I Screen Studies

A story today in the Melbourne Age (”Diving dollar has gold lining for silver screen“) suggests the plunging Australian dollar will mean more international production for Australia.

“There is a major increase in interest for opportunities to film in Australia,” said Jenni Tosi, general manager of industry development and investment at Film Victoria.

“Basically, it means that they can get 40% more for their dollar if they come here (now) than if they came in July.

“It’s a highly competitive area. They look for the cheapest territory to suit their projects, and amounts as little as $25,000 have been known to be the difference between whether a project goes to one territory or another,” Ms Tosi said.

The Australian dollar is significantly lower against the US dollar today than it was in 2005-06, when big-budget US films Charlotte’s Web, Ghost Rider and Where the Wild Things Are were filmed in Victoria. A tax incentive for foreign producers has also increased since then from 12.5% to 15%.

The article is essentially about the cost sensitivity of some international production, but what it suggests is that the financial crisis may reinforce existing trends towards greater international mobility of production particularly those projects on which location decisions are made primarily by financial calculation rather than story considerations.

In the article, the Melbourne Film Office and Film Victoria, two local film commissions, are bullish about prospects. This is in stark contrast to the situation in the USA, where as the New York Times REPORTED a couple of weeks ago, the rising cost of taxpayer funded schemes to encourage film and television production in particular states has led to legislators tightening eligibility rules amid stories of inflated budgets and lack of local financial benefits flowing from the production.  The NYT article traces the recent rush by states to implement tax incentives, credits and other schemes to attract production, to a ‘Defense against Canada’ law earlier this decade in Colorado. In fact, the trend for (usually publicly funded) film commissions and sub-national governments to offer subsidies or support to production has a much longer history both in and outside the United States: the emergence of Wilmington, NC, Vancouver in Canada and the Gold Coast in Australia as production locations in the 1980s was aided immensely by - if not the direct result of - either direct investment, tax incentives, loans, and other forms of support put in place by local governments.

More significantly, the NYT article contains the first criticism I have seen of the schemes which points out that they do not necessarily produce what is claimed for them when they are set up:

“There’s no evidence yet that this is a particularly efficient or effective way to create jobs,” said Noah Berger, executive director of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.

The nonprofit center reviews budget and tax policies in Massachusetts, which is spending about $60 million a year on producer credits. A recent study by Mr. Berger’s center pointed out that the state’s film credit, at 25 percent, is five times higher than that offered to those who build in designated economic opportunity areas, and more than eight times the state’s standard investment tax credit.

“There’s no way you can say this makes money for the public” treasury, said Greg Albrecht, chief economist for Louisiana’s legislative fiscal office.In 2006, the last year for which it has complete figures, the state granted about $121 million in credits. Mr. Albrecht estimates that only about 18 percent of that is ever recovered in taxes on expanded economic activity.

“It’s an expensive way to create jobs,” Mr. Albrecht said. But he noted that Louisiana, like New Mexico, can afford it, thanks to rising oil and gasoline revenue. “We’re happy as larks right now to do this.”

The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center report mentioned in the article is available HERE.

A big shout out to the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art and Australian Cinematheque for programming FIVE George A Romero zombie films for this forthcoming Halloween weekend. Brisbane is zombie central, what with the Spierig brothers first film Undead, the Brisbane Zombie Walk in May, and the Thrill the World event just the other day.

I’ve been meaning to post about GoMA and the Cinematheque for a while - they are also screening a major program of German films called ‘Out of the Shadows: German Expressionism and Beyond’ which includes not only many rarely seen silent and early sound expressionist films, but also a series of films influenced by the movement or synchronous with it, from Weimar comedies and spectaculars, monster films, city films, mountain films, spy films and war films. This really is a remarkable program curated by Russell Merritt. The QAG/GoMA site contains valuable synopses of all of the films.

On her fantastically useful blog Film studies for free, Catherine Grant has posted a number of links to freely accessible, online copies of a number of really important film studies books. Most come from the University of California Press which has over 700 scholarly titles freely available. Catherine also used the Online Books Page from the University of Pennsylvania to find these titles:

• Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (eds), Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes

• Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub

• Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company

• John M. Frame, Theology at the Movies

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies

• Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany

• William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film

• David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema

• Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema

• Jennifer E. Langdon, Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood

• Robert Philip Kolker, The Altering Eye

• Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema

• Nöel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema

On his excellent blog Personalizemedia, Gary Hayes has pronged the cinema again. In a post entitled ‘Video: Cinematic Game Renaissance - Game Now Leading Film’, Gary asks

Have we reached a tipping point - with many more user hours spent with games than films are they now more culturally relevant (as in our cultures are saturated with them)? With most films having ‘game-like’ story arcs and, at the last count, nearly 80 films with stories based on game titles in production I am starting to think so.

Game culture and their inherent stories are now absolutely mass media. In a low risk, and dwindling film business, creating stories around experiences that people have already spent 20-40 hours immersed in the story world, is a no brainer, so what we are seeing is a threshold now of game-like films but more importantly films based on games.

It’s time to call it quits in the measurement of the experiential media in relation to cinema. It’s not a war of cultural relevance that one or other can win. Culture doesn’t have to be a contest which begets winners and losers. I think we need to think about negotiating copresence and dance together, like Windradyne at Parramatta, with a slip of paper in our hats with ‘Peace’ written on it.

