American Studios Research Articles

Introduction

Introduction Haidee Wasson (bio) Long before the shifts wrought by the current plethora of electronic and digital formats there was an array of analog formats fueling media change. The contributors to this dossier focus on but one of these: 16mm film. First standardized in 1923 and widely used for over fifty years, this format bred a paradigmatic family of technologies that evolved into a dynamic, expansive, multi-modal media system, catalyzing lasting transformations in film art, theory, and practice. These essays honor 16mm’s centenary with scholarship that begins to map the international scale, scope, and continued impact of this uniquely important format. Recent scholarship in media studies by Lisa Gitelman, Jonathan Sterne, and others has rejected ahistorical and ontologically static definitions of media, urging the adoption of better ways to assess the shifting technical as well as industrial and aesthetic dynamics that constitute phenomena we tend to name with big, broad terms such as telephone, cinema, and television.1 Sterne proposes that we focus on formats. According to him, formats are “particular historical instantiations” that can help us to understand the rules that determine how “a technology can operate.”2 They result from “a range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience and workings of a medium.”3 Formats then are also more than technical clusters. They are also cultural, aesthetic, institutional, and political. The product of intentioned thought, negotiation, debate, and norms, formats also shape subsequent technological, aesthetic, and experiential phenomena. More [End Page 146] specific and narrowly conceived than the general media categories that undergird so much media history and theory, they help to make particular media applications, experiences, and uses more easily legible. Applying this to film history, for instance, demonstrates that cinema has long consisted of many formats that have changed over time. Big, loud, small, silent, color, architectural, and portable modes of cinema have co-existed. Each becomes a productive entry point to help us think more thoroughly about what cinema has long been—a complex multi-formatted medium. Initially marketed in 1923 as a filmmaking system for amateur film-makers, and as a film rental service for viewing movies reduced in size from industry-standard 35mm film prints, 16mm was born of the technological ferment that was integral to Hollywood’s rise. It was conceived as a complement to the industry’s equipment and business models. By the early 1920s, the American studios had built a blossoming empire on a form of entertainment that required centralized, rationalized modes of production, big audiences, and thousands of brick-and-mortar points of sale: movie theaters. Let’s call it big-box cinema. Yet all along, an unlikely crew of engineers, equipment manufacturers, chemical companies, community activists, artists, and theorists imagined something different. They foresaw a future wherein moving images and sounds would also thrive—beyond Hollywood—everywhere else. For them flashy feature films and spectacular picture palaces were but a prelude to the myriad other forms and functions yet to be discovered. As such, 16mm equipment developed in notable contrast to the industry’s heavy, expensive, and specialized cameras and projectors. This new system was comparatively portable, affordable, adaptable, easy to use, accessible, and programmable. Crucially, its film stock was not only smaller and hence lower cost but also non-flammable, unlike the 35mm cellulose nitrate stock that was used to produce and exhibit theatrical films into the 1950s.4 This foundational shift to acetate film, whose chemical-industrial roots are explored in this dossier by Alice Lovejoy, eliminated the threat of fire in filmmaking, storage, distribution, and projection, allowing 16mm prints to move (and accumulate) more freely; they could be shown just about anywhere. Collectively, the technical capacities of this new format enabled a significantly more horizontal ecosystem for making, circulating, and using film, laying the foundations for decades of explosive growth in the United States and around the world. Scholars of film have long known that 16mm was essential to facilitating modes of filmmaking that were both apposite and opposite to dominant commercial cinemas; these included amateur, home, documentary, independent, and experimental films. An emerging field of scholarship is building on this, demonstrating that 16mm also catalyzed film activity across business, industry...

