Abstract
An extensive international trade emerged very early in the history of filmmaking, with the economic characteristics of the industry leading producers and distributors to seek expanded markets overseas. Competition in the film trade affected even the smallest commercial industries worldwide, provoking a range of state responses while highlighting the ambiguous and complex nature of film. In addition to providing vital historical context and revealing the tension between film commerce and culture, an understanding of international competition is a necessary first cut at explaining policy responses. Problematizing competitive pressures illuminates their actual effects on the industry and their analytical limits in accounting for state responses to globalization.
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Notes
Hoskins, McFadyen, and Finn characterize nonrivalness as the “joint consumption characteristic” of filmmaking. Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen, and Adam Finn, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Observers have long noted nonrivalness in the industry; see, for example, William Victor Strauss, “Foreign Distribution of American Motion Pictures,” Harvard Business Review 8, no. 3 (April 1930): 307. The other attribute of public goods—“nonexcludability”—is more problematic, since moviegoers must purchase tickets. That said, state policy makers in some contexts do treat film as a kind of public good.
Some of these issues are discussed in Albert Moran, “Terms for a Reader: Film, Hollywood, National Cinema, Cultural Identity and Film Policy,” in Film Policy: International, National, and Regional Perspectives, ed. Moran, 1–19 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 4.
For a broad, if somewhat unsystematic, discussion of this, see David Prindle, Risky Business: The Political Economy of Hollywood (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993). The difference between risk and uncertainty is that risk is relatively calculable but uncertainty is not. The prospects for any given film are uncertain, although the industry operates on the basis of calculating and reducing risk.
Michael Chanan, Labour Power in the British Film Industry (London: British Film Institute, 1976).
Harold Vogel claims that six or seven of every ten films “may be broadly characterized as unprofitable.” Some of this may be an accounting sleight of hand for tax purposes, but industry insiders echo incessantly the difficulty of achieving financial success for most film projects. Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 31.
On the star system, see Cathy Klaprat, “The Star as Market Strategy: Bette Davis in Another Light,” in Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry, rev. ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985);
and Gorham Kindem, “Hollywood’s Movie Star System: A Historical Overview,” in The American Movie Industry: The Business ofMotion Pictures, ed. Kindem, 136–45 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982).
On the foreign activities of modern, large-scale U.S. firms, see Mira Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
The early history of U.S. government support to the film sector is covered judiciously in John T. Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
A prominent argument that power itself is “becoming less fungible, less coercive, and less tangible,” is Joseph S. Nye Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 188–201 passim.
A general work tracing this long-standing conflict through the last round of negotiations for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is David Puttnam, The Undeclared War: The Struggle for Control of the World’s Film Industry (New York: Harper Collins, 1997). Puttnam is an experienced British producer (Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields) who ran Columbia Pictures for a short period.
Powerful non-American firms like Pathé and Gaumont (France), UFA (Germany), Rank (Britain), and Toho (Japan) were influential in certain contexts. For a comparative and historical look at competition in other globally oriented industries, see Alfred D. Chandler Jr., “The Evolution of Modern Global Competition,” in Competition in Global Industries, ed. Michael E. Porter, 405–48 (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1986).
On the early development and technological aspects of filmmaking, see A. R. Fulton, “The Machine” in Balio, ed., The American Film Industry, 27–42; and Raymond Fielding, ed., A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television: An Anthology from the Pages of the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
Good coverage of this early period, focusing on U.S. distribution power in non-European markets, is Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–34 (London: British Film Institute, 1985).
For more on the Prince of Wales’s speech and an early American perspective on the matter, see Edward G. Lowry, “Trade Follows the Film,” Saturday Evening Post 198 (November 7, 1925): 12. The latter phrase was invoked repeatedly in subsequent decades in discussions of the purportedly extraordinary effects of American motion pictures on demand for American goods and services.
A sympathetic but useful early account of the MPPDA is Raymond Moley, The Hays Office (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1945), esp. chap. 15,“Foreign Relations,” 169–86.
Before being reconstituted as the Motion Picture Export Association in 1945, the Foreign Department was renamed the International Department in 1943 because “we wanted to emphasize the fact that we considered that motion pictures had become a vital, almost universal, international medium of communication, and that no nation was ‘foreign’ to their sphere of influence.” Will H. Hays, The Memoirs of Will H. Hays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 505; Thomas Guback, “Hollywood’s International Market,” in Balio, ed., The American Film Industry, 463–86.
