Kay Dickinson (Professor of Film, Concordia University)
28 November 2019
Lecture: Supply Chain Cinema, Supply Chain Education: Producing Workers for Transnational Media Production
Abstract: Increasingly, big budget films are manufactured across a number of different sites. While this practice may be motivated by the need for particular, narratively-determined backdrops, split location production is often a means of taking advantage of various competitive labour, infrastructure or tax affordances. Offshored Bollywood, Chinese and Hollywood projects (such as Star Trek Beyond and Independence Day: Resurgence) are now regularly, if partially, routed through the United Arab Emirates, often without regular viewers even noticing. Anna Tsing’s notion of supply chain capitalism is instructive here in how it reveals what it takes for a site to position itself as viable in this climate. A specially crafted worker subjectivity becomes crucial and, in so many ways, achieving this falls within the remit of how people are trained. To what extent does a liberal arts university education emerge as a complicit cog in the mechanics of cinema’s global supply chain, encouraging conformity to this sector’s needs for hierarchized diversity, entrepreneurship, and flexible uncertainty?
Bio: Kay Dickinson is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (Oxford University Press, 2008), Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (bfi, 2016) and Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (Palgrave, 2018).