SPEAKER LIST & ZOOM LINKS
Carroll Morton is Director of Film New Orleans, an initiative that leads the city’s efforts to attract and enhance the production of feature films, television series, documentaries and commercial filming. The Film Office works as a liaison for all production needs including permits, city services and logistical support. New Orleans is one of the fastest growing production hubs in the country with competitive state film tax credits, diverse neighborhoods and architecture, an award-winning independent film community and a city with a rich cultural heritage.
Jeannie O'Neill has been a Television Producer, Director and Writer for over 20 years. Her work spans all non-scripted genres, including documentary-style, reality, talk, hidden-camera, award shows, and game shows. She has directed celebrities, actors, hosts, comics, politicians, and non-professionals. Her credits include “House Hunters,” “Last Comic Standing,” “Deal or No Deal,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!,” “Dirty Jobs” “Ghost Hunters” and “Unsolved Mysteries.” A long-standing member of both the Directors Guild of America (for which she was the first and only woman in the Reality Television Directors Guide and continues to be one of only 3% of female director members) and the Producers Guild of America, she is currently at work on her 55th television production. New Orleans is her favorite American city.
Creative Cities
9:00–10:30 am
Dealing with crisis and perceived injustice: Experiences of Finnish creative workers during the prolonged pandemic
Variable restriction measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have complicated and narrowed creative workers’ possibilities to do their jobs. Based on a sample of 26 interviews with Finnish professionals of different sectors of creative work (film and television, theater, literature, music, circus), I explore how they make sense of their professional lives with intensified insecurities (cancellations and postponements of events and performances, disruptions of productions, losses of income) and the public discussion around the restrictions concerning the Finnish culture and event sector. The data was collected via Zoom and by phone from August to November in 2021. The treatment of culture sector and the prolonged crisis had strongly affected how the participants perceived the value of their profession and cultural work in the society. The participants assessed their experiences from the perspective of shared injustice in relation to other industries, but their affective reactions and estimations of the consequences varied. Moreover, for those participants who were allowed to continue their work, the pandemic foregrounded the importance of communicating crisis conditions in production teams and showing support for colleagues who had lost their jobs. Anne Soronen, PhD, is a media scholar who works as University Lecturer of Media Studies at Tampere University, Finland. She holds the title of docent in Media Studies at the University of Turku. Her research interests include intimacies of digital labor, everyday media cultures, creative industries, and affect theory. Currently Soronen studies Finnish creative workers’ professional belonging on social media platforms in affiliation with the project Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (https://www.dataintimacy.fi/en/). Previously, she has studied temporal practices in media work, emotional labor in magazine work, and gender performatives on lifestyle television.
Creative capitals in the New Orleans COVID lockdown
Few would doubt that New Orleans is a global cultural mecca. Known for its cultural traditions across music, cuisine, and festive traditions, the film economy has sat betwixt and between other sectors in the local cultural economy. This talk focuses on the interrelationships of film to these other economic sectors, both from a macro-perspective of measuring the value of the sector, and from the micro-perspectives of everyday cultural workers during the COVID pandemic in 2020 and 2021. These scales for analysis reveal the different ways we might interpret 'creative capital' during this crisis and in future ones. Vicki Mayer is Professor of Communication at Tulane University. Chelsey Sprengler is a doctoral student in the City, Community and Culture Program at Tulane University.
Policy Perspectives
11:00–12:30 pm
Polish Filmmakers! It’s a Netflix Emergency!
