Week 9 [Reading Notes] - Global Hollywood

Recommended Reading 1:

Park, Jane Chi Hyun (2010) Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema, pp. vii-xv.

In this book, Chi Hyun looks at the similarly fleeting references to East Asia as futuristic and technologized in a range of Hollywood movies since the 1980s, when such references became prevalent in the film industry and in U.S. popular culture more generally. She contextualizes these references within the social, economic, and cultural developments of this period, considering the ways in which East Asian peoples and places have become closely linked with various forms of technology in recent years to produce a collective fantasy of the futuristic, high-tech Orient—or East Asia as the future.
p. viii

This fantasy is imprinted in the national consciousness and exported to the rest of the world through media. It is based on and sustained through imagery, iconography, and modes of performance that conflate East Asia with technology in a global, multicultural context, constituting what Chi Hyun calls oriental style.
p. viii

Central to her exploration of oriental style is the idea not only of technologized Asiatic bodies and spaces but also of conditional visibility, or the ways in which certain bodies, objects, and images are sometimes visible and other times invisible in the dominant culture. This conditional visibility defines how the Asiatic appears in U.S. commercial media and how people of Asian descent are seen—and just as often not seen—in the public sphere. 

 p. viii

It is easy for Asian Americans to condemn images like those I just de- scribed as racist stereotypes due to the feelings of anger, disgust, and shame that may arise in us from seeing ourselves distorted in such images.

On the complementary flip side, it is just as easy to celebrate openly—or to consume secretly with guilty pleasure—the recent proliferation of “cool” Asian tropes that constitute the background and increasingly the foreground of more contemporary Hollywood films such as the Rush Hour series (1998, 2001, 2007), the Kill Bill dyad (2003, 2004), and The Forbidden Kingdom (2008).
p. viii

“Oriental style” describes the process and product of the ways in which Hollywood films crystallize and commodify multiple, heterogeneous Asiatic cultures, histories, and aesthetics into a small number of easily recognizable, often interchangeable tropes that help to shape dominant cultural attitudes about Asia and people of Asian descent. It is also part of the ongoing historical process of the racialization of East Asians in the United States (“oriental”) and as an aesthetic product that appeals to multiple audiences due precisely to its seeming lack of depth, subjectivity, and history (“style”). By explicating the relationship between process/context and product or text, Chi Hyun tries to show the ways in which oriental style matters culturally, particularly in its reflection and shaping of American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
p. ix 

As of yet, no book-length study has appeared that looks closely at what I am calling oriental style: the sometimes unsettling and often quite illuminating ways in which Asian tropes and themes occupy the background of Hollywood movies and how these tropes and themes implicitly structure the primary narratives and characters of these films.
p. ix,x

style cannot be separated from content, just as aesthetics cannot be separated from ideology. But why do certain cultural trends, styles, and narratives resonate strongly in certain periods and places for certain groups of people? 
Lawrence Grossberg calls a coherent, recurring grouping of such resonances a “cultural formation,” which Thomas Foster sums up as “a historical articulation of textual practices with ‘a variety of other cultural, social, economic, historical and political practices’ [that] cannot be reduced to ‘a body of texts’ but ‘has to be read as the articulation of a number of discrete series of events, only some of which are discursive.’" *1
p. x

At first glance, current Asian imagery in Hollywood seems to deviate from earlier, more explicitly stereotypical depictions of East Asians and Asian Americans. High-budget films such as The Last Samurai (2003) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) beautifully showcase Asian landscapes and cultures (albeit from a decidedly Hollywood perspective), while more and more Asian North American actors such as Lucy Liu, Ming Na, Sandra Oh, and Russell Wong grace the big and small screens.
p. x

This "Oriental style" can be observed in the Asiatic look of cinematic cityscapes and the appearance of a desirable Asiatic masculinity embodied in glamorous action heroes played by stars such as Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun-Fat and performed through martial arts, now de rigueur in Hollywood action sequences. These signs seem to indicate that East Asia, once abject and rejected, has become, or is very much in the process of becoming, attractive and even celebrated in U.S. popular media.

p. x

The Asiatic bear the traces of the uniquely orientalist forms of racism that have structured Asian American histories and identities even as some representations, regardless of the time periods and the racial constraints in which they have appeared, have moved beyond expected stereotypes.2  For instance, Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe), the Japanese exchange student in Sixteen Candles (1984), and Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), the Japanese American mentor in The Karate Kid, are both marked “oriental” through their narrative roles in these movies as well as by the deliberately self-orientalized performances of the actors who play them. However, the former is reduced to a stereotype, whereas the latter is a racialized type that becomes a humanized process. In other words, although both characters fall broadly under the category of Hollywood oriental stereotype, the differences in how the characters are developed within the narrative, or not, and how this affects the other characters’—and implicitly viewers’—relationship to the Asiatic suggest the need to look more carefully at how stereotypes are deployed in Hollywood.
p. xi

An Asian actor’s top billing in a film does not at all ensure that the film will not use racist stereotypes or that these stereotypes will be diminished. In fact, those stereotypes continue to be played to the hilt, often for spectacular and comic effects. Produced and consumed with an ironic, postmodern “wink,” such effects detach cultural signifiers of race, gender, and sexuality from the often brutal histories of power and subordination they have traditionally referenced. Played fast and loose on the big screen, these ostensibly emptied signifiers relegate racism, sexism, and homophobia to the past and, in the process, elude their present-day manifestations. Indeed, the role of such stylized racial images in the larger cultural trend that Lisa Nakamura calls “cosmetic multiculturalism”—a trend that characterizes the casts and mise-en-scène of films by younger male American directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Brett Ratner, Robert Rodrigeuz, and Justin Lin—epitomizes the complexities and contradictions of representing racial and ethnic difference in contemporary Hollywood.3
p. xi

