomerly a film journalist, I have always dealt with and seen people deal with volatility as part of the film experience. This includes the experience of producing and consuming film products. By volatility, I do not only mean that power dynamics shift around or between film producers and consumers. More importantly, I have perceived power dynamics shifting on the basis that film producers and consumers act in relation to one another when both are engulfed by feelings, impulses, and inexplicable intuition. In common sense terms, social dynamics have their affective and sensory aspects. Political economy and cultural studies, however, have paid insufficient attention to these aspects when it comes to the interplay between the consumers and the culture industry. This insufficiency motivated me to conduct this research, and I approach the film industry-audience relationship as unstable, but 8 affectual, and therefore biopolitical. Ethnographically informed, I trace and attribute the power dynamics between the audience and the film industry to intervention by physical entities, including organic bodies, inorganic objects and media technologies. I argue that the opaque intervention by these entities bears on the physical bodies of film producers and consumers, diversifies the result of cinematic communication, and as a consequence contributes to the instability of the biopolitical relationship between the audience and the film industry. Between July 2009 and March 2011, I interviewed filmmakers, film producers, marketers and spectators alongside running a focus group of film viewers. The collection of fieldwork materials details the practices of film production, promotion and consumption in post-2000 Taiwan where the film industry was booming once again after a decade of decay. The 2000s saw Taiwan film industry workers eagerly adopting successful business models from around the globe – especially from the wider East Asian region and Hollywood – in an attempt to sustain the industry financially. Like its international counterparts, the post-2000 Taiwan film industry invests in technoscience, tie-in products, ancillary markets and media convergence in order to seduce the senses of its audience. Sense seduction is first of all pursued via the adoption of globally or regionally circulated generic cinematographic language. That is, for the sake of product marketability, the industry seeks to produce film texts that can be classified easily into globally or regionally established film product categories. The post-2000 Taiwan queer romance cycle emerged from this context. 9 Against this backdrop, the practice of film production has become highly integrated with film promotion, with both loaded with the task of utilizing miscellaneous consumer products for the purpose of sense seduction. Through cross-industry alliances, product placement or cross-media marketing, the film industry has engaged itself in a (re)configuration of body-object relations. In other terms, film consumption in post-2000 Taiwan is promoted in connection with other consumptive behaviours. To bring about these behaviours, the film products join force with various consumer commodities in generating sensory stimuli. Multiple media technologies are at the same time mobilised as intermediary objects to bear on the spectator’s sensate body. Having become interconnected in an industry-(re)configured network of bodies and things, both the audience and film industry workers experience a desegregation of productive and consumptive activities. The phenomenon appears particularly distinct in cross-platform marketing, which sees both the audience and industry workers watch DVDs, surf the web, etc. in order to enhance the value of film products. On the basis of these findings, this thesis concludes that the film industry- audience relationship is an affectual, non-oppositional/desegregational connection that is mediated by an intricate network of diverse physical entities, including media technologies. Effecting sensory experiences as a factor within the network, a film genre is in this sense seen as drifting away from recognizable textual formulae into forming flexible interrelations with human organisms, mundane objects and communicative technologies. Generic film 10 communication is, accordingly, understood as involving sensory activities that take place within a nexus of bodies and things. I investigate generic