‘They wanted a bigger, more ambitious film’: Film Finances and the American ‘Runaways’ That Ran Away

From the early 1960s, the British film industry was increasingly reliant on American studio financed ‘runaway’ productions. Alexander Walker identifies United Artists and Universal Pictures as two of the major players in the trend he dubbed ‘Hollywood England’. This article offers a close examination of the role of two studios in the financing of British film production by making extensive use of the Film Finances Archive. It focuses on two case studies: Tom Jones (1963) and Isadora (1968), both of which had completion guarantees from Film Finances, and will argue that Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz, two of the key British New Wave directors, lost their previous ability to direct films to budget and within schedule when they had the financial resources of American studios behind them. It will analyse how, due to a combination of ‘artistic’ intent and Hollywood money, Richardson and Reisz separately created two of the most notorious ‘runaways’ that ran away during the 1960s.

La llegada de un nuevo entretenimiento. Circulación y apropiación del cine silente norteamericano en Colombia, 1910-1929

Este artículo analiza las modalidades comerciales y culturales bajo las cuales el cine silente norteamericano ingresó a Colombia y desplazó gradualmente los gustos cinematográficos de Europa hacia los Estados Unidos a finales de 1920. Así, expone cómo las productoras de cine norteamericanas trataron de comprender las necesidades comerciales de distribuidores y exhibidores de cine en Colombia y cómo se esforzaron por complacer los gustos cinematográficos del público al tiempo que los estandarizaban. Por medio del análisis de correspondencia consular norteamericana, revistas de cine y registros de prensa, a nivel local e internacional, se subraya, además, aspectos de la modernidad cultural y del intercambio comercial entre Colombia y Estados Unidos a principios del siglo XX.

Dr. Strange Geo-Blocking Love Or: How The E.U. Learned To Stop Worrying About Cultural Integration And Love The TV Trade Barrier

The E.U. Antitrust Case that opened on July 23, 2015 against Sky U.K. and six American studios—Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount Pictures, Sony and Warner Brothers—has its structural roots in the Television Without Frontiers Directive, which was vigorously debated as a last-minute standoff that threatened to derail the conclusion of the GATT Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and is still considered to be the cornerstone of the European Union’s audiovisual policy. This Article examines the unique history of a Cultural Exception with respect to audiovisual works as applied in trade negotiations to Hollywood film and television productions, and argues that, rather than violating E.U. regulations, the decades-old practice of regional contractual restrictions and geo-blocking is both consistent with and a direct result of the E.U.’s protectionist and paternalistic efforts to shield its individual member states’ local production entities from competition and its populations from a perceived and decidedly unwelcomed Svengali-like juggernaut of American cultural influence. The E.U. antitrust action is therefore in direct contravention to the spirit of the trade laws over which Hollywood studios were so stridently subjected to debating and is inconsistent with stated E.U. audiovisual norms. Abolishing regional access limitations will put the future of the E.U.’s various local distributors at risk, for the existing patchwork of distribution related rules impacting foreign property directly impacts American producers’ decisions regarding whether and how to continue to do business in the region. Thus, any attempt to implement the E.C.’s aspirational Digital Single Market 2020 target terms must be reconciled in light of the current political climate in Europe and global technological capabilities if the E.U. is to remain a relevant market at the forefront of the modern entertainment industry and continue to benefit from the uniquely privileged relationship it has enjoyed for nearly a century with its many Hollywood studio production partners.

