Examines Franco-American cinema relations, and France's periodic attempts to curb Hollywood's access to the French market. The text's major focus is the French influence - and American reaction to - the European Union's "Television Without Frontiers" directive and the 1993 GATT talks in Uruguay.

No Marketing Blurb

Essays by prominent scholars examining film distribution in the early years of cinema. This collection of essays explores the complex issue of film distribution from the invention of cinema into the 1910s. From regional distribution networks to international marketing strategies, from the analysis of distribution catalogs to case studies on individual distributors, these essays written by well-known specialists in the field discuss the intriguing question of how films came to meet their audiences. Contributors include Richard Abel, Marta Braun, Joseph Garncarz, André Gaudreault, François Jost, Charlie Keil, Martin Loiperdinger, Viva Paci, Wanda Strauven, Gregory Waller, and many more.

Mass Communication Theories: Explaining Origins, Processes, and Effects explores mass communication theories within the social and cultural context that influenced their origins. An intimate examination of the lives and times of prominent mass communication theorists both past and present bring the subject to life for the reader.

The most visible cultural institution on earth between the World Wars, the Hollywood movie industry tried to satisfy worldwide audiences of vastly different cultural, religious, and political persuasions. The World According to Hollywood shows how the industry's self-regulation shaped the content of films to make them salable in as many markets as possible. In the process, Hollywood created an idiosyncratic vision of the world that was glamorous and exotic, but also oddly narrow. Ruth Vasey shows how the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), by implementing such strategies as the industry's Production Code, ensured that domestic and foreign distribution took place with a minimum of censorship or consumer resistance. Drawing upon MPPDA archives, studio records, trade papers, and the records of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Vasey reveals the ways the MPPDA influenced the representation of sex, violence, religion, foreign and domestic politics, corporate capitalism, ethnic minorities, and the conduct of professional classes. Vasey is the first scholar to document fully how the demands of the global market frequently dictated film content and created the movies' homogenized picture of social and racial characteristics, in both urban America and the world beyond. She uncovers telling evidence of scripts and treatments that were abandoned before or during the course of production because of content that might offend foreign markets. Among the fascinating points she discusses is Hollywood's frequent use of imaginary countries as story locales, resulting from a deliberate business policy of avoiding realistic depictions of actual countries. She argues that foreign governments perceived movies not just as articles of trade, but as potential commercial and political emissaries of the United States. Just as Hollywood had to persuade its domestic audiences that its products were morally sound, its domination of world markets depended on its ability to create a culturally and politically acceptable product.

A biography of the famed German film producer whose successes such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Blue Angel have become industry classics. Hardt traces Pommer's work from the pre-Hitler days of the Ufa studio, his emigration to the US in 1933, his battle to establish himself in the Hollywood milieu, his political struggles as motion Picture Control Officer of the US Military during 1946-1949 as he tried to rebuild Germany's film machinery, and ultimately documents Pommer's survival as one of the major producers of the era. Includes photographs and film index appendices. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Through the lens of cinema, this book explores the ways in which the United States, Britain and India impacted each other politically, culturally and ideologically. It argues that American films of the 1920s posited alternative notions of whiteness and the West to that of Britain, which stood for democracy and social mobility even at a time of virulent racism. The book examines the impact that the American cinema has on Indian filmmakers of the period, who were integrating its conventions with indigenous artistic traditions to articulate an Indian modernity. It considers the way American films in the 1920s presented an orientalist fantasy of Asia, which occluded the harsh realities of anti-Asian sentiment and legislation in the period as well as the exciting engagement of anti-imperial activists who sought to use the United States as the base of a transnational network. The book goes on to analyse the American ‘empire films’ of the 1930s, which adapted British narratives of empire to represent the United States as a new global paradigm. Presenting close readings of films, literature and art from the era, the book engages cinema studies with theories of post-colonialism and transnationalism, and provides a novel approach to the study of Indian cinema.

Media Industries: History, Theory and Method is among the first texts to explore the evolving field of media industry studies and offer an innovative blueprint for future study and analysis. capitalizes on the current social and cultural environment of unprecedented technical change, convergence, and globalization across a range of textual, institutional and theoretical perspectives brings together newly commissioned essays by leading scholars in film, media, communications and cultural studies includes case studies of film, television and digital media to vividly illustrate the dynamic transformations taking place across national, regional and international contexts

This edited collection assesses the complex historical and contemporary relationships between US and Australian cinema by tapping directly into discussions of national cinema, transnationalism and global Hollywood. While most equivalent studies aim to define national cinema as independent from or in competition with Hollywood, this collection explores a more porous set of relationships through the varied production, distribution and exhibition associations between Australia and the US. To explore this idea, the book investigates the influence that Australia has had on US cinema through the exportation of its stars, directors and other production personnel to Hollywood, while also charting the sustained influence of US cinema on Australia over the last hundred years. It takes two key points in time—the 1920s and 1930s and the last twenty years—to explore how particular patterns of localism, nationalism, colonialism, transnationalism and globalisation have shaped its course over the last century. The contributors re-examine the concept and definition of Australian cinema in regard to a range of local, international and global practices and trends that blur neat categorisations of national cinema. Although this concentration on US production, or influence, is particularly acute in relation to developments such as the opening of international film studios in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and the Gold Coast over the last thirty years, the book also examines a range of Hollywood financed and/or conceived films shot in Australia since the 1920s.