The readings of racial imagery that comprise Yellow Future offer a preliminary framework for investigating "cosmetic multiculturalism" by considering oriental images and iconography as formal, creative conventions that draw on and influence socio-political representations of East Asia and Asian America. Using in-depth case studies of Blade Runner and The Matrix as critical flash- points, Chi Hyun studies the development of an oriental style that has taken root most deeply and flowered most visibly in Hollywood movies, but that has also begun to permeate U.S. media and popular culture at large. 
p. xii

The Matrix

The Matrix presents a depressing picture of the future in which technology plays a major role in turning people into machines—this time, quite actively and literally. However, the racial difference suggested by the “oriental” robot and dwarves in the dream scenes of an otherwise all-white British world have been replaced by a multiracial crew boasting mad martial arts skills. The Matrix passes as a celebration of the once marginal, now stylishly visible elements of multicultural America. In a turn that suggests we have come very far with respect to representing difference in the dominant U.S. culture, we are supposed to identify with these elements and cheer for them against the global threat of an alien enemy technology.

p. xiv

As many film historians have pointed out, the assimilation of nonwhite and non-American filmmakers, writers, cinematographers, financiers and dis- tributors, actors and actresses into the melting pot of American film has been and continues to be a defining element of this necessarily transnational national cinema. Most fans know that The Matrix was shot in Sydney and Chicago, choreographed by Hong Kong film veteran Yuen Wo Ping, directed by American brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, and coproduced by Warner Brothers and Village Roadshow Pictures, a subsidiary of the Australian distribution company Village Roadshow.
p. xiv

The Matrix stands out not simply for its innovative combining of Eastern elements such as wire-fu, manga and anime styles, but also for its Chinese philosophies incorporated with Western ones, such as Hollywood three-act structure and poststructuralism. For something which had been so shameful in 1980s America, 'oriental style' had become the template for such a slick, hip Hollywood vision of the future. What follows is the story of how this particular vision has become so commonplace in such a short time in the United States—and some thoughts on why we should care.
p. xv

________________________________________________

Reading 1:Moretti, Franco (2001). “Planet Hollywood”. New Left Review, May/June, pp.90-101.

Of course, the future of the Hong Kong film industry is not clear: it may be stunted by the incorporation into the People's Republic of China - or the exact opposite: the larger market may be a boost to production and inventiveness. Be that as it may, in the last generation or so, films from the likes of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and beyond, Hong Kong films have very efficiently caught the wake of Hollywood's greatest export staple: the films of action and adventure. 
With its many fuzzy internal divisions, but quite clear external borders, this is by far the most successful form both inside the US and abroad (with the exception of Europe).
Page 95

These stories will travel well and have international diffusion because they are largely independent of language. Almost like a ballet, their style, plots and narrative context can be translated/carried across. This is a throwback to 1920s Hollywood films, the pre-talkie era
Page 98

________________________________________________

Reading 2:Klinger, Barbara (2010) “Contraband Cinema: Piracy, Titanic, and Central Asia” Cinema Journal 49: 2, pp. 106-124.

Abstract: 

This essay examines piracy as a powerful means of circulating films transnationally. Titanic’s worldwide success, and in particular its underground popularity in Afghanistan, prompts consideration both of the impact of unlawful distribution on Hollywood cinema’s global reception and of theoretical issues raised by discourses that invariably surround cases of media piracy.

According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the studios it represents lost $6.1 billion in revenue to film piracy in 2005, with approximately $4.8 billion of that sum resulting from piracy abroad.1 While illegal trafficking in cinema is a problem in the United States, it represents the largest losses and arouses the deepest industry anxieties in relation to lucrative foreign markets, where US films can gross more than double the domestic take.

p. 106/7

Due to a continuing lack of regulation and ineffective enforcement of copyright laws abroad, international black markets often operate with impunity, making progress in this arena difficult. Hollywood officials have indicated in no uncertain terms the gravitas with which acts of piracy are to be regarded. In 2002, the late Jack Valenti, then MPAA President, stated that “[w]e’re fighting our own terrorist war.” In this war, scores of films are “kidnapped or abducted by unscrupulous forces” on a daily basis. This post-9/11 rhetoric, along with other developments such as the passage of legislation that makes theater camcording a federal felony, defines piracy as a serious criminal activity. Indeed, the MPAA describes the involvement not only of organized crime, where profits from media piracy fund prostitution and drug trafficking, but of terrorist organizations that use gains from pirated goods to finance their attacks

p. 107

In the Ukraine, one of Europe’s largest sources of illegal media, producers, and distributors of such goods see themselves as modern-day Robin Hoods who save their low-wage constituency from the “high prices set by avaricious US” companies. In this context, the making and selling of intellectual property “liberated” from Hollywood and other Western media centers is a matter of national pride.

- Jack Boulware, “Pirates of Kiev,” Wired Magazine, September 3, 2002, 110–115.

p. 107

In the literature on copyright, intellectual property, and piracy, some scholars too view the illegal media trade as a weapon against Hollywood’s attempts to ensure “domination of the world market” through “monopolistic distribution schemes.”*5 In these arguments, piracy becomes a mode of “nationalism and resistance” to US-style globalization.*6

p. 107

*5 - Shujen Wang, Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little- fi eld, 2003), 2. 

*6 - Michael Strangelove, The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 74–75.

In the Global Hollywood volumes, Miller et al. argue that the industry should recognize that piracy comes under “fair use in areas where traditional forms of distribution/exhibition result in market failure” (e.g., where movie theaters are few or nonexistent; where the citizenry is too poor to afford tickets or commercial video rentals). Further, piracy plays a significant “role in creating audiences and demand for media products” via the “cultures of anticipation” it inspires for US films worldwide (ibid.:256).

p. 108

- Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, p.223.