On the nature and development of this style, as well as its relationship to the economic system in which films were made, see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);
and Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
While he develops a “media imperialism” thesis, Jeremy Tunstall addresses a similar process of American media dominance in filmmaking, newspapers, and commercial publishing; see Tunstall, The Media are American: Anglo-American Media in the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
On the Mexican industry’s development in reflection of Hollywood, see Charles Ramírez Berg, Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967–1983 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 16–17. Egyptian observers repeatedly have referred to their industry with phrases like “the Hollywood of the East.” Other examples of this emulative tendency include India’s Bombay cinema— “Bollywood”—and even the name given to a film studio built in 1936 England by J. Arthur Rank: Pinewood Studios.
There are specific path dependencies in the complex technological development of the industry, and elements of filmmaking that are common today were neither necessary nor inevitable. The width of film stock and the spacing between sprocket holes, for example, became a universally accepted standard that aided in the global spread of American motion pictures, even if they originated in random choices. See Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975), 216.
A good guide to the workings of the major studios in this period is Douglas Gomery, Hollywood Studio System (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986).
Anticompetitive practices are discussed extensively in Mae D. Huettig, Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry: A Study in Industrial Organization (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944).
The challenges facing European filmmakers, and the advantages held by the United States, were apparent very early. See Strauss’s article from 1930, “Foreign Distribution of American Motion Pictures,” Harvard Business Review, 307–15. A first-rate account of British-American rivalry in the film trade is Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
C. J. North, “Our Foreign Trade in Motion Pictures,” in “The Motion Picture in its Social and Economic Aspects,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 128 (November 1926): 107. North was head of the U.S. Commerce Department’s Motion Picture Section.
The latter film was banned by Egyptian censors in 1938 for depicting the French revolution. John Eugene Harley, World-Wide Influences of the Cinema: A Study of Official Censorship and the International Cultural Aspects of Motion Pictures (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1940), 121.
See Magda Wassef, ed., Egypte: 100 ans de cinéma (Paris: Editions Plume and Institut du Monde Arabe, 1995), 20–21.
When the Egyptian industry itself celebrated its twenty-first anniversary in 1948, it dated its birth to the 1927 production of Leila. See al-Film Cine-Orient, no. 8 (October 16, 1948). Official Egyptian historiography usually downplays the role of foreign nationals in the development of the industry, especially after 1927. The early history of Egyptian filmmaking is found in Ahmed al-Hadari, Tarikh al-sinima fi Misr: aljuz al-awwal min bidayat 1896 ila akher 1930 [A History of the Cinema in Egypt: Part One, from the Beginning of 1896 to the End of 1930] (Cairo: Nadi al-Sinima bil-Qahira, 1989).
On Tal’at Harb and the founding of Studio Misr, see Ilhami Hasan, Muhammad Tal’at Harb: Ra’id sina’at al-sinima al-misriyya, 1867–1941 [Muhammad Tal’at Harb: Leader of the Egyptian Film Industry, 1867–1941] (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1986).
The sources for Figure 3.3 are the following: Federation of Egyptian Industries, Year Book 1973 (Cairo: General Organization for Government Printing Offices, 1973), 231; Ministry of Culture, Technical Office for the Cinema, Sina’at al-sinima: haqa’iq w-arqam [The Cinema Industry: Facts and Figures] (Cairo: General Egyptian Organization for the Cinema, Radio, and Television, various years); Ali Abu Shadi, “Chronologie: 1896–1994,” in Wassef, ed., Egypte: 100 ans de cinéma, 18–39. For a list of more than 1,500 feature films made in Egypt from 1927 to 1973, see ’Abd al-Min’em Sa’ad, al-Sinima al-misriyya fi mawsim 1973,218–46.
Studio details are in Jacques Pascal, ed., The Middle East Motion Picture Almanac, 1946–47, 1st ed. (Cairo: S.O.P. Press, 1947), 127–32.
Names and details on the explosion of production companies are listed in Galal al-Sharqawi, Risala fi tarikh al-sinima al- ârabiyya [A Treatise on the History of the Arab Cinema] (Cairo: al-Misriyya, 1970), 101–5; translation of PhD diss., Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, 1962.
The popularity of the cinema is noted by M. M. Mosharrafa, Cultural Survey of Modern Egypt, Part II (London: Longmans, Green, 1948), 59.
Jacob M. Landau, Studies in the Arab Theater and Cinema (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958), 179–80.
Studio rental cost between £E 1,500 and £E 4,000 per month in 1947. Cost breakdowns are in Pascal, The Middle East Motion Picture Almanac, 1 11. On foreign distribution, see Karen Finlon Dajani, “Egypt’s Role as a Major Media Producer, Supplier and Distributor to the Arab World: An Historical-Descriptive Study” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1979), esp. 130–42.