This paper is based on a study of the Netflix emergency fund 'Producers help the Crews' for Polish Below the Line filmmakers in the wake of a diplomatic struggle on the EU Audiovisual Media Service Directive, and policymaking debates over territorial expansion of video-on-demand online services. The $600 thousand fund has been established in the late spring 2020 as a part of $150 million Hardship Fund (a Netflix’s worldwide relief scheme). In result 737 Polish filmmakers received one-time financial help in the amount of the minimum monthly wage. The general aim of this paper is to achieve a better understanding of this small-scale venture’s intertwinement with Netflix’s broad investments in Poland and CEE region, and with the experience of differently situated film artisans. Firstly, using publicly available data and discourse I will present how Netflix’s COVID-19 emergency initiative could be contextualized within the global tech-pivot and economic framework of the small nation film culture. Secondly, using interviews with high-profile industry representatives, on one hand, and with a subaltern branch of filmmaking representatives on the other (namely: stop-motion animation artisans), I will question the pivotal position of Netflix’s global strategies in the everyday experience of differently networked occupational groups. Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna holds assistant professorship at the Department of Film and Audiovisual Media at the University of Lodz. His current research projects concern the following areas: production and reception of immersive technology, Central European animated film production, and the impact of film culture on the natural environment. Since 2019 he has been a researcher at the Visual Narratives Laboratory where he is coordinating XR production culture ethnographic study, including semi-structured interviews with above-the-line creative workers and questionnaire-based interviews with viewers. Since 2016 he has been a member of the Steering Committee of European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) and since 2019 a co-chair of the NECS Workgroup “Sustainable Media”. In 2020 and 2021 he has been a member of the competition committee of the Lodz Film Fund. His recent publication - co-authored with Judith Keilbach - is “Green(ing) Media (Studies)”. In: “NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies. #Futures”, Jg. 10 (2021-12-13), Nr. 2, S. 105–112. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/17278.
Taking a Cue from the COVID Lobby: Towards a Greener Film Politics
When in early 2020 the pandemic lead to worldwide lockdowns, film industries all over the world came up with covid protocols to ensure a safe and fast restart of film production. Based on its economic interests and its self-perception as socially and culturally important, the sector acted quickly by releasing long lists of guidelines and measures to lift work restrictions and continue working again. From a perspective that is concerned with social and environmental sustainability, this immediate action and smooth implementation of safety measures is highly interesting and sheds light on how the notion of urgency, temporality and responsibility shifts in different contexts. Using Dutch film production as an example this presentation inquires what the ease of implementing covid protocols teaches us for stipulating social and environmental sustainability measures. It addresses on the one hand social and environmental setbacks that the protocols caused in the Dutch film production and discusses on the other hand how changes in the workflow of film production due to the pandemic (could) contribute to more socially and environmentally aware filmmaking. Judith Keilbach is Associate Professor in the Media and Culture Studies Department at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the transformation of television and media technologies and infrastructures. She is currently working on a project about transnational media events and is interested in the relation of media and sustainability with a focus on production cultures. Together with Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna she founded the Sustainable Media workgroup of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies.
National Cinemas and Production
2 pm- 3:30pm
Pandemic Media and the Entertainment Sector in India
Despite the crisis-ridden narrative through which pandemic’s impact on the entertainment sector has been narrativized, there has also been a concurrent sense of jubilation in the way the pandemic has accelerated the spread of internet television, content acquisition and marketing in India. Simultaneously, infrastructural breakdown during the pandemic also meant rethinking the rationale behind the organization of exiting content libraries and improvising strategies to localize content to compete with broadcast television. Alongside Netflix and Amazon Prime, this period has also seen the rise of indigenous over-the-top (OTT) platforms, as well as the entry of players such as ZEE5, who are part of the broadcast television ecology into the OTT field. Prior to the onset of the pandemic, Netflix and Amazon’s investments were mostly directed at high budget portfolios that focused heavily on Hindi-language cinema. With the onset of the pandemic however, there has been a clear impetus to push for home-grown Netflix-focused media production. In this talk, I track the different phases of the pandemic and its intersection with the entertainment industry to outline how OTT platforms in India have engineered their strategies for content acquisition and shifted to direct commissioning during the pandemic. By analyzing media artifacts such as films and TV shows, rhetorical strategies used by OTT platforms, and public service- and -safety announcements commissioned by film trade guilds, I will outline the shape of “pandemic entertainment” in India and trace both the aesthetics and infrastructural shifts that it has entailed. Darshana Sreedhar Mini is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mini’s teaching and research lie at the intersection of gender, sexuality, transnational media, migrant media and screen cultures of South Asia, and her current book project is examining the genre of soft-porn in India and how it impacts public discourse on sexuality, obscenity, sex-work and sex-education.
