Spring Quarter Film & Digital Media Colloquium.
"Production Cultures: Critical and Cultural Dimensions of Film/Video Labor"
John Caldwell, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA
Given media's increasing digitalization and the collapse of traditional producer-vs-audience distinctions, this presentation will examine why it is important to consider not just the traditional concerns of critical media studies (onscreen content, fans and viewers, studio/network organization, media technologies, etc.), but to take seriously the rich array of new cultural practices and unstable social relations on the production side of film and television as well (socio-professional interactions, liminal group rituals, trade narratives, visual self-representations and demos, craft identities and legitimation, mentoring, worker affect, etc.). The industry's critical self-disclosures, self-reflexive cultural activities, and conventionalized habits can at times provide a far more vivid picture of the current state film and television than either: 1) traditional top-down political-economic and industrial perspectives; or 2) popular ground-up research on audience agency and fan studies. Professor Caldwell is particularly interested in new kinds of authorless authorship, distributed-and-harvested creativity, and the unruly impact that user-generated content has played in professional craft communities.
John T. Caldwell is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. His books include Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (Rutgers UP, 1995), Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Duke UP, 2008), Electronic Media and Technoculture (Rutgers UP, 2000, Edited), New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (Routledge, 2003, Co-Edited with Anna Everett), and Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Film/TV Work Worlds (Routledge: forthcoming 2009, Co-Edited with Vicki Mayer and Miranda Banks). He is also producer/director of the award-winning documentary films Rancho California (por favor) (2002), and Freak Street to Goa: Immigrants on the Rajpath (1989).
Sponsored by Film & Digital Media and the Arts Research Institute.