Development of the Animated Poster in the First Half of the XX century

The genre of animated posters emerged at the dawn of animation. In 1899, A. Cooper an English director created one of the first movie-posters in the history of world animation. The need for movie-posters with propaganda characteristics arose during the period of the WW1. During that time, the genre of the animated poster had been developed and had even become a stimulus to the development of the animation and film industry. It had achieved its greatest success in the UK due to the advanced level of printed graphics, as well as the fact that the British pioneered the development of systematic promotion approaches. German animators also worked in the genre of animated posters, but they filmed mostly instructional movies which presented technical or military information in a clear and simple form. By the end of the WW1 the structure of movie posters had evolved from transparent to narrative. During the war the genre of the animated poster was not developed in Russia. After the war, propaganda film-posters disappeared from the screens. Their place was taken by mostly political, educational and promotional posters. The time of experimentation with figurative language, technology, and structure of the animated poster was in 1920-1930s. Themes, targets and the form of presentation had changed, but the function remained the same - informational and visual propaganda. As the commercial poster had developed predominantly in European and American animation, the release of political posters initiated the development of Soviet animation. Sentiment changes in global politics and the situation in Europe during the late 1930s which evolved into the WW2, once again stimulated the entertainers interest for the genres of political-propaganda, patriotic, and instructive posters. During the war the production of animated posters formed a considerable portion of all the animation filmed in Soviet as well as American studios. With the cessation of hostilities films in the poster animation genre almost disappeared from the screens.

Traces of the World: Cel Animation and Photography

The animated cartoon has traditionally been excluded from photographic theories of cinema on the grounds that the animation camera is only incidental to the cartoon’s production, an assumption this article challenges. Taking as its basic premise that all works of celluloid animation were photographic in origin, this article demonstrates the ways in which the physical reality of our world, and particularly the world of the animation studio, leaves its mark on the cartoon image. Through the frame-by-frame analysis of cartoons by Warner Bros and other major American studios of the mid-20th century, the author catalogues the various visual imperfections that testify to cel animation’s photographic origins. These include improperly placed cels, reflections of the camera apparatus, dust and dirt particles, and even the fingerprints left by anonymous labourers. Although these mistakes may only appear on the screen for a fraction of a second, each has been preserved for posterity as a still photograph. In effect, an animated cartoon is a photographic record of its own production. A model for this method is the work of the artist Andrew Norman Wilson, whose ScanOps (2012) consists of a series of photographs culled from Google Books. Ultimately, this method of analysis serves as an inquiry into both the politics and the aesthetics of the labour process.

Watching Men Kissing Men: The Australian Reception of the Gay Male Kiss On-Screen

I n t h e 1942 f I l m C a s a b l a n C a , piano-playing Sam famously sings that we “must remember this: a kiss is just a kiss.” Although now a classic cinematic moment, coming from a Hollywood film, this is arguably something of a hypocritical message; when placed on-screen, a kiss has often represented much more than just a kiss. The kiss has been required to carry multiple meanings in the history of cinematic sex, from innocent affection to sexual passion. From cinema’s very beginnings until the mid1960s, Linda Williams argues, “a kiss of variable length had to do the job of suggesting all the excitement and pleasure of intimate sexual contacts.” This was certainly true in Australia, where a limited local film industry and a dependence upon British and American studios was coupled with multiple layers of censorship, first in the place of production and then through local censorship regimes. Kisses were targets for the censors, who feared that audiences might be enticed toward inappropriate passions. But if the kiss could arrive at a range of moments in the narrative and could convey a range of possible meanings—from affection to desire and from illicit passion to marital bliss—there was at least one kind of kiss that remained entirely unacceptable to the censors. Until the 1970s the kisses filmed by British or Hollywood studios and ultimately screened to Australian audiences were always between a man and a woman. Although heterosexual sex enjoyed a slow cinematic reveal, starting with the kiss and leading up to the eventual display of sexual intercourse, gay men were first seen kissing on-screen in the same films in which they were first seen having sex. There was no slow reveal; a gay male kiss only ever appeared in films that also featured sexually explicit scenes. While heterosexual kisses were cinematic symbols for the whole range of heterosexual sexual acts, when two men kissed on-screen, it was always foreplay.

