Behind the Screen

Inside European Production Cultures

P. Szczepanik, P. Vonderau, P. Szczepanik, P. Vonderau

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137282187
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Conceptualizing production studies from a European perspective, the book evaluates the history of European thought on production: theories of practice, the languages, grammars, and poetics of film, practical theories of production systems such as film dramaturgy, and the self-theorizing of European auteurs and professionals.

Part I

Fields and Approaches

1

Borderlands, Contact Zones, and Boundary Games: A Conversation with John T. Caldwell

Patrick Vonderau

In Production Culture. Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (2008), you have identified interviews with film/television workers as one of four key registers of analysis (apart from textual analysis, ethnographic field observation, and economic/industrial analysis). What was your worst experience doing practitioner interviews in Hollywood?

I would catch myself falling into the very traps I tell my graduate students to avoid: I would over-defer to higher-level interview subjects out of gratitude just because they granted me an audience; I did not keep systematic enough field notes to fully flesh out interview contexts in retrospect; I recorded much more material than I would ever have had the time or money to transcribe. “Open-ended interviews” can produce a nightmare of data. Unlike a number of countries in Western Europe, we do not have anything like the organized, collective multiyear government research funding for US research initiatives in the humanities, so individual scholars trying to do production studies research in Arts and Humanities have to repurpose and cobble together the resources informally to make production research happen.

In exploring industrial reflexivity and the “deep texts,” machines, or artifacts production workers circulate among themselves, you rely on Clifford Geertz’s notion of culture as an ensemble of texts, and on his call to “read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.”¹ “Reading over the shoulders” implies a sense of alignment or compliance, which became vital for the success of Geertz’s classic ethnography of Balinesian cockfights. But in how far does this perspective apply to the challenges of fieldwork in today’s culture industries? I am thinking of Barbara Czarniawska’s alternating conception of “symmetric fieldwork,” and of what she called shadowing, a technique and attitude that emphasizes cultural difference. Or, as she provocatively put it, (symmetric) fieldwork consists “not of ‘being nice to the natives’, but of allowing one-self to be problematized in turn—at a certain cost to the researcher, of course.”²

Of course, Geertz has generated considerable critique and revision since he outlined some of the classic interpretivist views that I build on. Beyond Czarniawska, the 1986 James Clifford and George E. Marcus book, Writing Culture, provides a good site for that revision.³ Yet I maintain that there are still good “takeaways” that we can gain from Geertz. First, “reading over the shoulders” of subjects as they try to make sense of themselves to themselves is still a fundamental tactical requirement in ethnographic fieldwork. Even if it is not the scholar’s overall strategic or final purpose, it should be an obligatory or preliminary part of fieldwork-based projects. Secondly, Geertz’s notion that culture is something we can know mostly as a collection of “texts about other texts” serves as an elegant and understandable bridge for cinema and media studies scholars trained in textual analysis and the humanities. When we take our research into the field we always necessarily confront our subjects in staged and constructed ways first, as texts, choreographed rituals, or scripted cultural realities. Acknowledging and planning for this fundamental preliminary stage does not preclude bringing many other things to ethnographic research that Geertz himself did not bring—including politics, self-critique, political economy. But we have to attend to honestly “reading” our field-site texts first, before we can get to any higher aspiration.

Czarniawska’s notion of “symmetric fieldwork” resonates on many levels, and evokes the coauthoring model of “shared ethnography” suggested in Clifford and Marcus. On a number of occasions I have argued not that we need to “cross-check” what we report before we present them as realities (as professional journalists do), but that we need to “keep ourselves in check” as scholars by deploying multiple (and sometimes contradictory) methodologies as we research. This is different from what Czarniawska is saying, but achieves a bit of the same goal, unsettling any predisposition or urge to omniscience by the researcher. But of course Czarniawska goes farther by destabilizing the researcher even further. I am still trying to figure out the proper balance in production studies between the scholar’s “analysis” and the scholar’s “performance” as an “actor” in the ethnographic account. The field of anthropology now favors full and complete disclosure of the fieldworker’s actions in ethnographic accounts, so allowing oneself to be “problematized” by informants is obligatory in the discipline. Yet, the field of film history—where many of my graduate students in “production studies” come from—takes the absolute opposite approach. I have witnessed other professors warning production studies/film history doctoral candidates to “take your personal story out of the account” lest you undermine the evidence and logic of the dissertation. I am still stuck in the middle of this institutional and disciplinary tension between ethnography’s complete, self-reflexive disclosure and the “Dragnet approach” from film history: “Just the facts, Ma’am. Just the facts.”

I am intrigued with Czarniawska’s argument for two other reasons: First, we do not usually have to invent, stage, or figure out how to “problematize ourselves” in media industry fieldwork. From my experience, we are always, from the start, a problem or are problematic for our corporate subjects or informants. Everything that unfolds in this commercial environment is opaque to an end reader of the published ethnography unless the scholar discloses and unpacks the specific conditions of her or his involvement in the industrial disclosure. The presence of scholars from the start disrupts, even in some small way. Second, Czarniawska’s notion of “shadowing” provides a compelling model for fieldwork. The adoption of this term in creative industries’ policy initiatives (along with “embedded research”) proves this point. But it is this very commercial, mainstream corporate adoption of the “shadowing” technique that I am currently trying to research and understand. One Hollywood film director I know, along with other directors, has been funded to “shadow” other more experienced and older film directors/mentors. I am presently trying to do two things: understand the commercial version of “shadowing” in the industry’s own “fieldwork,” and to attempt myself to “shadow” the industrial “shadower.” Now there’s a Geertzian phenomenon if there ever was one: shadowing in the industry’s own shadow-replicating hall of mirrors!

Where does “the field” begin, where does it end? It strikes me that in American production research, “the field” often seems bound to a territorialized notion of culture, and, accordingly, access is identified with a sense of “moving inside” a local, historically grown production community—as in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (2009),⁴ where this approach is pursued in order to develop grounded theories. Yet in how far could such an approach be exported to a European country like Germany or Sweden, for instance, given the way their media industries developed historically?

Your sense of this may have as much to do with the necessarily limited scope of our book Production Studies (an early attempt to frame the field), as with the geographical specificity of production studies methods. One might also consider a counterargument that the nationalized film and television industries of Western Europe may actually have been more territorialized than Hollywood since its studio system was broken up into endless subcontracting and flexible outsourcing networks starting in the 1950s. By contrast, European national broadcasters defined themselves historically by reference to unequivocal nation-state borders and governmental funding schemes, which evoked a clearer sense of “insides and outsides.” I have tried to shift the question of research territories a bit: to underscore how and why the borders between consumption and production have collapsed—irrespective of national boundaries. This is one of the fundamental assumptions of my current research on “para-industries”—the ubiquitous, surrounding marketing and cultural buffers that media industries use to manage their activities and consumers and to “cohere” as a unified enterprise. If we follow the logic of para-industries, then the sites of production studies research can be anywhere, in almost any geographic region. I think early on in my production studies work in the 1990s, I was constantly fascinated with all of the ways that the film and television industries prevented me from “entering,” and meticulously managed access by “outsiders”: the high, fortress-like walls of film studio lots, the bunkered containment of soundstages, the security guards and gates, or the military occupation of neighborhoods for location shoots. Now, however, I am drawn to the very opposite of industry’s policed borders: the 360-degree promotional surround that invites former “outsiders” “in.” Social media, viral marketing, prosumer production, and the constant Twitter chatter to fans and critics from “behind-the-scenes” film workers all play a role in establishing new forms of access. I think this may have fundamentally changed the “territoriality” you have described, and has opened up all sorts of entry points for production work that I never would have imagined.

Let us continue to talk for a moment about “culture.” In my own work on prop-making in the runaway context of Babelsberg studio production, “culture” has been a viable starting point, an image useful for constructing the cohesiveness of an otherwise vast, diffuse, and perplexingly heterogeneous assemblage that includes national checklists for film funding, regional unemployment policies, corporate contract work, communities of practice, mobile prop workshops, or molds and machinery—but the image of “culture” did not translate into an analytical tool. In fact, I felt the notion of culture to obscure the very social complexity I was interested in analyzing.⁵ This reminded me of Tony Bennett’s recent observation that there is a

tendency to merge culture and the social so closely together that they become indistinguishable. This is not to dispute the prevailing contention that, in a general sense, cultural practices are implicated in the make-up and organization of social relationships—although this has become so familiar a claim that its value is now more-or-less doxological, a ritual invocation that occludes more than it reveals. For, if analysis does not push beyond such general formulations to consider more closely the varied mechanisms through which culture and the social are connected, it can only too easily result in a set of ghostly, disembodied agents—values, beliefs, meanings, narratives—being credited with the ability to perform heroic tasks: securing social cohesion, or bringing about civic renewal, for example.⁶

Would you agree with Bennett, and what advice would you have to critically use his distinction between culture and the social?

This is a challenging question. I love your description of the cultural and material complexity of your prop-maker field site at Babelsberg, and can identify with your frustrations at trying to connect the sheer diversity of artifacts, documents, and practices there with underlying social issues. I fully share your sense that the “social” tends to be a missing or underplayed category in much production studies and cultural studies work. Behind everything I have tried to do in cinema and media studies is an impulse to connect artistic or cultural practice with social issues. That is why the endless taxonomies, models, diagrams that litter my work always usually have a category or column devoted to possible social functions for each of the “micro-”cultural practices I study or delineate. For me ethnography, at its most basic, involves a general task of inductive “pattern recognition.” But patterns of what? One of the nagging issues humanities graduate students have when working in the field involves the task of parsing out the differences between the cultural (expressive, representational, and material practices) and the social (organizational arrangements, relationships, modes of change, and the maintenance of order, etc.). Since we work inductively, it is of key importance to describe and catalogue the expressive, representational, and material practices as accurately and as thoroughly as possible. Many traditional cinema and media studies scholars do not apparently have the time to “waste” on this kind of obsessive mapping and plotting. It is at the micro level of the artifact or the industrial document that one is able to ask the next higher-order level of basic social questions: How is this artifact or text actually used or exchanged? How is this tool employed and to what end? What kinds of history and prehistory does this artifact or tool have? Answering these provisional questions immediately raises practical, local issues of social arrangements, power hierarchies, personal interests, and interpersonal boundaries and boundary maintenance. It is at this level that “the social” hopefully starts coming into clearer focus. The problem we sometimes have—and I think this precipitates the “doxological, ritual invocation,” and “occluding” that Bennett may be alluding to—is that we try to “go in for the theoretical kill” prematurely in our research. I encourage my graduate students to go into the field well armed with the social theories of Max Weber, Victor Turner, Karl Marx, Allen J. Scott, Paul M. Hirsch, Howard S. Becker, David Hesmondhalgh, Nick Couldry, or Angela McRobbie, but to hold them at arm’s length, in reserve—precisely so that they do not prematurely “perform heroic [explanatory] tasks” of the sort Bennett warns against. I have found that Couldry’s work is particularly good at keeping fieldwork honest, since he constantly pushes scholars to keep cultural studies systematically grounded in sound understandings of the social.

What are the costs of doing empirical production studies research, especially for those of us not living close to one of the world’s major production hubs? While production studies has been deliberately placed on the “low” end of academic scholarship, taking the seat of the degraded “Other,” in an identity-forming opposition to a socially blindfolded “high theory,” the resear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Introduction
• Part I: Fields and Approaches
• Part II: Modes of Production
• Part III: The Politics of Creativity
• Notes on Contributors
• Selected Bibliography
• Index