Shadow Economies of Cinema Mapping Informal Film Distribution 9781844574117, 9781844575831

Table of contents :
Cover
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Why distribution?
Formal and informal film economies
Shadows, sites and circuits
1 Distribution from Above and Below
Redefining distribution: theory and practice
Distribution from below
The cultural politics of distribution
Conclusion
2 The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse
‘Anything with sprocket holes’
The STV aesthetic
Transnational STV circuits
Shooting and selling STV action in the Asia-Pacific
The slaughterhouse of cinema
Conclusion
3 Informal Media Economies
The formal and the informal
The centrality of informality
Informal economies of cinema
Informality, cinema and the state
Between formal and informal distribution: Tropa de elite
4 Nollywood at Large
A short history of the Nigerian video boom
The formalising imperative
Formalising international distribution
Conclusion
5 Six Faces of Piracy
Copyright and the construction of piracy
Piracy as theft
Piracy as free enterprise
Piracy as free speech
Piracy as authorship
Piracy as resistance
Piracy as access
Everyday ethics of piracy in Tepito, Mexico City
Tepito postscript 2010
6 The Grey Internet
Mapping the online distribution ecology
Linking sites
Video-hosting sites
Cyberlockers
Informal enforcement on the digital frontier
Conclusion
Conclusion: Coordinates for Studying Distribution in a
Digital Age
From pipelines to swarms
Rethinking informational freedom
Appendix: A Film Distribution Research Guide
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

CULTURAL HISTORIES OF CINEMA This new book series examines the relationship between cinema and culture. It will feature interdisciplinary scholarship that focuses on the national and transnational trajectories of cinema as a network of institutions, representations, practices and technologies. Of primary concern is analysing cinema’s expansive role in the complex social, economic and political dynamics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. SERIES EDITORS Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson

ALSO PUBLISHED Empire and Film, edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe Film and the End of Empire, edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe

Shadow Economies of Cinema Mapping Informal Film Distribution Ramon Lobato

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain by Palgrave in 2012 Reprinted by Bloomsbury in 2018 on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk

The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Ramon Lobato, 2012

Ramon Lobato has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: keenan Text design: couch Cover image: Police in Quezon City, Philippines, destroy pirate CDs, DVDs and VCDs (© Gabriel Mistral/Getty Images)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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978-1-8445-7411-7 978-1-8445-7583-1

Series: Cultural Histories of Cinema Typeset by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

Preface . . . vii Acknowledgments . . . viii Introduction . . . 1 Why distribution? . . . 2 Formal and informal film economies . . . 3 Shadows, sites and circuits . . . 4 1 Distribution from Above and Below . . . 9 Redefining distribution: theory and practice . . . 10 Distribution from below . . . 13 The cultural politics of distribution . . . 14 Conclusion . . . 19 2 The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse . . . 21 ‘Anything with sprocket holes’ . . . 22 The STV aesthetic . . . 24 Transnational STV circuits . . . 26 Shooting and selling STV action in the Asia-Pacific . . . 30 The slaughterhouse of cinema . . . 32 Conclusion . . . 36 3 Informal Media Economies . . . 39 The formal and the informal . . . 39 The centrality of informality . . . 41 Informal economies of cinema . . . 43 Informality, cinema and the state . . . 47 Between formal and informal distribution: Tropa de elite . . . 49 4 Nollywood at Large . . . 55 A short history of the Nigerian video boom . . . 56 The formalising imperative . . . 59 Formalising international distribution . . . 63 Conclusion . . . 66

5 Six Faces of Piracy . . . 69 Copyright and the construction of piracy . . . 70 Piracy as theft . . . 72 Piracy as free enterprise . . . 74 Piracy as free speech . . . 76 Piracy as authorship . . . 78 Piracy as resistance . . . 80 Piracy as access . . . 82 Everyday ethics of piracy in Tepito, Mexico City . . . 85 Tepito postscript 2010 . . . 91 6 The Grey Internet . . . 95 Mapping the online distribution ecology . . . 96 Linking sites . . . 100 Video-hosting sites . . . 101 Cyberlockers . . . 104 Informal enforcement on the digital frontier . . . 106 Conclusion . . . 109 Conclusion: Coordinates for Studying Distribution in a Digital Age . . . 111 From pipelines to swarms . . . 112 Rethinking informational freedom . . . 114 Appendix: A Film Distribution Research Guide . . . 119 Notes . . . 129 Bibliography . . . 149 Index . . . 163

Preface

Each year in the coldest weeks of winter, an international film festival takes place in my home town of Melbourne, Australia. Though it lacks the glamour of its European counterparts, the festival’s opening-night party attracts a decent array of directors, stars and sales agents, along with tourists from interstate and overseas. The following three weeks afford the city’s cinephiles the opportunity to see on the big screen the films that have been doing the rounds of the festival circuit. Each year we go through the programme with highlighter pens at the ready, then queue in the crisp winter air outside the festival venues dotted along Flinders Street, Swanston Street and Russell Street. This is the official face of international film culture in the city. Just around the corner from the festival precinct is a different kind of international film culture, one which is the subject of this book. In DVD stores of dubious legality, tucked away inside non-descript shopping centres, you can find copies of many of the films screening at the festival, along with TV dramas, concert DVDs and music videos, all of which sell for half the price of a movie ticket, or less. Many of the discs are pirate copies or parallel-imported versions which violate official distribution agreements. They come in plastic sleeves adorned with spelling mistakes and printing errors. The subtitling is erratic, and sometimes the marketing blurb on the back cover belongs to a different movie from the one advertised on the front cover. But what these DVDs lack in finish they make up for in speed. Films usually go on sale here months before they make their big-screen ‘premiere’. Today, film distribution is everywhere, in every city – and not just within the infrastructure of multiplexes, arthouses, retail chains and broadcasters that makes up the formal film economy. Parallel to this official circuit is another world of grey-market and counterfeit media, of cheap straight-to-video films that never register in DVD sales data, a digital ecology of file-sharing and online video. Networks such as these are not common objects of analysis for cinema studies but they play a vital role in the global circulation of the moving image. What happens when we remove informal networks from the margins and place them at the centre of our models of film reception and consumption? This is what Shadow Economies of Cinema seeks to find out.

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

A great many people have helped make this book possible, too many to acknowledge individually here. Special thanks are due to: Lee Grieveson, Haidee Wasson and Rebecca Barden, for their support of this book; my PhD supervisors Audrey Yue and Sean Cubitt, always unfailingly generous with their time and knowledge; Meaghan Morris; two anonymous readers, whose feedback has greatly improved the book; my colleagues at Swinburne University and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, especially Julian Thomas and Stuart Cunningham, for encouragement and advice; and to many friends and colleagues – especially Kyle Weise, James Meese, Christian McCrea, Pete Chambers, Meg Mundell, Sun Jung, Scott Brook, Annamma Varghese, Radha O’Meara, Darshana Jayemanne, Karina Aveyard and Rowan Wilken – who read early drafts of this work. The financial support of the MacGeorge Bequest, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the ARC Cultural Research Network and the University of Melbourne’s Arts Faculty is gratefully acknowledged. Thank you to the editors and publishers of Studies in Australasian Cinema, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies and the edited collection The Business of Entertainment, Vol 1: The Movies, where early drafts of some sections first appeared. The Mexico City case study in Chapter 5 could not have happened without Tobias Ostrander, who has played an important role in the research underpinning this book. Joy Sandra Lee and Jonathon Auxier of the Warner Bros. Archive at University of Southern California were wonderfully helpful during my visits in August 2008. I owe a huge debt to Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, whose eagle-eyed editing, incisive feedback and encyclopaedic knowledge of film history have improved this book in many ways. Thanks especially to Leah Tang for being a constant sounding-board for half-baked ideas and an invaluable source of critique, and to Livia Radwanski for the stunning images of Tepito market. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the many distributors, formal and informal, who made the time to speak to me. This book is dedicated to my family: Jenny, Angelo and Julian Lobato.

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Shadow Economies of Cinema

Introduction

This is a book about the circulatory dynamics of cinema – how movies travel through space and time, and what happens to them (and us) along the way. My aim in writing Shadow Economies of Cinema has been to offer a different way of thinking about the innumerable practices of film viewing that are integral to everyday life around the world but marginal to film studies as a discipline. The book therefore revolves around a series of questions about distribution. Where is contemporary cinema located, and how is it accessed? How do distribution networks shape the way we experience and understand movies? What are the most popular and powerful distribution channels for cinema on a global scale? Shadow Economies of Cinema argues that effective answers to such questions require us to focus our attention on informal systems of film circulation, including pirate networks. In this sense, the book parts ways with the rich tradition of research on film distribution and exhibition that takes cinemagoing as its departure point. While the nickelodeons, movie houses and picture palaces of yesteryear, and the multiplexes of today, are important sites of cultural consumption, formal theatrical exhibition is no longer the epicentre of cinema culture. In an age when moving image culture is increasingly disembedded from the major studios’ product pipelines, an opportunity arises to recalibrate our research paradigms to better fit the realities of how film is being accessed in a globalised and convergent world. In the following chapters, I argue that this conceptual shift is best achieved by placing what I call the shadow economies of cinema – unmeasured, unregulated and extra-legal audiovisual commerce – at the centre of our analytical lens, and by considering the many ways in which they interface with conventional film industries. All around the world, films are bought from roadside stalls, local markets and grocery stores; they are illegally downloaded and streamed; they are watched in makeshift videoclubs, on street corners and in restaurants, shops and bars. International film culture in its actually existing forms is a messy affair, and it relies to a great extent on black markets and subterranean networks. Examining the industrial dynamics of these shadow film economies across a number of different sites – from Los Angeles to Lagos, Melbourne to Mexico City – the book shows how they constitute a central, rather than marginal, part of audiovisual culture and commerce.

Introduction

1

WHY DISTRIBUTION? A belief in the inherent power of cinematic representation has long shaped the discipline of film studies and the kinds of research carried out under its auspices. From the perspective of a film scholar, a movie is more than a reel of celluloid or a disc encoded with data; it is a cultural artefact endowed with transformative potential. Successive generations of film theorists have demonstrated cinema’s capacity to catalyse ethical awakening, to present new ways of thinking, feeling and acting, and to change in small but significant ways our understanding of the world around us. Underlying all this is the knowledge that cinema matters because it has social consequences. But to be of social consequence, a film must first reach an audience. In other words, it must be distributed. Distribution plays a crucial role in film culture – it determines what films we see, and when and how we see them; and it also determines what films we do not see.1 Thousands of features are produced each year, but only a small number of these will play to large audiences. Distributors, formal and informal, determine which films win and lose in this game of cultural consumption. In the process, they shape public culture by circulating or withholding texts which have the potential to become part of shared imaginaries, discourses and dreams. While not a dominant theme in the film studies literature, distribution networks have been studied from various perspectives. Film historians have tracked the international expansion of the Hollywood empire and the rise and fall of national theatre chains.2 Television scholars have analysed the commercial logics of broadcasters and cable networks.3 Political economists have theorised distribution as ‘the key locus of power and profit’ in corporate media.4 Yet the focus in most of this work is on formal institutions – studios, broadcasters, pay-TV providers, state regulators – and their role in structuring media flows. There is a tendency in the existing scholarship to approach distribution as the progression of texts through the channels laid out for them by media industries. I define distribution more broadly: as the movement of media through time and space.5 Using this enlarged definition opens up the study of media industries to an array of informal channels that are rarely documented and which may or may not be categorised as distribution networks from the vantage point of industry research and policy. It also moves our understanding of distribution closer to the parallel idea of circulation that features in media and cultural studies research.6 However, I retain the term distribution to foreground the agency of informal operators, thus placing them on the same level analytically as their formal counterparts. As we will see, informal distributors have played a vital role in film culture, from the early years of the medium right up to the present. Film studies’ models of distribution must therefore encompass not just the major studios and established independents but also a wide variety of individuals, organisations and virtual publics operating at the edges of – or entirely outside – the legal movie industry. Throughout the course of this book, the reader will be introduced to some of these informal agents. We will meet vendors hawking bootleg DVDs in crowded bazaars, fly-by-night companies selling into low-end DVD markets, community-based distribution networks that bypass cinemas and big-box retailers, small diasporic video companies catering to audiences longing for home, internet users illegally exchanging 2

Shadow Economies of Cinema

Pirate DVD vending in Mexico City (Livia Radwanski)

movies through peer-to-peer networks, and many more. Informal operators like these also count as distributors, and we should take them every bit as seriously as we do the Hollywood studios.

FORMAL AND INFORMAL FILM ECONOMIES In framing what we typically call the international film industry as one kind of distribution system among many others, Shadow Economies of Cinema attempts to develop a different kind of vocabulary for film industry analysis; one which can account for wider a range of systems in various parts of the globe. This book therefore takes a transnational view of film culture, approaching global industries not as surfaces for US domination but as a complex of networks with their own logics, strategies and ambitions. In the following chapters we will move back and forth between sites in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe, following the movement of films through circuits and analysing the industrial architectures which facilitate this movement. We will observe both differences and similarities in how cinema circulates across various sites and socio-economic contexts, in a way that does not reproduce familiar narratives of cinematic hegemony and resistance. Introduction

3

Consequently, this is not a book about dominant vs marginal cinemas, the commercial vs the underground, Hollywood vs art cinema, or first cinema vs third cinema. I make a different analytical distinction – between formal and informal distribution – which seeks to cut across some of these categories and reorganise them in a productive way. Formality refers to the degree to which industries are regulated, measured, and governed by state and corporate institutions. Informal distributors are those which operate outside this sphere, or in partial articulation with it. This book aims to show how the informal distribution realm, far from being a marginal force at the edges of film culture, is actually the key driver of distribution on a global scale. For this reason, my focus is on video, disc-based and online distribution networks, where informality is most prevalent, rather than broadcasting, cable, festival or multiplex circuits, which are usually subject to higher levels of regulation and consolidation.7 In framing distribution in this way, I offer an analogue concept within film studies for what social scientists call informal or ‘shadow’ economies. (The two terms are used interchangeably here.) Shadow Economies of Cinema is structured around a simple binary – formal vs informal distribution – which will be picked apart as the book progresses. From this basic premise emerges the idea of shadow film economies. In the same way that we can speak of a global system of regulated, measured, legal trade, and below that an informal sphere in which goods and people are traded off the books, so too can we speak of a formal film economy of studios, sales agents and festivals, shadowed by a vast, unmeasured and unevenly governed zone of informal commerce. These two interlocking spheres are differently exposed to regulation and measurement, and possess their own organisational dynamics. Formal distribution is characterised by revenue-sharing business models, complex systems of statistical enumeration and a ‘windowing’ releasing pattern driven by theatrical premieres. Informal distribution is mostly nontheatrical and is characterised by handshake deals, flat-fee sales and piracy. It is a world of moving image circulation that does not show up in the pages of Variety. It should be emphasised that the term ‘shadow film economies’ is intended as a heuristic device rather than a clearly defined field or category. I use it primarily as a way to evoke the collective power of informal networks, with a view to clearing some space for them within film studies research. But behind this gesture lies a more substantive point. As we will see, informal film commerce is, in a very important sense, a global norm rather than an exception or deviation. The international pirate economy exceeds the legal film industry in size, scale and reach; so one can reasonably argue that the ‘shadow’ economies are in fact integral to the traffic in images and sounds that supplies the world with its daily diet of entertainment. Shadow Economies of Cinema is both a gentle polemic for the significance of these networks to contempoary film studies and a survey of the research domain that opens up once formality’s epistemological authority has been set aside.

SHADOWS, SITES AND CIRCUITS The chapters of this book take a peripatetic journey through the shadow film economies, with each representing a successive stop on a tour of research possibilities. 4

Shadow Economies of Cinema

The distribution networks profiled here are extremely diverse, but they have one thing in common: each serves large, dispersed audiences without recourse to the established institutions of film commerce. In other words, they are informal in their organisation while also being efficient and extensive in their reach. These circuits provide glimpses of an alternative model of media power, based on a dispersed distributive capacity grounded in informal exchange rather than corporate muscle. I begin by providing some theoretical context for our journey. Chapter 1, Distribution from Above and Below, expands on the claim that distribution is a source of meaning and a site for cultural politics as well as a delivery mechanism. I show how our ideas about the power of media industries are produced by the modes of analysis and measurement we bring to bear on those industries. The chapter revisits key work from the fields of film history and political economy of communication, demonstrating how such research – while very important to our understanding of how film industries work – adopts a top-down perspective on the distribution business. The chapter then puts this way of thinking about distribution into dialogue with research on informal circuits to provide a revisionist critique of film industry historiography from the bottom up. Chapter 2, The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse, examines a curious interstice between formal and informal film industries. The straight-to-video/DVD production sector makes up a very significant proportion of the larger film economy in terms of its audience and the number of films it generates, which are often stigmatised as B-grade schlock or even worse. But as a cinematic shadow economy it has only a ghostly presence in our understanding of film industry structure, economics and ‘serious’ film culture. The chapter examines the industrial dynamics of US straight-to-video industries, focusing on the transnational itineraries of video production and distribution networks, which connect third-world and first-world industries in unusual ways. It concludes by considering the question of cultural value and how it plays out within this stigmatised field. Chapter 3, Informal Media Economies, takes a closer look at informality as an organisational dynamic within media distribution networks. Here I draw on economic, anthropological and urban studies research into informal economies, identifying points of overlap with current debates in film and media studies, and considering some of the insights that this body of work has to offer. Featuring examples of film circuits from Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the US, the chapter identifies common characteristics of informal distribution networks and explains how they interface with their formal counterparts. Chapter 4, Nollywood at Large, focuses on an informal film economy that has become a regional powerhouse. The Nigerian video industry (Nollywood) has a unique distribution set-up, one which takes full advantage of the efficiencies of street-level trade. Operating almost entirely off the books, Nollywood has evolved from preexisting pirate networks, which provided its initial shape and structure. Today, it is one of the greatest success stories in global cinema, producing thousands of new movies a year and catering to the growing appetites of a pan-African audience. But distributors are now under pressure from new copyright enforcement campaigns as producers attempt to give a more formal structure to the industry. This chapter considers the shifting relations between formality and informality that underwrite Nollywood’s emergence onto the world stage. Introduction

5

Piracy is a recurrent theme throughout the first half of the book, where the focus is on the material aspects of film distribution circuits. Chapter 5, Six Faces of Piracy, engages more directly with the ‘copyright wars’ rhetoric that has been such a feature of the post-Napster era. Recent years have witnessed the rise of BitTorrent, a corresponding ramping-up of anti-piracy enforcement and the emergence of increasingly vocal anti-copyright/pro-piracy movements. Each side is now entrenched in their positions, with the debate locked into an unproductive producer-vs-consumer paradigm. This chapter seeks to expand the terms of the discussion by analysing six ‘pirate philosophies’ – piracy as theft, free speech, free enterprise, resistance, authorship and access – thus thinking piracy in the plural rather than the singular. In the final section of the chapter, the complexities of informal trade are illustrated with a portrait of a DVD vendor in one of Mexico City’s most notorious pirate media markets. Chapter 6, The Grey Internet, focuses specifically on digital distribution, tracking new configurations of the formal and the informal in online environments. The online distribution ecology is extremely fragmented and fast-changing, and in many of the most popular platforms it is hard to draw a clear line between legal and illegal content, or formal and informal distribution. In this chapter, I demonstrate how internet piracy is accelerated by market gaps in legal media systems. I also consider how the formal and informal realms intersect at the level of copyright enforcement. The broad aim is to look beyond dominant rhetorics of digital distribution – the internet as a revolutionary force for distributive democracy or a lawless frontier of copyright infringement – in favour of a closer examination of how the formal and informal spheres converge online, and the ‘grey’ zones of distribution thus produced. The book concludes by setting out some coordinates for the critical study of distribution in a digital age, as industrial processes of distribution give way to amorphous practices of decentralised content sharing. Moving from 16mm stag film parties to video stores to file-hosting sites, Shadow Economies of Cinema is deliberately eclectic in its case studies, while also being consistent in its preoccupations. The emphasis throughout is on questions of access in cinema culture. This marks a deliberate step away from the debates over representation and interpretation that have long occupied the discipline of film studies. I argue that we need to take distributive politics as seriously as we do textual politics. A distribution-centred model of film studies asks: who is the audience? How are they constructed as such? What are the material limits that determine which texts are available to which audiences? I believe attention to questions such as these may help to broaden the scope of contemporary film studies, to bring the discipline into dialogue with other forms of social and cultural analysis, and to guarantee its relevance as we move further into an age of media convergence.

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Shadow Economies of Cinema

Left Behind (2000), a breakthrough DVD-only release from Cloud Ten Pictures

1 Distribution from Above and Below

Avid viewers of The Simpsons may recall a particularly amusing episode from 2005 called ‘Thank God, It’s Doomsday’. After seeing a Christian propaganda movie called Left Below, Homer becomes convinced that the Rapture is coming and rallies the citizens of Springfield to prepare for the impending apocalypse. The fated hour arrives and he is lifted up to heaven, where he meets – and subsequently annoys – God, who decides to turn back time and reverse the Rapture rather than endure the presence of Homer in paradise. Aside from some gags about numerology and Evangelism, this Simpsons episode also contains compelling evidence of the power of informal film distribution networks. The Left Below film that has such a profound effect on Homer is not a figment of Matt Groening’s imagination but a tongue-in-cheek reference to an actually existing series of B-grade films – the Left Behind (2000, 2002, 2005) trilogy – which achieved an extraordinary level of success among US Evangelicals in the early 2000s. Its presence in The Simpsons is testament to Left Behind’s status as one of the most unusual popculture phenomena of the last decade, a film franchise which sold an astonishing 6 million DVDs via a grassroots distribution strategy that bypassed the Hollywood system.1 Based on a series of popular books, the Left Behind movies were the brainchild of a small Niagara Falls company called Cloud Ten Pictures. Cloud Ten decided to forgo the usual theatrical release model and market the films in its own way. Rather than screening Left Behind in cinemas, it released the film straight-to-DVD and focused its attention on the film’s primary market: Evangelical communities. Thousands of ‘church cinema’ screenings were held across the USA, with ministers promoting the film enthusiastically from the pulpit. Sometimes the film’s stars (mostly B-grade actors like Kirk Cameron, from the 1980s sitcom Growing Pains) would show up as well. Hundreds of thousands of Americans saw the Left Behind movies in these church cinemas.2 Millions more purchased the DVDs to watch at home. Operating outside the established structures of the US film industry, the producers of Left Behind challenge our ideas about the distinction between independent and mainstream cinema culture. Companies like Cloud Ten have their own ideas about how to produce, distribute, market and exhibit movies. The highly organised and efficient model of church screenings combined with DVD sales constitutes a viable alternative to mainstream releasing patterns. Regardless of what we may think about the ideological content of Left Behind, or the resurgence of the religious Right in the USA, Distribution from Above and Below

9

this example vividly illustrates the power of informal networks. Approaching these shadow circuits not as anomalies but as an integral feature of the audiovisual landscape can help to generate a new understanding of how movies travel inside and outside established channels. This chapter expands on one of the fundamental arguments of the book: that our ideas about what cinema is and where it circulates have been shaped around specific (but far from universal) distribution models. I want to suggest that there are other stories to be told about distribution, and that we can think about this topic in a broader way. The present chapter develops this idea by revisiting the existing body of research on film industry structure and exploring how and where this literature does – and does not – account for unconventional distribution models like that of Cloud Ten. In this way, I clear some space for a revisionist history of nontheatrical and informal distribution circuits within the dominant narratives of film industry analysis, and provide theoretical foundations for the case studies to come in later chapters.