El retrato en los primeros cartelistas españoles de cine: De la escena costumbrista al retrato realista

El artículo, que forma parte de un trabajo más amplio, pretende resaltar el uso del retrato en los carteles de cine de los primeros cartelistas españoles antes de que se implantase el star-sytem en España. Para ello se describe la evolución que se produce en la representación de los personajes en los carteles de cine desde los años diez hasta el inicio de los treinta del siglo XX, período histórico de profundas influencias de las vanguardias artísticas y publicitarias en las obras de nuestros cartelistas. Sin embargo, a finales de los años veinte se pasa de la simple inclusión de una escena, basada en un fotograma de una película, a la representación cromática y realista del rostro de la estrella, justamente en los años en los que comienza a notarse la influencia de los grandes estudios norteamericanos en España. No obstante, destacan su libertad técnica y compositiva, y la influencia que ejercen sobre los cartelistas posteriores ya que muchos de ellos integrarán los retratos y ambientaciones en sus carteles, siguiendo las directrices de los grandes estudios o los estudios independientes: o sea, los estudios en general, pero sin abandonar su forma personal de pintar los rostros de las estrellas de cine.

A Fight for Love and Glory: The Moguls of Hollywood and the Third Reich

The story of Hollywood in Weimar is essential to understanding how the American studios (and thus American culture) dealt with the Nazis. To ignore its impact is to risk misunderstanding the issues of the 1930s, both large and small. Any simple interpretation of the American film studios' connections with the Third Reich belies the actual interactions of those involved. Claims to the contrary, and efforts to slap empty labels on them, inevitably fail to convince.

Slash and porn: media subversion, hyper-articulation, and parody

In this paper, I examine the rise in popularity of pornographic parody, and compare it to slash fan fiction. Parody, an imitation that implicitly critiques an original work, is an important element of contemporary media texts. Through satire, parody offers a subtle, yet powerful critique of contemporary culture. Beyond mainstream media texts, parody is also a staple genre of the pornographic canon. Although multiple types of pornographic parodies exist, I concentrate on heterosexual parodies of mainstream film and television made by professional American pornographic film studios. Another media product that demonstrates parody is slash fan fiction, the writing of highly sexualized fan fiction. By queering traditionally masculine texts, slash creates a systematic comment on the patriarchal sexuality of popular culture. I first discuss pornographic parody, specifically focusing on Star Wars XXX. I next claim that a useful lens through which to define and delimit porn parody comes through Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque. I compare both slash fan fiction and porn parody through this lens. I argue that slash fandom has the potential to subvert patriarchy, while the more commercial porn parody hyper-articulates it.

Rescued from Oblivion: Michael Klinger, Jewish Independent Producer

Rescued from Oblivion:Michael Klinger, Jewish Independent Producer Andrew Spicer (bio) Although absent from accounts of British cinema—he merits one passing sentence in Alexander Walker’s National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (London: Harrap, 1985)—Michael Klinger was a highly significant figure in British cinema over a twenty-year period (1960–1980) during which he made thirty-two films. If he is known at all, it is as the producer of Get Carter (1971), which is always discussed as a “Mike Hodges film” following the conventional Film Studies paradigm that privileges the director’s role. Yet Klinger’s career is fascinating and merits close attention as it tells us so much about the vagaries and vicissitudes of the British film industry during this period. Born in 1920, Michael Klinger was a second-generation Polish-Jewish immigrant whose family had settled in London’s Soho in 1912. Klinger was brought up in the rag trade, but his intelligence, energy, and entrepreneurial zeal found an initial outlet in the Soho sex industry, where he was the joint owner of the Gargoyle nightclub in Dean Street. Through his partnership with London’s East End Jewish entrepreneur Tony Tenser, Klinger morphed into filmmaker: The pair ran a small company, Compton Films, which made a number of “sexploitation films,” including Naked as Nature Intended (George Harrison Marks, 1961) and The Yellow Teddybears (Robert Hartford-Davis, 1963). It was a fortuitous association with Roman Polanski—Klinger was executive producer of his first British films, Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-Sac (1966)—that gave Klinger aspirations to make “films that will live,” as he morphed again into a reputable filmmaker, becoming the most successful independent British producer in the 1970s. Unusually, but [End Page 87] adroitly, his output straddled what were normally separate spheres of production. He continued to make exploitation cinema, the saucy sex comedies that formed the Confessions series (1974–1976) starring “Randy” Robin Askwith, beginning with Confessions of a Window Cleaner (Val Guest, 1974), which was a huge hit. In a sense these were “nice earners” while Klinger concentrated on what for him were more important projects, including crime thrillers—in addition to Get Carter there were Hodges’s follow-up, Pulp (1972), a deliciously witty spoof, and Claude Chabrol’s Les liens de sang (Blood Relatives, 1978)—and what he called “unusual” films, notably the bleak melodrama Something to Hide (Alastair Reid, 1972), which deserves to be far better known. His greatest efforts were expended on rivaling the Hollywood majors through producing internationalist action-adventure films such as Gold (Peter R. Hunt, 1974) and Shout at the Devil (Peter R. Hunt, 1976), financed and filmed in South Africa. Throughout his career Klinger was conscious of his Jewish heritage. He made Rachel’s Man (Moshé Mizrahi, 1976), an uneven but ambitious biblical love story shot in Israel in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. Klinger supported this film in the hope of strengthening the nascent Israeli film industry and as a result of his desire to work with Moshé Mizrahi, Israel’s leading young director, another “talent,” like Polanski and Hodges, whom Klinger admired. He also tried, for nearly twenty years, to make Green Beach, a war epic with a Jewish hero, which he had first commissioned in 1968, having read Jack Nissenthal’s account of his role in the Dieppe Raid in the London Jewish Chronicle. Nissenthal, a radar expert whose knowledge was so valuable that there were orders to shoot him rather than allow him to be captured, was the only noncombatant on the raid. Klinger saw this story as “The Dirty Dozen that really happened” but never quite succeeded in persuading either British or American studios to back his project. I was fortunate in having the opportunity to study Klinger’s career in depth, having been loaned his papers for the University of the West of England by his son, Tony, who also went into the film business. The Michael Klinger Papers contain information about the production of various films, including contracts, correspondence, costs, distribution rights, grosses, profit and loss accounts, and legal issues. There is also an extensive collection of scripts, including those for a...

Singapore's ‘Cinema-Age’ of the 1930s: Hollywood and the shaping of Singapore modernity

Cinema-going was the most popular form of entertainment in 1930s' Singapore, with an estimated 8000 viewers filling 20 screens each night in the city by 1936. About 70% of films screened were American and many large Hollywood studios had distribution offices in Singapore. A entire supporting field consumption shaped by film fandom culture emerged, from film magazines to sales in gramophone records and wireless broadcasting of popular soundtracks and live performances in dance halls at entertainment parks, called the ‘Worlds’—such as Great World and Happy World. There were diverse reactions to this social phenomenon from different quarters. The colonial government was alarmed at the perceived influence of decadent Hollywood films on a native audience in terms of moral vices and crime. Religious bodies and older members of the local non-European community were brought in to sit on the Cinematograph Films Censorship Annual Committee. Drawing from the Anglophone print media, this paper aims to document local audiences' voices in the highly-debated topic of censorship. The existence of a large corpus of English-language publications produced in inter-war Singapore for a local, non-European audience is testimony to the depth of the domestic, English-language public sphere, which cut across diverse ethnic backgrounds and was based upon a common framework of English-language education and cultural references. This paper will argue that America films played a crucial role in influencing social changes in Singapore, particularly amongst young people and women, as well as in shaping the identity of Singapore as a distinctly modern city.