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I need to write about these more, with a great deal more thought.

In my negotiation of television this evening I was struck first by that crazy advertisement where a woman pushes a red ball of wall around Melbourne.

It’s the latest in a small festival of short commercials for lovely enigmatic Melbourne which put me more to mind of ads from the 1970s for top French grog like Pernod and Imperial Leather soap (examples at the end of the post) than the film styles and genres they are, perhaps, reaching for. I don’t know yet if this makes me think any differently of Melbourne

and then, with far greater force, by the magnificent achievement that is First Australians. Even after one episode it is clear that this is landmark television.

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In the spirit of academic openness, and because I think they bear reading again, I’ve started to upload pre-publication drafts of my earlier publications, beginning with a piece that took a very long time, and which I felt really satisfied with, but which I also could have (can still) do more.

The article is called ‘Something Rotten in the State of Minnesota, or, The Morality of Backwoodsmen: A Simple Plan‘. The publication version appeared in Metro 121-122 (2000). It’s filed under ‘What I have written’ in the sidebar.

I remember I really didn’t like this film when I first saw it, but something kept drawing me back, and I went to see it three or four times at the movies (very unusual for me). I made copious notes, and delved into work on chance and fiction, and even came up with a sub-genre: the windfall fantasy, of which A Simple Plan is a variant: the windfall fantasy gone wrong. Reading this again almost a decade later, I remember how much the film affected me, stuck in my mind. It speaks to me now in a different way, as we experience what may well be the end of the Long Twentieth Century (Giovanni Arrighi). The film bespeaks the moral decay at the heart of America.

Arrighi’s book definitely bears revisiting.

I’ve just received a flyer about Jane Kelsey’s new book Serving Whose Interests? The Political Economy of Trade in Services Agreements. Jane is a professor of law at Auckland University, a prominent critic of globalisation, an extremely important (and readable) writer and speaker about the hidden agendas behind free trade agreements, and particularly their adverse social and cultural consequences.  (See her website HERE for links to some of her many articles and reports). I met Jane in 2003 at a conference in Amsterdam, and subsequently at International Network for Cultural Diversity conferences around the world.  I’m really looking forward to reading the book.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Taking Services to Market

1. Reading the GATS as Ideology

2. How the GATS was Won (and Lost?)

3. Trade-related Development

4. The Illusion of Public Services

5. Ruling the Services Infrastructure

6. Trade in People

7. Minds and Markets

8. Dominion Over the Earth

9. Energy Wars;

10. Serving Whose Interests?

I’m not sure how I’ve managed to completely miss this story, but glad to have found it now.

Earlier this year the Conservative government in Canada slipped a clause into a bill to amend aspects of the Income Tax Act which would have allowed the Heritage Minister (Canada’s cultural minister, responsible for film among many other things) to deny tax credits to projects s/he found morally offensive on the grounds that they are “contrary to public policy”. The proposal would have covered a wide range of projects which could be opposed on the basis of explicit sexual content (pornographic films are already barred from receiving tax credits), denigration of particular groups, gratuitous violence, and absence of ‘educational content’ (whatever that means).

The good news is that in the heat of the current election campaign and following sustained campaigning by filmmakers and the broader arts community (which also faced a raft of other cuts to federal arts programs) the Conservatives have dropped the clause (see report in Toronto Globe and Mail 8 October HERE).

The C-10 hoopla first reared its head in February after The Globe and Mail reported there was a little-known provision - at third reading before the Senate banking committee - that could cut off tax benefits for film and TV productions that contain graphic sex, violence or other content that the government finds offensive. It applied only to Canadian TV and film projects, while Hollywood and other foreign productions applying for tax credits would get a free pass.

Yesterday in his platform - called The True North Strong and Free: Stephen Harper’s Plan for Canadians - the Tory Leader said that while “these proposals were approved unanimously by the House of Commons, we will take into account the serious concerns that have been expressed by film creators and investors.

“A re-elected Conservative government … will maintain financial support for arts and culture at or above existing levels, while continuing to improve the effectiveness of allocations wherever possible.”

But this issue illustrates the potential for the many tax incentives and associated assistance packages provided by governments at all levels to be subject to political manipulation. In a sense, many already are since most (if not all) place conditions on those who access them, with granting of credits or incentives dependent on film projects being produced in particular places or with particular people. How different are they from this proposal? And is it not already possible for governments to censor or direct cultural activity through programs which are judged against some kind of ‘community standards’ test, or which rely on some kind of cultural test (as distinct from, say a Qualifying Expenditure test where the credit depends on money spent in a particular place or on particular services)?

In a characteristically fascinating post ‘They’re Looking for Us’ on his and Kristin Thompson’s blog Observations on Film Art, David Bordwell discusses “one of the most powerful weapons in the filmmaker’s arsenal,” the reaction shot. In this post, I want to add to David’s analysis by offering an example from the Korean gangster film, Chingu (Friend, Kwak Kyung-taek, 2001), which illustrates what for want of a better term we might call the non-reaction shot. It fits with DB’s broad analysis, and augments it too, I think. Calling it a non-reaction shot is not to say that it is devoid of emotional impact, or narrative importance. Far from it. But first, a recap of David’s post: (more…)

Among the amendments (or ’spoonfuls of pork’, to quote CNN) to the US$700 billion economic bailout package to get the bill over the line in the House of Representatives are some measures that reward film and television producers who work in the US. (more…)