Screen Industries in East-Central Europe

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.

List of contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: East-central European media as digital peripheries
1. Post-socialist producer: The production culture of a small and peripheral media industry
2. Managing the 'Ida effect': An art-house producer breaking out of the periphery
3. The service producer and the globalization of media production
4. Breaking through the East European ceiling: Minority co-production and the new symbolic economy of small-market cinemas
5. Public service television as a producer
6. HBO Europe's original programming in the era of streaming wars
7. Digital producers: Short-form web television positions itself between clickbait and public service
Conclusion: 'High circumscription' in the era of global streamers, and more questions to be asked
Bibliography
Index

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 collective ethnography of production cultures. In 2015, he was the main author of an industry report on practices of screenplay development for the Czech Film Fund. He is now leading the Screen Industries in Central and Eastern Europe Research Group (Charles University, a part of the EU-funded project KREAS), and working on two research topics: 1) the digitalisation of the Czech audiovisual industry, and the impacts of the European Commission’s Digital Single Market strategy on film and TV distribution, and 2) the practices and professional identities of post-socialist producers.

Summary

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.

Foreword

Evaluates how screen industries of Central and Eastern European nations are positioned in and respond to forces of globalization and digitalization.

Additional text

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.

Product details

• Authors: Petr Szczepanik, Petr (Charles University Szczepanik, Szczepanik Petr
• Assisted by: Michael Curtin (Editor), Paul McDonald (Editor)
• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.08.2021
• EAN: 9781839022739
• ISBN: 978-1-83902-273-9
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 158 mm x 236 mm x 26 mm
• Series: International Screen Industries; International Screen Industrie
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; Films, cinema, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / General