Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity

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Edited by Ramyar D. Rossoukh and Steven C. Caton

Type: Studies
Subject: Economics
Keywords: global, evolution, digital
Publishing date: 2021
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 288 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-4780-1396-9

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Book Presentation:
From Bangladesh and Hong Kong to Iran and South Africa, film industries around the world are rapidly growing at a time when new digital technologies are fundamentally changing how films are made and viewed. Larger film industries like Bollywood and Nollywood aim to attain Hollywood's audience and profitability, while smaller, less commercial, and often state-funded enterprises support various cultural and political projects. The contributors to Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity take an ethnographic and comparative approach to capturing the diversity and growth of global film industries. They outline how modularity--the specialized filmmaking tasks that collectively produce a film--operates as a key feature in every film industry, independent of local context. Whether they are examining the process of dubbing Hollywood films into Hindi, virtual reality filmmaking in South Africa, or on-location shooting in Yemen, the contributors' anthropological methodology brings into relief the universal practices and the local contingencies and deeper cultural realities of film production.

Contributors. Steven C. Caton, Jessica Dickson, Kevin Dwyer, Tejaswini Ganti, Lotte Hoek, Amrita Ibrahim, Sylvia J. Martin, Ramyar D. Rossoukh.

About the authors:
Ramyar D. Rossoukh is Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program at Princeton University. Steven C. Caton is Khalid bin Abdullah bin Abdulrahman Al Saud Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies at Harvard University.

Press Reviews:
"This field-framing book features eight exemplary case studies involving sophisticated fieldwork, comparative analysis, and provocative theorizing. It counters film studies' standard schemes, theorizing ‘modularity’ to explain production as simultaneously local and integral to ‘industries.’ Faulting media industries studies’ coherence and production studies for understating its anthropological debt, the book underscores the need for an interfield reckoning. Adding crucial Asian and African perspectives to the literature, this disciplinary boundary--making project pushes production studies to better explore its common ground with anthropology." - John T. Caldwell, Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

"Ramyar D. Rossoukh and Steven C. Caton have put together an exciting collection of essays with a uniformly high level of excellence. Located at a variety of sites around the world, each is ethnographically rich, analytically insightful, and well written. This will be a go-to book for courses in the anthropology of media, visual anthropology, and production studies." - Sherry B. Ortner, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles

"This volume shows us that film worlds are not constituted only by the film itself, the viewing experience, and the audience’s engagement with and interpretation of the content. Film creators work under complex conditions of creativity and constraint, local cultural expectations and understandings, and as part of teams, crews, and industries. Each chapter holds up a magnifying glass to different phases of filmmaking processes, analyzing their particular meanings, practices, and contributions to the actual film that audiences eventually watch." - Reighan Gillam, American Anthropologist

"[Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity] provides new and comparative insight on these industries’ differences as well as their similarities by being part of global cinema. This text will no doubt be a useful tool for researchers studying cinema and the ethnography and anthropology of film industries throughout the world." - Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi, Exertions

See the publisher website: Duke University Press

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