In conceptualizing transnational interactions, we can ask whether pirated US films, despite their illicit status, represent a form of imperialism in foreign markets; whether they, conversely, attest in particularly graphic terms to the power that local conditions exercise over the meaning of imported goods; or whether they raise other questions not fully addressed by the imperialism and localism positions.

p. 108

Titanic’s appearance in Afghanistan presents a charged meeting under highly vexed political circumstances of a Hollywood juggernaut and a foreign audience that illuminates piracy’s importance to grasping the intricacies of cinema’s international impact. As the first film in history to gross more than $1 billion in legitimate worldwide distribution and as a remarkably hot property in the piracy market, Titanic is an exemplary global cinematic phenomenon. Cameron’s fi lm, winner of eleven Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director), was regarded as a pinnacle of Hollywood’s epic storytelling and special effects wizardry.

p. 109

- Kevin S. Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar, Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).

The Global Titanic Phenomenon

From the beginning Titanic was promoted as a major event abroad: its theatrical premiere was held in Japan in November 1997, with a London premiere following later that month. The film opened officially in the United States in December, and then in more than forty other countries from January through April 1998 (save for Pakistan, where it opened theatrically in August 1998). 

p. 110

Although the Titanic’s sinking was not a part of most global audiences’ history or popular lore, the film based on its story earned substantially more money abroad than it did during its domestic theatrical run. Taking in $600 million in the United States, it grossed an extraordinary $1.2 billion in initial foreign distribution, making it the first film to hit the $1 billion mark at the overseas box office.

p. 110

In the process of achieving this distinction, Titanic broke box-office records in some locales such as:

- When it was released in the Middle East and in Indonesia (the country with the world’s largest Muslim population), it became the top-grossing film of all time.

- It was also the most profitable movie in Israel’s history, with one out of five Israelis going to see it.

- In New Delhi, Titanic was the first film to break the language barrier between English and Hindi, attracting substantial non–English speaking audiences. 

p. 110

Coupled with its global polysemy, Titanic’s extensive success in international markets allowed it to attain the status of a common experience among communities within different world populations.

p. 112

Titanic’s popularity in Afghanistan and elsewhere would represent Hollywood’s expertise in controlling world markets and colonizing the imaginations of audiences, including those with anti-Western attitudes. The information we have of responses from abroad seems to indicate the triumph of Hollywood storytelling methods and stars against the backdrop of a familiar narrative, the ill-fated romance sprinkled with sex. Audiences also reacted favorably to another widely promoted aspect of Titanic, the verisimilitude of the special effects. Through this lens, global fans appear to have fallen under the sway of Hollywood’s seductive imperial power, taken in by, among other things, the smoke and mirrors of its dream machine and the “shock and awe” of its technological displays.

p. 117

As Titanic sailed back onto Afghan cinema screens and into video stores and markets, it is clear that piracy had successfully fomented “cultures of anticipation,” keeping alive, even stoking a taste for, Titanic and Hollywood—both in the legitimate and black markets—long after the fi lm’s theatrical premiere. Without denying the significant resonances the fi lm may have had in vernacular registers (as a means of subverting state authority during the Taliban and as a springboard for a blissful media experience in the aftermath of their overthrow), attention is also due to its operation as a visible marker of the nature of transnational exchange. In this case, as media are represented in press and online accounts as synonymous with free speech rather than hegemonic control, the manner of fathoming the impact of US cinema on global popular culture attains a heroic sheen. 

p. 124

The description of the apparently free market in Kabul continues to demonstrate that, lurking behind substantial cultural, religious, and political differences, are national impulses informed by an unstoppable consumerist and capitalist spirit—a spirit that the West would have no trouble recognizing as an old, reliable friend in the midst of Central Asian and Middle Eastern wars representing a far more agonistic relationship.

p. 124 

Research Essay Questionnaire

Research Essay Questionnaire

1. What is your proposed case study film?
The Dark Knight (2008)


2. Why have you chosen this film? What interests you about it? What wider trends do you think it exemplifies?

I have always admired films from an early age, particular those of the 'superhero' genre and especially the Batman franchise. I also have a strong admiration for a majority of Christopher Nolan's films and enjoy his interpretation of the character of Batman in his trilogy of the films, with this one being my personal favourite. I studied this film during my A-level film studies course, learning that this film had one of the innovative and successful promotional marketing campaigns of a contemporary Hollywood blockbuster and it also received a lot of critical reception and become the most preordered blu-ray film of all time. I believe this film exemplifies many of the aspects of Hollywood that we have covered over the course and I believe by choosing this film as my cast study film will be personally engaging for me.


3. What are your research questions? What do you hope to find out about this film (and its assembly, marketing, reception, etc.) as part of your research process?

o What marketing considerations shaped the assembly of The Dark Knight from the outset?

o What can I find out about the key selling points of the film which persuaded its financial backers to put it into production?

o What useful and/or problematic connotations and public images did stars, director, genre and subject matter bring to the production 'package'?

o What theories and histories are you able to draw on to make sense of the ways in which your film came to be produced, marketed and commented on?

o  Research and analyse some of a range of materials and paratexts in circulation around my film – eg: adverts, reviews and press coverage, 'branded' merchandise, aimed at extending social / cultural reach and establishing for each film one or more marketable identities. 

o What viewing strategies, pleasures, or consequences were proposed by these paratexts? Were there any contradictions or tensions apparent between them?

o What social issues or cultural debates were raised by your film? How did the film portray these themes? How were these factors discussed in journalistic commentary on the film?

4. What issues/critical debates discussed on the module will your essay relate to? (Or please state other relevant topics/academic literature) Which week(s) are most relevant to your essay? What core, recommended and further reading do you think will be most useful?

