Yannis Tzioumakis

Marketing David Mamet: Institutionally Assigned Film Authorship in Contemporary American Cinema

his essay addresses questions of authorship in David Mamet’s cinema as these arise in the textual organization of promotional material that accompanies the release of a feature film in contemporary American cinema. The main focal point here is the film trailer as a representative sample of an increasingly large number of marketing strategies that also include film posters, television and radio spots, publicity stills, press kits, cast and crew interviews, behindthe-scenes documentaries, “making of” featurettes, and, more recently, web pages devoted to individual films. Specifically, this essay will discuss Mamet as an auteur by examining trailers for the films he has scripted and directed. This approach commences from the position that distribution companies use film authorship as an industrial category to increase the market value of individual filmmakers in a largely undifferentiated media marketplace. In this light, promotional material and marketing strategies become extremely significant texts in the production of the author. Consequently, this means that authorship here is not sought in the film text; instead, it is negotiated through intertext, regardless of whether a filmmaker could be constructed as an auteur through more traditional, textually determined processes. As a result, this strand of auteur criticism, which is labeled “industrial auteurism,” could potentially reveal “a different author,” an author whose presence is assigned institutionally, which often makes sense only in light of distributors’ attempts to market a specific product to a particular audience. This essay will demonstrate the distinct ways film distributors mobilized Mamet’s authorship. It will argue that the use of film authorship in contemporary American cinema marketing depends on the nature and extent of a filmmaker’s association with particular institutional Marketing David Mamet: Institutionally Assigned Film

Academic discourses and American independent cinema: in search of a field of studies. Part 1: from the beginnings to the 1980s

This paper examines the ways academic discourses shaped the field of American independent cinema. Through a discussion of a large number of works that examined the question of independent filmmaking in the USA and were published from the 1940s onwards, the paper provides a number of distinctions between particular approaches to what constitutes American independent cinema, and in effect offers a history of film criticism on the subject. More specifically, it groups work on the field under five different categories, each driven by agendas and objectives that were often conflicting. This conflict can be seen most clearly during the 1980s when a particular group of scholars examined American independent cinema as intricately linked to the Hollywood film industry and the studios while a second cluster of academic researchers located independent film completely outside the mainstream and as part of alternative media. In this respect, independent film production in the USA has come to represent a different set of characteristics for different groups of scholars, which to some extent explains why a consensual definition of the label ‘independent film’ has remained elusive.

Academic discourses and American independent cinema: in search of a field of studies. Part 2: from the 1990s to date

This paper examines the ways academic discourses shaped the field of American independent cinema. Through a discussion of a large number of works that examined the question of independent filmmaking in the USA and were published from the 1940s onwards, the paper provides a number of distinctions between particular approaches to what constitutes American independent cinema, and in effect offers a history of film criticism on the subject. More specifically, it groups work in the field under five different categories, each driven by agendas and objectives that were often conflicting. This conflict can be seen most clearly during the 1980s when a particular group of scholars examined American independent cinema as intricately linked to the Hollywood film industry and the studios while a second cluster of academic researchers located independent film completely outside the mainstream and as part of alternative media. In this respect, independent film production in the USA has come to represent a different set of characteristics for different groups of scholars, which to some extent explains why a consensual definition of the label ‘independent film’ has remained elusive. (Part 1 of this paper was published in the New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2011.)

The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970-2010)

In chapter 5, Shen examines the often banal and poorly attended DEFA produced fairy-tale films of the 1980s from the perspective of contemporary East German society and the persistent hostilities of that decade. Films culturally motivated by an enlightened realist agenda and fuelled by the tensions between the Soviet Bloc and Western powers, the unnerving threat of ecological nuclear disaster, notably Chernobyl (1986) and the official socialist party mandate calling for the advocacy and emancipation of women. These political issues, Shen convincingly claims, informed fairy-tale adaptations of this period and inadvertently re-established themes of Romanic idealism. These works reinvented contemporary cultural and meaning production via themes of peace in Godfather Death (1980), egalitarianism in The Prince Behind the Seven Seas (1982), and ecological protection in Iron Hans (1988). These fairy-tale films, loosely based on the original subject matter and adapted for political purposes, oscillated between conformity, fear of open public criticism and objection and the pretence of tolerance. In the closing discussion, Shen defines DEFA fairy-tale adaptations as ‘counter tales’, carefully avoiding the term ‘anti-tale’ because, as she contends, these modernised revisions did not so much break with the GDR’s German cultural heritage but rather sought to preserve and recreate a fairy-tale environment tailored to an enlightened social realist aesthetic in the service of modernity, be it for educational purposes, moral lessons of right and wrong, entertainment, social and/or political concerns. DEFA fairy-tale films still ended with the classic ‘and they lived happily ever’, although what constituted happiness was redefined by the state. The counter tale elements of these films include the characterisation of the ‘Princess’ as truly deserving of happiness by the merit of her good character rather than her noble birth. Further traditional tales promoting the accumulation of wealth were rejected as bourgeois and replaced by counter tales of the riches of true love. Notably, the literary element of violence was consciously eradicated from all fairy tale film adaptations, and DEFA substituted the power of mysticism and the supernatural (a common element of traditional storytelling) with the rationalist ideals of hard work, human ingenuity and moral virtue. Shen’s interpretive analyses and rigorous enquiry into so many of these fairy-tale films reveals a cumulative insight of immense value.