For an overview of Egypt’s star system, see Christophe Ayad, “Le star-système: De la splendeur au voile,” in Wassef, ed., Egypte: 100 ans de cinema, 134–41. An indication of the centrality of Egyptian stars to the industry is their presentation, along with a handful of directors, in Mustapha Darwish, Dream Makers on the Nile: A Portrait of Egyptian Cinema (Cairo: American University in Cairo, 1998). The limited number of Egyptian stars is discussed and quantified by el-Sharqawi, Risala fi tarikh al-sinima al- ârabiyya, 105–8. On genres, see Ali Abu Shadi, “Genres in Egyptian Cinema,” in Screens ofLife: Critical Film Writing from the Arab World, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Alia Arasoughly, 84–129 (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1996).
Paulo Antonio Paranagud, Mexican Cinema (London: British Film Institute and IMCINE, 1995), 24–25.
For a detailed study of the involvement of United Artists in Latin America from 1919 to 1951, based on corporate records, see Gaizka S. de Usabel, The High Noon ofAmerican Films in Latin America (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982).
Carl J. Mora, Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896–1988, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 31–32.
John King, Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (New York: Verso, 1990), 32;
Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 96–98.
For more on Hollywood’s influence and the “apprenticeship of dreams” by one of Mexico’s leading cultural critics, see Carlos Monsivdis, “Mexican Cinema: Of Myths and Demystifications,” in Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, ed. John King, Ana M. López, and Manuel Alvarado, 139–46 (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 141–42.
See Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 299–304.
Emilio García Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano, Vol. 1: 1929–1937 (Guadalajara and Mexico City: University of Guadalajara and National Council for Culture and the Arts, 1992), 211.
Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982), 206–8.
Jorge Schnitman, Film Industries in Latin America: Dependency and Development (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1984).
Emilio García Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano, Vol. 5: 1949–1950 (Guadalajara: University of Guadalajara; Mexico City: National Council for Culture and the Arts, 1992), 7.
See Michael Conant, Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry: Economic and Legal Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); and Conant, “The Paramount Decrees Reconsidered,” in Balio, ed., The American Film Industry, 537–73.
William F. Hellmuth Jr., “The Motion Picture Industry,” in The Structure of American Industry: Some Case Studies, rev. ed., ed. Walter Adams (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 380.
William F. Hellmuth Jr., “The Motion Picture Industry,” in The Structure of American Industry: Some Case Studies, 3rd ed., ed. Walter A. Adams (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 410. Hellmuth notes that U.S. foreign earnings in the film sector were $300 million in 1958, of which approximately $210 million were remittable to the United States.
Another piece of equipment for location shooting was the “Cinemobile,” a mobile studio invented by Egyptian-born cinematographer, Fouad Said, and still used today. This and other technological changes are covered by Robert H. Stanley, The Celluloid Empire: A History of the American Movie Industry (New York: Hastings, 1978), 242 and passim.
This increase may have been undermined by the declining demand for films in some Middle Eastern countries due to the departure of tens of thousands of European residents and military personnel. Georges Sadoul, “Geography of the Cinema and the Arab World,” in The Cinema in the Arab Countries, ed. Georges Sadoul, 129–36 (Beirut: UNESCO and Interarab Centre of Cinema and Television, 1966), 132–33.
This figure is based on data from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), al-Ihsa’at al-thaqafiyya: al-sinima wal-masrah [Cultural Statistics: The Cinema and Theater], 1964–1996; and Ministry of Culture, Sina’at al-sinima: haqa’iq w-arqam [The Cinema Industry: Facts and Figures], various years.
For more on Egypt’s postwar balance of payments and foreign trade position, see Charles Issawi, Egypt at Mid-Century: An Economic Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954);
and Bent Hansen and Karim Nashashibi, Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic Development: Egypt (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research and Columbia University Press, 1975).
On the Soviet cartoon, see Sklar, Movie-Made America, 215. The seminal Marxist take on Donald Duck is Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, trans. and rev. ed. (New York: International General, 1991).
Charles Issawi notes that “By the end of the war Egyptian individuals and institutions had accumulated sterling balances of about £E 400 million.” Issawi, Egypt at Mid-Century, 204. In a 1947 edition of this book written in 1942–1943, he estimated annual film industry expenditures at £E 500,000; filmmaking was widely viewed then as a lucrative business, with Egypt having “possibilities as a first-rate international film centre.” Issawi, Egypt: An Economic and Social Analysis (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 93. The so-called war profiteers, however, had no interest in filmmaking as anything other than a short-term investment. See Sa’ad el-Din Tawfiq, Qissat al-sinima fi Misr: dirasa naqdiyya [The Story of the Cinema in Egypt: A Critical Study] (Cairo: Dar elHallal, 1969), 83–84.