"Something That Is US": Robert Donat, Screen Performance, and Stardom in the 1930s

It's true of all wonderful actors that they somehow are in a complex relationship with stardom, particularly British actors; they think they mistrust it, and they want the regard of their peers. They want to be perceived as actors. Anthony Minghella (qtd. in Woolf 5) THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES THE COMPLEX relationship between acting and stardom in British cinema in the 1930s by looking at the career of Robert (1905-58) and his starring roles in three films from the beginning of his career: The Count of Monte Cristo (1934), The Ghost Goes West (1936), and Knight Without Armour (1937). These three films have been chosen because the opportunities presented for role playing within the films themselves complicate the demands of Hollywood-style stardom. In the first film, plays a character at very different points in his life; in the second, two characters within the same film; and finally in the third, a character asked to impersonate another character. With Donat's first film success as a leading man in The Count of Monte Cristo, an international hit, his stardom was activated in both American and British contexts. American studios saw him as a valuable commodity with box office appeal that did not, as with other British stars of the time, confine itself to specifically British authences. Consequently, from the start of his career, had to reconcile the demands of studios, who wanted to develop and define his roles in line with his emerging star image, with his personal acting preferences, which included burying the Donat image under a variety of differing roles and characterizations. Mark Glancy suggests that this had a specifically national aspect, pitting the commercial imperatives imposed by Hollywood against the relative autonomy offered by the British studios. Although the latter certainly involved, as saw it, fewer creative constraints on the actor, British producers such as Alexander Korda and Michael Balcon were just as keen to package as a romantic star, a labeling that strenuously resisted.1 The shifting configurations between actor and star throughout this time are made clear from an examination of how and his roles in these films were presented in magazines and film publicity. The former saw attempting to communicate his acting credentials, invoking such qualities as skill and versatility against the background of the exploitative commercialism of the film Industry. clearly wanted his authence to know that he was unwilling to play the romantic young man, contrasting the importance of image (which made a Hollywood star) with the acting skill that he felt was integral to British stardom. However, the tensions between actor and star were also played out in his performances, which show a remarkable reoccurrence of theatrical tropes such as role-playing, disguise, and doubling. These emphasize the distinction between performer and role, undermining uncomplicated star appeal. This article traces the reconfigurations of these performance modes throughout his early career to 1938, when after filming Knight Without Armour for Alexander Korda, was the first British star to sign a contract for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's British production arm, MGM-British. This contract, discussed later in this article, gave him significantly greater control over the development of the script and his choice of roles. Most works on British stars, such as Richards on Gracie Fields (Age of the Dream Palace 16990) or Harper on British actresses of the 1930s (137-51), have approached them in terms of the significance of their star image. This method, despite drawing attention to the actors, finds discursive consequence not in their skills but in the relationship their image has to the culture that gave it significance. This perspective on the actor as star-text is derived from Hollywood-centric theoretical models that have directed interest away from performance and acting, aspects that have, as Minghella points out in the opening quotation, a peculiarly British inflection. …