REDEFINING DISTRIBUTION: THEORY AND PRACTICE It may be helpful at this point to consider how the term ‘distribution’ is used in both common speech and in film industry discourse. In the most general sense, distribution involves the dispersal of matter or information across a given geographical area or temporal period. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the ‘action of dividing and dealing out or bestowing in portions among a number of recipients’.3 This action has both a passive mode (the distribution of cancer genes in a population) and an active mode (the distribution of pamphlets by political activists). In its active mode, distribution becomes an industrial process and a cultural technology. Soft drink distribution, for example, begins at the end of the production line and involves all those activities which are required to facilitate purchase, many of which would typically be subcontracted to logistics contractors. These include importation of the finished product, payment of taxes and duties, transport to warehouses and retailers, stocktaking and inventory, collection of payment, liaison with vendors, price monitoring and so on. This part of the product lifecycle also involves a variety of informational activities such as marketing, advertising and public relations, which occupy an increasingly important role within the distribution process. Distribution acquires new shades of meaning in different contexts. For example, ideas of distribution and redistribution play important roles in political philosophy, and economic redistribution is a central practice within public policy. Taxation, industry subsidies, welfare payments – these are all concerned with the distribution and redistribution of resources and money.4 But while the idea of distribution is a key plank of social democratic government, it is far from uncontested. In the USA, ‘redistributionist’ is an insult hurled by conservatives at liberals.5 This reminds us that questions of distribution are nothing if not political. If we understand politics as a struggle for power and resources, then distribution is politics at its purest. In film industry discourse, distribution has a more concrete set of meanings. Conventional typologies, such as those offered in media studies textbooks, describe distribution as the segment of the film industry linking production and 10

Shadow Economies of Cinema

exhibition/consumption, involving the sale, reproduction, delivery, translation, marketing and promotion of motion pictures in various territories and across all formats, from 35mm prints to digital downloads. Compared to production, the distribution sector receives little public attention. Yet it constitutes the biggest part of the overall industry in terms of personnel and revenues, as the following quote from former 20th Century-Fox executive Strauss Zelnick makes clear: The bulk of our business is distribution. Probably three quarters of our employees are involved in generating revenues. Out of the other quarter, most are involved in counting revenues, and then we have about twelve people who are involved in actually making movies. The bulk of our business is financing, distributing, and accounting. We have a huge staff that does nothing but license our pictures in all markets around the world.6

The distribution sector that Zelnick describes here is in a state of ongoing reinvention. Even within the relatively stable Hollywood studio structure, distribution practices have evolved significantly over the years in the face of technological developments and regulatory realignments. The early years of cinema were characterised by a gradual formalisation of distribution processes, and increasing complexity in the chain from production to consumption. In the USA, the first formal distribution structures were the film exchanges that appeared at the turn of the twentieth century.7 Exchanges institutionalised the informal practices of swapping and trading that were common among exhibitors. These exchanges would purchase films from producers and then rent them out to exhibitors. Over time a system of price differentiation began to emerge with new releases attracting a higher rate than older titles. A subscription system also took hold, meaning that exchanges committed to buy the output of a particular producer over a given period of time.8 The studio era was characterised by increasing levels of standardisation in distribution. The Runs–Zones–Clearances system established for the first time a formal hierarchy of exhibitors, reflecting a strategic ‘spatial and temporal separation of markets’ that has been central to mainstream distribution strategy ever since.9 Films began their run in the swanky metropolitan theatres, then after a strictly monitored embargo period (the clearance) migrated to second- and third-run venues located on the urban fringes before ending up in far-flung regional theatres. Control of distribution proved to be the basis of the US studios’ dominance and the guarantee of their future prosperity.10 This system of strategic market segmentation was extended to include formats as well as theatre circuits in the post-television era. The ‘windowing’ model, involving the staggered movement of content across overlapping release windows (theatrical, cable, DVD, pay-TV, broadcast TV and so on), became the master logic of mainstream film distribution in the latter half of the twentieth century. The role of the major studios and distributors, evocatively described by Edward Epstein as ‘dream clearinghouses’, has since been to oversee and manage the flows of money and data that these movements generate.11 In the internet age, distribution has taken on yet more meanings. As formats proliferate and converge, the objective of distribution is to exploit film content across as many different platforms as possible. Intellectual Distribution from Above and Below

11

property exploitation and enforcement take centre stage as the emphasis shifts towards monetisation of content in a multi-channel environment. Film historians and political economists who have analysed the evolution of this model often focus on power relations between studios, producers, exhibitors and the state. As a result, there is a rich body of work on the structural organisation of film distribution pipelines in the USA and internationally. Janet Wasko and Thomas Guback, among others, have written widely and lucidly on this topic. Guback emphasises the role of ‘the policies developed by the American industry to capture and maintain markets and to obstruct foreign competition’ as instrumental to the global dominance of Hollywood.12 This body of work reminds us that the business of mainstream film distribution is characterised by oligopoly and collusion, and it offers a powerful critique of the studios’ business practices. At the same time, it places certain circulatory systems (chiefly, studio distribution) squarely at centre of the analysis and relegates others to the sidelines of film history. This top-down perspective on distribution is in part a product of the methodological norms of film industry research, in which certain forms of empirical knowledge are privileged. Chief among them is box-office revenue, the holy grail of industry knowledge.13 Box-office data, compiled by the studios and market research firms like Nielsen, constitute the basis upon which success and failure, dominance and marginality, are judged. Yet box-office data is only one part of the story of a film’s circulation through diverse markets. It does not, for example, tell us how many people watch a given film on TV, how many buy the DVD then make copies for their friends, how many download the film, or buy a bootleg copy at their local corner store or street market. It is also highly vulnerable to manipulation by the studios.14 In her influential book Desperately Seeking the Audience, Ien Ang describes these industrial knowledge-generation practices as the ‘institutional point of view’. For Ang, who was writing about broadcasting industries in the 1980s, technologies of audience measurement work to represent consumer activity in statistically concrete ways. The objective is for distributors to come to know and understand their publics as assemblages of empirical data. This necessarily involves an erasure: In the everyday realm, living with television involves a heterogeneous range of informal activities, uses, interpretations, pleasures, disappointments, conflicts, struggles, compromises. But in the considerations of the institutions that possess the official power to define, exploit and regulate the space in which television is inserted into the fabric of culture and society, these subjective, complex and dynamic forms of audiencehood are generally absent; they disappear in favour of a mute and abstract construct of ‘television audience’ onto which large-scale economic and cultural aspirations and expectations, policies and planning schemes are projected.15

Ang is pointing here to the epistemological dimensions of distribution practice. In her account, knowledge of media practice is shaped for institutional uses and expressed in institutional vocabularies, suppressing informal circulations and experiences. A key task of media scholarship is to deconstruct the ‘politics of knowledge’ that governs this relation.16 Ang’s point applies equally to cinema. Critical analysis of film industries must be careful not to take the forms of knowledge these industries produce at face 12

Shadow Economies of Cinema

value, lest we end up reproducing the same familiar narratives about how film circulates and is consumed. It is important to acknowledge the many gaps in the industry’s data sets, and to think about how these shape our understanding of audiovisual circulation. For example, many smaller cinemas and independent retailers do not participate in the data-collection efforts of the major studios, and the degree of variation is especially strong in international box-office accounting. As a result, the current distribution system is unable to measure the circulation of, or demand for, non-Hollywood cinemas.17 Hence it is not surprising that films like Left Behind fall through the cracks of the measurement system and are rendered invisible. This also explains why many networks of film circulation in developing nations are not counted within this framework. We clearly need to complement the Hollywood-centric institutional critique of distribution with approaches attuned to the workings of informal networks, which play such a vital role in the movement of film worldwide and which have their own specific dynamics and characteristics. To insist on the diversity of the distribution landscape is not to deny the power of dominant circuits but to acknowledge that our analyses of cinematic circulation need not start and end with the Hollywood studios, national distribution oligopolies, or state institutions. Alternative and parallel distribution circuits have always existed alongside studio infrastructures, including the many nontheatrical circuits that transport cinema into homes, workplaces, vehicles, aeroplanes, clubs, restaurants, bars and countless other sites. As Barbara Klinger argues, an understanding of such networks is ‘key to grasping the depth and breadth of cinema’s social circulation and cultural function’.18

DISTRIBUTION FROM BELOW What might such a diversified analysis of film distribution involve? What other tales can we tell about how the moving image circulates? I will stay with the US example for a moment, to make an additional point about the vantage points of film industry historiography. While most scholars have focused their efforts on the major studios, there is a minor strand of historical research that provides a counter-narrative to the ‘institutional point of view’, offering a fertile ground upon which to build an analysis of cinema’s shadow economies. A good place to start is the literature on 16mm and other narrow-gauge cinemas. From the 1920s onwards, 16mm circuits opened up a whole new market for nontheatrical and non-professional distribution, providing a parallel infrastructure for moving image dissemination, education and appreciation. As scholars including Charles Acland, Haidee Wasson and Patricia Zimmerman have documented, in contrast to the studios’ increasingly consolidated distribution networks, the 16mm landscape was ‘wildly unorganized, decentralized, and difficult to monitor let alone control’.19 Individuals and small organisations suddenly found themselves in the position of being de facto film distributors, generating new kinds of viewing practices and modes of consumption. Private rental companies hawked their wares through camera stores and mail-order. Libraries, galleries, unions, community groups, ethnic clubs and political organisations hosted their own film nights. Within this alternative Distribution from Above and Below

13

circulatory system, new hubs and nodes appeared.20 Film councils and film societies performed mediating functions, generating an alternative circulatory infrastructure and regulatory system. A vast network of amateur film clubs cross-pollinated with avant-garde and foreign cinema scenes.21 And then, of course, there are the black-market circuits. We don’t often think of pornographers as film distributors, but they have played a crucial role in the dissemination of the moving image in many nations. Porn has long had its own alternative networks that, while informal and subterranean, are efficient and widereaching. Long before the invention of the VCR, 8mm and 16mm adult movies were watched in clubs and home theatres. From the 1910s onwards, travelling showmen would host stag parties in ‘smoke-filled lodge halls and fraternity houses’.22 By the 1930s there was an established mail-order distribution network for adult cinema, with small companies like Pacific Ciné Films and Nu Art doing a lively trade in girlie movies, hawking their wares in magazines for amateur cinema enthusiasts. After the war, 8mm porn was sold under the counter in photo stores, bars, petrol stations and workplaces. While the history of these circuits is sparsely documented, we should not underestimate the scale of the industry nor its capacity for rapid and effective distribution. Nor should we overlook the importance of pirates within the history of film distribution. Piracy, which is as old as cinema itself, has been a fundamental driver of global film distribution since the turn of the twentieth century. Meliès’ classic 1902 film A Trip to the Moon was widely copied, especially in the USA, where the director was unable to secure any profits from its exhibition. Other piratical practices – such as ‘bicycling’ and ‘jackrabbiting’, in which exhibitors put on unapproved screenings of popular films in violation of distribution agreements – were common throughout the early cinema period. The black market for 16mm bootleg prints and private projection equipment which emerged in the post-war period would also prove problematic for the established distributors, with army officers frequently emerging as the culprits in bootlegging rings.23 Every new distributive technology has spawned its own form of pirate exchange. These are but a few examples of the shadow circuits that have always existed alongside studio distribution. In the next chapter, we will take a closer and longer look at the nontheatrical video cultures which emerged in the 1970s and which constituted a parallel circuit for the production and distribution of movies in the home video era. My point here is a straightforward one: even on its own home turf, the Hollywood system has never been the only game in town. Film has circulated and been enjoyed informally from the earliest days of the medium, and if this informal circulation has not shown up in our data sets and research frameworks it is because they have been calibrated in a way that renders these movements invisible.

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DISTRIBUTION A ground-level view on the movement of cinema through time and space opens up a new set of possibilities, allowing us to think about distribution not only in terms of structures, institutions and policies, but also in terms of everyday encounters with the 14

Shadow Economies of Cinema

moving image. As part of this project, we need to develop critical vocabularies that are suitable for comparative research across different sites and that do not reproduce culturally specific ways of thinking about media and its circulation. A memorable example of this kind of alternative distribution analysis is S. V. Srinivas’s account of the theatrical B-circuit in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.24 B-circuit cinemas are old, run-down and located in remote villages where bigger distributors do not venture. Srinivas describes how Hong Kong martial arts films are acquired second-hand from Asia, make their way though the Indian cities and are then bought and sold in lots by entrepreneurial local traders, many of whom do not have a background in the film industry, before ending up in these theatres. Prints are sent out to the most remote village theatres where they are screened until they disintegrate. Distributors splice sequences from other movies into the film reels in an attempt to give the audience more value for money, and titles of films are changed at will (for example, Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master II [1994] becomes Dangerous Guy). In these low-value markets, profit margins are so slim that established distributors do not bother competing, so this particular system of informal distribution works to fill gaps in the market and facilitate film cultures that would not otherwise exist. It is an off-the-books industry that does not show up in indexes of global film trade. There is little room in the conventional models of film and media studies for informal systems like this. The Indian B-circuit is difficult to study via modes of analysis geared towards consolidated and regulated Euro-American industries. Srinivas’s approach is different. He looks closely at the reception contexts for Indian cinema, the specific publics they call into being, and the mechanics of the distribution system itself. In this way, economic structure is analytically yoked to affective experience, and the everyday enjoyment of cinema is understood in terms of its position within broader processes of subject and citizen formation. This is an excellent template for informal distribution research. The challenge here is to think about distribution through the lens of cultural politics as well as political economy. Understanding how this relation plays out in different times and spaces requires a flexible set of tools, and no single meta-theory will be appropriate in every setting. However, it is possible to establish some general analytical coordinates to guide our enquiry. Shadow Economies of Cinema is underwritten by a number of fundamental claims about the nature of film distribution – and media distribution more broadly – and its relation to everyday life, which can be summarised as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Distribution is about the transmission of values, competencies and ideology. It is a site of cultural politics. Distribution is the ground upon which reception occurs. Without distribution, a text has no audience. Distribution inscribes cultural difference. It fragments audiences along lines of gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity and class. Distribution frames the way texts are experienced and understood by audiences. Distribution shapes film culture in its own image. Informal film distribution is the global norm.

Distribution from Above and Below

15

These propositions, which together make up a kind of rationale for the critical analysis of distribution networks, help focus our attention simultaneously on the material and the symbolic, the cultural and the economic, the micro and the macro. Keeping these general ideas in mind when studying distribution systems ensures that we do not reproduce the ‘institutional point of view’ or take its claims for granted. As a way of concluding this introductory chapter and providing some theoretical context for those that follow, let me briefly expand on these points and offer some examples. The starting point for any analysis of distribution circuits should be an affirmation of the centrality of audiovisual media within processes of subject formation. While burying ourselves in the detail of how distribution networks function, we should not lose sight of why cinema is important in the first place – and by extension, why distribution matters for cultural analysis. Movies shape the future self: they teach us how to be women, men, children, mothers, fathers; they show us how to talk, dance, love and think. Whether at the level of style, sentiment or overt politics, whether for good or for ill, films are agents of change. Without distribution, however, none of this is possible. To insist on the primacy of distribution is to invert the text-centric norms of an older model of film analysis. Distribution’s functions can be broken down further. At the most obvious level, there is the question of provision and denial: distributors, formal and informal, make cinema texts available or unavailable to audiences. Many films never get picked up for release or remain locked in the vaults because of a presumption that they will fail commercially. There is also the question of state involvement in distributive processes ˆ shima’s In the Realm of the to consider, of which there are countless examples: Nagisa O Senses (1976) has always been screened in Japanese cinemas in a censored version, for example, while Andrew Lau’s Hong Kong police epic Infernal Affairs (2002) acquired an alternative ending for the mainland Chinese market to avoid upsetting the censors. But what we also need to consider are processes of textual regulation that take place informally, rather than via direct government intervention. In the pirate DVD economies discussed in Chapter 5, all manner of content is available, so long as there is a market for it. But when a text declines in popularity, it may fall out of circulation and become more difficult, if not impossible, to acquire. In other words, it is censored – made unavailable – by the logic of the market, rather than the state. These marketbased control mechanisms work via cumulative actions by many minor agents rather than broad governmental sweeps. Distribution reflects cultural and socio-economic difference, but it also inscribes difference in new ways. Audiences are organised and separated by distribution networks on the basis of gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, class and other vectors of identity and status. This aspect of distribution has been explored by the anthropologist Jeffrey Himpele, a specialist in Bolivian media, who argues that distribution is productive: it creates meaning and difference. Himpele tracks films as they move through social space, using these trajectories as entry points into a broader analysis of class and cultural capital. He begins a key essay on this topic with a discussion of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), mapping its staggered movement outwards from the bourgeois cinemas at the bottom of the La Paz valley on to a variety of cheaper cines populares frequented by immigrant and indigenous underclasses. This trajectory both mirrors and consolidates existing social divisions: ‘distribution 16

Shadow Economies of Cinema

Cinema’s cultural geographies: a map of Los Angeles, taken from a New York Times online feature based on Netflix DVD rental data, shows the spatial distribution of audiences for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

itineraries mark, separate, and organize the relations between people and places and what stories are told about them’. The trickle-down model of distribution at work in La Paz reflects distributors’ ‘social imagination of the city’ as well as broader patterns of economic inequality.25 As gatekeepers to circulating commodities, distributors distribute local differences by composing a series of sights and sites – like narrative cinema’s internal succession of intercutting scenes – to form a media containing potent narrative schemes. Reading this temporal and spatial field (what I have called itineraries) spectators insert themselves as subjects when they decide, or feel it is decided for them, which films to see and where to see them.26

This approach links the political-economic aspects of film distribution that have long interested scholars with questions of social and cultural practice. Contexts of distribution – where, how and when people encounter movies – frame the perceived Distribution from Above and Below

17

meaning of texts and the way we incorporate them into our symbolic lives. Distribution elevates some cinematic encounters (opening nights, festival screenings) to the status of cultural events and relegates others (two-for-one weekly rentals, latenight movies) to the bottom of the value chain. Plucked off a dusty shelf in an Indian spice store, a pirate DVD of a Bollywood movie may appear to some viewers a disposable piece of ‘ethnic’ media, but if the same film is seen in a theatre in Calcutta or at the opening night of an international film festival in Chicago it will become something else entirely. The key variable here is distributive context. These framings and reframings are a vital, yet invisible, part of everyday film consumption in complex media environments. Barbara Klinger, drawing on Raymond Williams’s notion of signal systems, understands these processes in terms of ‘institutional cues’, which shape audience expectations of texts in subtle but profound ways.27 This production of contextual meaning is as central to distributive processes as the delivery functions described in media industry textbooks. The act of distribution also materially shapes the text itself, adding another layer of meaning to the viewing experience. Film reels acquire marks and scratches as they move through exhibition circuits, from the big global cities to the low-value markets. Cinemagoers in regional areas and developing nations are all too familiar with these reminders of their peripheral status in the distribution hierarchy. Textual subtractions and additions are particularly noticeable in informal distribution circuits, and above all in pirate circuits. Low-quality DVD burning often results in freezing and pixellation, the digital equivalent of static. Timecodes and logos appear, revealing the original source of the pirate version. Sometimes the sound is poorly synchronised or the subtitles are missing. Handicam bootlegs recorded in theatres often feature bobbing heads, ambient sounds (laughter, coughs, yawns) and a colour palette that seems slightly bleached, making the film appear as if it were shot on ageing film stock and adding a strange kind of temporal dislocation to the viewing experience. Scholars including Lucas Hilderbrand and Laikwan Pang have begun to theorise some of these meanings, providing a kind of media archaeology of faulty formats and the ‘laborious and alienated’ spectatorships they generate.28 There is also a deeper level of textual re-engineering at work in distribution processes, which not only deliver audiovisual goods to the consumers who desire them but also work to shape those desires by dictating the terms under which these goods may be acquired. Whether formal or informal, distributors place limits on the range of options available to us by supplying some films rather than others, and they shape our consumption of this sub-set of distributed audiovisual production through commercial technologies ranging from advertising and public relations to price differentiation, release strategy, release timing and so on. In contrast to the neoclassical economic model of perfectly competitive equilibrium, in which production responds directly to demand by satisfying the needs and wants of a particular market, analysis of distribution circuits often reveals that demand can be an effect of distribution. In other words, distributors shape public taste as well as reflect it, creating a feedback loop between distribution and demand. This feedback loop has subtle effects on film cultures. When distributors set out to (re)ignite consumer demand for certain products – from never-before released ‘masterpieces’ of Iranian cinema through to back-catalogue Roger Corman movies or 18

Shadow Economies of Cinema

Asian horror box sets – they weave new narratives about cinema’s past and future, endowing texts with certain kinds of cultural value. Over time, this process also allows new styles and genres to emerge as demand is massaged into new textual formations, feeding back into future production decisions. In this way, distribution shapes film culture in its own image. Similar processes are at work in informal circuits, which often bring marginal texts back into circulation and create new ways of viewing and understanding them. As the Indonesian film critic Ekky Imanjaya notes, Indonesia’s supernatural horror and exploitation films from the 1980s – The Queen of Black Magic (1983), Lady Terminator (1989), Virgins from Hell (1987), Mystics in Bali (1981) – have long been considered embarrassing additions to the national cinema canon, but many of these films are now getting a new lease of life among the Indonesian middle class thanks to their popularity in pirate circuits.29 This is but one example of how informal distribution can re-engineer public taste. Stressing the largely informal nature of global distribution reminds us that movie business happens not only in corporate boardrooms, at festival soirées or industry conventions, but also in street markets, bazaars, illegal rental businesses, places of worship and grocery stores. Distribution is the province of enthusiasts, small-time traders, fly-by-night entrepreneurs, gangsters, preachers and a whole host of other non-professional agents. Analysing distribution from below as well as above reveals a vast array of informal circuits bubbling away beneath the surface of mainstream film industries, in many different nations, across many different formats. As we move through the remaining chapters of this book, we will venture further and further into this informal realm.

CONCLUSION This chapter has provided some coordinates for the critical analysis of distributive networks. My argument throughout has been that informal distribution is a central rather than marginal feature of film culture. While it is has not been prominent in film industry scholarship, we can draw on existing work to create flexible new approaches for the analysis of these circuits. By paying attention to otherwise invisible networks – such as those through which the Evangelical film Left Behind travels – we glimpse the size and scale of the informal film economy. At the same time, we must keep in mind power relations within distribution networks and the social and cultural processes they catalyse. In the following chapter we will take a closer look at the history of nontheatrical distribution via a study of early straight-to-video film. My focus will be on the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a boom period for video distribution and straight-to-video production. Like the early 16mm networks, VHS ushered in new forms of film circulation and reception, creating its own genres, stars and aesthetic norms. A significant amount of straight-to-video production and distribution took place under conditions that could only be described as informal, involving ephemeral companies with shady backgrounds. As we will see, straight-to-video – an interstice in the mainstream distribution model – became a haven for low-budget film production and a direct descendant of many of the informal circuits discussed in this chapter. Distribution from Above and Below

19

Mounir Fatmi, Skyline (2007),VHS tapes, 800 x 365cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York. Photographer: Jean-Baptiste Dorner. Exhibition view from Fuck Architects: Chapter III, FRAC Alsace, Sélestat, France, 2009

2 The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse

In his 2007 installation Skyline, the Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi offers us a memorable image of the city as, quite literally, a cinematic space. Fatmi uses hundreds of VHS cassettes to construct a plastic cityscape, stacking them carefully to suggest office blocks, monuments and skyscrapers. Each cassette has been opened up to reveal the tape inside, which falls gently over the videos and the empty space below. As the threads of tape hit the floor, they form a huge tangle that reaches out horizontally towards the viewer, like the hair of some dark giant. This work, which stands almost 4 metres high, had a powerful effect on me when I saw it. It brought to mind debates about the mediatisation of urban experience, the spread of surveillance technology, the expressive power of architecture. But, above all, it made me think about home video. The viewer of Skyline has no way of knowing what images and sounds these cassettes contained, if any. There is something almost sacrilegious about seeing a videocassette stripped of its ability to be anything other than a vessel for black tape. Media objects lose their aura of transformative power when their materiality is exposed in this way. Cinema becomes waste. When we think about cinema from the perspective of the text, films seem like isolated aesthetic objects, unique and powerful. Approaching cinema from the perspective of distribution offers a different vantage point, allowing us to see film as a commodity circulating in space and time. The reality of the film economy is that there are many more films released each year than there is critical capacity to analyse and make sense of them. Every year, thousands of movies are released into nontheatrical markets, and most disappear off the radar without having made any kind of mark. Some are watched by only a handful of people. This presents a problem for theories of cultural value, raising intriguing questions about the relationship between the perceived value of a film and its distributive context. There is an incommensurability of scale here: the nontheatrical market is enormous, yet obscure. In Chapter 1 I suggested that distribution circuits shape film culture in their own image, creating demand for new forms of cultural production. In this chapter, which focuses on straight-to-video releasing and the peculiar production cultures it has generated, we will see ample evidence of this feedback loop between distributors and producers. From low-budget action movies to erotic thrillers, straight-to-video distribution has spawned its own speciality genres, iconography and star system. Operating outside theatrical exhibition networks, straight-to-video circuits have their own specific dynamics and are only partially integrated with mainstream film The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse

21

industries. In this sense, straight-to-video has strongly informal features. My focus in this chapter is on the bottom end of the video market, where informal production and distribution practices are common. Note that the term ‘straight-to-video’, as used here, encompasses all pre-recorded home video formats, including DVD, and does not refer exclusively to VHS.1

‘ANYTHING WITH SPROCKET HOLES’ Reliable data on the nontheatrical movie sector is hard to find, but according to a study by the Harvard economists Anita Elberse and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, 59 per cent of titles in the US video/DVD marketplace are released straight-to-video.2 There are vast straight-to-video industries in nations such as Japan (home to ‘V-cinema’ straight-toDVD releases and ‘OVA’, or original video animation, movies), Thailand (where straight-to-VCD release is popular with independent directors3) and Mexico (known for its ‘videohome’ narcotraficante movies). And as we will see in Chapter 4, Nigeria’s booming film economy is run entirely on a straight-to-video model that has reinvented the possibilities of nontheatrical releasing. Despite its unsavoury reputation, straightto-video is a big – and global – business. In terms of the number of films released each year, straight-to-video is the empirical norm of contemporary cinema. The emergence of straight-to-video (hereafter STV) as a releasing model needs to be understood in the context of the emergence of video hardware and video markets in the 1970s, which led to major structural changes in the distribution sector. Having dispatched the remaining format rivals, the VHS and Beta systems battled it out throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, with the former emerging victorious around 1988. Soon video was generating more revenue than the box office, and its potential as an untapped market had been well and truly acknowledged by the major studios. At the same time, the rapid domestic take-up of VCRs created a serious product shortage on the content side. Demand for movies to fill the shelves of video stores and the schedules of cable stations (which began operation around the same time as video appeared on the scene) was such that US production skyrocketed from around 350 pictures per year in 1983 to nearly 600 in 1988.4 As in the studio era when producers madly cranked out product to meet the insatiable demand of audiences, or in the early days of TV when the networks were desperate for movies to screen, this was a seller’s market. The following quote from a former senior vice-president of New Line Cinema attests to this: Perhaps the biggest boon that has ever occurred in the independent sector was the explosion of home video in the early eighties. It was a voracious market for anything with sprocket holes, and even the major studios couldn’t provide enough product to satisfy the demand. All of a sudden there was enormous capital available to independent theatrical distributors as advances against the home-video rights. Not only was all this money being used to acquire films, it also fueled the entrance of many independents into production.5

North American consumers were not the only ones clamouring for anything with sprocket holes, for the video boom also coincided with the ongoing deregulation of 22

Shadow Economies of Cinema

Table 2.1

Structure of the US video economy, 1980s–90s

Majors

Mini-majors

Video independents

Fox Sony/Columbia Disney Paramount Universal MGM

Miramax Orion Cannon De Laurentiis Group New Line

Island Avco Embassy Filmways/AIP Virgin Vision Lorimar Nelson Prism Entertainment Hemdale New World Carolco Vestron Media Home Entertainment Family Home Entertainment

International Video Entertainment Vidmark Magnum Entertainment Lightning Video ThrillerVideo Monterey Home Video FilmDallas Atlantic Releasing Avenue MCEG Weintraub Entertainment Group and others

broadcasting in Europe, Asia and Latin America. As formerly state-run stations were commercialised and/or privatised, the demand for ‘average or below-average American films’ increased exponentially and a new market niche was born. In 1984 home video was generating $1.4 billion for US film suppliers, with more than half of this going to independent companies.6 By the time STV releasing hit its peak in the mid- to late 1980s, an array of small US operators was actively competing for a slice of the action (see Table 2.1). These independents worked on a flexible model of dispersed, small-scale production and ad hoc distribution through the mini-majors, the larger independents, small fly-by-night operators, or through self-distribution.7 This sector of the film industry was chaotic and undercapitalised, but there was money to be made for those who knew how to tap the right market. While many of these new video entrepreneurs were entering the film industry for the first time, others were established players. Of these, quite a few came over from the B-film and exploitation industries. Others had connections to the adult industries. Noel Bloom, for example, had a background in adult distribution and later went on to head the ironically named Family Home Entertainment, a key company in the independent video scene.8 The context of New Hollywood is significant here. Studio directors of the late 1970s were becoming increasingly open to sex, violence, swearing and other racy content, and as a result the mainstream film industry was felt to be encroaching further and further on territory that used to belong to genres traditionally associated with B-producers, such as Blaxploitation, soft porn and monster movies.9 What was left of the exploitation industry needed to find a new market niche, and a lot of it ended up in STV. Producers and distributors traditionally associated with B-genres, The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse

23

such as Roger Corman, were able to make the transition from theatrical Bfilms/exploitation into an equivalent position at the bottom of the video hierarchy. The discourses that frame STV in industry commentary and film criticism testify to this legacy – STV is frequently referred to as a dumping ground for low-quality productions, a criticism also levelled at B-movies. In this way, the cheap action flicks and horror movies that dominated the video market represent the relocation of residual forms of exploitation cinema from the big to the small screen.