Annual Statement of the Foreign Trade of Egypt, various years. Ten Egyptian films were exported to Brazil in 1948. Cine Film, no. 26 (June 1950): 63.
Samir Farid, “Periodization of Egyptian Cinema,” in Screens of Life: Critical Film Writing from the Arab World, ed. and trans. Alia Arasoughly, 1–18 (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1996), 11.
Sina’at al-sinima: haqa’iq w-arqam [The Film Industry: Facts and Figures], General Egyptian Organization for the Cinema, Radio, and Television, Technical Office for the Cinema, March 1964, p. 14. Inter-Arab rivalry of the period is covered in Malcolm Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal ’Abdel Nasser and His Rivals, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971);
and Stephen M. Walt, The Origins ofAlliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
International Motion Picture Almanac, 1956, 794, and 1957, 850. The peso was devalued from 8.65 to 12.50 to the dollar in 1954. Hollywood’s work in Durango is noted by Emilio García Riera, Historia del cine mexicano (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educacíon Pública, 1986), 244.
Brazil’s Portuguese-language films had a linguistic disadvantage, though this did not preclude exports, especially in later years with state patronage. See Randal Johnson, The Film Industry in Brazil: Culture and the State (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 138–42.
Federico Heuer, La Industria cinematográfica mexicana (Mexico City: privately printed, 1964), 86–87. Heuer was the director of the Banco Nacional Cinematogrfifico when he wrote this detailed study.
John King, “Mexico: Inside the Industrial Labyrinth,” in King, Magical Reels, 129–44. See also Fernando Macotela Vargas, La industria cinematográfica mexicana: estudio juridico y economico (Mexico City: National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1969). Vargas served as director of the Cineteca Nacional in the 1970s.
Balio, “Adjusting to the New Global Economy: Hollywood in the 1990s,” in Moran, ed., Film Policy, 27. The initial merger and acquisition activity included Transamerica’s purchase of United Artists in 1967, Kinney National Service’s buying of Warner Brother in 1969, and MGM’s expansion into hotels and gambling. For more on these and subsequent merger and acquisition activity, see the organigrams in Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics, 57; Allen J. Scott, “A New Map of Hollywood and the World,” University of California, Los Angeles, unpublished manuscript; and Lisa Mirabile, ed., International Directory of Company Histories, vol. 2 (Chicago: St. James, 1990).
While out of date in important ways, comprehensive organigrams depicting decades of ownership change by the majors are in Barry Langford and Douglas Gomery, “Studio Genealogies: A Hollywood Family Tree,” Gannett Center Journal 3, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 104–22. Useful if dated discussion of some of the larger trends is also in Stanley, The Celluloid Empire, 231–41, 252–67.
Michael Storper, “The Transition to Flexible Specialisation in the U.S. Film Industry: External Economies, the Division of Labour, and the Crossing of Industrial Divides,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 13, no. 3 (September 1989): 273–305;
Michael Storper and Susan Christopherson, “Flexible Specialization and Regional Industrial Agglomerations: The Case of the U.S. Motion Picture Industry,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77, no. 1 (1987): 104–17.
See also the critique of Storper’s work in Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robins, “Hollywood for the 21st Century: Global Competition for Critical Mass in Image Markets,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 16, no. 1 (March 1992): 1–22;
and Storper’s response, “Flexible Specialisation in Hollywood: A Response to Aksoy and Robins,” Cambridge Journal ofEconomics 17 (1993): 479–84.
Useful discussion of flexible specialization in general is found in Paul Hirst and Jonathan Zeitlin, “Flexible Specialization: Theory and Evidence in the Analysis of Industrial Change,” in Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions, ed. J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer, 220–39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Mora, Mexican Cinema, 139. For more on the Echeverría period, see Paola Costa, La “Apertura” cinematográfica: México, 1970–1976 (Puebla, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1983).
As interior minister in 1968, Echeverría was widely considered responsible for the massacre. For more on the effects of 1968 on state relations with intellectuals, see Roderic A. Camp, Intellectuals and the State in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 208–12.
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Flibbert, A.J. (2007). International Competition in Film. In: Commerce in Culture: States and Markets in the World Film Trade. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607279_3
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