Screen Industries in East-Central Europe

Product Description This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.This book provides an alternative perspective into the audiovisual and media industries of eastern and central Europe, namely the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. In doing so, it offers insight into the ways the screen industries of small nations are positioned in and respond to globalization and digitalization. Petr Szczepanik suggests that for these 'digital peripheries', globalization and digitalization are as yet incomplete, stumbling processes, closely intertwined with and mediated by deeply local circumstances and players. Instead of a top-down economic or political overview, this book places central focus on the lived realities of producers as key initiators, facilitators, and cultural intermediaries. Drawing on in-depth interviews, it looks closely at how their agency is circumscribed by the limited scale and peripheral positioning of the markets in which they operate, and how they struggle to come to terms with these constraints through their business strategies, creative thinking and professional self-perceptions. Each of the seven chapters provides a close study of one such production practice. This includes but is not limited to independent producers limited by the size of their home markets; the 'service producers' working on large Western projects in Prague and Budapest and short-form online video production with its promise of dynamic growth in the era of mobile. However diverse, all these cases illustrate that while many industry practices and actors remain territorially and nationally bound, it is impossible to understand the full complexity of media markets and producer practices in the internet era without considering transcultural networks and flows. Theoretically building on the literature in critical media industry studies, this book offers a comparative analytical framework for studying small and/or peripheral media industries beyond east-central Europe. Review "A tour-de-force meticulously researched analysis of East-Central European production. Unpacks how new co-financing schemes "circumscribe" small, peripheral film industries. Ably derails lazier academic platitudes about producer agency, national cinemas, and transnationalism. A precedent-setting, theoretically astute "must-read" for media industry scholars." - John Thornton Caldwell, UCLA, USA"Focusing on producers in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, Szczepanik clearly shows how the realities of smallness and peripherality shape the globalization and digitization of media production. Beautifully written and the result of extensive research, Screen Industries in East Central Europe makes a very significant contribution to media studies. It also takes small-nation film studies to a new level of analytic precision." - Mette Hjort, author of Small Nation, Global Cinema"This brilliantly researched book presents an unparalleled view of how film and television is made in East-Central Europe today. Grounded in deep knowledge of the historical underpinnings, power structures, and geopolitics of contemporary media production, Szczepanik offers a powerful refutation of the Cold War frameworks that still, too often, define understandings of East-Central European media."- Alice Lovejoy, University of Minnesota, USA About the Author Petr Szczepanik is an Associate Professor at Charles University, Prague. He has written books on the Czech media industries of the 1930s (Konzervy se slovy, 2009) and on the state-socialist production mode (Továrna Barrandov, 2016). Outcomes from his research on state-socialist producer practices in East-Central Europe were partly published also in Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Culture (Palgrave, co-edited with Patrick Vonderau, 2013). He led the EU-funded FIND project (www.projectfind.cz, 2012–2014), which used student internships for a