Form, Thematics and Politics of the New Hollywood Blockbuster (Week 3)

• Peter Kramer - Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
• Thomas Schatz - The New Hollywood

Authorship in Hollywood (Week 5)

• Jon Lewis - The Perfect Money Machines
• Timothy Corrigan - Auteurs and the New Hollywood
• Erin Elizabeth Hill-Parks - The Development of Christopher Nolan's auteur persona

Marketing and Paratexts (Week 8)

• Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson - Promotional Screen Industries
• Jonathan Gray - Coming Soon! Hype, Intros and Textual Beginnings

Global Hollywood (Week 9)

• Franco Moretti - Planet Hollywood

5. What kind of primary materials will you consult as part of your research? Try to be as specific as you can. How will you find these materials? How will you use them?
- Core and Recommended Readings.
- I own Nolan's Batman trilogy on Blu-Ray, with a Special 'Joker' edition of The Dark Knight, so I can use the bonus features on those discs are a resource.
- Critical Reviews of the film via the website www.mrqe.com and IMdB.
- Online resources such as the film's online promotional materials and fan forums as well as further reading materials.
- Using resources from the library on campus. 


6. Which part of the research essay process do you think will be the most difficult or challenging?
Starting it!
- How many questions should I propose to answer in the essay? I could talk about such an array of topics, I can't quite decide how to approach it.

Week 7 [Seminar Notes] - Marketing and Paratexts

Week 7: Marketing and Paratexts in Hollywood

This session introduces some relevant methods and theories for your research essay, with examples of critical analyses based on ‘paratexts’ in circulation around a selection of Hollywood films. Materials considered will include posters, trailers, behind-the-scenes featurettes, websites, and social media. We will discuss the theory of ‘paratexts’ (Gray), and other relevant concepts, including ‘proprietary characteristics’ (Altman), ‘high concept’ (Wyatt), and the ‘discursive surround’ (Klinger). We will also look at various promotional materials produced for The Bling Ring as a case study of marketing in contemporary Hollywood.

Different elements of film marketing and promotion are there

- Viral marketing campaign and spreadability 

- Trailers

- Review and Interview snippets

- Creating narratives beyond the film texts in different markets

- Blair Witch Project people deliberately gave authenticity to the found footage to spark debate

- Participation

- Trailers

- Posters

- Interviews and other journalistic materials

- Toys and merchandising

- Uses of social media to make it engage

These are all about anticipation, participation and shareability. 

FIlm History and the Discursive Surround

-"Promotional forms...operate as an intertextual network specifically designed to identify a film as as commodity...Films circulate as products, not in semantic vacuum, but in a mass culutural environment teeming with related commercial significations." (1989: 9)

- Marketing, merchandising and hype pluralise a film by 'raiding' the text for 'capitalizable' features that can circulate on their own.

- The dissemination of images, characters, songs, stars, ideas and re-interpretations extend's the film's presencee in social arena of potential viewers.

Paratexts/Satellite Texts

- The term 'paratexts' first coined by literary theorist Herard Genette to refer to printed materials that surround the texts of a book

- Adapted into film and TV studies and expanded by scholars such as Babara Klinger, Janet Staiger, Jonathan Gray, Jason Mittell; sometimes referred to as 'satellite texts'.

- Encompasses all materails that circulate around a film or TV 'text' - including (but not restrcited to) adverts, posters, trailers, interviewers, reviews, DVDs extra, commentaries, games

- Entryway Paratexts - Before you view the film

- In Medias Res Paratexts - 'in the middle of the action' during or after viewing

(Gray 2010)

- Paratexts create filters/frames through which we experience the text, create viewing strategies, extended beyond the text and its initial consumption

"hype and surrounding texts do more than just ask us to believe them or not; rather, they establish frames and filters through ......"

Genres and 'Proprietary Characteristics

"By definition, genres can never be fully controlled by a single studio, whereas individual studios have exclusive access to contract actors, house directors, proprietary characteristics which are copyrights and trademarks that protect story/character properties.....

(Altman 1999: 115)

Watch Whiplash

Justin Wyatt and High Concept

Five key elements:

- Look

- Stars

- Characters

- Music

- Genre

- Marketability of the concept must possess a visual form, presentable in TV spots, trailers and print ads

- Modular aesthetic: songs, sequences are extracted for marketing merchandising

Critical Commentary

– You should think of this assessment as an essay. It’s called ‘critical commentary’ to emphasise that it should focus on analysing written texts and critical debates about Hollywood cinema (rather than analysing individual films in detail). It should still follow the usual conventions of essay writing and structure, even though you may find that you are summarising and engaging with written texts perhaps a little more than you might on some film studies modules. 

 – You will need to quote from the texts you are discussing, of course, but try to make sure that you do so selectively and don’t pad the essay out with too many (long) quotations. You should ask yourself: can I paraphrase this instead?  (remember to provide a reference, though, and to make sure that the line between quoting and paraphrasing is clear. If you’ve borrowed even 2 or 3 distinctive words as a phrase, that should be in quotes). What words and phrases are really distinctive and necessary to quote, and what can be summarised? It can often be more effective to explain an idea in your own words and intersperse it with choice words or phrases from the source text.  

Let’s take an example. You may want to use this sentence from Timothy Corrigan: 

"Since the 1970s especially, the auteurist marketing of movies whose titles often proclaim the filmmaker's name, such as Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1981) or Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995), aim to guarantee a relationship between audience and movie whereby an intentional and authorial agency governs, as a kind of brand-name vision whose aesthetic meanings and values have already been determined. “

But do we actually need to reproduce the whole thing? Here, I would suggest that you scan the sentence and pick out what you think are the key words or phrases. You should then summarise the rest and just incorporate key nuggets into your sentence – e.g. "a relationship between audience and movie whereby an intentional and authorial agency governs” or "brand-name vision whose aesthetic meanings and values have already been determined”. 

Or, even just smaller phrases, like “intentional and authorial agency”. 