THE STV AESTHETIC Like all movies, STV releases have traces of their industrial history in their textual organisation. STV aesthetics and STV economics are inextricably linked, though neither is reducible to the other. What then is the relation between the industrial context of STV – this peculiar interplay between a new distribution platform and existing production cultures – and the formal qualities of STV movies? Some industrial background on STV production may be helpful here. Production budgets for most STV features are small by Hollywood standards, generally ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to the low millions. This constrains production quality but makes it much easier for these films to make their money back. Many STV erotic thrillers of the 1990s could turn a profit on the basis of 15,000–20,000 sales, which was not difficult considering the number of video stores and retailers in the global market at that time.10 Low budgets also mean employing non-union casts and crews, another characteristic of informal economies. Some STV producers are able to negotiate labour agreements at 50 per cent of regular union rates.11 The smallest companies usually bypass unions completely, which means that health and safety regulations are less strictly enforced on set. As such, STV is a site of exploitation in more than one sense of the word. This has other implications. For one, it means that the STV industry is geographically dispersed, because producers seek out savings by relocating production to lower-cost sites. Much North American STV production takes place in Canada, where labour and rents are cheaper than in Hollywood. Toronto is an important centre for telemovies, while the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles is the hub for porn productions. The STV labour force extends far beyond North America: films are commonly shot in the Philippines, Thailand, Romania, Mexico and Canada. STV movies are usually more likely to be made in these interstices of the global film economy, or to feature one location masquerading (often unsuccessfully) as another, or to feature an incoherent polyphony of accents and costumes. This also affects the kinds of sets and locations that are used in STV movies, which in turn structures the generic landscape of STV. For example, the villa/mansion on the outskirts of the city is a staple of international STV movies and is frequently used as the venue for X-rated rendezvous, drug deals, or shoot-outs. This architecture is a hallmark of countless B-grade action films. Wide staircases, glass brick walls and minimalist white decor all connote 1980s glamour without being detailed enough to distract from the spectacle of sex or gunplay. Cheaper than a studio soundstage, the villa/mansion is a production cost-saving device which over time has become a generic 24

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hallmark. Likewise, the numerous STV films shot in Toronto are easy to spot – there is a ubiquitous cloudy sky. This is another quirk of production: the muted Ontario light lends many of these films a uniform greyness, and shorter shooting schedules mean crews cannot wait around for sunny days. As these examples demonstrate, many of the films designed for this market have a common feel to them, no matter their generic identity. But genre is still very important to STV’s internal industrial organisation, as it demarcates production and reception in specific ways. There is no room for generic ambiguity in STV: producers specialise in particular genres – action, horror, kids’ movies – and stick within these boundaries. More than any other sector of the film industry, the STV market bases its continued existence on the voracious appetites of genre buffs for whom the number of films released theatrically each year is never quite enough. An STV film is doomed to failure if it cannot fit easily into one particular section of the video store. This is a film culture that doesn’t expect or even desire the exceptional; the important thing is that the film covers the right generic bases. Thus, when critics berate STV movies for being unoriginal, they are missing the point. STV does not attempt to compete with the A circuit – it has its own logics and pleasures. Normally used as an insult in film criticism, the term ‘derivative’ is a compliment in STV, for the key to market success is the efficiency with which a film can internalise and respond to the norms of its genre and the expectations of its audience. Like the Poverty Row studios of the classical Hollywood period, STV producers specialise in giving audiences what they already know they like (and nothing more). STV has also spawned its own speciality genres, which owe their existence to video distribution. Martial arts movies and the erotic thriller are two STV favourites, as they are cheap to produce and have global ‘playability’.12 Another is the kind of ‘mockbuster’ movie made by US production house The Asylum – examples include Transmorphers (2007), The Da Vinci Treasure (2006), AVH: Alien vs Hunter (2007) and Snakes on a Train (2006).13 STV is also known for its endless sequels, which offer lower-budget leveraging of franchises like American Pie (1999) and Bring it On (2000). And pornography, of course, is the most important STV genre of all. Adult movies helped to drive VCR takeup and they still make up a large chunk of the STV market, although the informal nature of the porn industry means that it is impossible to quantify this exactly. STV has its own star system, which cross-pollinates with the Hollywood A-list as well as with modelling, tabloid culture, the music industry, wrestling, bodybuilding and sports. On the one hand, there are some actors who seem to work exclusively within STV and are famous in this field without ever having had much of a presence in ‘real’ movies. One classic example is Cynthia Rothrock, world karate champion and star of innumerable B-grade martial arts flicks that went direct to video in most nations. Other stars are more mobile and can move in and out of STV at different points in their careers. The recent films of Steven Seagal – once one of the biggest names in action cinema, now the star of cheap transnational B-movies shot in Romania (Mercenary for Justice [2006], Flight of Fury [2007]) – exemplify the latter trajectory. It is often said that in STV you’re ‘on your way up or on your way down’, a quip which alludes to its function as both a breeding and dumping ground.14 For some actors, STV is a self-enclosed field in which careers can be built and maintained, while for others it functions as a springboard, temporary refuge, or final destination. The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse

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Let me illustrate these trajectories in and out of STV with two examples. Prior to her death in 2007, tabloid heiress Anna-Nicole Smith starred in several STV and madefor-TV features including the action films To the Limit (1995) and Skyscraper (1996), both of which are still commonly found in the bargain bins of discount retailers. Featuring taglines such as ‘Her code name was Colette, her mission was danger’, these movies were clearly not made with the critics in mind. Equal parts soft porn, melodrama and B-action, they function essentially as vehicles for a celebrity whose star-text traversed gossip mags (the J. Howard Marshall marriage and inheritance), modelling (for Guess Jeans and other companies), reality TV (The Anna Nicole Show [2002]) and the tabloid/paparazzi culture in which she felt most at home until her untimely death in 2007. A different kind of STV trajectory can be found in Dennis Farina, a character actor (and former police officer) who specialises in playing detectives. Farina has starred in ‘quality’ TV and cinema like NBC series Law and Order (1990–2010) and several films by Michael Mann (Thief [1981], Manhunter [1986]), while also showing up in innumerable bottom-of-the-barrel telemovies and STV features: Street Crimes/Dead Even (1992), Drug Wars: The Cocaine Cartel (1992), The Corpse Had a Familiar Face (1994) and so on. As such, Farina has a different kind of STV presence from Smith and a different kind of mobility. This speaks to the coherence of the ‘STV star’ as a category in contemporary popular culture, as well as to the diversity that exists within this category. Another common feature of many nontheatrical movies is a specific kind of narrative structure and pace, revealing roots in television rather than cinema. Many STV films are in fact made-for-TV movies – movies of the week, telemovies, late-night features – which have been repurposed for video or DVD release. There is a close structural connection between the made-for-TV and STV production sectors: cable was the biggest source of funding for independent production until the STV boom of the mid-1980s, but in many cases they worked in tandem, each providing partial financing to producers.15 The expanding video market allowed made-for-TV producers to give their films a second ‘window’, increasing their commercial value. Hence the difference between movies and telemovies is very blurry in STV culture, and texts have a lot of mobility between these categories. This overlap between TV and video registers textually, as many nontheatrical films are punctuated by fade-to-blacks where the ad breaks would have been, testifying to their previous incarnation as cable movies. A generic B-grade STV movie like The Fatal Image (1990) – which on closer inspection turns out to be a telemovie recut for video release – has a distinctive narrative structure, with minor hooks every fifteen minutes or so to keep the audience from changing channels during the ad break.16 This ‘tainted’ nature of the STV film is one of the reasons it has been subject to so attention little within film studies scholarship.

TRANSNATIONAL STV CIRCUITS At first glance, the global STV market seems to be as thoroughly dominated by American product as the theatrical market. There are few parts of the world in which someone like Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris is unknown. I have watched low-budget American action and horror films on buses in Poland, at state-run theatres in Cuba, in 26

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chain video stores in Serbia and at video bars in Sri Lanka. However, STV is actually less American than it appears, both at the level of industry structure and textual content. The presale system of financing, used widely in the STV economy and elsewhere, has been central to the internationalisation of STV production and distribution. Presales involve one-off payments from various international investors on the basis of a pitch for a future film, which is then used as collateral to finance the funding of the film. This is not a profit-sharing system but an outright sale. Distributors acquire exclusive rights for their territory and retain all revenues generated there. This method of financing was pioneered in the early 1970s by Dino De Laurentiis and the Dutch banker Frans J. Afman, a former cavalry officer turned movie mogul who, according to Sight & Sound, ‘epitomised the decade of revolving credit facilities that kept in contention a series of companies who made the movie business fun’.17 Afman and the French bank he worked for, Crédit Lyonnais, would become major players in independent film financing throughout the 1980s and 90s. His presale model was adopted by many independent film-makers, including more than a few Hong Kong producers.18 Here is how the system worked in practice for the Cannon Group, the company behind films such as the Charles Bronson Death Wish (1974) sequels, Sylvester Stallone’s Cobra (1986) and numerous Chuck Norris movies: Often with no more than a catchy title and a star name, together with the now familiar, hurriedly-prepared and lurid Cannon poster, [Cannon co-owner Menahem Golan] would describe the film to foreign independent distributors. If they liked the sound of it, they would open a letter of credit with Cannon, the agreed sum payable only on delivery of the finished film to their territory. Cannon then took these letters to Credit Lyonnais who advanced 75% of the letter of credit’s paper value, accepting the letter as collateral provided it came from an accredited source. Golan would often boast that these presales put projects into profit before they even commenced production … Golan claimed that foreign distributors would soon come to know that they could rely on the delivery of a Golan/Globus production and that if they happened to lose money on one film, then another down the line would make up for it.19

Film critic Roger Ebert’s account of a Cannes meeting with Golan gives a further sense of how such deals were put together: When I was in Menahem Golan’s hotel room at the Cannes film festival … he had one entire wall covered with this giant chart and shown down the left-hand side were names of 27 would-be movies, or possible movies, and across the right of the chart were 60 different territories like Italy, France, but then also Angola, Zambia, and then they had gold stars. It’s like bingo. When a movie has enough gold stars, it’s been sold in enough markets with advance payments or guarantees, then they’ve got the money to make it, then they make it and ship it out.20

As these comments suggest, presales were an effective way for small companies to make back their production budgets and hopefully turn a profit. Unlike the complex revenue-sharing formulae used by the major studios, presales were quick, simple and easy, and provided a form of financing for films that might not have been made The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse

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otherwise. These flat-fee payments precluded the possibility of the producers participating in the ongoing returns of hit movies, but in most cases preselling proved to be a lucrative arrangement for both parties during the video boom period. For Dino De Laurentiis, presales accounted for between 65 and 72 per cent of the budgets of his productions,21 and we can assume that the figures would have been as high, if not higher, for a company like Cannon. As the point at which ‘First World production is most directly inscribed by global tastes’,22 presales contributed in an important way to a deep internationalisation of the video industry throughout the 1980s, which was felt both in the USA and elsewhere. Michael Curtin argues that the presale system led to Hong Kong films developing a kind of pan-Asian quality, and that this was especially the case with action films.23 Ding-Tzann Lii goes further, suggesting that the presale system used by Hong Kong producers, and the corresponding sensitivity to regional tastes that such deals required, endowed Hong Kong movies with a unique ‘yielding’ quality – the ability to adapt to local tastes, to conform to a regional imaginary, to ‘Asianise’.24 As Lii and Curtin note, presales required films to be culturally translatable to the maximum degree, which is partly why the visual spectacle of the action genre is well suited to this financing method. Many video independents also made use of foreign tax shelters to boost their bottom lines.25 This was another factor in the transnationalisation of the video industry from the 1980s onwards. Cannon used an offshore haven in the Dutch Antilles where the effective tax rate was between 1 and 3 per cent; however, this meant that the money they funnelled through this tax haven could not be returned home unless they were willing to pay higher US tax rates.26 Investing in offshore production was one way around this problem. As a result, Cannon shot war films in the Philippines (Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection [1990]), superhero movies in Canada (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace [1987]) and dramas in Australia (Evil Angels/A Cry in the Dark [1988]). The Italian Black Cobra (Cobra Nero) series from the 1980–90s (Black Cobra [1987], Black Cobra 2 [1990], Black Cobra 3: Manila Connection [1990] and Detective Malone/Black Cobra 4 [1991]) provides a useful example of how these industrial dynamics shape film form. Featuring poorly dubbed English dialogue, these ultra-low-budget exploitation films brazenly rip off elements from Cannon’s aforementioned Stallone vehicle Cobra and also borrow from Dirty Harry (1971), The Dead Pool (1988) and Die Hard (1988). American footballer-turned-action star Fred Williamson, best known for his roles in the Blaxploitation classics Black Caesar (1973) and Three the Hard Way (1974), stars as a renegade Chicago detective who takes the law into his own hands. Over the course of the series, Williamson’s character Robert Malone takes on a gang of bikies, a rebel army and two Islamic terrorist cells, dispatching them with poorly shot karate and cheesy one-liners. The first Black Cobra is shot in Rome but set in Chicago; the later films are shot and set in the Philippines (the narrative pretext: an Interpol officer exchange). They star a motley collection of American expats, European B-movie regulars and local extras. The Black Cobra films are textbook examples of the STV tendencies described here. They are ultra-cheap productions that confound even the most basic norms of 28

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narrative cinema: the editing is disjointed, the plot incoherent and the dialogue is dubbed in post-production, Italian-style (at one point a boy speaks with the voice of an old woman). Black Cobra 4 does not even star Fred Williamson as claimed: the producers simply recut the first film, added some new footage and passed off the result as a new production. The transnational production of the films takes full advantage of cheap Asian labour, yet much of the demand for these films comes from the traditional action markets of East Asia, France, Italy and Eastern Europe.27 The Black Cobra series and hundreds of other similar 1980s STV action films emerged from a once-booming network which spanned several continents and employed thousands of people, a shadow cinematic economy which is not opposed to Hollywood but is, in important ways, structurally disconnected from it. Meaghan Morris has offered a compelling analysis of the transnational dimensions of North American STV martial arts movies. Hers is one of only a handful of published studies on this topic,28 and it offers a useful model that can be extrapolated to other STV genres. Nominating the years 1985–93 as the dominant period of STV action, Morris performs a virtuoso reading of the intertextual politics of these films, which draw heavily on Hong Kong kung fu movies and are typically funded through international presales. She describes STV action as a ‘minor’ cinema, in the Deleuzian sense of being a different, yet overlapping, way of ‘handling the same material’ as Agrade action. The minor action mode involves such things as transnational film crews, fast shooting schedules, cheap shooting locations (often in the third world), a ‘ “sleazy” look’ and informal modes of exhibition.29 STV action cinema is transnational both in its content and its distribution, which circulates ‘scenarios of “contact” between rival ways of life to diverse audiences worldwide’.30 Morris also suggests that there is a cross-cultural class imaginary to be found in transnational action which revolves around narratives of ‘emulation’ – the process of learning from a master (a common trope in martial arts films). This raises the question of how to critically interpret the transantional linkages that characterise STV production and distribution. There is a tendency within political-economic analyses of offshore production to read media flows from the ‘West’ to the ‘rest’ as beholden to the logic of global capital. A prominent example of this argument is Toby Miller’s New International Division of Cultural Labour model, which argues that the internationalisation of Hollywood production is a cost-saving race to the bottom, involving the relocation of labour-intensive production to low-cost third world sites, with profits returning from the periphery to the centre.31 While offshoring in film industries clearly has an economic basis, there are also other questions that we can ask about the trajectories and implications of these flows. It is especially important to consider what happens to these models when we shift our gaze to the production strategies of non-Hollywood players. In the STV field, the USA performs an aggregating function, linking up the various elements and attempting – where possible – to centralise distribution, but the STV landscape is still highly heterogeneous. The following profile of an Antipodean STV production/distribution outfit looks in more detail at some of the periphery-to-periphery flows that are common in STV economies.

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SHOOTING AND SELLING STV ACTION IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC International Film Management was a production company headed by the Australian producer Antony I. Ginnane, who has produced sixty feature films – mostly lowbudget STV titles – since the late 1970s. Its successor, Ginnane’s California-based company IFM World Releasing Inc., distributes these films on DVD along with a variety of other STV and made-for-TV titles. Ginnane (who used to joke that his middle initial stood for ‘International’32) is an aggressively global producer who has long advocated the internationalisation of the Australian film industry. His production and distribution strategies, described below, are indicative of STV’s border-crossing tendencies. Ginnane’s film activities began in the early 1970s. After an unsuccessful directorial debut with the 1971 European-styled art film Sympathy in Summer, Ginnane shifted into a producer role and decided to target the exploitation market. Working with directors such as Richard Franklin and Brian Trenchard-Smith, Ginnane released a large number of genre movies with abundant nudity and violence throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These included the erotic adult comedy Fantasm (1976), the horror flicks Patrick (1978) and Thirst (1979) and the notorious Turkey Shoot (1982), famously described by the prominent Australian critic and broadcaster Phillip Adams as ‘a film of unrivalled sadism and brutality’.33 These were all low-budget films designed to play well in overseas markets. The emphasis was on visceral entertainment, and they represented a radical departure from the government-funded Australian cinema of the 1970s and 80s. Most of Ginnane’s features are faithful contributions to established exploitation sub-genres with global ‘playability’, such as the vampire film the martial arts film and the humans-as-prey film. He also cast overseas leads in his movies to boost their international sales, much to the anger of local actors’ unions. The idea was to move Australian film-making closer to the fast-and-cheap model of American B-cinema. The role played by the Australian ‘10BA’ tax law is important here. IFM was one of the key beneficiaries of 10BA, a tax write-off scheme which was introduced in 1980 by the federal government and which had the effect of funnelling huge amounts of private money into the Australian film industry. Scaled back in several stages throughout the 1980s, 10BA enabled many investors to realise profits by securing flatfee international presales. The video market allowed what Ginnane described as ‘nostar average’ features to rake in, on average, advance sales of around AU$500,000 for US home entertainment rights and AU$350,000 from other territories.34 These two factors ushered in a type of prolific, fast-and-cheap film culture that has not really been seen in Australia since, and they also contributed in significant ways to the internationalisation of the Australian film industry by encouraging producers to seek presale deals abroad to underwrite their projects. During the late 1980s and early 90s, Ginnane made a number of action films in the Philippines. These include the supernatural horror film Demonstone (1989), the hostage/action feature Savage Justice (1988), the action/sci-fi film Driving Force (1989) and the Vietnam War movies The Siege of Firebase Gloria (1989) and A Case of Honor (1991). These productions were thoroughly international affairs: 30

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These films, all around [AU]$1 million, were funded by US and Australian banks (including NZI Securities) and presold to US distributors like J&M, Atlantic, and Fries Entertainment. Again generally genre pictures, they were based on Australian scripts, used some Australian directors and key crew and US actors, and otherwise used Filipino crew and facilities, although post-production was done in Australia. The move to the Philippines was clearly designed to take advantage of the lower labour costs and to bypass union problems in Australia.35

Ginnane himself is very candid about this prerogative, describing the Philippines as ‘a low-cost production centre where we could maximise production for minimal costs’.36 The strong history of local production was a factor in this decision, along with the landscape (the jungle settings could stand in for numerous Asian locations), the success that Roger Corman had with his Philippines productions and a number of other commercial connections Ginnane was developing at the time which involved expanding the IFM distribution network into South East Asia.37 The Philippines productions were made in partnership with two Manilan entrepreneurs, Marilyn Ong and Rod Confessor, with whom Ginnane founded the spin-off company Eastern Films Management. Ginnane also had extensive dealings with the British actor and producer David Hemmings. Hemmings was the co-founder of Hemdale, another independent production and distribution company catering mostly to the home video market. (When Hemdale went bankrupt in the late 1980s, this almost sank Ginnane as well.) Hemmings also directed several IFM films, including Race for the Yankee Zephyr and The Survivor (both 1981). The distribution of IFM films tells a similar story. Via presale deals with small distributors including the UK/Irish outfit Liberty, the US independent Vestron and Roger Corman’s New World, many IFM films achieved a thoroughly global presence in the video market without the benefit of a distribution deal with one of the majors. The following passage, taken from Ginnane’s autobiography, gives a sense of the sales environment for one of his films at the time: Germany was sold to Highlight for $125,000; the UK (video only) to Braveworld for $110,000 with Sky picking up UK pay TV at $30,000 per title. Pacifica in Japan paid $70,000 each and 2 competing companies in Spain bought the 2 titles for $25,000 each. Other territories initially licensed included Israel, Portugal, Korea, Greece, Turkey, South Africa, Sweden, Middle East, Taiwan and Central America. Filmpac took Australia on both titles and paid $85,000 for the pair.38

Like the Hollywood studios that reduce costs by offshoring the labour-intensive parts of productions to developing nations, IFM took full advantage of its place within a globalised film production ecology. Over the years Ginnane has also offshored to other low-cost destinations including Mexico, Canada, Lithuania and the former Yugoslavia. He nominates Bulgaria and the Ukraine as countries that represent particularly good value for money today.39 But IFM is an Australian-run company, working from a peripheral position in the global film economy – or, in the case of Eastern Films Management, in partnership with Asian industry players. This represents a parallel rather than a centrifugal trajectory, a movement from one film industry periphery to another, which is The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse

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nonetheless beholden to the same commercial logic that underwrites other kinds of international offshoring and outsourcing. The account of the Philippines productions that Ginnane provides in his autobiography testifies to the informal nature of the STV sector – films were made on the fly in unpredictable conditions, with slim budgets allowing little margin for error. Ginnane preferred to operate this way in order to keep costs down, and he understood that STV audiences were forgiving of low production values provided that films adhered to generic norms by offering the required number of explosions, car chases and topless girls. The international flows generated by STV production and distribution are piecemeal and subterranean, rather than global in the grand sense. They ape Hollywood in terms of form and genre, but they operate outside the studio system. The transnational dimensions of Ginnane’s Philippines-produced films are inescapable: the mixed-race cast and crew, the polyphony of accents, the curious cultural elisions that occur when ‘local’ talent is recruited onto international productions.40 In other words, the films bear the legacies of their production and distribution context at a textual level, and they are not directly comparable to the kind of Global Hollywood productions which seek to suppress these histories by making one place stand in for another, as was the case with other Philippines-lensed US productions such as Platoon (1986). This is not to say that this kind of periphery-to-periphery offshoring does not have its own problems, but it does add weight to Morris’s argument regarding the textual transnationalism at work in minor action cinema. The example of IFM illustrates the ‘fast and cheap’ production model of the STV market. Companies working at the bottom end of the STV market seek out small market niches, provide a low-cost product and rely on a model of steady, small-scale turnover rather than ‘tentpole’ mega-success. Success in STV is difficult due to the high levels of competition and the undercapitalised nature of the sector – finding secure financing was always one of IFM’s biggest challenges – but the nature of the audiovisual market is such that there is usually a small but healthy market for lowbudget genre films, even if this has diminished since the heyday of home video. It is to the perceived cultural value of this vast body of STV production that I now turn.

THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE OF CINEMA In his work on popular fiction, the Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti raises a question of great importance to both literary studies and film studies – one which an analysis of STV may help to answer.41 Moretti’s essay ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’ begins with a lengthy list of book titles, all long-forgotten nineteenthcentury detective stories that never made it into the canon of crime fiction. These obscure texts are the departure point for his retheorisation of literary value – they are the ‘forgotten 99 per cent’ that make up the bulk of literary production, the bulk of popular consumption, yet which are rendered invisible by the optic of literary studies and its fetishisation of the exceptional: The history of the world is the slaughterhouse of the world, reads a famous Hegelian aphorism; and of literature. The majority of books disappear forever – and ‘majority’ actually

32

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misses the point: if we set today’s canon of nineteenth-century British novels at two hundred titles (which is a very high figure), they would still be only about 0.5 percent of all published novels.42

For Moretti, canons are merely the tip of an iceberg whose submerged bulk is an equally interesting object of analysis. This vast literary wasteland provides answers to questions of cultural value. For example, why do we read Arthur Conan Doyle today rather than one of his forgotten contemporaries? What does the other 99 per cent of literature have to offer? Moretti argues that taking this excess cultural material seriously allows us to see literary production in a more holistic way. His work employs quantitative methods in an attempt to find patterns that can explain why some texts, writers and styles endure at the expense of others, approaching literary production as a competitive field in which textual conventions operate as forms of product differentiation. To illustrate this principle, Moretti tracks the emergence of the clue as a formal device in detective fiction of the nineteenth century, demonstrating how it operated as a kind of evolutionary technology which writers either adopted or ignored at their own peril: detective stories which used clues to engage their readers became dominant, while those without faded into obscurity. Literature becomes a Darwinian battleground in which styles, formats and genres are born and die off according to intricate laws of textual competition. Let’s take some of Moretti’s ideas and see how they can help us understand the STV market. My suggestion here is that STV may be to cinema what long-forgotten detective novels are to literature. As we have seen, STV movies make up the ‘invisible’ bulk of global production activity. STV also has the lowest discursive status of any kind of film, being ineligible for Oscar nominations and for most other markers of institutional recognition.43 The parallels between STV and the forgotten popular fiction texts that Moretti describes are quite clear. What, then, is cinema studies to do with this other 99 per cent? Cinema studies is often burdened with a romantic idea of what cinema is and should be – a grand imagination of film as a medium endowed with effects, potential and magic. The scale of STV output renders this intimate relationship with the filmic text impossible. How can one possibly care about, let alone watch, all those obscure titles hitting video store shelves every year? Most of these films are not made to be remembered or cherished; they are designed to deliver a modest amount of pleasure and then to be forgotten. STV is the slaughterhouse of cinema. This brings us back to canons and to the broader notion of cultural value. To whom are STV films valuable? What kind of value are we talking about? Do canons articulate STV value? Granted, in an age of niche markets, the film canon is larger and more complex than the literary canon Moretti analyses. Despite the endurance of such things as British Film Institute and American Film Institute Top 100 lists, film canons today are far from uncontested and are constituted by an infinite number of subcanons (genre-specific canons, star-based canons, subcultural canons, guilty pleasure canons, IMDB user canons and so on). Nonetheless, the importance of canonisation as a discursive technology has not diminished; it is how critics, consumers and filmmakers alike make sense of the endless cinematic landscape, which is only ever The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse

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knowable in fragments.44 Individual STV films may be famous or infamous at different registers of value. Some of them are genuinely loved; others are enjoyed in a tongue-incheek way, for containing the worst special effects, the silliest dialogue and so on. But most come and go without making any kind of impact. In STV we have a cultural form based on the pleasures of mediocrity, and this is why it is so difficult to theorise using the traditional literary studies/cinema studies toolkit. To call an STV film mediocre is to state the obvious. I do not mean this as a value judgment in the manner of a publication like Film Comment, which snobbishly claims that ‘[t]hough straight-to-video titles are inadequate in many different ways, the fact of their mediocrity is reliable’.45 Mediocrity is also a mode of production. Consider the following quote from Cannon’s Menahem Golan, speaking at the high point of the 1980s video boom: ‘Theatrical is not the only mouth to feed. If Hollywood produced five times as many films as it does now, it would still not meet the demand. There is space for the mediocre!’46 Given the kind of cheap, ultra-violent movies that Cannon produced, Golan’s open embrace of the mediocre may come as no surprise. However, this comment tells us something significant about STV, an industry that quite literally treats the film as a cut-price commodity, something to be bought and sold and watched and forgotten. In this ‘space for the mediocre’, the function and value of the text are different. STV films are not individualised and autonomous in the same way as theatrically released films; like the B-film or the early short, they are interchangeable and disposable. As such, STV films are a curious combination of mass and flexible production tendencies, pumped out in large numbers by small studios to a reliable formula. In fact, their status as commodities echoes the kind of minor action thematics theorised by Morris: like the anonymous henchmen in an action movie, STV films come out of nowhere and are dispatched just as quickly. STV is so vast it is unknowable; one is awed by its scope, but one also despairs at the thought of having to care too much about these ephemeral texts. We return again to the same set of questions. Do these films matter? In what ways do they matter? Should we care about them? Should we attempt to preserve them? The work of archivist and film theorist Paolo Cherchi Usai is illuminating on this point. In his book-length polemic, The Death of Cinema, Usai invites a retheorisation of cultural value in an age of audiovisual abundance: It is estimated that about one and a half billion viewing hours of moving images were produced in the year 01999 [sic], twice the number made just a decade before. If that rate of growth continues, three billion viewing hours of moving images will be made in 02006, and six billion in 02011. By the year 02025 there will be some one hundred billion hours of these images to be seen. In 01895, the ratio was just above forty minutes, and most of it is now well preserved. The meaning is clear. One and a half billion hours is already well beyond the capacity of any single human: it translates into more than 171,000 viewing years of moving pictures in a calendar year. Some may say that a good deal of that figure is produced by video cameras monitoring bank counters and parking lots, but I do not. With or without security monitors, the overall number of moving images we are preserving today is infinitesimal compared with mainstream commercial production. In India alone several hundred films are made a year, and only a tiny portion of them end in the archives. Television in developing countries is produced on videotapes that are erased every few months. If so many of these

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images come and go without our even hearing about them, then how in the world can we form an idea of what cultural heritage is?47

This is the archivist’s dilemma: it is not possible to remember everything, so what should be forgotten? What is the value of a film that no one, not even its creator, cares about? After all, more than a few stars, directors and producers would be only too happy to erase their STV years from the public record. Addressing this issue of scale in all its complexity is beyond the scope of this book, but the vastness of the STV landscape can help to throw the stakes of this problem into relief. If nothing else, taking seriously the audiovisual excess that is STV can help us to think of cinema in a different way – as something other than a genealogy of great directors, or a signifying system, or a set of psychic effects; but rather, as an industrial field that exceeds knowable limits. When seen from this vantage point, cinema’s shadow economies move from the margins to the very centre of global film culture. The inherent disposability of STV also has implications for the way we conceptualise consumer choice, and I want to return now to the economic dimensions of STV for a moment. Much cultural analysis takes it as a given that culture is consumed because it is meaningful in some way to its audience. Scholars, including Moretti, look for answers to the riddles of consumption in the text itself, assuming that the popularity of a text is a function of its content. However, it does not always work like this in the movie economy, and especially in the STV market. An STV film may sell purely because its cover has been made to look like a recent Hollywood blockbuster (recall The Asylum and its rip-off ‘mockbusters’ like Snakes on a Train, 18 Year Old Virgin [2009] and The Terminators [2009]). Sometimes people buy STV movies because they are placed strategically near the checkout of discount stores, or because they have seen every other movie on the shelf at Blockbuster. As noted earlier, STV consumption is not (just) about consumer choice and the fulfilment of psychic needs. It is also shaped by marketing and distribution strategies, the effects of which are not always predictable. STV throws other models of cultural consumption into doubt as well. I am thinking here of Chris Anderson’s influential ‘long tail’ theory, which refers to the 80 per cent of cultural production that is unpopular on an individual basis but massively popular if viewed as a whole.48 Anderson argues that if consumers are provided with appropriate search tools and access to a catalogue unfettered by warehousing constraints, they will end up renting more obscure titles than they would be willing or able to at your average Blockbuster. The interesting aspect of Anderson’s argument is that it too is framed as a celebration of unfettered consumer choice rather than as an analysis of the structuring effects of distributive technologies: The lesson is that what we thought was a naturally sharp drop-off in demand for movies after a certain point [along the demand curve] was actually just an artifact of the traditional costs of offering them. In other words, give people unlimited choice and make it easy for them to find what they want, and you discover that demand keeps on going into niches that were never even considered before – instructional videos, karaoke, Turkish TV, you name it.49

This takes us some way towards understanding STV, which, with very few exceptions, finds itself at the far end of Anderson’s long tail. But in Anderson’s approach, there The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse

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remains the presumption of a rational consumer actively making meaning through consumption, as well as the presumption of underappreciated ‘quality’, which is to say unextracted value, on the part of long-tail texts.50 This is not an accurate description of STV. Anderson’s model of consumption works for self-consciously marginal cultural production with high levels of (sub)cultural prestige – Iranian cinema, Takeshi Kitano movies and so on – but the sprawling underground of STV is not really this kind of long tail. Many STV texts may not be valued by anyone in particular, yet the industry as a whole continues to sustain itself. STV is not a field of undiscovered gems: it is a space of surplus audiovisual production. So while popularity is partly a function of distribution, I do not follow Anderson in suggesting that there is an underlying ‘level playing field’ which can be restored if we fix the distribution bottlenecks. Distribution is in fact constitutive of demand, and of reception. The level playing field is a fantasy.

CONCLUSION It is now time to exit the slaughterhouse in search of other terrains, but a recap of the chapter’s key arguments is in order first. I began by pointing out the STV sector’s centrality to the global film industry, noting its huge annual output of titles as well as its absence from many indexes of global film business. The international dimensions of STV financing were then discussed and a case made for the existence of a minor form of transnationalism within STV films. STV films are limit cases for theories of cultural value: they are comprehensible neither as art nor as mass culture; they are simultaneously marginal and mainstream; they do not respond well to an analysis based on notions of textual meaning, consumer choice, or subcultural consumption. This journey into the STV slaughterhouse reminds us of the interdependent relationship between production and distribution systems. Home video is not just a stage in the value chain through which Hollywood product passes. It has produced its own specific distribution model which in turn has given rise to whole new production infrastructures, aesthetic forms, genres and consumption practices. As we have seen, the major studios share the stage with an amorphous collection of fly-by-night operators, many of which are thoroughly transnational in their industrial scope and practice. From hereon in, we will be moving away from this particular kind of STV culture and towards shadow film economies that bear even less resemblance to the mainstream film business. The next chapter develops an analytical framework through which these informal industries can be approached.

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Pirated DVDs/VCDs on sale outside the Shatilla refugee camp in south Beirut, Lebanon (Paul Keller. Creative Commons licence)

3 Informal Media Economies

Beyond the infrastructures that constitute what we know as the international film industry – multiplexes, film festivals, video stores, cable TV – lie other largely unmapped terrains of film distribution. So far in this book, we have set out some coordinates for such a map. Chapter 1 addressed methodological and conceptual questions in distribution analysis, identifying the problems with industrial histories that focus only on formal networks, while Chapter 2 shifted the analysis to a specific interstice between the formal and informal film economies (straight-to-video releasing) and the production cultures it has generated. From this point onwards, we move further away from the formal film economy to consider the many distribution networks that operate in loose articulation with or entirely outside this system. The point of such an approach is to bring informal modes of distribution closer to the centre of our analytical frame, where they rightfully belong. One benefit of this reorientation is to place film industry studies into dialogue with other traditions of research on the circulation of cultural commodities. Within fields such as human geography, economics, anthropology and urban studies there is a rich body of work on informal economic systems – from street markets and hawker networks to large-scale criminal enterprises – which has generated fascinating models for the analysis of distribution networks. In recent years media studies has begun to engage with these ideas, led by the influential work of Ravi Sundaram, Brian Larkin and Jeffrey Himpele.1 Yet much remains to be done, especially in film studies where there has been relatively little contact with the literature on commodity circulation that can be found in the social sciences. In this chapter, I revisit early debates about informal economies from the 1970s and demonstrate how the insights they generate can be used productively within analyses of film industries and networks. I then provide examples of informal media economies of differing sizes and scales. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the distribution of the 2007 Brazilian film Tropa de elite (Elite Squad), and its unique trajectory through both legal and extra-legal circuits, illustrating not only the empirical significance of informal distribution but also its articulation with formal systems.

THE FORMAL AND THE INFORMAL Informal, or ‘shadow’, economies can be defined in a number of different ways, but in general usage the term refers to economic production and exchange occurring within Informal Media Economies

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capitalist economies but outside the purview of the state. In its purest form, the shadow economy is a space of unmeasured, untaxed and unregulated economic activity. If the formal sphere is a space of order and oversight – ‘a world of salaries or fees paid on time, regular mortgage payments, clean credit ratings, fear of the tax authorities’2 – then informality is characterised by handshake deals, reciprocity, gift economies, theft, barter and other modes of exchange and redistribution which bypass institutions. Positive defining factors vary, but this idea – informality as a negative state, outside the formal realm – is common to all definitions.3 Economists have long sought to quantify and monitor informal production and exchange, usually with a view to bringing these flows into the formal zone of taxation and regulation. In the late 1970s, research into the size of the shadow economy captured the attention of policy-makers around the world. A widely read 1978 article by Peter Guttman claimed that around 10 per cent of personal income went untaxed in the USA. The following year Edgar L. Feige raised the stakes by putting the size of the US ‘irregular’ economy at 27 per cent of GDP.4 Today, estimates of the size of the informal economy in Latin American, Eastern European and African nations frequently exceed 50 per cent of GDP.5 While these studies differ in scope and methodology, the general point is clear: in many settings informality is a norm, not an aberration. A great deal of the debate in this field can be traced back to two papers which were published in the early 1970s. The International Labour Office report Employment, Incomes and Equality: A Strategy for Increasing Productive Employment in Kenya, published in 1972, was influential in attracting interest to the informality model as an alternative to the discourse of unemployment, which presumes an industrialised economy and regulated labour. The ILO report focused on workers engaged in forms of production outside waged and salaried labour, and defined informality according to the following six criteria: a) ease of entry; b) reliance on indigenous resources; c) family ownership of enterprises; d) small scale of operation; e) labor-intensive and adopted technology; f) skills acquired outside the formal school system; and g) unregulated and competitive markets.6

Keith Hart’s 1973 study of informal economic activities among the Fra-Fra in Ghana highlighted the role of the informal sector as an economic buffer and a means of survival for communities whose needs were not being met by waged labour.7 For Hart, the defining feature of economic informality was a low level of rationalisation. He illustrated this through an ethnographic profile of one of his informants who, following his discharge from the army, pieced together an income from a number of informal sources, including a makeshift gin bar run out of his rented room. Subsequent studies of the informal economy have developed this early analysis, with varying political orientations. Research in the Marxist tradition tends to foreground the difficulties faced by those excluded from participation in the official economy and the tactics they use to survive.8 On the other side of the political spectrum, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto controversially points the finger of blame for non-integration of informal economic activity into formal structures at the overregulated nature of many third world nations and their under-developed property rights systems.9 40

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These various claims about the informal economy illustrate how slippery a notion it is, and how it can be recruited into the service of different political projects. Critics continue to debate whether informality is best conceptualised as a discrete sector of the economy or as a mode of production, a symptom of neo-liberalism or a repository of entrepreneurialism, a problem to be solved or a potential to be harnessed. Few, however, dispute the fact that informality is ‘a fundamental politico-economic process at the core of many societies’.10 There is a great deal of traffic between the formal and the informal over time and space, and between different parts of a production or distribution system. Formal economies can become informal and vice versa. The emergence of illegal supply chains following the outlawing of alcohol in the USA is an example of the first trajectory, with the National Prohibition Act of 1919 creating a booming underground market for liquor. The formalisation of payday loans and other kinds of micro-financing is an example of the second trajectory, as money-lending activities previously carried out by loan sharks and gangsters mutate into a legal, multi-billion dollar industry.11 Informality is not just about crime and vice. It is also an appealing strategy for multinational corporations at the core of the formal sector. Subcontracting, outsourcing and offshoring often have the effect of moving labour activities partly or wholly out of the formal realm. IT companies relocate labour-intensive manufacturing to shady enterprises in the developing world, while trendy design companies in London or San Francisco commission work from eager young freelancers at exploitative rates or ‘on spec’.12 Even legitimate-looking products may have been produced using informal labour – blouses sewn by outworkers in western Sydney, computer parts made in invisible factories in export processing zones in the Philippines – before they enter the formal realms of distribution and retailing in first world nations. The same logic is at work in film industries. Hollywood studios operate largely in the formal realm but film production still involves many kinds of informal activity, including unpaid cameo appearances, shooting in unregulated third world sites and harnessing the promotional power of fans.13 Film financing has long been a ‘grey’ economy, with money funnelled in from an array of disreputable sources. In 2010 it emerged that Saadi Gaddafi, wayward son of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was investing millions in US indie movies.14 In Mexico, it is rumoured that popular narcotraficante movies – violent straight-to-DVD action films about the drug trade – are funded by drug gangs. There are many other examples one could mention here, all underscoring the fact that, in film economics, the formal and the informal are closely linked.

THE CENTRALITY OF INFORMALITY Etymologically, informality appears to be a shadow, implicitly less central than its root, formality. But this should not lead us to conclude that formality is some kind of organisational constant from which informality departs. As Philip Harding and Richard Jenkins argue, an absence of formal regulation is the historical norm. History may be viewed as the progressive encroachment of formality upon widening areas of social life, as a consequence of

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literacy and the introduction of ever more sophisticated information technology, on the one hand, and the increasing power and bureaucratization of the state, on the other.15

Hence the kind of regulating state that characterises formal economies cannot be essentialised as some kind of universal presence. This is especially (though not exclusively) the case when analysis moves beyond the industrialised, regulated and consolidated industries and spaces that are characteristic of advanced economies. As the urban historian and critic Mike Davis argues, much of the developing world (he uses the example of the Congolese capital of Kinshasa) is characterised by a ‘figureforeground reversal of formality and informality’ which ‘reinvents the categories of political economy and urban analysis’.16 The assumption that formality is the rule – when, in many places and in many ways, it is the exception – is implicitly ethnocentric. It is also important to note that governments and formal enterprises can actively produce informality. This is the logic at work in the de-regulation and privatisation of state industries, as per the Thatcher era in the UK or post-Soviet Eastern Europe, where the deliberate scaling-back of state involvement in industry gives rise to ‘flexible’ labour practices (including the offshoring of work to lower-wage environments) and mass lay-offs (leading to unemployment and, in some cases, a reliance on informal revenue-generating activities such as petty crime).17 A similar effect is produced by many forms of strategic rationalisation. The replacement of roving ticket attendants on trains with automated ticket machines, in the name of efficiency, produces higher levels of fare-evasion; the removal of ushers from multiplexes makes it easier to sneak into theatres without a ticket; and so on. Thus informality can be produced through the withdrawal, as well as the absence, of regulation and oversight.18 While criminal activities are typically informal, it should be stressed that informality can be found on both sides of the law. Many informal activities are both legal and reputable. Even the most regulatory-minded states stop short of banning cash-in-hand babysitting or tutoring. Off-the-books trade in food, handiwork and domestic services is also widely tolerated, so long as it remains at a small scale. Illegal arms trading and tax avoidance, however, are clearly different matters. The implication here is that informal activities are neither inherently good nor bad. It is difficult to make any kind of moral claims about either formality or informality as an organisational principle. Corporate espionage, after-hours tutoring, Sunday school teaching, DVD counterfeiting, cash-in-hand lawn-mowing and methamphetamine production are all equally informal. Given this, the few things we can say for sure about informal economic activity are that it reduces the tax base of states, and that it presents a problem for large-scale attempts to organise workers.19 To sum up, there is little to be gained from the wholesale condemnation of informality, as the informal sector is a means of survival for many millions of people excluded from wage labour through no fault of their own. At the same time, we must resist the temptation to celebrate informality for its own sake. There is a tendency in some writing to fetishise informal economic activity as resistance against corporate capitalism or a return to pre-industrial forms of community exchange and sharing.20 While acknowledging informality’s potential, we also need to stress that informalisation is an important dynamic within the corporate sector, and that informal 42

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economies – such as street trading and food preparation – frequently involve the systematic exploitation of women, children and immigrants.21 One would be foolish to make any claims about the inherent worthiness of either formality or informality as ideals or empirical realities, given the diverse nature of the activities occurring within – and crossing between – each realm.

INFORMAL ECONOMIES OF CINEMA Having surveyed some of the general features of informal economies, we now return to the question of how cinema fits into this landscape. The present section expands on the distributive dynamics of the informal film economy, identifying some characteristics that are common to many informal distribution circuits. As I noted earlier, there are no inherent qualities shared by all informal systems other than a degree of empirical invisibility or a tendency towards unregulation. Still, we can identify a few features that are common (though not universal) among such networks. For instance, many informal circuits have temporal qualities which differ from those of conventional distribution structures. In the windowing system upon which Hollywood and arthouse distribution models are based, the linear funnelling of content through formats (theatrical to DVD to TV) monetises time, creating a hierarchy of value based on a text’s newness.22 Informal networks do not use such a model, preferring in general to get product to consumers as quickly and directly as possible. Many informal circuits also have a qualitatively different relationship to space. The established model of international film distribution divides the world into discrete zones in which selected distributors are granted exclusive rights. Global theatrical film releasing has developed around a diffusion model, in which new releases premiere in the USA and move outwards through the western world before ending their days in developing-world markets, although the model is now shifting towards simultaneous global (day-and-date) releasing. Of course, legal parallelimporting and illegal piracy operations mean that spatio-temporal separation of markets is an ideal state rather than a reality; but at its core the mainstream distribution model is about the orderly movement of texts across and within spatially bounded territories. In contrast, informal circulatory networks are largely subterranean, meaning that texts move through space and time with a lower level of interference from copyright law, taxes, tariffs and state censorship. As I write, the most obvious example of this is the BitTorrent software used by hundreds of millions of consumers across the world, which enables films to be transported over great distances at great speed and at negligible cost. File-sharing is not completely outside the sphere of regulation, as ongoing piracy prosecutions and network neutrality debates attest. However, it is clearly at the informal rather than the formal end of the spectrum. Less dramatic forms of deterritorialisation include the common practice among tourists and migrant workers of transporting DVDs from home to host country in their personal luggage,23 a form of distribution which is regulated, in theory at least, by customs and immigration laws but which results nonetheless in the movement of huge amounts of media from one place to another without the help of official distribution channels. In Informal Media Economies

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other words, there is a special kind of mobility at the informal end of the scale which relies not on the muscle of vertically integrated conglomerates but on the movements of large numbers of small actors. Informal distribution is usually invisible – or at least less visible than its formal counterparts – in the industrial indexes and data sets that constitute our empirical knowledge of media flows. In Chapter 1, I noted that the Hollywood studios favour complex accounting systems based on revenue-sharing, used to calculate and redistribute revenues between producers, studios and retailers. This system works to spread risk around and to provide commercial incentives for all parties. For it to function effectively, huge effort must be put into gathering data about the performance of individual films at various stages of their lifecycle. Enter technologies of industry monitoring, which have a long history in Hollywood. In the studio era ‘checkers’ would lurk in cinema foyers to ensure exhibitors reported the correct attendance figures back to distributors. In the early 1970s, distributors took aerial photographs of drive-ins with infra-red cameras to check exhibitors were accurately reporting the car count, and therefore the revenues collected.24 These technologies of surveillance have now evolved to the point where rental transactions at suburban video stores can be monitored in near-real time from the distributors’ headquarters. There is a whole ancillary industry of media measurement and revenue monitoring set up to facilitate this commercial surveillance. Companies including Rentrak and Nielsen enable studio heads to access real-time data on how their movies are performing at DVD stores in Wyoming or multiplexes in Wapping. This data is then fed back to marketing staff, who use it to plan future release patterns and PR campaigns. In the informal film economy, there are few comparable systems of accounting and surveillance. No amount of market research can hope to make sense of the infinite number of viewings that take place informally. This is true both in the pirate economy, where monitoring is obviously very difficult, and in the lower reaches of the legal film industry, where technologies such as point-of-sale tracking are less common and industry-wide sales data less effective. In other words, the ability to monitor media consumption drops off sharply as we approach the informal end of the distributive spectrum. Many niche markets – including the Christian film industry discussed in Chapter 2 – are the domain of small distributors and retailers which do not use the sales tracking services of Rentrak and Nielsen.25 And, as we saw in the previous chapter, straight-to-video distribution is typically based on flat-fee and presale models instead of the revenue-sharing formulae which underwrite studio contracts and the revenue-tracking technologies associated with them. As a result, there is less data available on how these films perform. This is one of the reasons why some film industries and cultures seem to fall ‘off the map’ of industry discourse. The further we move away from the consolidated, rationalised accounting models of the formal EuroAmerican film industries, the greater the degree of invisibility and variation. Recall the Indian B-circuit distributors discussed in Chapter 1, which have little presence within the industrial accounting systems of Indian cinema and which operate under informal regimes of credit and commerce.26 Films circulating informally also tend to feature higher levels of textual variation. Formal distribution is a domain of standardisation and ‘brand integrity’: multiplex distribution offers the consumer an implicit guarantee that the experience of watching 44

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Spider-Man 3 (2007) will be more or less the same whether you live in Singapore or South Africa. Other windows in formal distribution offer different guarantees. When we rent a DVD from Blockbuster we can usually be confident that we will receive the film we have asked for, that it will conform to the requirements of its rating category and that it will play when we insert it into the DVD player. As we move into the informal realm, these guarantees fall apart. Texts in informal circulation accumulate interference – additions, subtractions, inflections, distractions – as they move through space and time. Commercial bootleggers and fly-by-night video companies have less of an economic incentive to ensure textual standardisation, so films are frequently recut, redubbed and retitled at will.27 Pirate markets are particularly susceptible to textual change, and examples of textual fluctuations within illegal distribution are numerous. Regular file-sharers know all too well that many of the movies circulating in P2P networks come with unexpected extras like Russian dubbing or Dutch subtitles. Bootleg DVDs sold in pirate markets may be illegally copied before final postproduction and have been known to contain alternative endings and unfinished special-effects sequences (as in the rough cut of X-Men Origins: Wolverine with unfinished CGI work, which was famously leaked onto the internet prior to its release date in 2009). Even legal distribution has its risks, as evidenced by the wilfully misleading cover images and taglines of low-cost B-movie DVD multi-packs, the kind one encounters at discount stores, which substitute one star for another and inflate cameo appearances into starring roles. The implications of informal distribution go beyond availability and can significantly shape exhibition and reception. Informally distributed texts are typically consumed in the home or in social spaces beyond the cinema, and usually in a state of distraction. In many of its manifestations, informal distribution produces a kind of spectatorship which rarely resembles the encounter between autonomous text and sovereign spectator imagined by psychoanalytic film theory. Film studies concepts like immersion or suturing cannot be transplanted wholesale into the informal realm, whose rhythms and texture often have more in common with television or radio than cinema. Cinema is something that may be on in the background while you travel, eat, sleep, socialise, or work. As Jonathan Crary has suggested, the way we respond to visual stimuli has been disciplined over time by institutions and technologies, from the pinwheel to the projector. Distraction needs to be understood not as the opposite of respectful attention but as an ‘effect, and in many cases a constitutive element, of the many attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects’.28 Crary’s emphasis on the historically constructed nature of ‘paying attention’ is helpful, as it is these norms and practices which tend to break down in informal distribution. Here, one’s relationship to other people in the viewing space is as important as one’s relationship to the text. The difference between many viewing situations arising from informal distribution and the idealised textual encounter of classical film theory is inescapable. An extreme instance of informal cinema culture, one which erases textuality altogether, has been described by the urban theorist Abdoumaliq Simone.29 In a remarkable essay, Simone reflects on his experiences living in Cameroon and South Africa, describing how African communities reconstruct meaning from material, social and symbolic infrastructures in various states of dysfunction. He emphasises everyday actions that respond to situations of scarcity through attempts to ‘multiply the uses Informal Media Economies

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that can be made of documents, technologies, houses, infrastructure, whatever’.30 The essay includes an account of ‘cinemagoing’ in Douala, one which would occupy a position at the extreme edge of the spectrum of informality. As such, it provides a powerful account of one of the myriad ways in which filmic infrastructures can be put to social use. I quote from it here at some length so as not to remove the encounter he describes from its context: Not even two minutes from the Western entrance to the [Machouchou] quarter stand the remains of what was once Douala’s largest cinema, now closed for the past several years. Next door stands a four-storey building that once housed one of the city’s better Catholic high schools, now moved to another more suburban location. The demise of both has a lot to do with the relationship between them. The pupils would miss classes to attend matinee showings next door of an endless fare of cheap kung fu movies. The young people would barely pay attention to the films; it was more a place to smoke marijuana and have sex. Some efforts were made to get the authority at least to close the place during school hours. But this was to no avail, especially as the very popular soft porn showings at the weekends drew crowds of local functionaries. While over the years the cinema had been stripped clean – of seats, carpet, even major sections of the roof – the locked projection room strangely remained intact. Given its proximity to Machouchou, the cinema was a convenient hangout for neighbourhood youth, a beguiling place of refuge since, despite its present locked down fortress appearance, its status as a gathering-spot of criminals was well known to the police. But as far as I could make out, there were no raids, no arrests. Unlike the high school kids, these youth actually came to watch cinema, perhaps as a respite from just how much their lives had become clumsy imitations of third-rate movies. The thing was that there were no movies per se to watch. Rather, they had managed to attach the projector to a small generator simply to get it running and would then sit, often for hours, watching the rays of light as they reached the surface of the screen. Afterwards, they would get beers and have long discussions about what they had seen, arguing over plot lines and characters.31

There is no place in mainstream film theory for this cinemagoing experience. It rewrites the space of the cinema and its presumptive social functions, but also displaces the text from its usual position at the core of film culture, in a way that may help us to rethink some of the assumptions of text-centric film studies. Another kind of argument about informality can be found in Arif Hasan’s accounts of media networks in Karachi, where much of the population lives in informal settlements.32 Extensive networks of small-scale private enterprise provide many core services here, from education to public transport. Trade liberalisation has meant that lifestyle commodities, including many media products, are now more affordable for the lower classes. A new media landscape is emerging in the cracks of the established system: an informal sector consisting of pirate video clubs, video halls, software vendors and cable TV companies which provide various forms of audiovisual entertainment to consumers priced out of legal markets. For Hasan, these new consumer cultures illustrate the distance between ‘a First World economy and sociology [and] a Third World wage and political structure’, with cheap and ubiquitous media commodities softening the blow of increasing structural inequality. The role of 46

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informal media distribution is to provide a ‘bridge’ between these various worlds, if only at the level of fantasy.33 While the Douala story recounted by Simone suggests a role for informal media as a phantasmatic infrastructure across which unrelated social practices may take place, in the case of Karachi informal audiovisual infrastructures perform a mediating function, linking economies and cultures through popular imaginaries. For Hasan, informal media is a symptom of structural change, a side-effect of economic liberalisation. This is a common characteristic of informal media markets, which frequently present to their customers an affordable smorgasbord of audiovisual options in places where other goods and services are in short supply. So while celebrating the new forms of access that shadow networks open up, we must also be aware of the wider political economy within which they operate.

INFORMALITY, CINEMA AND THE STATE The relationship between informal distribution networks and the state is highly variable. On the one hand, there are many informal networks that facilitate the circulation of material blacklisted by governments. When this occurs in nations with strong censorship regimes and questionable human rights records, it is often hailed as an act of free speech, as something to be applauded. In their 1985 book Global Political Fallout: The VCR’s First Decade, Gladys and Oswald Ganley provide some examples of how pirate circuits were politicised in the Cold War years. They cite a secret US government cable which expresses barely concealed delight over the prevalence of video piracy in post-revolutionary Iran, noting that an ‘enormous black market has come into existence to provide Western films for a high price to the middle and upper classes’.34 One of the most popular bootleg videocassettes in Iran during the 1980s was Footloose (1984), with its theme of ‘rebellion against fundamental religious principles’. Piracy becomes, in this account, a driver of liberty and democracy. This is a recurrent theme in news coverage of media systems under authoritarian rule. Many American news organisations ran stories on the popularity of Titanic (1997) in Afghanistan during the Taliban years, when pirate copies of the film were circulated in defiance of the strict ban on all music, film and television.35 This argument about the ‘democratising’ properties of informal and pirate distribution has been articulated in relation to non-Hollywood texts as well. Soviet director Sergei Parajanov’s 1968 film The Colour of Pomegranates was never legally released abroad as it displeased the Soviet censors, but a pirate 16mm version was circulated in the UK and elsewhere. A screening of this pirate print at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London was almost derailed when Sovexport threatened legal action, but as ICA director Chris Rodley said at the time, ‘what rights can they have over a film they say never existed?’36 Likewise, the group of Chinese film-makers known as the Sixth Generation directors, including Jia Zhangke (Pickpocket [1998], The World [2004]) and Zhang Yuan (Beijing Bastards [1993], East Palace, West Palace [1996]), have on many occasions fallen foul of China’s film censorship policies.37 Yet their films circulate freely in pirate markets, in the PRC and elsewhere, demonstrating that informal circuits offer a way around the regulation of official channels. Informal Media Economies

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This way of looking at informal distribution tends to frame it as a resistance to authoritarian repression. But there are many circuits which do not fit this narrative. Consider a recent scandal in the Philippines, in which informal networks became the conduit for a film containing graphic footage from a horrific mass-murder. In November 2009, 57 people – including a local politician, his supporters and 31 journalists – were gunned down by an armed militia in the town of Ampatuan, in Maguindanao province. The bodies were beheaded and mutilated; women were raped, shot in the breasts and stabbed in the eyes. The massacre caused a huge scandal, receiving news coverage across the country and internationally. Within a few weeks, a DVD entitled Maguindanao Massacre 11/23/09 had appeared in pirate stalls.38 This ‘documentary’ featured four hours of footage of the crime scene clean-up. Viewers saw body parts protruding from the dirt, exhumation of corpses from a mass grave and other gruesome details. The DVD was marketed as a true crime exploitation video, and Filipinos were outraged at the video pirates for cashing in the tragedy. The origin of the Maguindanao Massacre 11/23/09 footage remains unclear, but there appears to be some kind of link between pirates and the local authorities. This serves as a reminder that while escaping conventional regulation, informal distribution is not always entirely outside the sphere of the state or industry. There are many other examples of state–pirate or formal–informal interdependencies that we can mention here.39 A major research report into piracy in Russia notes a ‘web of police and security-service protection’ for pirate disc factories, the largest of which are housed within military bases and even nuclear power plants.40 Some of these factories also produce discs for the legal market, and all are guarded by government security forces. In the Russian economy, there are no clear lines between legal and illegal, public and private. A different kind of relationship between informal circuits and the state is discussed by Anna Pertierra in her work on new media networks in Cuba.41 Despite strict government control of broadcast, print, radio and the internet, Cubans enjoy a surprisingly diverse media environment. A vast array of informally circulated content is available, distributed mostly through personal networks and small media rental businesses. A key technology of circulation is the portable external hard-drive. Harddrives are typically sent by friends and relatives overseas then used by Cubans as repositories for film and TV content. Talk shows, music videos, feature films, anime and HBO series are all widely available within days of their release or broadcast in the USA. This economy is entirely informal, but it is not illicit. Hard-drive circuits in Cuba facilitate entertainment: there is relatively little interest among Cubans in politically sensitive material. For this reason, the Cuban authorities generally tolerate this exchange, and most are personally involved in it. There is no formal system of intellectual property in Cuba (it is considered anti-revolutionary) so pirate networks operate with impunity. In recent years the state has even started issuing licences to the pirate DVD rental operations.42 In this sense, informal networks are organs of mainstream media rather than illicit exceptions. The relationship between these cinematic shadow economies and the state is characterised not by hostility but by tolerance, co-optation and interdependence. Depending on the context, informal circuits can be spaces of resistance or hegemony, art or propaganda, free speech or repression. At other times they are 48

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everyday, banal phenomena. Their flexible nature means that all manner of content can flow through them. As we have seen, they connect with formal state structures at a number of levels. Rather than being a self-contained entity, the informal film economy interfaces constantly with the state and with formal film industries. The following section of this chapter offers a more detailed case study of an instance of informal distribution in Latin America, its links to the film industry proper and its articulation with other systems of urban informality.

BETWEEN FORMAL AND INFORMAL DISTRIBUTION: TROPA DE ELITE The street economies of developing nations provide a rich source of stories and styles for cultural industries catering to first world markets. In the wake of recent ‘slum cinema’ hits such as Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and Tsotsi (2005), we are seeing a new visual vocabulary of the developing-world city emerging, structured around the libidinal flows of the informal economy.43 Many recent Latin American films are particularly invested in the spectacularisation of urban informality in the guise of ghetto gunplay and block parties. In Brazil, ‘favela films’ like City of God (2002) explore and aestheticise the affective dimensions of criminal economies.44 In 2007, the release of the Brazilian director Jose Padilha’s film Tropa de elite (Elite Squad) provided a striking example of what happens when informality as a thematic concern combines with informality at the level of distribution. The film’s unique trajectory through the Brazilian market incorporated formal and informal elements, moving between extra-legal and legal circulation over time. This movement between informal and formal registers is also central to the film’s narrative, which explores police corruption and the drug trade. An analysis of Tropa de elite’s distribution helps to bring together some of the themes we have been exploring throughout this chapter and throughout the book. Set in the favelas of Rio de Janiero, Tropa de elite is the fictionalised story of a reallife police squadron, BOPE (Special Operations Batallion), which is notorious for its aggressive tactics. A big-budget, high-octane action movie, Tropa de elite combines elements of social critique with exploitation cinema. It was massively popular in Brazil, where it became the number one box-office hit of 2007. A sequel, Tropa de elite 2: O inimigo agora é outro (Elite Squad: The Enemy Within), was released in 2010. However, most of the film’s audience saw the original Tropa de elite well before the theatrical premiere. In June 2007, four months before Tropa de elite came out in the cinemas, a master tape was stolen and leaked on the internet. Pirate copies very quickly found their way into thousands of street markets and informal stores in every corner of the country, where they became very popular with vendors and customers alike. Sociologist Augusto de Oliveira describes the scene at a central Rio market, the Camelódromo Uruguaiana, thus: For those of you who don’t live in Rio, let me try to explain what this place is like. The market takes up a large block of land in the middle of downtown. It’s an ugly place, with hundreds of stalls clustered beneath a steel roof that blocks out the light and the air, separated by extremely narrow pathways. CD vendors blast out music at an almost unhealthily high

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The informal economy as content and conduit: a scene from Tropa de elite (2007)

volume. It was here that I first saw pirate DVDs of Tropa de elite. Most vendors were selling copies. Day after day, you could see the film playing on TV sets mounted on the sidewalk; passers-by would stop to watch snippets of the film; and the vendors would promote the film energetically and effusively – something I’d never seen before in my 15 years of coming here.45

Research commissioned by a Brazilian polling company suggests that 10–12 million people watched these pirate pre-release versions of Tropa de elite.46 There were even fake sequels available in street markets, containing footage of police operations hastily edited together by the pirates in an attempt to cash in on the film’s popularity.47 But the greatest surprise was yet to come. In October 2007, when Tropa de Elite finally opened in cinemas, it was hugely successful. It made more money at the box office than any other film that year, including Hollywood behemoths like Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). People went and saw Tropa de elite for a second or third time, and the massive word-of-mouth buzz around the film drew in new audiences as well. Rather than sabotaging Tropa de elite’s box-office performance, widespread piracy seems to have enhanced it. The story of Tropa de elite connects with our discussion at a number of levels. First there is the question of the spatial politics of the film’s distribution across both formal 50

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and informal spheres. In Brazil, as elsewhere, distribution networks reflect and reinforce social stratification. Many of the favelas in Brazil have no cinemas, theatres, or other formal cultural institutions. Going to the multiplex is a privilege reserved for the middle classes. The default means of engagement with the moving image is DVD piracy and, increasingly, file-sharing.48 Tropa de elite was especially popular among these favela audiences. Like the spatially segregated cities of Brazil, the distribution of the film marked spaces differently according to socio-economic status. In the favelas, Tropa de elite made its presence felt not just through the street vendors blasting the film from TVs, the soundtrack wafting from shops and homes, the references to the film in everyday conversation, but also through its take-up in popular culture. Children re-enacted scenes from the movie in the streets, pretending to be BOPE officers.49 The movie’s cover art became an integral part of the streetscape as it appeared in street markets across the nation. Tropa de elite may appear at first to be thoroughly localised: a Brazilian film, telling a specific kind of story about Brazilian cities, distributed in a way suited to local conditions. But its locality, both at the level of content and circulation, is filtered through the global. Large, informal markets such as the Camelódromo Uruguaiana, and hundreds like it around Brazil, overflow with cheap consumer goods imported from China: clothes, technology, gadgets, electronic media, DVDs. The explosion in consumer culture among the poor that has emerged in the last decade is, then, closely linked to the globalisation of the Brazilian economy. In many of these commercial zones, there is no clear distinction between the legal and the illegal. Goods, which may be legally imported, are sold off the books. Many camelódromos also accommodate street vendors who have been kicked off their former turf as part of urban redevelopment initiatives, so informal trading practices run deep. Piracy is a natural consequence. In other parts of the country, informal markets such as these are being integrated into mainstream shopping malls, further blurring the lines between formal and informal trading spaces and practices.50 These distribution networks are a vital part of the Latin American mediascape. To dismiss them as pirate or criminal is to overlook interdependencies between the formal and informal economies. There is also the question of the instrumental productivity of pirate circulation. The Tropa de elite story demonstrates the efficiency of street piracy as a distribution model. In Chapter 1 we were reminded of the amount of work it takes to get a film from post-production to its innumerable retail outlets. Brazilian pirate circuits were able to mobilise this distributive muscle just as quickly through informal channels. The fact that millions of people had seen the film within weeks of its appearance in street markets suggests that the major studios are not the only players in film culture able to rapidly assemble a mass audience for a film and to market it successfully to millions of people. Tropa de elite’s surprising success at the box office also indicates that the erosion of formal revenues is not a necessary side-effect of informal circulation. On the contrary: buzz generated by piracy, as a form of free marketing, can in some circumstances outweigh revenue ‘leakage’. Advocates of file-sharing often make this argument, but the Tropa de elite incident provides some rare empirical evidence to back up the claim. It is still unclear who leaked the Tropa de elite master tape. According to one rumour, the master was stolen by the military police, who had unsuccessfully Informal Media Economies

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attempted to have the film banned by the courts on the basis that it was slanderous to their reputation.51 In any case, a line of some sort can be traced between formal and informal institutions. As in the film’s narrative, where police wages are subsidised by bribes and middle-class law students fuel the drug economy by buying marijuana in the favelas, the story of Tropa de elite’s circulation is characterised by interdependencies between the formal and the informal. The movement of Tropa de elite from the post-production studio to the internet to the street to the big screen represents one kind of distribution trajectory. Elsewhere in this book we have encountered circuits with a range of different characteristics. Some formally produced texts slip into informal distribution shortly after their release, circulating there while also making their way through the formal windowing system. This is the case with most Hollywood blockbusters. We have also encountered informally produced texts which remain entirely within the informal sphere for distribution, as in the Maguindanao DVDs. Finally, we have observed distribution systems which are informal as a result of their industrial invisibility rather than their illegality, as in straight-to-video. What these various circuits have in common is that they do not fit into the way of thinking about distribution that we have internalised within film and media studies. There is no orderly movement through release windows here, just the messy, multidirectional scurrying of large numbers of small-scale distributive agents. In the next chapter, we will look in detail at an informal media economy in West Africa which has been able to harness the distributive power of pirate street markets, the bedrock of the global informal media economy, to build the world’s fastest-growing screen production industry.

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Nigerian VCDs on sale in the Bijlmer area of Amsterdam (Paul Keller. Creative Commons licence)

4 Nollywood at Large

Surveys of the international film business by industry analysts typically arrange the world into a pyramid formation. At the apex, the seat of global cinema power, one inevitably finds Hollywood – the world’s most profitable industry, producing the gold standard of global entertainment. Below that is India, with its huge regional audience and massive annual output, then Japan, China, France, Germany and so on down the list. This way of imagining the international film industry is of course problematic, not least because it reduces the complexity of global media flows to a competition between self-contained national units. But there is also a deeper question here about what counts as a national film industry in these surveys. The pyramid reflects a culturally specific understanding of film business, based on a certain type of media economy which generates empirically measurable data about feature production, international sales and box-office returns. Industries which play by different rules are rendered invisible. Consider the exceptional story of the Nigerian film industry, often referred to as Nollywood.1 This almost exclusively straight-to-video industry has grown exponentially since the 1990s. While Nollywood production values are low, the level of audience engagement is very high. In the mid-2000s an average Nigerian film was selling about 30,000 copies – 150,000 for the most popular releases – with many more copies circulating through pirate channels.2 But until 2009, when UNESCO listed Nigeria as the world’s second biggest film producer, there was no formal acknowledgment of the industry’s size or scale in international media statistics.3 Many world cinema enthusiasts in the West are still unaware of the existence of this vast, multi-lingual and extremely dynamic industry, which releases more than 1,000 films a year – significantly more than the USA and, by some counts, India. Nigerians, however, are in no doubt as to the popularity of their local cinema, which is deeply integrated into everyday life and public culture. As film scholar Onookome Okome argues, Nigerian video ‘has remained solidly at the centre of the visual space in West Africa in the last twenty years, asserting its narrative presence as well as building up an industrial infrastructure from the grassroots’.4 Demand for Nigerian cinema is now widespread throughout Africa. Nigerian stars like Genevieve Nnaji, Omotola Jalade Ekeinde and Ramsey Nouah have huge fan bases across the continent and throughout the African diaspora. The reason this booming film industry rarely appears in discussions of global cinema is because it exists almost entirely in the informal realm. Nollywood’s Nollywood at Large

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distribution sector is controlled by an array of small-time entrepreneurs, pirates and marketers (the local term for distributors), which has yet to congeal into major studios and corporations as per the Euro-American model. Nor is there any formal structure for international distribution, which means that Nigerian DVDs are difficult to come by in the West outside diasporic African communities. Yet despite this structural separation from global film business – or perhaps because of it – Nollywood has flourished. Analysis of its structure reveals an alternative distribution template of considerable potential, one grounded in informal rather than formal exchange. To date, the literature on Nigerian video has been produced largely by anthropologists and scholars of African cinema and literature.5 Dialogue between this body of Nigerian video research and mainstream cinema and media studies is rare.6 Nollywood’s critical ghettoisation is a function of the obscurity of African cinema within western media scholarship and the fast-and-cheap nature of the video medium, which is not taken seriously by many film scholars. But Nigeria has a great deal to offer current debates about film and media industries. As we will see in this chapter, informality has been central to the success of the industry, with pirates building up a vast regional audience for Nigerian films. However, as producers attempt to formalise, regulate and consolidate the industry, informality is being recast as a threat to longterm sustainability. This tension between formality and informality, latent in many of the shadow film economies we have looked at thus far, is a defining feature of the Nigerian video industry as it enters its third decade.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE NIGERIAN VIDEO BOOM Nigerian video is a popular cinema, the first large-scale phenomenon of its kind in Africa. Its birth in the 1990s came at the end of a long period of foreign domination of audiovisual culture. Apart from the films of well-known directors like Ola Balogun and Hubert Ogunde, most Nigerians had relatively little engagement with locally produced movies during the 1970s and 80s, when 35mm and 16mm production was at very low levels.7 This state of affairs was replicated across much of sub-Saharan Africa, where Hollywood, Bollywood and Hong Kong films were all widely available but African films were ‘foreigners in their own countries’.8 One estimate suggests that African titles accounted for less than 0.1 per cent of titles screened on the continent.9 This all changed with the emergence of video as an alternative to celluloid cinema. Driven by the availability of imported video cameras and videocassettes, a new industry emerged outside the established networks of film production, training, distribution and exhibition. The first video hit was Kenneth Nnebue’s 1992 film Living in Bondage, a melodramatic tale of greed and supernatural retribution, which captivated audiences and became a pop-culture sensation. Living in Bondage and the films that were produced in its wake had little in common with the tradition of 35mm African art cinema associated with auteurs like Souleymane Cissé or Ousmane Sembène. The aesthetic of these ‘video films’ was televisual, reflecting the training of production personnel who learned their skills on TV sets rather than in the celluloid cinema scene. The emphasis was on escapism, scandal and spectacle, with narratives 56

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crafted around popular genres like supernatural horror and domestic melodrama. Rough, cheap and crowd-pleasing, the early videos inaugurated a new cinematic populism that has defined the character of Nollywood to this day. As the video boom gathered pace in the mid-1990s, locally made tapes began to appear in their hundreds in street markets across Nigeria. Shot quickly and cheaply, the videos were often made by amateur producers with no formal training. As a result, early Nollywood films were plagued by technical problems, especially poor sound, crude editing and disorientating camerawork. But this did little to dampen the enthusiasm of viewers who bought and rented these videos in great numbers. Makeshift rental libraries appeared, their shelves full of VHS tapes with titles like Glamour Girls (1994) and Deadly Affair (1995). By 1997, the video industry was producing nearly a film a day.10 Today, the output is two or three times that. Films are still scripted, shot and released within a matter of weeks, although production values have risen considerably. Budgets extend up to US$200,000, sometimes higher – but many films are still made for a fraction of this amount. A common misconception about Nollywood is that it is one single industry. In reality, the video economy is made up of a number of smaller entities – principally, the Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and English-language industries – each with its own history and organisational dynamics. As Moradewun Adejunmobi argues, the general trend across Nollywood as a whole has been ‘a diversification of style and content motivated by the emerging delineation of audiences for particular types of video film’.11 For example, the Hausa films made in Nigeria’s Islamic north are conservative in their content and favour Bollywood-esque romance with music and dance sequences (but no kissing). Action and drama are the strong suits of the Igbo and English films, which tend to have bigger budgets. In all cases, new narrative forms cross-pollinate with older genres and formats, including Latin American telenovelas, the Yoruba theatre tradition and popular African literary forms.12 Nollywood also has transnational as well as subnational dimensions, being integrated with the Ghanaian video industry, where it has been claimed the video production model originated in the late 1980s.13 There is a lot of traffic between these various cultural forms, with stars and story ideas in constant circulation. A crucial factor in the success of Nigerian video is its unique distribution model. Most Nollywood films bypass cinemas and are acquired via informal markets, as is the case with most commodities in Nigeria. Films are bought and rented at low cost from a vast network of local markets, street stalls and small video stores, which stretches right across Africa. The first Nigerian video-films circulated on VHS, but with the emergence of digital disc formats distribution has shifted to VCD14 and, to a lesser extent, DVD. No West African marketplace is complete without stalls selling Nollywood discs, their covers adorned with attention-grabbing titles and photo montages of stars. Though labyrinthine, these distribution circuits are organised and efficient. Their capacity for high-speed, low-cost circulation stems from the fact that they evolved from pirate networks previously occupied with the sale of Hollywood and Bollywood bootlegs. In his groundbreaking research on the Hausa video industry in northern Nigeria, media anthropologist Brian Larkin explains how this system grew to accommodate legitimate trade in videos and to return revenues to producers: Nollywood at Large

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The everyday practice of piracy in [the regional capital] Kano was based around the mass distribution of the two most popular drama forms, Indian and Hollywood films, and the reproduction of televised Hausa dramas and Islamic religious cassettes. Nearly all of those who might be described as pirates were at the same time involved in the duplication and sale of legitimate media, and the organization that emerged made Kano the regional distribution center for electronic media in northern Nigeria and the wider Hausaphone area (which covers parts of Chad, Cameroon, Benin, Ghana, and the Sudan). The system is this: the main dealers are based at centers in Kano, like Kofar Wambai market. They then sell to distributors in other northern cities, and these in turn supply smaller urban and rural dealers who provide goods for itinerant peddlers. The system is based on a complex balance of credit and trust; and although it depends, in part, on piracy, it has evolved into a highly organized, extensive distribution system for audio- and videocassettes.15

As Larkin notes, these informal networks have evolved into a distribution system for locally made videos, with piracy built into this system at every level. While the northern Hausa video industry differs in many ways from the Yoruba, Igbo and English-language industries, the distributive logic is similar: pirate copies and originals intermingle in distribution channels. Pirates are central to the system’s operations, as they develop and maintain the distribution networks. There is massive revenue leakage, but enough money makes its way back to producers via marketers to sustain production. This is a very different model of distribution from the ‘windowing’ system used in Europe and North America. There is no formal revenue-sharing in the video economy, only handshake deals and commissions. The system is built on speed rather than temporal staggering, the objective being to get films to market as quickly as possible. Nollywood’s lack of formal structure presents problems for producers, as we shall see, but the system has been a boon for consumers. Intense competition among vendors, both authorised and unauthorised, makes for competitive pricing and speedy delivery. Nigerian videos are typically watched among family and friends at home. The level of VCR and VCD player penetration in Nigeria households is relatively high, and home viewing is seen as a safer option than venturing out into the streets to go to the cinema. Accordingly, distribution has evolved along almost entirely nontheatrical lines. Movies typically cost around 400 naira (US$3.5), and can also be rented for about an eighth of this price.16 Discs are passed around among extensive networks of family and friends, and are commonly viewed in large groups, making participation in video culture less prohibitive than the VCD price alone would suggest. In addition, thousands of informal video clubs allow those without a VCR/VCD to watch the latest Nigerian movies. A video club is simply a room with a TV, some benches and an electric generator, maybe decorated with movie posters, where videos are shown to crowds of locals every couple of hours. Entry costs around 20–30 naira, less than US$0.25.17 Videos are also screened day and night at market stalls, hairdressers, shops, bars and many other small businesses. Nigerian fans are known for their willingness to ‘stand or sit nearly anywhere and anyhow to see the video film’.18 In some of these spaces, access requires the purchase of a drink, a haircut, or whatever else is on sale; in others it is free, although of course one has no control over the environment and may be moved along at any moment. This kind of public spectatorship is a central feature of the West African media landscape. 58

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Audiences have multiple points of entry into video culture, and different social groups have different access privileges. Many video clubs are male-dominated spaces where women are not always welcome. But the level of video penetration in everyday life is still very high: for most Nigerians – male or female, young or old – videos are usually accessible by one means or another. This is especially so among city-dwellers and the young, who passionately embrace video culture. The point, however, is that the entire video economy would not exist without the agile distribution system upon which the industry is founded. The cheapness and versatility of video and VCD formats, a highly efficient and decentralised network of informal trade and intense competition at the point of sale have helped to ensure that video culture is now a part of everyday life throughout West Africa. Nollywood is clearly unlike other film industries. There are no formal distribution companies, just individual marketers and pirates, and in the place of cinemas there are video clubs and street markets. This is why Nigeria has been overlooked as one of the giants of global film culture. Nollywood bears little resemblance to the EuroAmerican industrial model, and it does not produce the kind of data and industrial knowledge that can validate the claims made on its behalf. As the anthropologist John McCall argues, Nollywood is ‘radically horizontal in its organization’.19 This flexibility has worked in the industry’s favour so far, creating a huge market for locally produced content, but not everyone in the industry is happy with the current state of affairs. Many producers now favour a more formal model, with less piracy and stronger intellectual property enforcement. Momentum is building behind the campaign for a more standardised and respectable Nollywood. In the following section I consider how this drive to formalise the industry affects the distribution sector.