Pitfalls and Possibilities: The Impact of Covid-19 on Media Production and Production Imaginaries in Mumbai
This talk focuses on the impact of the Covid pandemic on two distinct but related fields of media production in Mumbai, India: the Hindi film industry better known as “Bollywood,” and the dubbing industry responsible for adapting and translating American content into Indian languages and Indian content into English. While the talk will discuss the disruptions posed by the pandemic, it will also focus on the possibilities envisioned by media producers. For example, Hindi filmmakers regarded the pandemic as an opportunity to rationalize production practices and improve the quality of filmmaking, while dubbing professionals utilized the long period of lockdowns in India to create new professional identities and raise the profile of their industry. Tejaswini Ganti is Associate Professor of Anthropology and core faculty in the Program in Culture & Media at New York University. A cultural and visual anthropologist specializing in South Asia, her research and teaching interests include anthropology of media, Indian cinema, media industries, production cultures, visual culture, translation studies, neoliberalism and globalization. She has been conducting research about the social world and filmmaking practices of the Hindi film industry since 1996 and is the author of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Duke University Press 2012) and Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004; 2nd edition 2013). Her current research examines the politics of language and translation within the Bombay film world; the dubbing of Hollywood films into Hindi; the formalization and professionalization of film training through film schools in India; and a social history of Indian cinema in the U.S. She is currently writing a book, Thinking in English, Speaking in Hindi: Translation, Creativity, and Indian Media Worlds for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2022.
Essential Workers
4:00–5:30 pm
Yes, We Are Essential
Israeli TV workers, both below and above the line, experience precarity in a way which resembles the characteristics of the Film and TV industries elsewhere. The global pandemic, which stopped TV production temporarily, considering global measures of social distancing, eventually resolved itself quickly to a rapid return to work, as the Israeli government swiftly regarded TV productions as ‘essential work’. Using interviews with TV industry workers in Israel, both below and above the line, this study shows that while feeling some notions of precarity, most workers thought the pandemic brought about more work. Moreover, most of them identified with the notion of being essential, while, at the same time, couldn’t be blind to the way their work contributed to, what they regarded as, the sedation of Israeli citizens in a time of a severe health emergency which was accompanied by an ongoing crisis in Israeli politics. Noa Lavie (PhD., Tel Aviv University) is an Israel Institute Grant Recipient. A sociologist at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo with expertise in media and communication, television studies, and cultural industries, she has studied the field of television in Israel, focusing on the question of defining television quality in the fields of reality television production in Israel and television drama. Currently, Lavie is focusing also on gender inequalities in the family (concentrating on generation Y) and on creative industry labor markets. She recently co-edited a special issue of Poetics on the transnational spread of non-Anglo-American culture, with her co-editor Dr. Simone Varriale, University of Lincoln, UK. Dr. Lavie is the Head of the Political Communications Division at the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College and the Academic Director of the College's Young Adult Program.
Is Kirsten’s Dunst’s nanny an essential worker? Studio NZ in the Covid times
In many ways and for many reasons Aotearoa New Zealand has weathered the impacts of Covid-19 better than most other parts of the globe. Highly restricted borders and a managed isolation system for arrivals to the country has ensured relatively low rates of infection and has facilitated new strains of public discourse about who, how and why people ‘get in’. This has played out in many industries including the film industry which, despite periodic lockdowns, has been able to continue operating by deeming film workers as essential workers in order to ferry them into and out of the country. This has dovetailed with all kinds of big and fascinating questions about what we mean by essential work during the pandemic, how essential work is raced, classed and gendered (but only sometimes) and how film and the arts are (de)valued in Covid times. I’ll offer some initial thoughts on film work as essential work in Studio NZ using Kirsten Dunst’s nanny as an illustrative example. Bridget Conor is Associate Professor of Communications at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. Her areas of interest include cultural work, inequalities in cultural industries and goopsh*t. She has published things, including most recently the UNESCO report Gender and Creativity: Progress on the Precipice.