So, instead of using the whole sentence, you could write something like: 

As Timothy Corrigan explains, Hollywood’s marketing practices since the 1970s have tended to deploy the name of the director as the guarantor of “a relationship between audience and movie whereby an intentional and authorial agency governs” (1998: 40). For Corrigan, then, auteurism in contemporary Hollywood is best viewed a commercial strategy through which such a “brand name vision” determines the film’s “aesthetic meanings and values” for its audience (ibid).   

– If you have used a long quotation, consider whether it could be shortened and whether you really need all of it to make your point. You will definitely get a low mark if your essay is just a patchwork of extended quotations without much of your own critical intervention.  

– Remember that quotations always need to be set up / introduced in some way – don’t just place them straight into your text without anything to frame them. 

For example, please avoid this:

Contemporary Hollywood auteurs often maintain celebrity status. "The practice of the auteur as a particular brand of social agency appears most clearly and most ironically in the contemporary status of the auteur as celebrity” (Corrigan 1998: 43).  
[Here, the quotation is just plonked in there as a standalone sentence without any introduction or framing. This is almost always wrong!] 

Please do something like this instead: 

Contemporary Hollywood auteurs often maintain celebrity status, as Timothy Corrigan argues: "The practice of the auteur as a particular brand of social agency appears most clearly and most ironically in the contemporary status of the auteur as celebrity” (1998: 43). 
[Here, the quote is introduced – the reader is told that the words come from Corrigan – and connected smoothly to your own point at the start of the sentence]. 

 It is also good practice to see if you can link from the quotation afterwards too – so, the next sentence might draw on the quote here – e.g. You might write, “This notion of an auteur’s 'social agency’ blah blah …. “ or something like that, which uses something from the quote to build up the next point. You don’t always need to do this but it is worth considering, because it helps integrate the quotation into your own text. 

– You may want to develop an argument as part of your essay, but it’s also fine to present the debates relatively objectively – don’t feel you have to decide, for example, which account of post-classical Hollywood is more convincing for you – it’s fine to acknowledge that there are competing ideas about this; your job is to present those concisely and effectively.

– You may feel there’s less room for personal, subjective input or ‘interpretation’ here, and that you are ‘just' repeating the arguments of others, but remember that the skill being practised and tested here is actually quite a challenging one – the ability to summarise and distil complex arguments, compare them, and place them into context

– You might want to mention individual films in passing, of course – e.g. In Q1 the different definitions of New Hollywood will probably require some filmic examples to make it clear. But you don’t need to go into depth or use them as case studies. Please don’t spend too long explaining film plots etc – keep this kind of thing to a minimum.  

– Questions 1, 2 and 4 require you to use a range of texts to answer the question. I’ve picked out two from the core reading in each case, and these must be used at some point, but you don’t have to hew too closely to the arguments offered by those named texts necessarily. I have named them to make it clear how the question connects to the weekly reading, but to answer these questions properly you’ll need to draw on a wider range of reading too. Feel free to use texts that are not in the recommend or further reading if you want to. 

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hGZ5N8wZKtkC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=functions+of+the+auteur+contemporary+hollywood&source=bl&ots=hE41K4gKX4&sig=OGCoP0T0nIDYXxVZ_3D55NXC1wY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjovpTlmv3PAhVMBcAKHaneA8YQ6AEIUTAH#v=onepage&q=functions%20of%20the%20auteur%20contemporary%20hollywood&f=false

http://www.thomas-elsaesser.com/images/stories/pdf/elsaesser_the_author_a_retrospect.pdf

https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/10443/961/1/Hill-Parks10.pdf

http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/819/a-case-study-on-film-authorship-exploring-the-theoretical-and-practical-sides-in-film-production

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JsjfCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT18&lpg=PT18&dq=what+is+the+agency+of+auteur&source=bl&ots=RMuVCsy4Ya&sig=fSrv9CN9qlzE8ZPwfxHMXNSVPN4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiuyrPagorQAhVlLMAKHbhFD-EQ6AEIJjAC#v=onepage&q=what%20is%20the%20agency%20of%20auteur&f=false

With reference to Corrigan (1998), Elsaesser (2012) and other relevant literature, what are some of the functions of the ‘auteur’ in the contemporary Hollywood film industry?

Plan

Intro

Introduce the auteur explaining their importance in Hollywood in Film authorship, maybe a brief insight into the history. How has their functionality changed in more recent times

MARVEL INDIE DIRECTORS

Week 8 [Reading Notes] - Independent Cinema

Reading 1:
Balio, Tino (2013) Hollywood in the New Millennium. London: BFI. pp.114-148. (Chapter 6: “Independents: ‘To the Rear of the Back End’”)

During the 1950s and 60s, it designated mainstream films financed by a major studio and made by outside producers, be they former studio directors and stars, creative producers or talent agents. During the same period, the term was also used to describe the works of avant-garde filmmakers whose films played mainly in museums and film festivals. And from the start, an independent film meant a self-financed film without any support from a distribution company.
p. 114

The independent film scene had changed in fundamental ways, which led to closing of the speciality divisions of the majors and the demise of scores of indie outfits. The indie films that found distribution confronted escalating advertising costs, competition for theatre space from the tentpoles of the majors, and a foreign audience indifferent to most American indie films.
p. 115

The growth of new television technologies generated a huge demand for con- tent, which a new generation of film-makers was ready to fill. Independents entered the business knowing that even a modest picture could recoup most of its costs from the pre-sale of distribution rights to the burgeoning pay-cable and home video markets... The sale of pay TV rights yielded anywhere from a few hundred thou- sand dollars to a million and more. Although these sums were insignificant compared to what a Hollywood blockbuster could fetch, such ancillary income for a low-budget picture might make the difference between profit and loss.
p. 115