Representing Recording Studios of the Past: A Review Essay

Andy Bradley and Roger Wood. 2010. House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/Sugarhill Recording Studios. Austin: University of Texas Press. John Hartley Fox. 2009. King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records. Urbana: University of Illinois Press Roben Jones. 2010. Memphis Boys: The Story of American Studios. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. The recording studio, a site that music makers use to represent and produce sonic culture, is not merely a musical place. Recording studios are social, electronic, architectural, acoustic, and creative technologies of representation. Throughout recording processes, music industries seek to mystify the functional status of the studio among consumers of pop music. This encourages alienation between consumers and producers of popular music, rendering the agency of music business interests invisible, inaudible, and transparent. Roben Jones's Memphis Boys: The Story of American Studios, John Hartley Fox's King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records, and Andy Bradley and Roger Wood's House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/Sugarhill Recording Studios present music scholarship with three recording studios that significantly contributed to American popular music. These works successfully document the local and national contexts in which these studios produced, as well as many accounts of individuals who were involved in the studios and specific recording sessions; however, these are books in which the representation of recording studios weighs heavily on celebrations of illustrious music makers and the popular music they produce. Jones and Fox are not as careful in attending to the diverse artistic and technological agencies of architects, carpenters, acousticians, engineers, musicians, producers, and business people in the history of the recording studios as are Bradley and Wood. Works such as these perpetuate readers' misunderstanding of the complexities involved in recording studio labor and inhibit scholarly analyses of popular music production. Representations of recording studio life comprise a small category of scholarship on popular music. In addition to the three examples of histories about studios that this essay reviews, social scientists analyze the dynamics between individuals, technologies, and sounds in order to understand the role of music production in shaping popular cultures. These contributions primarily divide between those that describe the experiences of recording studio workers (Horning 2004; Jones 1992; Kealy 1979; Porcello 2003) and those that describe how the efforts of studio workers shape sounds that propagate in both local and global music markets (Green and Porcello 2005' Meintjes 2003; Veal 2007). This sort of social scientific writing favors descriptions of the processes of record production. These works present studios as sites of labor in which social actions shape musical sounds and personhood in ways that blur the supposed boundary between the technological and the creative. Ethnographic methods afford greater access to the details of recording studio labor. Ethnographers such as Meintjes and Porcello, in their respective contexts, are able to directly encounter challenges associated with recording, experiencing the collaborations between producers, agents, musicians, and engineers, among other workers, as well as the studios' placement within specific genres and related industrial flows. The three reviewed texts are not ethnographies. The authors of the texts write in a context that is temporally distinct from the now historical moments associated with the studios about which they write. This determines the primary question that organizes this review: How can histories of recording studios gain greater proximity to workers and recording processes without the benefit of physically co-present ethnographic methods? Writing about recording studios that demystifies the myth of intimacy between the consumer and the recording artist facilitates music scholarship that explains the cultural tensions that determine the sounds and social lives of a pop album. …

Burma, Hollywood and the politics of entertainment

For almost a century, movies about or set in Burma, particularly those made by the major American studios, have had certain elements in common. While emphasizing its more colourful and exotic characteristics, they have either romanticized the country or depicted it as a remote and untamed wilderness. Also, Burma has served as a backdrop for dramatic Occidental adventures, in which the local inhabitants played little role. More recent movies pay the Burmese people greater attention, but they are still secondary to the main plot, even when the movies consciously draw attention to the current military regime's human rights abuses. In films like Beyond Rangoon and Rambo, however, complex issues are over-simplified or exaggerated to the point of unreality. These movies have proved effective at planting vivid images in the popular mind and helping to mobilize support for the country's opposition movement (including in Hollywood itself), but crude and misleading messages such as those sent by Rambo can actually hinder the resolution of Burma's many problems.

The Eady Levy: A Runaway Bribe? Hollywood Production and British Subsidy in the Early 1960s

The histories of British and American film production have long been entwined, but interaction between the two industries was perhaps most intense during the 1950s and 1960s as Hollywood companies relocated film production to British locations on a large scale, investing millions of dollars in Britain and financing hundreds of projects technically identified as British. These ‘runaway productions’ were not unprecedented; similar practices were prevalent in the 1930s as several Hollywood studios set up British production units in order to meet the quota requirements of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act (Glancy 1998). However, runaway production in the 1950s and 1960s stands apart due to its much larger scale and the massive impact it had on both the British and American film industries. According to Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, American studios produced ‘about 170’ films in Britain between 1950 and 1959, approximately 14 per cent of Britain’s total film output (Harper and Porter 2003: 114; Vincendeau 1995: 464). By 1967, the National Film Finance Corporation reported that American finance accounted for 90 per cent of all production capital invested in Britain (Murphy 1992: 258). In the intervening period, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a clear distinction between American runaway production and ‘indigenous’ British film-making. This article examines the influence of the British Film Production Fund, or Eady levy, on American production in Britain in the early 1960s. The Eady levy has often been acknowledged as an economic stimulant for film-making in Britain, motivating and sustaining the investment of Hollywood companies, but it also possessed a cultural dimension and was responsible for shaping the content of the films produced by American studios in Britain. In particular, the Eady levy encouraged Hollywood companies to use their British subsidiaries to

