Political History of Film Crew as a Temporary Total Institution
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Film crews and film sets remain surprisingly under-researched fields in Film Studies. Drawing on an organizational definition of the film set as a "temporary total institution" which is based on generalized role structures and role enactments (Bechky 2006), this paper looks at the ways film crews were constructed in the history of Czech cinema 1945-1970, i.e. between the nationalization of the film industry and the political backlash against the Czech New Wave. Although crews exist only temporarily – for the period of a single project –, they also act as "total institutions" which are physically and socially isolated from the external world, and structured according to long-lasting internal rules and norms. As such, crews demonstrate a paradoxical historicity: they operate as transient battlegrounds where external historical forces shape how film is produced, but also as bounded and protected places which are inertial and resistant to top-down political changes and pressures. This paper will discuss how film crews have been variably (self-)defined and constructed and how they have related to both "upper" (producer and executive level, political committees) and "lower" (suppliers of services) strata of the production community. Using archival research and oral history to analyze concrete examples of top-down organizational and political reforms implemented to rationalize and discipline film production, I will focus on practices of (self)policing and "boundary-work" (Ganti 2012) that served the production community to preserve its work world and related hierarchies and values ("production culture", see Caldwell 2008). |
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