Abstract
Recent studies of media industries, production cultures, and creative labor mainly approach contemporary Anglophone examples in a manner that suggests they provide universally applicable models. These studies therefore tend to disregard earlier historical precedents and alternative modes of production. One such alternative is provided by the screen industries of East-Central Europe. This region’s production systems were influenced heavily by the state-socialist regimes that held power in the region after World War II and by the Cold War. In fact, they continue to be affected by cultural and economic policies that were implemented under state socialism. The media industries of East-Central Europe are still struggling to respond to the dissolution of the state-controlled economy and its organizational structures, and to their marginal geopolitical position, and have been unable to develop internationally competitive strategies. At the same time, Czech films and Polish films have attracted sizable audiences in their respective domestic markets, and production facilities located in the Czech Republic and Hungary have become important destinations for the runaway productions of American, Western European, and even Asian companies. Among the most prominent issues discussed in relation to the long and painful transformation of the film and television industries of East-Central Europe have been their failure to efficiently manage creative work and design medium- to long-term production strategies related to developing screenplays, establishing collaborative networks, and determining the roles that producers are expected to play.
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Notes
For the first book-length treatment of these subjects, see Marcin Adamczak, Piotr Marecki, and Marcin Malatyński, eds, Film Units: Restart (Kraków: Ha!art, 2012).
The complex Marxian concept of the “mode of production” has already been applied to state socialism in economic and social theories. Here I draw primarily on the compressed version developed by Janet Staiger, who focused on organizing film production, especially the division of labor. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);
Ben Singer, “Mode of Production: Issues and Debates,” in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 633–635.
My perspective on production culture is limited in scope by working with archival documents and oral history instead of conducting ethnographic research. See John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture. Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
See Timothy Havens, Amanda Lotz, and Serra Tinic, “Critical Media lndustry Studies: A Research Approach,” Communication, Culture and Critique 2 (2009): 247.
See, for example, Mira Liehm and Antonín J. Liehm, The Most Important Art: Soviet and Eastern European Film after 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977);
David W. Paul, ed., Politics, Art, and Commitment in the East European Cinema (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983);
see interviews with Czech filmmakers in Antonín J. Liehm, ed., Closely Watched Films: The Czechoslovak Experience (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1974);
Billy Budd Vermillion. Liehm, ed., Closely Watched Films: The Czechoslovak Experience (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1974); Billy Budd Vermillion, “Art Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1956–1981,” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011.
Dina Iordanova, Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central Europe (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 20.
For a political-economic theory of shortage as a systemic principle of the centrally planned economies of the Eastern Bloc countries, see János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). For a contemporaneous discussion of the state-socialist film economy, see, for example,
Radoslav Selucký; Poznámky k návrhu na novou ekonomickou organizaci Československého filmu (Prague: ČSF, 1966).
See Kristin Thompson, “Early Alternatives to the Hollywood Mode of Production: Implications for Europe’s Avant-Gardes,” Film History 5 (1993): 386–404.
See Petr Szczepanik, “Wie viele Schritte bis zur Drehfassung? Eine politische Historiographie des Drehbuchs,” Montage AV 22, no. 1 (2013): 99–132.
Dorota Ostrowska, “An Alternative Model of Film Production: Film Units in Poland after World War Two,” in A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Aniko Imre (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 461.
The 1930s’ Society for the Promotion of Film Art was referred to by several film historians as a model for the Polish units. See, for example, Marek Haltof, Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 54.
Staiger’s account of the emergence of the producer-unit system in the early 1930s was criticized by Matthew Bernstein, who located the origins of what he calls unit production in the mid-1920s and claimed that it was linked historically to independent producers. See Matthew Bernstein, “Hollywood’s Semi-independent Production,” Cinema Journal 32, no. 3 (1993): 41–54. For a discussion of the links between Hollywood and Ufa, especially of the Ufa producer Erich Pommer, who, before returning to Germany, worked for Paramount at exactly the time when the studio introduced the unit production (according to Bernstein),
Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 170.
On the other hand, dramaturgy was not institutionalized in British and American theater and film until the 1970s, when it tended to be called “literary management?” See Mary Luckhurst, Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945 (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 14.
Michèle Lagny, De l’histoire du cinéma: Méthode historique et histoire du cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), 34, 181–236.
Braudel regarded the history of events as the most superficial aspect of historical change, describing them as “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” He encouraged the social sciences to adopt the concept of the longue durée as a common methodological ground that promised to reveal the multi-temporality of their subjects and enable comparisons to be drawn between their conclusions. See Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in On History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 21.
In current ethnographically informed political science scholarship, micro-politics refers to the inner workings of politics, which is to say the everyday practices of decision-making that underpin political organizations. Micro-political studies focus on the organizational context and organizational culture that determine both the possibilities and the constraints of such decision-making at the level of smallest units of action, and on the ways in which they allow for groups to reach a consensus on, and to deviate from, formal rules and officially set goals. See Roland Willner, “Micropolitics: An Underestimated Field of Qualitative Research in Political Science,” German Policy Studies 7, 3(2011): 155–185. Political anthropologists have examined relatively autonomous micro-political processes in concrete local settings and the ways in which they “not only reflect larger political processes and national-level conflicts, but may contribute to them.”
John Gledhill, Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 128. For an example of ethnography of power struggles in the art world, see Maruška Svašek, “Styles, Struggles, and Careers: An Ethnography of the Czech Art World, 1948–1992,” PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 1996.
I am referring here to Bourdieu’s sociological theory of the relative and changing autonomy of the field of cultural production vis-à-vis the field of power; see Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
Ganti used these concepts to explain the cultural processes of modernization, globalization, and gentrification in the Hindi film industry of the 1990s and 2000s. See Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
See Petr Szczepanik, “‘Veterans’ and ‘Dilettantes’: Film Production Culture vis-àvis Top-down Political Changes, 1945–1962,” in Sovietisation and Planning in the Film Industries of Soviet Bloc Countries: A Comparative Perspective on East Germany and Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960, eds Pavel Skopal and Lars Karl (Berghahn Books, forthcoming 2013).
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© 2013 Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau
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Szczepanik, P. (2013). The State-socialist Mode of Production and the Political History of Production Culture. In: Szczepanik, P., Vonderau, P. (eds) Behind the Screen. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_8
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