‘Coming to a cinema near you?’: digitized exhibition and independent cinemas in Australia

Australia is on the path to achieving a full-scale conversion to digital cinema exhibition probably within the next five to ten years. Despite early optimism that digitization could provide a catalyst for greater democratization of the Australian exhibition market by creating more opportunities for audiences to see independent and alternate films, this outcome now appears far from certain. The launch and ongoing roll-out of the international standard for digital exhibition, which is now firmly controlled by the major American studios, is intensifying, rather than diminishing, the market dominance of these media conglomerates and their local allies, the major Australian exhibition chains. Independent film exhibition and alternative presentation formats, on the other hand, are being pushed even further to the periphery by these increasingly centralized market forces. While independent and major exhibitors have historically coexisted, although at times in a somewhat uneasy relationship, the financial imperatives of digital cinema now threaten to drive many independent cinemas to the edge, and with them the ongoing diversity of cinema culture in Australia. Of particular concern is the fate of independent theatres in regional and rural locations where many provide the only public screening opportunities within large geographic areas.This article outlines digital developments in Australia's commercial cinema industry within a national and international context, and in doing so considers the impact of digital exhibition technologies on Australia's independent cinema sector.

It's So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture

The bold white letters of Hollywood are so emblazoned on our collective cinematic imagination that it takes a degree of reflection before considering that Hollywood was neither the birthplace of cinema nor wholly dominant even during its post-war golden age when the export of American films covered Europe like a cultural imprint of Marshall Aid. Vanessa Schwartz's book, dotted with technicolor film stills, paparazzi images of film stars and coated in primary coloured pages, pans out from such a sharp focus on the Sunshine State and attacks the simplistic conception of the Americanization of mass culture through a presentation of the internationalization of the film industry during the 1950s. Divided into four chapters that can be read as independent studies within themselves, It's So French! tracks the development of cinema and filmmaking from its national, studio-based focus prior to the Second World War to a multinational and cooperative enterprise epitomized by the Cannes Film Festival and Around the World in 80 Days. Her central argument, and one which is clearly inspired by the likes of Kristen Ross’ Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, is that the rise of mass culture and consumerism did not automatically denote Americanization (a term which, unfortunately, she does not unpick) and that, in actual fact, it was not something to which French culture was particularly averse. Her first chapter is a study of what she terms ‘Frenchness films’, that is usually American films, shot in American studios but which bought into the extravagant, musical and creative nostalgia of the Belle Epoque era in France. With scenes taken straight from Toulouse-Lautrec paintings (the photographs and stills included here show the uncanny resemblances) and frequent doses of the infamous can-can, many Hollywood films of the era paid homage to fin-de-siècle Paris as both the home of art and of popular culture. While many of these films, tracked from An American in Paris to Gigi, are particularly clichéd in their portrayal of France (or more specifically, Paris), others, such as Moulin Rouge, were praised by their contemporaries for their portrayal of Impressionism and their own visual artistry. Schwartz argues that this theme of Frenchness within Hollywood films of the 1950s was representative of a circular cultural exchange between France and the United States.

Le cinéma américain : un impérialisme culturel ?

There are many people who equate American cinema with the domination of world screens. It is not a new trend and it is true that the American studios have always tried to have the biggest market share in all the countries showing their films. Yet, the paradox is that those countries can take advantage of the American presence on their soil; for example, taxation of profits or of ticket sales can finance local productions while the various American “runaway productions” enable some countries to develop or update their own cinematographic infrastructures and at the same time provide the opportunity for their local technicians to improve their skills. It is thus possible to take advantage of the American domination that is predominantly an economic one and that follows the trend of globalisation.

Winning the infringement war but losing the battle for damages—a case study for trade mark litigants

The Federal Court of Australia has awarded nominal damages only to five major American film studios which commenced proceedings for, and succeeded in establishing, infringement of their trade marks.