Work and Labor
9:00-10:30 am
Tensions, Commitments, and Tactics Within the Dizi Industry During the Covid-19 Pandemic
This talk examines the impact of the Covid 19 Pandemic on Turkey’s dizi production and political economy, focusing on the tensions, commitments, and strategies of coping that arose within the dizi industry during the process. While most actors and actresses wanted production companies to suspend production, state officials, as well as most producers and below-the-line workers wanted the productions to continue. I explore how the Covid 19 Pandemic exacerbated the tensions between the dizi actors and state officials, and the ways in which producers and below-the-line workers coped with new production conditions and costs on the sets. Zeynep Sertbulut is a PhD. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at New York University. She also holds an advanced certificate in Culture and Media and an MA in Near Eastern Studies from NYU. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from the State University of New York at Binghamton and Bogazici University in Istanbul with a dual BA degree in Global and International Affairs. She has conducted twenty-one months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with dizi (Turkish serialized television melodramas) makers and members of the Radio and Television Supreme Council, the state agency for monitoring radio and television content in Turkey. Her dissertation researched examined how dizi makers create and assess their work amidst the structural and institutional constraints that shape the representations that they produce, and the ways in which ideas about audiences affect dizi makers’ creative choices. She has presented her work in various venues, including the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association and Society for Visual Arts. She is currently working on several articles.
Drama contracts as documents of exception and meanings of risk in Turkey’s drama production during the pandemic
Covid has transformed film production, leading to important ruptures. The scholarly emphasis so far has been mostly on viewing practices, distribution, streaming revenues, and “the future of television.” While documenting these changes, I foreground the continuities in the field of Turkey’s transnational dizi (TV drama) production. If the pandemic has proven to be a social laboratory for innovation as far as media production in general is concerned, what kinds of innovations have taken place and what kinds of innovations have been disregarded in dizi production? When the pandemic as an exceptional global event hits media production, what exceptional organizational measures are implemented and what zones of exception – such as the work contract – are kept intact? With these questions in mind, my contribution to the workshop will highlight the social and legal inequalities produced by “handcuff” contracts as they are defined by performers in the Turkish TV drama industry. Drawing on interviews with performers and the discursive framework of these extremely binding “handcuff contracts,” I want to explore the meaning and experience of “risk” as one signs a contract that has not been revised due to the pandemic, which has transformed an entire field. Ergin Bulut works as an Associate Professor at Koç University's Media and Visual Arts Department. He researches in the areas of political economy of media and cultural production, videogame studies, media, affect, and politics. He is the author of A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry (Cornell UP, 2020). His work has been published in leading journals including Media, Culture & Society, Triple C, International Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture and Critique, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Television and New Media, Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies. In 2019-2020 academic year, Bulut was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and faculty fellow at Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at UPenn.