THE FORMALISING IMPERATIVE There can be no doubt that Nollywood is a big business. Its workforce not only includes film-makers, creative personnel and distributors, but also a whole range of ancillary industries and occupations. As Chukwuma Okoye argues, the video film provides a counter narrative to not only the silencing of the ordinary people but a remapping of the postcolonial social, cultural, and economic landscape by providing both entertainment and employment, by lifting countless [Nigerians] out of debilitating conditions, and offering viable possibilities for many more in other engagements. Without dependence on imperial and local state agencies these films demonstrate their viability through the many unemployed, poor, and hungry people, undoubtedly millions of them – marketers and importers of video cassettes and CDs, the film producers and their production crew, screen writers and actors, score composers, operators of the thousands of video rental outfits all over the country, distributors, visual artists who design the posters, printers, media practitioners, publicity outfits, journalists, even academics, and countless others – whose standards of living have witnessed considerable improvement. A great many of these professionals have attained the enviable status of urban millionaires.20

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As the visibility of the industry grows, so does the desire to quantify these multiplier effects in more precise terms. The aim is to make Nollywood, a quintessentially informal media economy, more amenable to conventional measurement and accounting, bringing it into the formal realm. This initiative is part of a broader attempt, driven by leading figures in the production sector and endorsed by the Nigerian government, to generate a more reliable empirical framework for measuring video income and exports. For this wing of the video industry, informality is increasingly figured as a problem to be overcome.21 For example, many producers complain that they cannot secure conventional financing for their movies – in the form of bank loans or guarantees – because bankers distrust the opacity and informality of the current distribution system. As a result, undercapitalised producers are at the mercy of loan-sharks, patrons and individual investors who do not require such guarantees and have other ways of ensuring repayment. Many producers argue that access to conventional financing would raise the quality of Nigerian movies, allowing them to secure better distribution deals and improving the Nollywood ‘brand’.22 Formalisation is seen as a solution to the structural shortcomings that restrict Nigeria’s attempts to become a global media powerhouse. As Alessandro Jedlowski argues in an incisive analysis, the push towards a more conventional industry model is being led by a sub-set of producers who wish to see Nollywood shed its informal skin and become a mature business with global reach. They want to see Nollywood movies sold on Amazon and iTunes, screened at European film festivals and broadcast on cable networks. Most importantly, they want a formal distribution system which will allow them to tap into to a potential goldmine: the African-American audience. The aim is to create bigger-budget, conventionally funded movies, and to integrate the rough-and-ready video industry into the world of formal finance and banking.23 If formalisation is to succeed, stronger and more effective regulatory institutions are needed. We are now beginning to see such institutions emerging, albeit slowly and unevenly. The state regulator, the National Film and Video Censors Board, plays an increasingly proactive role in industry development, building on its longstanding censorship and classification remit. In addition, there is an evolving network of industry bodies which make up a loose self-governance structure for the industry, including the Association of Movie Producers, the Video Club Owners Association of Nigeria, the Film and Video Producers and Marketers Association of Nigeria, the Coalition of Nollywood Guilds and Associations (a new umbrella organisation) and so on. However, the Censors Board and the various professional groups rarely see eye to eye, and there is a great deal of conflict between and within the various institutions. One area where the formalisation imperative is particularly visible is copyright enforcement. Nollywood was built on piracy, but attitudes are changing as the industry – led by the Nigerian Copyright Commission and its Strategic Action Against Piracy (STRAP) initiative – attempts to shore up intellectual property protection for producers. In 2003, a hologram sticker was introduced to distinguish legitimate DVDs from fakes.24 In 2007, the industry trialled a licensing system for video clubs and retailers with the aim of reducing piracy while at the same time gathering vital data about the scale of the industry.25 Representatives of the producers’ associations now 60

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monitor street markets to identify violations, and even major hubs of pirate distribution like Alaba International Market are closing down unlicensed stores (sometimes leading to shoot-outs with police).26 These measures have reportedly expanded the zone of formal distribution from 500 to 30,000 retail outlets within a few years, bringing a substantial amount of the distribution sector under state regulation and measurement.27 However, these initiatives do not always work as intended. The hologram initiative was abandoned after the government ran out of stickers, and the video club licensing scheme has generated a huge backlash among exhibitors, leaving its future in doubt. In the last few years, there has also been a curious movement within distribution back towards theatrical exhibition, which is seen as a zone of (relative) formality in the ocean of VCD and video club piracy. This is a surprising turn of events, given the industry’s proudly nontheatrical roots, but in the context of the formalisation imperative it makes sense. Theatrical releasing of videos was first trialled in 1997 when Zeb Ejiro’s video Domitilla (a popular drama about prostitution) screened in several Lagos cinemas in conjunction with cable airings on the African Independent Television channel.28 Today, big-screen releases are becoming more common in Lagos as top-end English-language movies – some of which are shot in 35mm rather than on digital video29 – play in cinemas for extended periods before appearing on VCD. A few titles even have premieres abroad before their theatrical seasons in the domestic market. The general preference among the bigger producers is for a conventional release pattern with individually monetisable windows. Piracy is reduced by delaying the disc release until substantial theatrical revenues are recouped. What are we to make of these efforts to formalise the industry? Is there a deeper logic driving Nollywood’s formalisation imperative, one common to other film industries? Is it appropriate to compare Nigeria to pre-1908 Hollywood, which was on the verge of a long process of formalisation and consolidation beginning with the establishment of the Motion Picture Patents Company? While such comparisons may be tempting, it is best to avoid constructing teleologies of industry evolution. Film industries have different evolutionary paths, and formalisation is not the only possible end-point for a ‘mature’ industry. Informality is still an integral rather than transitory feature of the Nigerian video scene, especially in distribution, because this informality is consistent with the broader political economy of West Africa and because it facilitates the cheap and rapid circulation of videos in a way that no formal system would be able to. It is also important to consider the resistances to formalisation among producers, distributors and consumers. As Jedlowski notes, many smaller producers are more or less happy with the current state of affairs and prefer the flexibility of the informal model. For these producers, ‘the local market is still large enough to make the business worthwhile, and the quality of the products tends to be a secondary issue, with video production designed very specifically for local audiences’.30 These bottom-end producers favour high levels of production, low budgets and a customised/localised mode of address (in the Nigerian context, this typically means making films for religious communities and smaller geo-linguistic markets). For them, the informality of the present distribution system, while certainly a source of revenue leakage, is not necessarily a barrier to making money. The challenge is to get films to market quickly Nollywood at Large

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and to make them as widely available as possible, before the pirates can catch up. Hence we need to see the formalisation imperative as the prerogative of a certain subset of producers, and not the industry as a whole. It is also debatable whether audiences have much to gain from Nollywood becoming more formal. Pirate infrastructures built the industry, and strong competition among informal retailers keeps prices low and delivery fast. There is always access to a diverse supply of movies, and if anything the last few years have been characterised by overproduction – too many films rather than too few. From a consumer perspective, the informal economy ensures easy access and low pricing, and is therefore something to be protected rather than eradicated. However, informality creates other kinds of problems for consumers. At present, one of the biggest gripes is product quality. Audiences seem to be tiring of the quick and dirty Nollywood titles and are eager for more professional features, which are hard to produce under informal conditions. There are also many annoying aspects of the existing production and distribution model – as when producers chop a single movie into two or three instalments and sell them individually (as Blood for Tears Part 1 and Blood for Tears Part 2 [both 2007], for example). Hence, what is essentially one single movie effectively costs double or triple what it should. These are the kinds of deceptive practices that many in the industry want to stamp out. There is also a deeper question lurking in the background of the current debates, regarding the relationship between the informal economy and the state. Nollywood – which as Okoye noted has produced so many ‘urban millionaires’ – has put little back into the public purse. As an informal media economy, it exists outside the sphere of taxation as well as regulation and measurement (see Chapter 3). Profits from the video business have gone to individuals, rather than corporations or institutions. The Nigerian state benefits only indirectly via levies on blank discs.31 Hence the video pirates, and the industry in general, can potentially be accused of depriving their fellow Nigerians of much-needed central revenues – for roads and hospitals, for film schools and archives, for emergency relief and so on. The issue of taxation takes on a particular significance in developing nations with pressing infrastructural needs but limited capacity for revenue collection. Formal–informal relations concern not only the efficiency of distribution systems but also a more fundamentally political question – the role of the state in public life. While Nollywood’s exuberant informality certainly reflects, and makes the best of, the dysfunctional Nigerian economy, it also closes off the possibility of the video industry playing a central part in national economic development. Nollywood is a ‘privatised’ form of media, the product of a commercial industry that has no interest in the statedriven modernisation or the universalist public sphere of African independence movements.32 The driving logic of Nollywood is personal enrichment, not social change. Of course, were the corrupt Nigerian government to receive tax earnings from video producers and distributors, it could not be relied upon to redistribute these to its population in productive ways. Some critics point out that the video industry in its current informal state performs social services in a de facto manner – as when film crews contribute something in return for permission from a traditional chief to shoot in a particular village or neighbourhood (repairing a section of road, for instance).33 62

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But for many African intellectuals committed to collectivist forms of political activism, the rabid entrepreneurialism and consumerism stoked by the Nigerian video economy is understandably disheartening. This underscores the fact that informal media economies are very difficult to reconcile with existing paradigms of media and social analysis. Resisting neat categorisation as virtues or vices, as sources of innovation or exploitation, as relics of the past or talismans of the future, informal media economies in general – and Nigerian video in particular – frustrate the desire for moral master narratives.

FORMALISING INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION Having examined the deep-rooted informality of the video industry and the current campaign for formalisation, let us now consider how these dynamics play out in terms of the international distribution of Nigerian videos. As noted earlier, Nollywood is a business with global dreams. Intricate webs of trade and textual influence connect Lagos and the various regional production centres with diasporic Africans in Europe, the Middle East, North America and the Caribbean. For an aspirational industry like this one, informality is both an asset and a liability. Moradewun Adejunmobi offers a typology of the different modes of transnationality shaping Nigerian video culture, which provides useful contextual information for this discussion.34 First, Adejunmobi reminds us of the geographic situation of African ethnic groups who found themselves divided by one or more national border after the colonial powers’ carve-up of the continent in 1885. The Yoruba people, for example, can be considered transnational as they reside in Nigeria, Benin and Togo. The Hausa population is similarly spread across Nigeria, Niger, Sudan, Cameroon, Ghana, the Ivory Coast and Chad. Second, there is the actual distribution of movies throughout the African continent and throughout diasporic communities in Europe and North America. Third, the movies themselves frequently exhibit a textual kind of transnationalism, for an increasing number are now shot or at least set outside Nigeria, from Benin (A`be. ní [2006]) to the UK (Osuofia in London [2003]). To Adejunmobi’s list we might also add the numerous promotional initiatives through which the industry is seeking to position itself on the world stage, including the annual Nollywood Foundation convention in Los Angeles and the Afro Hollywood Awards in the UK, and the various forms of patronage it receives from its high-profile Hollywood supporters, such as the actor Danny Glover. I will focus on Adejunmobi’s second point, the distribution of Nigerian movies, while also making reference to the other vectors of Nollywood’s transnationality, some of which are co-constitutive. Nollywood has a very strong global presence throughout Africa and in diasporic West African communities elsewhere – but what are the actual channels of distribution? How do the movies reach dispersed, passionate audiences around the world? As we will see, the international distribution network is almost entirely informal, although the small amount of licit trade that exists is highly valued by producers and marketers with their eyes on international expansion. Disc-based distribution is still the lynchpin of Nollywood’s international circulation, although satellite TV and online streaming are rapidly catching up. Nollywood at Large

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Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes with pirated Nollywood DVDs, seized during raids in November 2010 (Image courtesy of Kings County District Attorney’s Office, New York)

Let’s begin with the disc circuits. Nollywood VCDs and DVDs are widely available in Amsterdam, New York, London and other polyglot cities in Europe and North America, where they are sold in diasporic grocery stores and video retailers. These circuits are largely piratical, and enforcement efforts are sporadic at best.35 Foreign copyright authorities have little incentive to protect the rights of overseas rightsholders in the face of more direct pressure from their local counterparts, especially the affiliates of the US studios and record labels. As a result, the rights of less powerful cultural producers, especially those in the developing world, are rarely enforced internationally. There are signs that this situation may be changing as producers become more astute about registering their work for copyright protection. Nigerian industry representatives in the USA have been leading the charge, spearheaded by the increasingly powerful Film-makers Association of Nigeria (FAN), a US-based Nollywood lobby. Working with the local District Attorney’s office, FAN recently orchestrated raids of pirate vendors of Nigerian movies in New York, resulting in the seizure of 10,000 discs from nine stores in Brooklyn’s Flatbush area.36 FAN had reason to be concerned: almost all the Nollywood trade in Flatbush was in bootlegs, with only one store out of ten selling authorised DVDs. The pirate vendors were undercutting the authorised vendor by a considerable margin: pirated discs sold for $3, compared to $5 for legal copies. While FAN’s campaign to enforce Nigerian producers’ rights in the USA is understandable, perhaps commendable, it is not always clear what these initiatives hope to achieve. Anti-piracy raids disperse pirate vending, or drive it underground, rather than eradicate it. As Joe Karaganis argues, raids are a form of ‘selective enforcement’ which ‘picks and chooses targets from the ocean of infringing activity’ and can easily become ‘arbitrary … theatrical, politicized, and a tool of competitive advantage among businesses’ seeking to eliminate low-priced competition.37 Whether 64

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this has any effect on the prevalence of DVD piracy among diasporic communities in the USA remains to be seen. In addition to international DVD and VCD circuits, Nigerian movies are also appearing in increasing numbers on satellite TV networks. English-language Nollywood movies, the most internationally mobile, can now be seen on two dedicated twenty-four-hour channels hosted by the South Africa-based MNet – Africa Magic and Africa Magic Plus. These channels have opened up Nigerian film culture to audiences across Africa. Even though few African households can afford satellite TV subscriptions, these channels permeate public spaces like restaurants and bars, vastly increasing the reach of video culture. Specialist channels like Nollywood Movies (UK) and the Africa Channel (USA and UK) offer a similar service for diasporic viewers. Satellite TV broadcasting of Nigerian movies is a largely formal economy, with licence fees paid to producers – although it is often alleged that fees are far too low to sustain production. There are also rumours of widespread piracy by some of the smaller regional broadcasters in Africa. Overlaying the largely informal disc circuits and the largely formal satellite TV circuits is an online distribution ecology. This has both formal and informal wings. Legal video-on-demand services like Izogn Movies – a streaming site which offers 5,000 movies for online rental at $US0.99 to US$1.99 per film, facilitating around 38,000 movie purchases a month38 – coexist with pirate sites that stream the latest films without authorisation. In these illicit sites, which make their money from display ads, the objective is to maximise visitor traffic. This grey economy of online video (see Chapter 6) includes dedicated Nollywood sites as well as more general African culture portals, which feature video streaming alongside forums, chat, games, dating and other attractions. The experience of watching a movie on one of these sites is quite distinctive: imagine a small, pixellated image, surrounded by banner ads and occasional pop-ups, with scrolling white text superimposed over the image, proudly announcing the website’s URL, and often advertising other things like migration advice and dating services.39 There is also a vast amount of free Nigerian video content on YouTube, much of it uploaded by fans. Producers can have this content removed by issuing a report of copyright infringement to YouTube, but this usually results in the content being reposted elsewhere under a different username. Nigerian producers with their sights set on international expansion face a difficult task in monetising international streaming and disc circuits, which are so thoroughly informal in nature. While there are many new distribution initiatives on the horizon, it will be a long time before Nigerian videos surface on the shelves of HMV, or in the catalogues of Netflix and Lovefilm. Mainstream retailers in the affluent Euro-American markets are reluctant to deal with Nigerian producers directly and require an association with established local or multinational companies, and these links have yet to take shape. The legal international sales channels that do exist are unreliable: they are slower than their pirate counterparts, and usually more expensive. This state of affairs has led to much anxious commentary about the state of the distribution system in Nigerian newspaper columns, industry forums, blogs and message boards. Rather than thinking exclusively about the informal nature of Nollywood’s global circulation in terms of crisis and leakage, it is important to acknowledge the structural Nollywood at Large

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advantages of informality. No formal system, however constituted, would be able to rival piracy’s thorough permeation of the West African diaspora. While formal distribution would certainly be more effective in getting Nigerian films into certain key markets (such as film festivals and online retailers), the trade-off would be an increase in price. Widespread international piracy may be the burden that Nollywood has to bear for its massive popularity. To complicate things further, there are those outside Nigeria who suggest that the problem is not too little but too much distribution. Many film-makers and intellectuals in other African countries, especially Anglophone nations like Ghana and Tanzania, claim that Nollywood has decimated their indigenous video industries by ‘dumping’ large amounts of cheap product in local markets and by polluting their national cultures with the crass individualism of the videos. Ghana has started imposing a levy on visiting Nigerian actors and producers, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo there have been moves to ban Nollywood films.40 Throughout Africa, critics and intellectuals – many of whom come from the literary establishment – see in video culture the intrusion of western vulgarity and individualism into the African cultural space: Among Africa’s elites, hostility is almost uniform … Cultural critics complain about ‘macabre scenes full of sorcery’ in the films. The more alarmist describe Nigerian directors and producers as voodoo priests casting malign spells over audiences in other countries. They talk of the ‘Nigerianisation’ of Africa, worrying that the whole continent has come to ‘snap its fingers the Nigerian way’ … Five decades after much of Africa gained independence, its elites fear being re-colonised, this time from within the continent. ‘The Nigerians will eat everything we have,’ says a former official at the Ghanaian ministry of chieftaincy and culture.41

This critique of Nollywood’s influence abroad brings to mind the cultural imperialism effect often attributed to Hollywood. In the above claims we can see an economicprotectionist and a cultural-nationalist argument intertwining, and it is difficult to draw a clear line between the two. This serves as a reminder that minor cinemas also have their critics. To a young film-maker in Accra struggling to find funding for the next production, Nigerian media may well be a more threatening and corrosive force than US cinema.42 Nollywood, the scrappy underdog of global cinema, may also be its next hegemon.

CONCLUSION Nollywood emerges from these various debates as an industry which is simultaneously too big and not big enough, a symbolic language which is excessively local and overly westernised, an industry subject to too much and too little regulation. This diversity of viewpoints is unsurprising, given how Nigerian video has permeated so many aspects of everyday life in West Africa. Popularity inevitably brings controversy, and the neverending debate about the future of the industry is proof of this. Such debates represent an interesting twist in the remarkable Nollywood story. 66

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The video industry is unique in that it has evolved from an economy based on illegal duplication of foreign films to a legitimate, though largely informal, economy trading in locally produced product. With its nontheatrical distribution model, Nollywood is proof that informality can underwrite large-scale audiovisual cultures as well as ephemeral circuits. At this stage, the future of the industry’s formalisation imperative is uncertain, although it seems unlikely that increased regulation will substantially alter the deep-seated informality of current distribution practice. It will be fascinating to see what directions the industry goes in over the next decade, and whether industry-wide reforms will be successful or whether they will create further fragmentation and diversification in the distribution sector. This chapter has examined in detail the mechanics of a largely informal film industry, one built on pre-existing pirate circuits. The next chapter takes us away from industry analysis and towards a discussion of media ethics, as we consider the politics of copyright infringement in a transnational frame.

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Pirate DVDs on sale at Tepito, Mexico City (Livia Radwanksi)

5 Six Faces of Piracy

In 1992, shortly after his epic film Malcolm X came out in cinemas, Spike Lee was patrolling the streets of Harlem with a baseball bat. Lee was determined to keep his movie out of the hands of the street vendors who sell pirate copies of new releases, so the firebrand director called a few of his beefier associates – ‘muscle’, in Lee’s words – and took matters into his own hands. Lee and his mates headed for 125th Street, then a popular trading site for bootleggers, to chase vendors away under threat of force. For Lee, this was a question of ethics: he expected that the black communities that supported and enjoyed his film would, as a matter of principle, see it through the proper channels. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with the African-American consumer in some urban areas,’ he lamented. ‘They want to buy an inferior product and get something for a bargain.’1 Though few film-makers adopt this hands-on enforcement model, most share Lee’s frustration when it comes to piracy. It is understandable that a producer or director investing years of work into a project wants to see a return on their investment. Debate about the ‘copyright wars’ returns to this point frequently, focusing on questions of revenue leakage and financial losses to cultural producers. The Motion Picture Association is keen to remind us of the economic and social cost of piracy by invoking dramatic statistics such as these: • • • •

•

the major US studios lose $6.1 billion globally each year as a result of piracy, losses to audiovisual industries worldwide are estimated at $18.2 billion annually, millions of illegal discs and thousands of burners are seized in anti-piracy operations each year, 80 per cent of global piracy originates from outside the USA, with especially high levels of pirate audiovisual consumption occurring in China (90 per cent), Russia (79 per cent) and Thailand (79 per cent), piracy operations have links to terrorist outfits, prostitution rings, drug smugglers and organised crime syndicates.2

For the MPAA, piracy is defined as ‘the unauthorized copying, distribution, performance or other use of copyrighted materials’.3 Other industry bodies, such as the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia, define piracy even more broadly, as ‘any form of revenue leakage from any point in the value chain’4 – a phrase which highlights how piracy often becomes a scapegoat for the industry’s Six Faces of Piracy

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structural problems. In the context of the so-called copyright wars, the ‘pirate’ label is now a discursive weapon to be deployed against a wide range of perceived enemies. The term is strategically used to define distribution activities occurring outside the sphere of rights-holder revenue-generation as deviant and exceptional. But as we have seen throughout this book, film piracy is as old as cinema itself and needs to be understood as an inherent feature of audiovisual distribution rather than an aberration. In previous chapters we encountered a wide array of informal circuits, from bootleg video rings to file-sharing networks (Chapter 3). We examined the role pirate networks play within legitimate film industries and saw evidence of their productive capacities (Chapter 4). My aim throughout has been to take some of the heat out of the piracy debate by looking at how a diverse range of networks function, steering clear of ‘copyright wars’ rhetoric in favour of a materialist approach. Now, having seen how diverse pirate circuits work in practice, we can consider some of the thorny ethical and philosophical questions around unauthorised copying. In this chapter I argue that piracy debates need to be opened up to a more diverse range of voices, both in terms of their implicit geography and their conceptual foundations. In most nations, and especially in the USA, the discussion about media piracy is heavily polarised. The debate is not really a debate at all but a repetitive performance of partisan posturing, with two viewpoints dominating above all others: an industry-driven anti-piracy/pro-copyright line pitched against an equally shrill anticopyright/pro-piracy defence by consumer advocates and libertarians. This headbutting does not do justice to the complexity of the matters before us. It is reductive, idealistic and implicitly ethnocentric, in ways I will explain shortly. Instead of thinking of piracy as a singular practice, it is necessary to think in terms of piracies. Depending on the context, piracy may be theft or a legitimate business practice, a free speech act or a form of political resistance. Sometimes it is all these things at once. The discussion that follows seeks to untangle some of these threads by surveying six different ethical and philosophical positions on copyright infringement – what I call the six faces of piracy. This is not an exhaustive account of all possible positions but a way to open up the conversation to a broader range of viewpoints. In the final section of the chapter, I bring some of these threads together with a case study of a pirate DVD vendor at the Tepito market in Mexico City, foregrounding how pirate circuits can also be networks for film preservation and archiving, and how the lines between formality and informality are often very blurry indeed.

COPYRIGHT AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF PIRACY The intellectual property (IP) system – encompassing copyright, patent and trademark law and regulation – is promoted by media industries as a common-sense way of protecting the rights of cultural producers, rewarding them for their efforts and fostering future innovation. But intellectual property is itself a historically and culturally specific idea, not a moral absolute. The philosophical foundation of copyright – the concept of private property as an organising principle of society and the economy – can be found in the shift from feudal to early modern social structures 70

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in Europe. Intellectual property may be an integral part of capitalist thought and practice, but it is neither universal nor historically constant. The history of copyright has been the subject of countless studies.5 While precedents for copyright can be found in ancient Greece, Italy and the Netherlands, most scholars trace the origins of modern copyright to early eighteenth-century England, and specifically to the passing of the Statute of Anne in 1710. Named after the reigning monarch, this statute provided authors and publishers with the first enforceable period of monopoly control over their work – a period of fourteen years, extendable once only, after which a work would enter into the public domain. This was considered to be a fair trade-off between the competing demands of individual authors and society at large, which was presumed to benefit from a freely accessible archive of cultural production. This way of thinking about the role of copyright – as a compromise between producers and consumers – is fundamental to legal doctrine, entrenching the idea that the interests of these two camps are opposed. From this perspective, it is the job of law to ‘balance’ competing needs and desires. The globalisation of copyright law has gathered pace since the late nineteenth century. In 1886, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works was signed by a number of European nations, and would go on to become the key template for global copyright in the twentieth century.6 The USA passed its own International Copyright Act in 1891, which extended protection to foreign authors for the first time. This internationalisation was consolidated and extended with the 1948 Brussels Convention (which granted copyright protection to cinema) and the 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which formed part of the final Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The GATT’s successor, the World Trade Organisation, is a key driver of what John Frow calls the ‘new world order in knowledge’.7 A few key points can be drawn from this brief account. First, copyright works to convert knowledge into capital, yet its reach extends beyond the realm of the economic and into the symbolic: it designates forms of cultural production as legitimate or illegitimate based on a set of values which privilege originality and innovation. In contrast, the public domain is always defined negatively, as that which is ‘left over after all other rights have been defined and distributed’.8 Second, copyright terms have increased steadily over time, meaning that cultural production is kept out of the public domain for longer periods. Copyright terms now extend up to seventy years after the death of the creator in many territories. Term extensions have been a key feature of recent US trade pacts, such as the Free Trade Agreements signed with Australia and South Korea. Wherever IP industries have political clout, constant pressure for further extensions exists. In 2011 the Council of the European Union extended the term of copyright protection for sound recordings from fifty to seventy years, just in time to stop multiplatinum albums by the Rolling Stones and The Who from falling into the public domain. The debates currently raging about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a controversial plurilateral treaty which promises to significantly increase enforcement obligations in signatory nations, provide a taste of the IP maximalism to come.9 Six Faces of Piracy

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Third, ‘art’ and ‘business’ are not always diametrically opposed forces in IP debates. The history of copyright contains many examples of artists who have been more interested in the extension of moral and property rights than in the future of the public domain. Wordsworth, Twain and Dickens were all champions of copyright, as are Metallica and George Lucas today.10 We should also note that copyright law has on some occasions also been used as a tool to protect the rights of individual artists against corporate interests. For example, the moral rights (droit d’auteur) provision of European copyright law was the basis for John Huston’s court victory over MGM in relation to the colourisation of the 1950 film The Asphalt Jungle.11 Hence it is not always easy to separate the interests of individual producers, media corporations, cultural industry sectors and the public within these IP skirmishes. Given the high visibility of today’s digital copyright debate, which is marked by suspicion and misunderstanding on both sides, there is a need to acknowledge that ideas about copyright and its infringement are historically contingent, and are therefore subject to change and contestation. Understanding the historical and spatial variability of ‘piracy’ is the key to a more complex and productive debate. This means approaching piracy not as something to be attacked or defended but as an integral part of the global political economy of media, with diverse manifestations and effects. Piracy must be defined in the plural. With this aim in mind, the next section offers a critical reading of six different philosophical positions on copyright infringement: piracy as theft, free enterprise, free speech, authorship, resistance and access.