Miramax

Miramax, the most famous company of the group, was founded in 1979 by Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Adopting a straight acquisition policy from the start, Miramax 'nurtured new talent, helped introduce American indie films to a broader audience and brought European and Asian filmmakers to US viewers' (Graser and McNary, 2010). Miramax emerged from the fringes ofindependent film distribution in 1989 when it released three big hits, Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot, which starred a then relatively unknown Daniel Day-Lewis; Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, andvideotape, which garnered writer-director Soderbergh the Palme d'Or at Cannes; and Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
p. 117

Arguably the com- pany's most creative efforts were devoted to the marketing campaign for The Crying Game. Miramax succeeded in making people want to see the film with- out knowing why. A British release with no major stars about the British-IRA conflict made the picture seemingly a hard sell to Americans. But it did have an unusual plot twist, involving the trans-sexual identity of a lead character, which Miramax exploited to create a cause celebre that rivalled the famous publicity campaign for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). The Crying Game became a crossover hit. It also became a great critical success, receiving six Academy
Award nominations, including best picture, and winning the Oscar for best screenplay for the writer and director, Neil Jordan. 'The industry was staggered by the response,' reported Variety (Fleming and Klady, 1993). 
p. 117

  

  

Discourses of Cinematic Culture and the Hollywood Director: The Development of Christopher Nolan’s Auteur Persona Erin Elizabeth Hill-Parks

Discourses of Cinematic Culture and the Hollywood Director: The Development of Christopher Nolan’s Auteur Persona Erin Elizabeth Hill-Parks


The development of what is now known as auteur theory is commonly credited to the French film critics of Cahiers du Cinéma who first popularized the idea of the auteur in the early 1950s (Astruc, 1968; Truffaut, 1976; Hillier, 1985, 1986).

The auteur, although never having a complete and codified definition, was a director, often working within the restrictive Hollywood system, who rose above the subject matter or conditions of production to create a work of art, thereby imprinting his, or rarely her, viewpoint and style in the film.
p. 20

The auteur was a director “consistently expressing his own unique obsessions, the other [was] a competent, even highly competent, filmmaker, but lacking the consistency which betrayed the profound involvement of a personality” (Caughie 1981: 10). Therefore, the traditional notion of an auteur is a director who consistently displays an artistic signature in the films he or she directs, making the director the primary source for artistry and unity in not just an individual film, but in a set of films
p. 21

 Furthermore, technological changes with cameras and other equipment allowed for new aesthetic possibilities in cinema, including lighter cameras enabling outside, natural shooting. These conditions, among others, contributed to a new way of thinking about directors and cinema, as happened again with New Hollywood directors, discussed later in this chapter, as well as current thinking on auteurs.
p. 22

As Marjut Salokannel argues “we must remember that cinema involves the intersection of three concurrent forms of social practice: the artistic, the economic, and the technological. The structure of each of these is determined by a specific set of historical and social conventions, with their own inherent power-relations” (2003: 152). Film theories and methods do not occur out of isolation or because of a solitary influence, but rather through a complex negotiation of factors that inevitably derives from different levels of discourse being influenced by others. The rise of the contemporary auteur in this research could only happen at a specific time of technical innovation and cultural change resulting in new modes of production and methods of consumption.
p. 22

While this opened the door for new artistic freedoms in film, “first and foremost the new ratings system was a business proposition. The studios needed to update their product lines and the new code was a means toward that end” (Lewis, 1998a: 90). Because, as Justin Wyatt notes, “aesthetic ‘products’ are presented to suit the conditions of the overall market, and as the marketplace shifts across time, so does the product” (1998a: 64), Hollywood noticed that younger directors were attracting a sizable audience for a small production budget, and so studios granted these directors a high amount of freedom to make films.
p. 25

The auteur in Hollywood has always been a commercial one, with artistic goals and financial concerns ever present together. The rise of the blockbuster era was not the death of New Hollywood, but rather a shifting of artistic concerns to align with commercial demands, which is still seen in contemporary cinema with auteur blockbusters (Flanagan, 2004).

Thomas Schatz notes that in the mid-1970s, “while Coppola was in the Philippines filming Apocalypse Now [1979] […] his protégés Lucas and Spielberg were busy refining the New Hollywood’s Bruce15 [special effects, sensationalism] aesthetic (via Star Wars and Close Encounters), while replacing the director-as-author with a director-as-superstar ethos” (1993: 20).

To make a personal statement or an impact on a film, then, directors must carefully choose the projects they work on, finding one that can be both financially successful and also allow for their own imprint. The more successful a director is at balancing the artistic and commercial sides of film, the more freedom he or she will have to do a more personal project. Steven Soderbergh’s work as a director is an example of this, with both mainstream blockbuster and personal, artistic films alternating in his filmography (Scott, 2009).

Warren Buckland  “that an auteur in contemporary Hollywood is a director who gains control over all the stages of filmmaking: not just film production, but also distribution and exhibition” (2003: 84), suggesting that both small and big budget films could be considered auteur vehicles depending on the level of power the director had over the project and the ensuing media outlets. Buckland proposes that power within the Hollywood industry is an indicator of being an external auteur because the director is able to control aspects outside of the film. According to this theory, one must be both an internal auteur, controlling the aspects within each film, and an external auteur, having power in key decisions in the distribution, marketing, and exhibition of the film, to be a contemporary auteur. Although not at the same level of power as Buckland’s subject Spielberg, Christopher Nolan has become an external as well as internal auteur as seen through his roles as director, producer, and writer of most of his films as well as the freedom to move between genres, adaptations, and original works.
p. 29

One of the most influential studies on the auteur outside of the text in the past two decades came from Timothy Corrigan’s A Cinema Without Walls (1991), where he suggests the idea of a commercial, not just artistic, auteur. Framed in a discussion of postVietnam War American films, Corrigan proposes that the auteur, rather than being considered a Romantic, solo, artistic individual who fought against production constraints, could instead be viewed as “a commercial strategy for organizing audience reception” (1991: 103, emphasis in original). For Corrigan the auteur was not something present only in the films, but also outside of the film in the discursive surround and, moreover, had been commodified to the point where he or she was not truly present within the text, but instead interacted more directly with the audience outside of the text.
p. 43