Exhibition
11:00 am -12:30 pm
Essential Intermediaries: How Film Festivals Have Re/Negotiated (Their Position Within) Film Culture during Covid-19
Film Festivals are essential intermediaries in the film culture ecosystem: as meeting places for talent, producers and sales, but also for distributors and audiences in general. This presentation will think through some of the key challenges and changes festivals were and still are facing during the COVID pandemic and contextualized these in the ongoing debates on the film culture writ large. On the one hand, I will take a look at issues of the market function of festivals and consider which impact the disruption of the pre-pandemic festival format has had on industry stakeholders like filmmakers, producers and distributors and further circulation and exhibition patterns that usually hinge on festival premieres. Here the newly negotiated relationships between streamers and festivals is also of interest. On the other hand, I will look at issues of audiences, co-presence and community building and how festivals cope when their main infrastructure, the local cinema, is closed. Grounded in industry conversations, emerging academic research and public debates dealing with the current state of online, hybrid or on-site festivals, the presentation will discuss essential aspects of how festivals operate during and potentially after the Corona pandemic. Dr. Skadi Loist is Assistant Professor (Junior professor) for Production Cultures in Audiovisual Media Industries at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF in Potsdam, Germany. Skadi’s research focusses on film festivals & circulation, queer film culture, and screen industries, diversity and sustainability. Skadi is Principle Investigator (PI) of the research project “Film Circulation on the International Film Festival Network and the Impact on Global Film Culture” (BMBF 2017–2022) as well as Lead PI of the international research project “GEP Analysis: Assessing, Understanding, and Modeling the Impact of Gender Equity Policies (GEP) in the Film Industry” (DFG/ESRC/SSHRC 2021–2024). Skadi believes in the power of networking and collaboration. Together with Marijke de Valck, Skadi founded the Film Festival Research Network (FFRN) in 2008, which connects more than 700 researchers and practitioners in the field. Skadi is a former Steering Committee member of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) (2015-2021) and active founding member of the NECS workgroup “Film Festival Research” (2008-), was inaugural co-chair of the “Film & Media Festivals” Scholarly Interest Group at SCMS (2011-2013), was inaugural co-chair of the “AG Medienindustrien” of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM) (2012-2021), and serves as Editorial Board member of NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies. Outside the academy, Skadi has long worked with the Hamburg International Queer Film Festival and was inaugural board member of QueerScope e.V., the association of Independent German Queer Film Festivals.
Fraught Gatherings: CinemaCon, ShowCanada, and Fractures of Promotional Discourse in the Exhibition Industry
As exhibitors gathered in August 2021 for their long-delayed annual trade convention, CinemaCon, in Las Vegas, the Delta variant was pushing COVID-19 case counts in the United States to heights not seen since the Alpha-fueled surge the previous January. With a vaccine mandate in place at the convention, cinemas across the country above 70 percent of 2019 capacity, and a slow but seemingly steady box office recovery in progress, they nonetheless had reason for a trepidatious optimism. The five-day convention and trade show was marked by the uneasy combination of these elements. The programming provided a forward-looking pep rally for beleaguered exhibitors hoping to reaffirm belief in the business of cinemagoing and cement their partnerships with studios. However, simmering issues from day-and-date streaming releases and battered theatrical windows to supply chain difficulties and labor shortages crept in, offering intermittent reminders that exhibition was still in the throes of an existential crisis that refused to be fully contained. Drawing on on-the-ground ethnographic research and trade coverage, this paper investigates CinemaCon and its Canadian counterpart, ShowCanada, and the way exhibitors put forward, intermingled, and sought to contain competing interpretations of the crisis in the course of these 2021 gatherings. Charlotte Orzel is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who holds an MA in Media Studies from Concordia University. Her doctoral research analyzes the recent history of film exhibition in the United States and Canada and the way shifts in exhibitor practice reflect changing industrial visions of cinemagoers. She has also written about film historiography, IMAX, cinema advertising, and the international ownership of cinema chains.
Inside/Outside Hollywood
2:00-3:00 pm
Ireland: extending production facilities in a post-Covid world
This talk highlights something that was already happening - the proliferation of new-build studio space in Europe and around the world means that Hollywood and other producers can shop around for places to shoot. Bill Grantham is a media academic and practitioner, with a long and substantial experience as a researcher, teacher, writer, lawyer and executive in Europe, the USA and Australia, with a focus on media studies, cultural studies, film, television, law and policy. Grantham is formerly Visiting Professor of Media Law and Policy at Loughborough University, London and has devised and taught courses like "Media Law and Policy" and "Media and Cultural Studies: Contexts and Practices." Grantham serves as the overall reviewer of the special themes issue of Social Identities on community rights and an article reviewer for Television and New Media [SAGE].
On Valuing and Devaluing Labor: The Uses and Abuses of Defining How Hollywood Works
This presentation will explore three recent rumblings within the film and television industry that have tracked the different meanings of workers, creatives, labor, and power between different Hollywood professional communities: the WGA’s push against talent agencies, IATSE’s successful pushback against the AMPTP, and the increase in diversity initiatives across the Hollywood Landscape in light of external social actions like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, and internal movements like #TimesUp. By looking at common trends across these different struggles, my presentation will explore the changing definitions of Hollywood production and a critical pushback by Hollywood’s workers to highlight creativity as essential to the conversation about “content creation.” Miranda Banks is an Associate Professor within LMU’s Department of Film, Television, and Media Studies at the School of Film and Television. Her primary area of research is the American film and television industries, with a specific focus on power dynamics in creative production. She authored The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (Rutgers 2015) and co-edited the collections Production Studies (Routledge, 2009) and Production Studies, The Sequel (Routledge, 2015). Her massively multiplayer game, Room at the Top, challenges implicit bias in collaborative labor and illuminates tensions that arise between individual gain and team building. It has been played at numerous film and media production programs across the country.
Health and Safety
4:00-5:30 pm
1922/2022
The Kansas Flu (xenophobically reclassified by Anglos as ‘the Spanish Flu’) added to the impact of the Great War in decimating more significant world cinemas than Hollywood, specifically the German and French, where infrastructure and labor alike were left in a ruinous state., reshaping the New International Division of Cultural Labor This was also a revolutionary period technologically for the industry. What lessons might we learn for today, when illness and new technology are reshaping the NICL? Toby Miller was Distinguished Professor at the University of California Riverside for a decade and at New York University for eleven years. The author and editor of over fifty books, his work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Turkish, German, Italian, Farsi, French, Urdu, and Swedish. His most recent volumes are A COVID Charter, a Better World (2021), Violence (2021), The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture (2020), How Green is Your Smartphone? (co-authored, 2020), El trabajo cultural (2018), Greenwashing Culture (2018), Greenwashing Sport (2018), The Routledge Companion to Global Cultural Policy (co-edited, 2018), Global Media Studies (co-authored, 2015), The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture (edited, 2015), Greening the Media (co-authored, 2012) and Blow Up the Humanities (2012). Formerly the editor of the Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Social Text, and Television & New Media, he currently edits Open Cultural Studies and is co-editor of Social Identities: Journal of Race, Nation and Culture. Toby is Past President of the Cultural Studies Association (US).
Policy and Reality in Hollywood’s Return to Work
In September 2020 Hollywood blockbusters resumed production, but it was by no means a return to normal. On big union productions, life on set had been altered in accordance with new safety measures as outlined by a task force comprised of the AMPTP, all the unions and guilds, and several health officials in their white paper and a second document, “The Safe Way Forward,” that added additional “organizing principles.” This collaboration between unions and management was unprecedented, marking a shift in how producers, studios and unions dealt with set safety proactively rather than in response to a tragic accident. However, the collaborative effort between those who fund and those who make Hollywood film and television, was just one of the media return to work plans. Stakeholders in these plans represented different state and private financial interests. I look at union-endorsed policies and the Georgia state guidelines to identify and compare the varied interests are reflected in the policies. Regardless of whether pandemic measures (or on-set consultants) remain long-term, these plans have helped raise new questions about media worker safety. Kate Fortmueller is an assistant professor at the University of Georgia. Her writing about film and television labor has appeared in journals including Film History, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and Media Industries. She is the author of Beneath the Stars: How actors and extras helped shape the landscape of production and Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID (both University of Texas Press, 2021).