PIRACY AS THEFT Let’s begin with the most common understanding of piracy, one enshrined in legal doctrine and industry practice. As indicated above, the purpose of copyright as a regulatory system is to ensure that levels of protection for IP rights-holders are on a par with those extended to other property owners, such as land owners or car owners. From this perspective, copyright is seen as something to be legislatively consolidated and pedagogically entrenched. Piracy, on the other hand, is imagined as an act of social and economic deviance – that is, as theft. In the world of film, this approach to piracy is best exemplified by the actions of the Motion Picture Association of America and its international wing, the Motion Picture Association. No one has been more vocal in the denunciations of piracy nor more florid in their rhetoric than former MPAA president Jack Valenti. A former aide to Lyndon Johnson, this powerful lobbyist ran the MPAA from 1966 until 2004. He contributed significantly to several landmark legal offensives, including the failed 1984 Sony Corp vs Universal City Studios case (the ‘Betamax case’), which sought to stamp out the booming home video industry, and the much-maligned Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which introduced controversial ‘anticircumvention’ restrictions. Now deceased, Valenti was a legendary orator. During Congressional hearings for the Betamax case, he famously quipped that ‘the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone’. He regularly referred to piracy as ‘a pandemic’ which robs IP industries of what is rightfully theirs, and was also fond of making unsubstantiated 72

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connections between piracy operations and terrorist groups including Hezbollah, Hamas, the IRA, Al Qaeda and Lashka-e-Toiba.12 The MPAA’s war on piracy strives to embed an ethics of copyright in the global mindset. MPAA ad campaigns attempt to counter the belief that piracy is a victimless crime by featuring Hollywood technicians and tradespeople lamenting the threat that piracy poses to their livelihoods.13 MPAA competitions such as the ‘Xcellent Xtreme Challenge’ offer DVDs and Hollywood studio trips to children who submit anti-piracy essays. The organisation’s website even promotes a ‘Copyright Kids’ game (www.copyrightkids.org) where children can familiarise themselves with the virtues of IP by registering their own poems, paintings and drawings for protection.14 While the USA has been the key driver of international IP maximalism, anti-piracy campaigning and enforcement is a feature of many national media industries. Hong Kong’s film community famously came out in force against disc piracy on a national day of action in March 1999, when cinemas shut their doors and stars including Jackie Chan, Steven Chow, Leon Lai and Anita Mui led a protest march to the Hong Kong Central Government Offices. In Australia, anti-piracy ad campaigns draw a link between disc piracy and the dismal state of the Australian film industry, imploring the consumer to ‘think about what you’re really burning’. Key players in the Indian film industry are now hiring ‘cyber hitmen’ to take down pirate movie websites by crashing their servers with DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks.15 And as we saw in the previous chapter, copyright enforcement is now the number one priority for many Nigerian film-makers. These various examples illustrate the importance of IP enforcement for film industries in all nations. Like IP law itself, anti-piracy campaigning is increasingly a global phenomenon. Industry estimates of losses due to piracy, used widely in these campaigns, are controversial. For many years, these figures were based on calculations which presumed that for each movie accessed illegally, a legitimate version of the same film went unsold. This logic is dubious as it ignores the influence of pricing levels and distributive contingencies in media consumption. Furthermore, reports of industry losses are usually based on gross rather than net figures, and are necessarily suspect given that piracy’s subterranean and disreputable nature means attempts to quantify it are inevitably speculative.16 Methodologies have improved in recent years,17 but industry data collection is inevitably driven by a public relations imperative. As Majid Yar notes, delineating the empirical contours of the piracy ‘epidemic’ has as much to do with increasing amounts of everyday activity being criminalised as it does with verifiable increases in unauthorised distribution: high figures put pressure on legislators to criminalize, and on enforcement agencies to police more rigorously; the tightening of copyright laws produces more ‘copyright theft’ as previously legal or tolerated uses are prohibited, and the more intensive policing of ‘piracy’ results in more seizures; these in turn produce new estimates suggesting that the ‘epidemic’ continues to grow unabated; which then legitimates industry calls for even more vigorous action.18

So, while film producers and studios do have legitimate concerns about revenue ‘leakage’, the war on piracy also needs to be understood as a public relations exercise Six Faces of Piracy

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aimed at reinforcing a deferential relationship to copyright and showing the vulnerable side of a powerful industry. Having discussed some of the features of anti-piracy discourse, I now offer another reading of piracy, one which sees copying not as a scourge but as a potential business model.

PIRACY AS FREE ENTERPRISE While several of the approaches to piracy discussed here involve an implicit critique of the free market, one does not. This perspective – what we might call the laissezfaire approach – reads piracy as the purest form of free enterprise. Unimpeded by restrictive legislation and monopolistic market structures, piracy from this vantage point can be appreciated as a flourishing of commercial activity catering directly to market needs. As Ronald Bettig notes, there is a longstanding economic argument that greater efficiency can be achieved in a liberalised regulatory environment where the reduction in returns to copyright holders would be offset by productivity gains arising from lower prices and wider availability of cultural goods.19 This argument for ‘weak copyright’ is a recurrent feature of regulation debates. Even The Economist has suggested that copyright terms should be stripped back to fourteen or twenty-eight years.20 In other words, an argument can be made on economic grounds alone that strong copyright is undesirable. If we push this argument to its logical limit, it becomes possible to read piracy as the quintessential form of free enterprise. This view suggests that the two competing objectives which copyright seeks to balance – collective progress and individual profit – can be folded into one another. This way of thinking about piracy foregrounds some of its economically generative dimensions. It highlights that box-office revenue is not the only way film consumption can create economic value, and emphasises that piracy is ultimately a mode of consumption which can be monetised in numerous ways (one example is product placement in movies, where brand value is increased with unauthorised circulation). It also breeds demand for cinema in demographics that may one day ripen into viable formal markets. From this laissez-faire perspective, copyright protects one kind of economic activity but, in doing so, stifles the possibility of other, perhaps more creative, revenue-generating arrangements. The historian Adrian Johns argues that the idea of piracy as ‘a business force’ has long been a driver of anti-IP movements, up to and including those of today’s opensource movement.21 Johns notes that many of the economists and public intellectuals associated with a critique of copyright – including Ronald Coase and Oliver Smedley – were motivated not by anti-establishment sentiment or a commitment to redistributive justice but by a combination of free-enterprise orthodoxy, a philosophical commitment to individualism, distrust of state regulation and loathing of the BBC ‘monopoly’. This argument was most powerfully articulated by the Institute for Economic Affairs in a 1965 pamphlet on radio regulation in the UK, which featured a section entitled ‘Piracy as a Business Force’. According to Johns, these figures ‘made the public-monopoly broadcasting system into a lynchpin of their arguments against Keynesian orthodoxy’.22 These anti-copyright debates were taking place at the same 74

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time as the pirate radio ships moored off the coast of England were beginning their illegal broadcasts, and Johns argues that the two events were ideologically connected. (One of the ships was called the Laissez-Faire.) This alternative history of pirate philosophy – which connects pirate radio culture to what would become Thatcherite free-market ideology – offers compelling evidence of the link between piracy and economic liberalism in the UK. A different though parallel relation between the free market and pirate practice can be found in present-day China, the source of many of the bootleg DVDs sold around the world. The PRC’s thriving pirate economy is often painted as the Mr Hyde to formal capitalism’s Dr Jekyll, but this only reveals part of the story. Here, the lines between formal and informal business are often blurred, with DVD factories producing legal copies during the daytime and pirate copies of the same film during the evening.23 This grey economy is a side-effect of the boom in legal enterprise that has followed China’s accession to the WTO, as piracy is dependent on factors such as increased consumer activity, availability of digital technology and new levels of commercial autonomy for Chinese businesses. Illustrating the overlap between the formal and the informal, Warner Bros.’ subsidiary in the PRC even chose as its first home video licensee a well-known piracy outfit, the Xianke company.24 As this suggests, in China the economic dynamics of pirate activity are more complex than the mere production of bootleg DVDs. Weak Chinese enforcement of western IP creates profit opportunities right along the media supply chain, and there will always be a business ready to take these up. Many cheaply produced DVD players are not equipped with the anti-copying mechanisms that make life difficult for consumers – region coding, Macrovision, copy protection – because the manufacturers of these units are not part of vertically integrated audiovisual conglomerates and have little to gain from the extra costs incurred through building copy-prevention technology into their players.25 This kind of IP-weak environment is piratical, yes, but it can also be read as a more pure kind of free market. In comparison to an oligopolistic, vertically integrated, top-heavy capitalism which perpetuates itself through technical standards and IP regulation, this ‘cockroach capitalism’ is speedy, nimble and furtive.26 Over the years the Japanese electronics giant Sony Corporation has evolved from cockroach to insect-killer, reflecting an evolving relationship to the formal. At the time of the Betamax case, Sony was a hardware manufacturer on the receiving end of the MPAA’s anti-home video offensive. It was portrayed by the studios as a rogue company trying to erode copyright protection and destabilise the industry. Two decades later, Sony is now in the opposite position. Since its purchase of Columbia Pictures, it has become a Hollywood giant which takes a very hard line on piracy. One attempt to shore up IP protection in the face of endemic copying involved embedding spyware and data-collection programs into the CDs of Sony-BMG artists, a strategy which became a public relations disaster.27 The manufacture of cheap hardware that thumbs its nose at the technical standards of Big Hollywood is close to a pure version of cockroach capitalism, but piracy is its epitome. In the laissez-faire imaginary, piracy fills gaps in the market with maximum efficiency, catering to demand when and where legitimate industries are Six Faces of Piracy

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unwilling or unable to do so. Consider the following quote from Bob Vallone, General Manager of Hong Kong chain UA Cinemas: The pirates have become so wealthy they have superior manufacturing equipment lines over legitimate manufacturers and licensees. Their network of distribution is to be envied. They can get movies and music CDs onto the streets of Asia virtually overnight.28

Here we have a reading of the pirate which begrudgingly admires his/her speed, flexibility and technological savvy – all the qualities of the network society’s idealised citizen. While the industry position views piracy as a mortal threat to film trade, a laissez-faire reading sees the informal networks that constitute piracy operations as the ultimate ‘new economy’ and as a potential model for other distribution circuits. And as we shall now see, piracy can also be a hot-button political issue.

PIRACY AS FREE SPEECH Arguably the most effective critiques of current copyright law have come from a group of vocal, tech-savvy American liberals. Affiliated with the ‘free culture’ movement and such bastions of techno-libertarianism as Wired29 magazine and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, commentators like Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow are attempting to make copyright reform a mainstream political issue. They argue that copyright’s intended balance between the public interest (which requires that people can easily access and use information) and the free market (requiring frameworks to protect property rights and provide secure incentives for innovation) is increasingly favouring the latter over the former. These writers – and many others – feel that the piracy issue is inextricably linked to the right of free expression. The sympathies of Lessig and his contemporaries lie with consumers and creatives. They are concerned, on the one hand, with the harsh penalties that peer-topeer downloading attracts, with our inability to legally transfer data between different pieces of hardware, with the bugs and spyware that jam up our computers. At the same time, they seek a way through the copyright minefield for directors, writers, musicians, DJs, animators and software developers, via legal recognition of appropriative cut’n’paste techniques as legitimate forms of expression. In his book Copyrights and Copywrongs, Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses the history of copyright as it relates to literature, film, music and software, arguing that the current hardlockdown phase of IP regulation is stifling creativity. He proposes a system of ‘thin protection’ as the best way to ensure the fair compensation of creatives while still fostering a culture of innovation and freedom of information.30 Michael Strangelove takes a more anarchic approach in his study The Empire of Mind, lamenting the internet’s transformation from a space of culture-jamming and activism into a marketplace ruled by IP autocrats.31 For Strangelove, piracy is a progressive act designed to take back what should rightfully belong to everyone – the liberating potential of digital technology. This kind of popular copyright critique is reminiscent of the hacker ethos of the free software movement32 and an older generation of culture-jamming activism. 76

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Lessig, a former Young Republican and now Stanford law professor, is the most powerful figure in this movement and the driving force behind Creative Commons, an easy-to-use alternative to copyright licensing. Creative Commons operates on a ‘some rights reserved’ principle: artists who license a work this way can still benefit financially from its use, but they may also give permission for the work to be used creatively by others (as samples, as source code and so on) or for non-profit purposes. Lessig’s influential books The Future of Ideas, Free Culture and Remix have become bibles for the copyright reform movement.33 Free Culture has even spawned its own student movement, which is increasingly visible on US college campuses. Lessig’s brand of copyright activism is grounded in the liberal values of informational freedom and personal liberty. He argues that forms of appropriative cultural production are under threat from the ‘copyright warriors’ whose restrictive IP laws are harming free enterprise and suppressing the creativity of users. The solution is a weakening – not a wholesale dismantling – of IP law. In Lessig’s words, ‘Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.’34 Like the laissez-faire crowd referred to earlier, Lessig sees excessive regulation as a threat. This is a similar sentiment to that espoused in other recent high-profile interventions in IP and innovation debates, such as Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) and Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks.35 The liberal copyright critique advanced by these critics is a reformist position which seeks a taming of IP maximalism rather than the wholesale overthrow of the political and economic systems of which it is a part. Lessig, like most copyright liberals, insists that his ‘message is absolutely not antimarket’.36 While noting that piracy has long been a constitutive feature of the content industries, he constantly declares his opposition to ‘theft’, drawing a line in the sand between acceptable piracy (cut’n’paste cultural production, culture jamming, remix culture) and stealing. But as Kavita Philip correctly notes, this argument is somewhat ethnocentric, given that the ‘creative’ pirates defended by Lessig are typically white and middle-class while ‘uncreative’ mass reproduction is associated with the developing world.37 Consider the following quote from Lessig, which makes a quintessentially liberal connection between property rights and freedom: A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don’t get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can’t get paid, is anarchy, not freedom … Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it.38

The careless use of the word ‘queered’ here should alert us to some of the exclusions that underwrite Lessig’s distinction between appropriation and theft, and which also animate the arguments of his colleagues. This is a point to which we will return shortly. In the meantime, let’s consider another reading of piracy, this time from a poststructuralist perspective. Six Faces of Piracy

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PIRACY AS AUTHORSHIP While the arguments profiled so far concern issues of access, economy and politics, cultural theorists and philosophers have critiqued intellectual property by dismantling one of its foundational concepts: authorship. By approaching the author as a textual effect rather than a sovereign expressive agent, poststructuralist thinkers including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes have sought to dismantle commonsensical ideas about originality, innovation and expression. From this perspective, all authorship involves piracy. If we take these ideas in a slightly different direction, we end up with an equally compelling question: is piracy a form of authorship? The postmodern critique of the author draws attention to the historical specificity of our intellectual property system and how it formalises a particular concept of invention and creativity. What passes for originality or appropriation, as opposed to theft or forgery, is in most cases a by-product of IP law rather than universal standards of creative conduct. If we accept that the structural basis of intellectual property is culturally specific, then the logical next step is to ask how ideas about property, authorship and originality are propagated and sustained – and how we might go about changing them. Poststructuralist and postmodern theories provide some conceptual tools which we can use to scrutinise these processes. A famous attack on conventional notions of authorship comes via Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Death of the Author’. Arguing that ‘it is language which speaks, not the author’, Barthes seeks to cut the text loose from the discursive anchors provided by what we understand as authorship.39 By ‘death’, he refers not only to the redundancy of the author as a critical category but also to a kind of transformation that occurs during the act of writing: ‘the author enters into his own death, writing begins’.40 Most importantly for our purposes, Barthes sees the act of creation not as the labour of a unified expressive soul but as the selection and combination of fragments of alreadyexisting discourse: a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture … the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as to never rest on any of them.41

This model of authorship presents a problem for the notions of originality and innovation which underwrite IP law. If originality is now impossible and the role of the artist or writer is simply to rearrange existing discourse in new combinations, what makes a pirate different from an artist? Only the fact that they rest too long on one particular site, resisting copyright’s call to move along in a timely fashion. The work of Derrida offers a more explicit critique of copyright law. His wellknown essay ‘Limited Inc a b c’ – originally written as a response to the philosopher John Searle, who had earlier published a scathing critique of Derrida – delights in mocking his opponent along with the principles and practices of copyright. The 78

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purported authorship of Searle (to whom he slyly refers as Sarl; SA in French stands for société anonyme, and denotes a publicly limited company) is sent up in the opening paragraphs, in which Derrida suggests that his opponent’s claim to copyright is fraudulent given that their correspondence is dialogic in nature, the two writers have colleagues in common, and that Searle acknowledges a family member in a footnote: If John R. Searle owes a debt to D. Searle concerning this discussion, then the ‘true’ copyright ought to belong … to a Searle who is divided, multiplied, conjugated, shared. What a complicated signature! And one that becomes even more complex when the debt includes my old friend, H. Dreyfus, with whom I myself have worked, discussed, exchanged ideas, so that if it is indeed through him that the Searles have ‘read’ me, ‘understood’ me, and ‘replied’ to me, then I, too, can claim a stake in the ‘action’ or ‘obligation,’ the stocks and bonds, of this holding company, the Copyright Trust.42

Derrida’s point is that every act of creation is indebted to what has gone before it, and that all this sits precariously on the shifting sands of language, a system of arbitrary webs of signification. If the materials with which the artist is working are not their own, how can one claim to be the sole creator – much less the owner – of a particular text? The same spirit animates the opening to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari’s A Thousand Plateaus, in which the authors jibe that ‘Since each of us was several, there was already a crowd.’43 This line of argument suggests that the creation of a text is in some way a process of selecting from what has gone before. To be an author, then, involves the recombination of these elements into a coherent whole. The logical conclusion is that authorship and creativity are piratical. Does it also hold that piracy is creative, or a form of authorship? This depends on the context. As we will see in the case study at the end of this chapter, many forms of commercial disc piracy involve substantial modification and ‘enhancement’ of content which could be understood as forms of creativity. The piracy-as-authorship argument does important work in destabilising the concepts of creative ownership and moral rights to control of a work, and the logical extension of this argument is indeed to see piracy as authorship. Returning now to film studies, we can identify many potential sites where these propositions about authorship come into conflict with the discursive structures that regulate film culture. One example is genre. Key genre theorists such as Steve Neale have defined genre as an agreed pact between producer and audience, and in so doing have sought to qualify the once-dominant auteur theory with a more sophisticated model of formal evolution, one which acknowledges the cultural labour of audiences.44 The tension between the auteur model of film analysis and the genre model therefore requires us to rethink both the role and value of the author. Any text, whether it conforms to or confounds the norms of established genres, relies on our familiarity with at least some of the texts and styles it does or does not invoke. Without this, it would be meaningless – and unprofitable. Genre films illustrate particularly clearly the ways that conventional narrative structure, formal elements and characters convey indexed meanings, so that audience labour (prior filmgoing experience) is converted into cultural capital. ‘Innovation’ lies in the selection and combination of pre-existing elements. All films function in this way, including those that claim to break every rule Six Faces of Piracy

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of narrative cinema while still conforming to the well-established meta-genres of the art film, the experimental film and so on. Genre theory teaches us that cinema is a hall of mirrors, with each new text reflecting its constituent parts. From this perspective, it is difficult to see how a copyright system which attributes authorship to one entity alone can equitably redistribute revenues. The law is a blunt instrument for these delicate problems.45 Today’s piracy debate relocates these discussions about originality and authorship in cultural production to the sphere of distribution. If genre theory suggests that traditional ‘auteurist’ claims to authorship have as much or as little moral weight as other modes of cultural production, does this also weaken the implication that only one kind of creativity gives the moral right to control how a work is distributed? Destabilising authorship necessarily calls into question our assumptions, formalised in IP law, about the role that originality plays in determining who controls access to the work. The question remains the same: what moral claim can be legitimately exercised over the distribution of cultural products created in complex socio-symbolic contexts where the origins of a concept, phrase, image or riff are multi-dimensional and interrelated? Having briefly sampled the poststructuralist critique of authorship, and considered its implications for piracy debates, let us now turn to Marxist critique for a different take on the issue.

PIRACY AS RESISTANCE While film industry lobbyists decry piracy, postmodernists read it as an intrinsic component of authorship and cyber-libertarians see it as a business model, Marxist critics have interpreted piracy as a form of subversion. Scholars in the critical political economy tradition foreground issues of power and resistance within the media industries. They draw our attention to the ‘expansionary logic’ of capital and to issues of ownership, regulation and control.46 As well as being texts, films are understood as ‘commodities whose value is derived from the labour that makes them’.47 From this perspective, copyright is a hegemonic legal institution which converts information and labour into capital. As copyright’s maligned Other, the act of piracy takes on a certain political value. Unlike Lessig, these critics are decidedly antimarket; they view the media as an architecture of control and exploitation which operates in the service of capitalism. They insist on the importance of class as an explanatory category. Ronald V. Bettig, in his authoritative book Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property, argues that copyright represents a strategy of property regulation and market colonisation operating in the service of the international bourgeoisie. Bettig provides a detailed history of copyright law, highlighting the ‘essential connection between the rise of capitalism, the extension of commodity relations into literary and artistic domains, and the emergence of the printing press’.48 He notes how the US government, in close consultation with the MPAA, has spread copyright culture globally through trade sanctions against recalcitrant nations, FTAs with built-in IP boosters, multilateral initiatives such as GATT and the WTO, and increased 80

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infringement penalties and enforcement efforts. Bettig’s reading of the home video turf wars, of which the Betamax case was the most spectacular moment, draws the following conclusion: The ultimate goal has been to raise the effectiveness and comprehensiveness of the international intellectual property system in order to create or extend markets exploitable not only for US home-video distributors but for other communications and mass media transnationals as well.49

For Bettig, pirate circuits are spheres of commercial activity which have yet to be (re)colonised by transnational audiovisual empires. The conversion of pirate markets into legitimate markets effectively means handing them over Hollywood. The argument here is that piracy, in its obstruction of capitalist domination, represents a form of resistance. In addition to exploring issues of control and ownership, Toby Miller and his coauthors open up a new direction for class analysis in media studies by exploring the political economy of film labour. Their book Global Hollywood is concerned not only with media owners but also with the ‘below-the-line’ workers who paint the sets and drive the delivery vans. They argue that intellectual property law is one of the key enablers of the major studios’ exploitative practices: ‘IP’s transformation of knowledge into property traditionally prioritises ownership over use, creators over audiences and production over reception’.50 Global Hollywood lists countless examples of heavyhanded IP enforcement, such as Disney’s lawsuit against a Florida school over the copyrighted cartoon characters painted on its buildings. It offers a sophisticated theorisation of piracy which revolves around a question that is also central to this book – whether piracy should be taken seriously as a form of film distribution. While noting that pirate operations frequently involve exploitation of various kinds and may interface with state and corporate networks in myriad ways, they approvingly invoke Michel de Certeau’s model of the tactical in their discussion of ‘mobile, small-scale pirate networks that cater to local populations rooted in the practices of “transformative appropriation” ’.51 Here, as in the work of Bettig, piracy is implicitly valorised for its challenge to the Hollywood status quo. The Hong Kong-based media critic Laikwan Pang takes this argument further. In polemical style, Pang mounts a reading of pirate media ‘as a critical interrogation of today’s international cultural politics’.52 Through a textual and industrial analysis of Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003/4), she argues that Hollywood has freely pilfered textual content from Asian cinemas while simultaneously waging rhetorical war against copyright infringement. For Pang, the difference between the two forms of piracy is legality, which is of course defined according to structures that favour Hollywood. Pang’s work mounts a compelling challenge to dominant copyright discourse – but it also tends at times to construct a binary opposition between a pillaging West and a cowering Rest, with ‘Asia’ presented as the passive victim of cultural imperialism.53 This is a common feature of what we might call ‘anti-anti-piracy’ arguments, which are framed against a backdrop of Hollywood over-enforcement. The question is differently inflected when we consider the effect of commercial piracy on non-US cinemas. Pang’s focus in much of her work is on China’s position in the copyright wars, Six Faces of Piracy

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and the last chapter of her book Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia addresses the difficult issue of piracy’s negative impact on film production in Hong Kong and the PRC. This presents some unresolved questions about the limits of piracy-as-resistance discourse. Can piracy of non-western cinemas be as easily excused under this rubric as the piracy of Paramount blockbusters? By extension, is the piracy-as-resistance argument, usually framed in response to Hollywood domination, unwittingly UScentric? This brings us to a final reading of piracy, one which tackles the geopolitics of IP head-on.