Instead, Corrigan saw the auteur as being constructed outside of the text and perpetuated primarily through interviews. For example, Corrigan singled out director Francis Ford Coppola “as the auteur-creator victimized by the forces of [industrial, goliathan] productions” (1991: 109, emphasis in original) who had to maintain this carefully constructed auteur identity to sell his films, rather than being an auteur through his art. Corrigan suggests Coppola is successful as a commercial auteur where his auteur status remains independent of the quality of his work, but instead is dependent on the self-promotion of his image.
p. 43

Although the industrial auteur is primarily based on an origination point in official discourse, it is also predicated on the idea that audiences will understand the industrial references. The idea of the industrial auteur leads to a method of study that takes “into consideration the increasingly complicated relation between audiences and film-related forms of media (magazines, interviews, on-location reports, reviews, and the making-of featurette)” (Tzioumakis, 2006: 60). In this case the industrial auteur works within the cinematic industry in multiple ways to procure a reputation for not just his or her work, but also for him or herself, which is then incorporated with and compared to the films he or she produces (Flanagan, 2004).
p. 47

Christopher Nolan has worked as both a commercial and industrial auteur, as well as a blockbuster auteur, and constructed a specific persona by appropriating the thriller and noir genres onto new forms (independent, revenge, comic book, and period-fantasy films), forging a reputation for placing independent film sensibilities in mainstream Hollywood films as well as intelligence and creativity. Both the commercial auteur and the industrial auteur concepts can be incorporated into the author function, constructing an auteur persona which allows for a method of studying the multiple factors involved in constructing the auteur, both inside and outside of the text.
p. 47

The auteur was becoming an integral component in the cultural promotion of his or her film and could be seen as a cultural agent within the film world. Although the auteur is still predicated on the film, “there are many kinds of auteurs in contemporary film culture. And there are many strategies through which a movie maker can employ the agency of auteurism and by which audiences can use it as a way of understanding films” (Corrigan, 1998: 58). One of the ways of being an auteur is to become a celebrity – an auteur star. While this can be compatible with forming an auteur persona, there are two primary considerations with the auteur star: possible fissures in the filmic world and factors of temporality. Creating a successful auteur persona requires complementing the film world’s themes and ideas and also developing a persona that will be accessible beyond the contemporary moment.
p.48

This research suggests that the careful balancing of the auteur-star culture with a specific and relatively stable persona will help emphasize the continuity and artistry of the films, creating an auteur persona, rather than distract from the film or create irreparable fissures. Andrew notes, summarizing Gilles Deleuze, that “the auteur marks the presence of temporality and creativity in the text, including the creativity of emergent thought contributed by the spectator” (1993: 83), suggesting that the auteur is still present within the text as a mark of quality and creation, but the viewer also has a role to play in composing a type of intertext of the film, bringing their own understanding to the film and the notion of director. Christopher Nolan creates a consistent persona that reflects the auteur-star trappings of self-promotion to some extent with interviews and DVD materials, but creates a solid film world separate from any direct mixing, or folding in, of the viewer’s world. His persona, instead, gently guides readings of the film by emphasising themes, such as the double and identity, rather than things such as product placements.2
p.49

Critical Commentary: Recommended Reading [Week 5]

Reading 1:  Lewis, Jon, “The Perfect Money Machine(s): George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Auteurism in the New Hollywood”, Film International vol. 1, no.1 (2003), pp.12-26

By mid-decade, Spielberg's Jaws and Lucas's Star Wars took things to another level (financially at least) while at the same time hinting at another sort of moviemaking that did not require such big concessions to talent. Jaws was the first film to break the $100 million mark. Star Wars nearly doubled the domestic revenues earned byJaws and it exploited ancillary I merchandising tie-ins in ways that no film-even the animated films made at the Disney Studios-had done before it.
p. 66

As Hollywood evolved into a blockbuster industry in the late 1970s, Lucas and Spielberg provided the formula for high-concept entertainment. "If a person can tell me the idea in 25 words or less," Spielberg boasted to J. Hoberman in 1985, "it's going to make a good movie. I like ideas, especially movie ideas, you can hold in your hand."  With such an embrace of simple, striking narratives-narratives that support mass marketability Spielberg displayed a penchant for deliberating upon marketing schemes in advance of principal photography.
p. 68
Quote: Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies andMarketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp.13.

In the new Hollywood, auteurism and celebrity intersect in interesting ways. Auteurs gain notoriety less for a signature style than for a signature product. Lucas's and Spielberg's films are easy to package and multiply in form and format. Their oeuvre presents a model of contemporary filmmaking in an industry that is no longer (just) about making movies. But success is never so simple. Auteurism in the present tense is about celebrity and reputation and how a particular director or producer might use his or her celebrity and reputation to make deals and thus films and money. On that score, Lucas and Spielberg are unrivalled.
p. 68

For historians, auteurism regards the relative quality of an artistic signature. The evaluation of a given oeuvre becomes a matter of posterity and legacy. On that score-in some future account of late-twentieth-century American filmmaking - Lucas and Spielberg may well have plenty to worry about.
p. 69

In a 1996 essay titled "Who Killed the Movies?"David Thomson looks back and laments the end of the auteur renaissance and the emergence in its place of a "medium [that has] sunk beyond anything we dreamed of,leaving us stranded, a race of dreamers. This is more and worse than a bad cycle... and I blame Spielberg and Lucas."Thomson's essay is nostalgic and rueful. "Twenty-five years ago,"he writes, "the best directors were identifiable. They had their own language, the deepest sense of personal style."
p. 69

Special effects have gained prominence at the expense of mise-en-scene, performance (of the human kind), and narrative/thematic depth.The primacy of special effects is never more apparent than it is in two Spielberg-produced films. The first, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit, directed by Spielberg's protege Robert Zemekis features animated characters with which live-action actors occasionally interfere. The film is at its most interesting in Toon Town where the effects bedevil and overwhelm the flesh and blood on screen.
p. 70

While the first wave auteurs focused primarily on mise-en-scene and took pride and care in directing actors during the production phase, Lucas and Spielberg are almost exclusively post-production directors.
p. 70

If a director or producer's claim to auteur status regards the degree to which he or she has controlled a project, Lucas and Spielberg are auteurs of the highest, strictest order. Such a degree of control was from the start dependent on a similarly high degree of box office success.
Thomson and others are right to downplay Lucas's and Spielberg's commitment to a directoral, auteur cinema. Lucas and Spielberg used their postproduction expertise to establish another sort of auteur project. As much as the old studios-MGM, Warner, etc.-cultivated a signature look in the so-called classical era, Lucasfilm, 1L M,and Spielberg's production unit, Amblin, have produced a recognizable, signature product." Like no other directors before or since, Lucas and Spielberg successfully challenged studio control over postproduction, and they did so in order, as auteurs, to control their products completely. Lucas has gone so far as to exert control over the exhibition of his films through his THx-line of theatre sound systems and videocassette and DVD sound reproduction.
p. 71

Lucas and Spielberg have exploited their auteur celebrity more deftly than did any of their predecessors. Most film historians damn them for this particular skill, or at least insist that we need to put their oeuvres in the context of certain significant changes in the film industry. As the film historian Henry Jenkins writes: "By treating filmmakers as independent contractors, the new production system places particular emphasis on the development of market value of an individual director." 18 This market value is tied to the consistent supply of a familiar, visual, and narrative formula. Directors are wont to develop and consistently adhere to such a recognisable style and form because familiarity breeds success. And success insures control.
p. 71/72

In virtually all of the early interviews, Spielberg espouses a pure joy in filmmaking. But at the same time he discounts the very pretensions that supported 1970S auteurism: personal signature, marginal and/or antagonistic relations with studio Hollywood, a priority on artistic integrity, and a seeming disinterest, though it need not be altogether honest or true, in a film's stake in the marketplace. By embracing high-concept filmmaking, Spielberg expressed (according to his critics at least) undue interest in what works and what doesn't work with audiences. By seeming to prioritise public relations over personal artistic principals, he effectively snubbed the very filmmaking practice that reviewers, critics, and historians had come to idealise.
p. 73/74

As to his own role within 1980s American cinema, Spielberg concluded, again off the cuff. "Francis [Coppola] lives in a world of his own, George [Lucas] lives in a galaxy far, far away but close to human audiences, and I'm an independent moviemaker working within the Hollywood establishment."
Spielberg's deceptively simple remarks here are revelatory.Independence is and always has been an ideal in Hollywood. But while Spielberg's success at the box office has enabled him to maintain control over his movies, the notion that he was ever making films somehow independent of the studios is patently ridiculous.
p. 74
Quote: Chris Auty,"The Complete Spielberg," Sight  and Sound (Autumn 1982): pp. 279.

In Visions of Empire, the film historian Stephen Prince puts the culture commerce dichotomy in Lucas's and Spielberg's oeuvre into a specifically Reaganite context-a context at once reflected in and refracted out from the world of movies and moviemaking,
"Relationships between culture and commerce, film characters, and commodities," writes Prince, "are being reorganised in the era of the blockbuster as an economy of advertising comes to regulate film production and its representations of our cultural life in new ways. Some films become ads, and characters like ET become products." 
p. 76 
Quote: Stephen Prince, Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Film (New York: Praeger, 1992), pp. 22.

Kolker's book reveals the difficulty of doing auteurist history in the blockbuster era-an era that marks the industrial demise of the auteur. For example, in the third edition Kolker's book reveals the difficulty of doing auteurist history in the blockbuster era-an era that marks the industrial demise of the auteur. For example, in the third edition he adds a section on Spielberg, a director that he tries to like but in the final analysis regards as merely the best director in a particularly bad era"of minimal experimentation and large scale repetition." For Kolker, Spielberg is the avatar of a pervasive "cinema of retrenchment."
p. 78/79 
Quote: Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 3rd ed, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 247-248. 

Though Lucas's work has been no less mainstream or commercial than that of Spielberg, Lucas has historically been far less willing than Spielberg to publicly embrace the Hollywood system. Lucas's account of his decision to seek a modicum of autonomy from Hollywood reveals a film student's notion of independence based in large part on the European model championed by the auteur critics and French New Wave filmmakers whose work dominated the film school curriculum in the 1960s and 1970s.
p. 80

It is important to remember that the freedom to make movies "independently" in Hollywood comes at a cost. Lucas and Spielberg found a formula for success with the film-going public. But more significantly,they found a formula for success in their dealings with the studios. In the mid-1970s, when Lucas and Spielberg first hit the scene,auteurs were under significant pressure to turn things around at the box office. And that's exactly what these two auteurs did.
p. 84

The 1970s studios' conglomerate owners, the likes of Transamerica, Coca-Cola, and Gulf and Western, dealt with their studios like any of their subsidiaries as units held accountable to consistent business practices, marketing policies, and bottom-line performance. As the entertainment market expanded in the 1980s,these corporations began to insist that films be distributed in a variety of forms and formats to better exploit the vertically and horizontally integrated marketplace. Lucas and Spielberg were the first and the best at the very sort of filmmaking designed to succeed under such an economic policy. In light of this we might ask here, at the end, had Lucas and Spielberg not arrived on the scene just when they did, would studio executives in 1980s Hollywood have had to invent them? 
p. 84