PIRACY AS ACCESS Recent work from postcolonial and critical legal studies offers a different reading of piracy, one less concerned with its ethics than with its potential. This approach is interested in the transformative aspects of piracy, in piracy’s capacity to disseminate culture, knowledge and capital. It interrogates the relationship between technology and development, asking not ‘Whose property?’ but ‘Whose future?’. A familiar cast of characters populate piracy debates in the first world: the teenage file-sharer, the struggling film-maker, the media multinational, the pirate-terrorist syndicate and so on. Missing from this scenario are forms of everyday piracy which take place in contexts where accessing media legally is not an option. Many communities in the developing world are not included in the Marxist critiques outlined above because they may not belong to a working class per se, much less the creative class to whom liberal copyright reformers address their arguments. For billions of people around the world, piracy is an access route to media that is not otherwise available. This kind of piracy is not usually a self-consciously political act but a banal, quotidian activity practised in a context where legal alternatives do not exist. This mode of everyday media piracy is common in South East Asian mediascapes. A 2006 article from The Bangkok Post features interviews with pirate consumers, who explain their reasons for violating IP law: Recently, self-confessed cinephile Saner Lohvithi bought a pirated DVD of Rainer Fassbinder’s In the Year with 13 Moons from a shop at Chatuchak Weekend Market. On another recent evening when he was downtown, he dropped by at a sidewalk stall on Silom to purchase bootlegged discs of Saraband, Ingmar Bergman’s new movie, Princess Raccoon, Seijun Suzuki’s cult musical, and Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 classic Aleksandr Nevskiy. ‘I know it’s illegal, I know about intellectual property,’ says the 33-year-old. ‘But I’m not buying pirated King Kong or The Lord of the Rings. I’m only buying the movies that, if I do not resort to pirated DVDs, I won’t have any chance of seeing. But since I really want to see them, I do not have any choice, do I?’ … A number of cinephiles in Thailand share Saner’s opinion: without piracy, they wouldn’t have any chance to watch daring, unusual, non-Hollywood movies from around the globe. Thai theatres wouldn’t dream of showing, say Princess Raccoon, a madcap musical by the maverick Japanese director, or the Expressionist classic Dr Mabuse, and a legal copy of each bought over the Internet will cost over 1,500 baht (each ‘ghost’ copy costs around 100 to 150 baht).54

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The article makes the important point that Thai DVD piracy operations provide their own subtitles for discs, as many imported official versions, especially arthouse films, do not contain Thai subtitles. This has led to pirate versions of international films being shown in film courses at Thai universities.55 The article concludes by suggesting that the pirate economy may have done more to stimulate ‘highbrow film culture’ than the 2006 Bangkok International Film Festival, which did not subtitle its films for local audiences. This raises a question about the role of pirate distribution within international film flows. While DVD pirates may be helping to foster a nascent cinephile film culture in Thailand, this is a culture modelled along Euro-American, and to some extent Japanese, lines. Pirates tend not to touch Thai films because official copies are reasonably priced and the profit margins are slimmer. As a result, a hegemonic ‘international arthouse’ film appreciation is reproduced through piracy, and so are the omissions that structure the film festival circuit.56 Compare this to the informal Nigerian video circuits discussed in the previous chapter which offer a different kind of access: a piracy which does not hook peripheral viewers into an international canon but provides a material ‘infrastructure’ for the production and circulation of an indigenous visual culture.57 The difference between these two examples relates to specific instantiations of pirate circuits rather than inherent properties of piracy itself. Piracy is oblivious to content and will make available whatever the market demands. The Delhi-based critic Ravi Sundaram has brought rich experiential detail to debates about informal circuits. In a series of absorbing essays and in his book Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism, Sundaram documents an everyday, non-legal Indian media world, characterised by speedy, small-scale practices of circulation (as opposed to production). This is a culture of cassette-based music trade, DIY computer networks, cheap mobile phone repairs and pirate VHS/VCD movies; a ‘world of informal technological knowledge existing in most parts of India, where those excluded from the upper-caste, English-speaking bastions of the cyber-elite learn their tools’.58 This kind of piracy conforms neither to boosterist hype (India as a brave new world of service-sector growth) nor to Marxist models of economic imperialism (India as a source of cheap labour). It is founded upon copyright-infringing practices which are non-oppositional and non-countercultural, and which have little in common with the cut’n’paste postmodernity fetishised by many US copyright reformers. Instead, this kind of everyday piracy is ‘a strategy of both survival and innovation on terms entirely outside the current debates on the structure and imagination of the net and technoculture in general’.59 Sundaram describes how pirate distribution networks are remodelling Indian cities, frustrating the panoptic fantasies of urban planners and creating new media circuits and industries in ‘the interstices of contemporary urban growth, disorder and fragmentation’: [U]rban residents are now assaulted with a deluge of cultural products, cassettes, CDs, MP3s, VCDs, cable television, gray-market computers, cheap Chinese audio and video players, thousands of cheap print flyers, and signage everywhere. What is remarkable here is that the preponderance of these products comes from the gray or informal sector, outside the effective regulation of the state or large capital. India today has the world’s second largest music

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market, a large film industry with global dreams, a mostly gray computer market, and thousands of tiny phone and word processing shops and cybercafes. And as if from the ruins of urban planning new media bazaars, which supply these networks, have emerged existing in the cusp of legality and nonlegality.60

The pirate networks described here provide the material routes for an alternative technological modernity, generating new forms of media access, emergent social practices and possibilities of change. This is a notably different proposition from the liberal/libertarian freedom-of-speech model, which does not address the material politics of who can speak and under what circumstances. In a compelling essay, Kavita Philip examines some of these differences. She suggests that the figure of ‘the technological author’, whose shaky foundations we would expect to be further eroded by the simulations of digital culture, is in fact rearing its head once more in order to shore up the proprietary rights system that underwrites techno-capitalist expansion. She invites her reader to reconsider this narrative of authorship from the perspective of ‘sites in the global south which are perceived, in the liberal democratic discourse of development stages, to be mired in the “not yet” ’: What does it mean that, at the very historical moment that technological authorship seems to become widely accessible, the law marks off certain authorial spaces as transgressive? What difference does it make that a particular kind of ripping off happens on the margins of the industrialized world, among the ‘less developed’ members of the WTO, at the apparent edges of the reach of western liberal democratic law, where the lines between authentic original and corrupted copy are being blurred by street vendors and high-tech entrepreneurs?61

Philip argues convincingly that the libertarian reading uses the commercial disc piracy practised in Asia as a rhetorical Other against which the free-software movement can define itself. Western technoculture thus maps out a desired narrative for the global poor, a developmental trajectory from ‘illicit to licit sameness’ which strictly specifies the limits of acceptable copying.62 Asia is encouraged to imitate the West by replicating its political and economic systems and by promoting responsible digital citizenship, but must keep its hands off first world IP capital. One of the inspirations for this argument is the Bangalore-based legal scholar Lawrence Liang. In a series of essays, Liang makes the crucial point that legality itself is a relative concept. He notes that millions of Indians break the law every day, by bribing officials for essential services, or stealing electricity because no legal sources exist. These ‘porous legalities’, which characterise life in much of the developing world, may be the only routes through which contact with the technological modernity that the West takes for granted may be realised. From this perspective, piracy is not about morality, freedom or resistance; it’s about ‘ways through which people ordinarily left out of the imagination of modernity, technology and the global economy [find] ways of inserting themselves into these networks’.63 Liang does not suggest that these networks are the only or the best trajectory; his emphasis is on the agency of individuals and communities within legal frameworks ill-suited to their needs. This kind of postcolonial IP critique invites us to look past libertarian and radical discourses, which imagine the first world user as default subject, and to think of piracy 84

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in a wider political frame. It helpfully qualifies the vision of piracy-as-resistance, foregrounding another aspect of illegal copying – its banality. While media industries paint piracy as a sin and the neo-hacker generation enjoys the kicks it provides, the piracy-as-access perspective asks us to remember that piracy is often an everyday act evacuated of overt political content. Pirate consumption is rarely a self-consciously resistant act, especially in contexts where legal alternatives do not exist. In these circumstances pirate media becomes ubiquitous, unremarkable and banal. Hence we must distinguish between the politics of piracy at the level of everyday consumption (where copyright infringement is not always directly linked to the interrogation of power structures) and the politicisation of piracy in IP debates (where piracy becomes political after the fact). In a more recent contribution to the debate, Liang adds another layer to this reading of piracy by questioning the very notion of ‘access’, drawing our attention to a developmentalist tendency within writing on global piracies. For Liang, there is a cleavage in the copyright literature between an access-to-knowledge paradigm (restrictive IP prevents the third world from accessing vital informational goods) and the familiar consumer-rights arguments (restrictive IP prevents consumers from realising the full creative potential of digital technology). In developing-world contexts, the former is usually prioritised: Access to films and music are seen as frivolous, and not in the realm of the real world concerns of the A2K [access-to-knowledge] movement. In the world of knowledge and culture there seems to be a very clear demarcation between essential and non-essentia[l] goods. The suspicion of pleasure and curiosity stems from an older history where the development discourse constructs the subject of development as a wretched figure which then enables all kinds of top down interventions to improve their lives. But if we are to reverse the assumption of what are the essential needs of people, these divisions between the essential and non-essential needs ge[t] a little more complicated.64

For Liang, it is essential that the third world consumer is not consigned to a purely functional realm. The availability of generic AIDS drugs and the exploitation of traditional knowledge by multinational agribusiness corporations are vital issues in IP debates, to be sure, but in our rush to draw attention to IP’s political economy we must be careful not to reduce the third world user to a one-dimensional subject with no interest in or capacity for the copyright-infringing creative practices at the centre of piracy debates in the West. As Liang puts it, ‘ideas of access cannot be examined without simultaneously looking at issues of desire and subjectivity’.65 Hence, discourses of media access must not become a vehicle for paternalism. With this important rejoinder in mind, let us now turn to a case study of developing-world film piracy in which both everyday access and peripheral creativity are foregrounded.

EVERYDAY ETHICS OF PIRACY IN TEPITO, MEXICO CITY As we saw in Chapter 3, informality has no built-in ethical compass. It is the task of analysts to describe and compare the attributes and features of specific pirate Six Faces of Piracy

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An informal media store at Tepito, Mexico City (Livia Radwanski)

practices. An act of piracy can be theft while also being an interrogation of IP regimes or a ‘new economy’ business practice. Different pirate practices have a different mix of characteristics, and each must be evaluated on its own terms. In Mexico City in 2008, I observed first-hand a distinctive type of informal DVD distribution, which does not fit easily into our established notions of what a ‘pirate’ is. The following profile of a DVD store in the Tepito market district focuses on the experiences of one vendor involved in a highly specific and localised business, which is not necessarily representative of the pirate economy as a whole. Yet this story highlights the diversity of practices which together make up what we think of as global piracy. Buying DVDs in Latin America typically means engaging with the informal economy. Legal copies of films are available at chain stores and shopping malls, but their high prices mean that pirate versions are a far more attractive option. For most Mexicans, 40 per cent of whom live below the poverty line, they are the only option. As a result, piracy is a big business here. In 2006, an estimated 800 million blank media units were imported from South East Asia, most of which are thought to have ended up in the illegal economy.66 One estimate suggests that 300,000 residents of Mexico City make their living from media piracy.67 Industry data is suspect so we should not put too much faith in these statistics, but nobody disputes the fact that the pirate 86

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economy is the most important and effective audiovisual distribution system in Mexico. By any measure, piracy is the default circulatory system for most people here, the standard from which formal distribution departs. In Mexico City piracy is not usually about resistance or free speech; it is a mundane and unremarkable activity in which almost everybody engages in order to partake in film culture. DVD vendors, ubiquitous throughout the city, constitute a dispersed and evershifting geography of informal commerce. Clon (pirate) discs can be bought from markets, from ambulantes (itinerant street vendors), from makeshift shacks by the roadside, from stalls outside metro stations and in most other places where large numbers of people congregate. Enterprising young men sell DVDs to drivers stuck in traffic jams or passengers on the metro. Discs cost between 3 pesos (US$0.30) and 10 pesos (US$1), depending on the film, the level of competition between vendors and the quality of the copy. Much of what is available is the usual Hollywood fare, with bootlegs of the latest blockbusters hitting the streets within days of the film’s official release (or sometimes beforehand). This accounts for the largest part of the market. But the pirate economy is diversified and has a long tail of its own. Some stalls focus on very specific market niches. In Mexico City I have seen makeshift stalls in roadside ditches, with signs reading cine de arte (art cinema). In a city as big as this, all tastes are catered for if you know where to look. The downtown Tepito barrio is the centre for pirate DVD distribution, and it is here that the complexities of the city’s informal film economy are most visible. Tepito covers fifty-seven blocks and is home to 50,000 people. At its core is a giant open-air market, in which over 8,000 vendors do business six days a week. The Tepito area also includes an indoor market area housing a further 2,600 stalls, a Sunday antiques and craft bazaar and a night market where shoes are sold wholesale. All this amounts to an estimated 15,400 formal and informal economic units and an estimated average daily turnout of over 220,000 shoppers.68 You can buy anything at Tepito, from candles to counterfeit watches to cocaine. It is regarded by middle-class Mexicans as a dangerous area, and few venture here. Tepito’s history can be traced back to the precolonial period, when it was part of the city of Tenochtitlan. In the 1920s it became infamous as the city’s trading place for stolen goods. During the import substitution era of the 1950s and 60s, Tepito was the place to buy fayuca – electronic and luxury items smuggled into the country to avoid tariffs. Today, Tepito’s pirate operations take full advantage of trade liberalisation. A range of factors has contributed to the flourishing of piracy here. Access to cheap hardware imported from Asia has increased demand for audiovisual content. Meanwhile, the structural adjustments of neo-liberalism have pushed more and more Mexicans into the informal sector.69 In this sense, piracy in Mexico, as in most other nations, is a kind of bastard child of globalisation, an unacknowledged by-product of economic integration. Tepito is often held up as a worst-case scenario for copyright violation. An article in The Economist marvels at the spectacle that awaits: ‘Pirated DVDs abound, with copies of children’s shows incongruously placed next to pornographic films.’70 On a 2005 trip to Mexico, which included a face-to-face meeting with then-Mexican President Vincente Fox, MPAA head Dan Glickman visited Tepito to inspect the markets and collect evidence of infringement. ‘I’ve been to pirate markets all over the Six Faces of Piracy

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world,’ he commented. ‘This is the largest I’ve ever seen.’71 A Special 301 watchlist report from the IIPA echoes these sentiments by singling out Tepito as the premier site for illicit audiovisual distribution and urging local authorities to develop an ‘intense enforcement plan’ as soon as possible. The report also notes, with regret, that markets such as Tepito are ‘well organized’ and ‘politically protected’.72 This is true, but only to a certain extent. The area’s reputation as crime centre does not endear it to local authorities, who have to be paid off regularly. Tepito’s long-term viability is in no way guaranteed and is always under threat from urban regeneration and gentrification initiatives. Tepito’s pirate economy is complex and fragmented. Vendors operate as both wholesalers and retailers, catering to a diverse array of customers who include consumers, distributors and other vendors. Stacks of printed DVD sleeves are a common sight – these are sold in bulk for around 40 centavos (US$0.04) each to other vendors who wish to do their own duplication or who have sourced discs elsewhere. Most Tepito stallholders seem to switch between these functions: there is no clear line between distribution and retailing. Movies are sold alongside pirated music, software and other consumables. This flexibility is characteristic of informal economies. Most vendors stock the usual selection of Hollywood movies and are difficult to distinguish from one another, but others specialise. One stall sells Asian and kung fu films. Pirated Christian CDs and DVDs are on sale at a nearby stall. Another seems to specialise in boxing films. Yet more stock various kinds of pornography (one stall proudly advertised its large zoofilia and hermafrodita collections). A consequence of this specialisation is that the films available at Tepito and the film cultures they facilitate are very diverse. This is equally true of the vendors, all of whom are there to make money but who may have other motives as well. In this sense, Tepito is home to many different piracies, all equally illegal but not necessarily equivalent in terms of motivation or social function. This became clear to me when I got to know a vendor named Juan and his family, who have sold DVDs at Tepito for many years. Juan’s stall is crowded but simple, with shelves running along either side, a long table in the middle and a TV suspended overhead. Shelves are covered with DVDs, piles of printed sleeves and assorted paraphernalia. Attached to the stall is an open-air browsing section. Here, several hundred titles are displayed in their cases and hung in racks, ready for inspection or sale. The arrangement of all elements is simple but carefully organised to maximise the available space and the visibility of the merchandise. Film posters, including some vintage promo material, are pasted up around the shop. As well as Juan and his brother, there are normally a few other traders hanging out here chatting. The atmosphere is relaxed and convivial. Juan’s store is a pirate operation, and he freely admits this, but it is a different kind of piracy from that practised by many of the other DVD vendors at Tepito. Many of Juan’s activities are better described as a kind of film archiving. His speciality is Mexican films. At his store, you will find some of the oldest Mexican features in circulation, such as Mexico’s first sound film, the 1932 prostitution drama Santa, obscure Mexican go-go films and disco films, the ever-popular Santo series of wrestling/superhero movies, Mexican Westerns and films by auteurs such as Arturo Ripstein. There are also several films about Tepito itself, including Los fayuqueros de 88

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Tepito (1982), a feature about the market’s contraband economy, along with independent documentaries. This is only a random sample: the selection is huge. While Juan does stock other miscellaneous titles – Harry Potter (2001–11), boxing and narcotraficante movies about drug gangs, the Luis Buñuel back catalogue – most of the titles in the store are old Mexican movies. Juan’s products are sourced in various ways. Many are simply copied from the official DVD versions sold by established distributors or boutique labels like Criterion and JC Films. Others are transferred onto DVD from old 8mm and 16mm reels, or from VHS or Beta recordings of TV broadcasts. Juan and his associates oversee the transfer from the original format, source content for illustrations from the internet or from promo material kept in the store and design a professional-looking cover. Juan is particularly proud of these covers, which are often very impressive and are adorned with the name of his family’s company. Juan’s stall also contains a very impressive collection of old movie posters, postcards and photographs. His father’s stall is overflowing with newspaper clippings of film-related advertisements and articles dating back to the 1950s. Much of this is arranged lovingly, though haphazardly, in cheap plastic folders. Sourced from old bookshops and libraries, it is the kind of material that official film institutions in Europe or North America would keep in temperature-controlled vaults with computer indexes. The informal archive that is Juan’s store has neither the space nor the funds for this. Film culture here is tactile and material, embodied in things you can touch and take home with you. What is distinctive about Juan’s form of piracy is that in many cases it is the only distribution these films receive. Many of the films he stocks have no formal distributor. Others appear to be titles which have been ‘orphaned’ when studios changed hands or ceased operation. In any case, official versions of these films would be far too expensive for most of the Tepito community, which Juan sees as his primary market. He thinks of his pirate stall as a social service as well as a business, one which keeps films in circulation and keeps Tepiteño culture vibrant. Most of Juan’s discs sell for 10 pesos (US$1). His average cost per disc amounts to 7 pesos, which leaves him with a profit of 3 pesos (US$0.30), or 30 per cent. This is a slim margin, and the business needs a high number of sales per day to be viable. Juan tells me that on an average day he sells around 250 discs. Like most vendors here, he switches between wholesale and retail. The DVDs in their cases are sold to shoppers, while sleeves are sold to other Tepito stallholders or distributors. Bartering and other informal trading is also common. At one point, I see Juan do a swap with another local trader – two DVDs for four rolls of toilet paper. Juan’s DVD store, like many Tepito enterprises, comprises a number of secondary activities. A proportion of his business comes from selling individual films at higher prices to specialist collectors or enthusiasts. These are generally ultra-rare films, or films which have been restored to their original versions, and they can fetch up to 10,000 pesos (US$1,000) each. Some of this business is conducted online with overseas buyers, including enthusiasts from Europe who order films by email. If there is a film you are after, Juan will try to track it down for you, transfer it to DVD and send you a copy. To my surprise, Juan claims that his customers have included Imcine, Mexico’s state-run film institute – he says that on around ten occasions they released Six Faces of Piracy

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under their own label films which they acquired through pirated copies bought from his store.73 It is clear that Juan’s business is highly organised and diversified while also being thoroughly informal, in that it is untaxed and invisible to the statisticians. Regulation is limited to pay-offs to the police.74 Juan has no hesitation in talking to me openly about his work, as he knows the police tolerate his activities. Although this is undeniably a pirate operation, the purported immorality of this activity is complicated by the fact that Juan’s distribution is the only thing keeping many of these films in circulation. Even where legal copies of these films are available, they cost ten times what Juan charges and are therefore beyond the reach of the Tepito community. So while Juan appears to be profiting from these sales at the expense of copyright holders, he is also helping to build audiences for national cinema which may not otherwise exist. In this sense his activities are contributing to the maintenance of Mexican film culture. Still, Juan and his family take little pleasure in their status as pirates. The term is an uncomfortable one for them: there is certainly no sense of proud oppositionality here, and Juan’s father tells me that they would prefer to build their business into a formal operation were it possible to do so. The romanticism attached to piracy-asresistance arguments does not translate in this context. Even in Tepito, the practice of piracy is a source of some embarrassment and plays out as a pragmatic response to material factors rather than a political act. This raises questions not only for the study of informal economies but also for our ideas about the role of formal institutions within film culture. Would the kind of lowcost, efficient distribution being carried out here informally be possible in a conventional distribution environment? The profit potential for many of these titles is slim to nonexistent, and few legitimate distributors would bother with them. One could argue that if piracy were not so widespread costs would eventually come down and distributor incentives increase, but given the kind of films Juan sells and the incomes of his customers it is hard to see this happening. As we saw in Chapter 3, informal economies predate their formal counterparts but they can also end up picking up the slack in situations where structurally adjusted formal economies downsize – a neo-liberal ‘catch-22’ which is felt all too acutely in Latin America. The archival functions performed by Juan in this sense represent a privatisation of what is seen in other national contexts to be the role of the state, but the duties he is performing – keeping films in circulation, keeping a film heritage alive – clearly have beneficial effects for Mexican national cinema culture. This presents an interesting counterpoint to the trope of film-as-waste offered in my reading of straight-to-video cultures. In the first world video store environment this kind of encounter with STV-cinema-as-commodity invites a reconsideration of the cultural value of the filmic text. In Tepito the registers of value are different, even though the space is comparable. In Juan’s store we are presented with the materiality of cinema in a very palpable sense – spindles of discs, piles of printed jackets, fading movie posters – but this is no slaughterhouse. For Juan and his customers, each dusty movie is a part of Mexican film history, a memory to be protected, and the fact that every one of these discs amounts to a violation of IP law does not reduce their significance. 90

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During one of our conversations, Juan tells me a fascinating story about a customer of his. This man, a Tepito local, had a very disadvantaged childhood and received little formal education. He was also an avid viewer of pirate movies. Now he is a doctor in the Mexican army – quite an accomplishment for someone in his situation. According to Juan, movies were partly responsible for this man’s success: he had taught himself to read by studying the subtitles on pirated discs and tapes bought from Tepito. Whole infrastructures of social relations, of exchange and communication and control, have been built on the foundations provided by piracy. Piracy is generative as well as redistributive.75 Of course, not all of the phenomena to which piracy may give rise are inherently progressive, and pirates cannot always claim self-education as a defence. But watching movies is always educative in a broader way, providing a set of coordinates for the future self, contributing to shared cultural repertoires and shaping what is thinkable and sayable. The role of pirate distribution in structuring these collective cultural reservoirs is immense given its global ubiquity. It is not possible to speak of global imaginaries or literacies without also speaking of piracy. This may be one way to reconcile the competing discourses of access and creativity that structure piracy debates, thus easing the implicit division between first world creatives and the third world ‘IP poor’. Enlarging our understanding of these everyday pirate pedagogies to include not only the purely instrumental but also the expressive, the intimate, the spectacular and the fantastical may help to move piracy debates into new and fertile territory.

TEPITO POSTSCRIPT, 2010 Two years after I first met Juan and his family, I return to Tepito to see how their business is going. I wander around the crowded streets for an hour, past stores selling pirate CDs, baseball caps, sports shoes, porn and fried pork. Juan and his father are nowhere to be found. Have they moved, or were they taking a day off? I dig up a business card that Juan gave me, a cheery green design with his details (Juan Castro, collectionista76) and a mobile phone number superimposed on a montage of old Mexican screen actors. After a few attempts I get hold of him, and we arrange to meet up the following day. He tells me an address, the corner of two streets near the centre of Tepito. I get there early the next day and chat to Juan and his family as they set up the store, which is now in an unfamiliar spot. It turns out that another trader took over their old location. His father’s store, the one with all the scrapbooks and faded posters, has also disappeared. Now the family is working out of a temporary enclosure, constructed from metal rods and tarpaulins. It is a step down from the concrete building they used to occupy. I ask Juan what happened to the old store. He sighs and tells me that the police shut them down. This comes as a shock to me: anti-piracy raids at Tepito are often met with violent resistance, so the police rarely bother. A truce between the traders and police prevails, with problems resolved through pay-offs or negotiation. Just the other day I had seen two uniformed police officers shopping for pirated DVDs at Tepito, Six Faces of Piracy

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chatting animatedly with a stallholder about the latest releases. They made no attempt whatsoever to disguise the fact they were buying bootleg copies. Juan suspects that a local chain of bookstores made a complaint to the police, and that the right kind of pressure was applied by well-connected people. The chain he names is a local version of Borders or FNAC. Its stores, ubiquitous in Mexico City shopping malls, stock commercial US, European and Latin American movies along with arthouse titles and Mexican classics. Juan suspects that they closed down his store as a way of restricting low-priced pirate competition in the niche market for vintage Mexican films. He cannot be certain they were behind it, but that’s what he suspects. In any case, it was made clear to his family that the old business had to go. Juan is not happy about this turn of events, but he is making the best of the situation. ‘Now we sell Blu-ray,’ he tells me, pointing to a box full of pirated American movies. I follow his gaze and scan the DVD covers. The faces of Matt Damon, Bruce Willis and Angelina Jolie stare back at me. Pirating American movies is fair game at Tepito; no chance of being closed down for that. Juan can still trade here, as long as he steers clear of selling anything that might annoy formal businesses with connections to the police. Hollywood seems the obvious choice. Juan hopes that there will be sufficient demand for Blu-ray discs, which are not as widely available here as conventional DVDs, to keep the store going for a while. This is their new specialisation. The informal archive of Mexican cinema has been relocated to his father’s home. Juan’s business has moved out of the pirate long tail and into its mainstream. Perhaps the problem was that their brand of piracy was too local, too close to home, or perhaps there is more to the story. In any case, the prospects of Juan’s business going formal are now even more remote. Juan and his father still dream of opening a legal movie store, but they will struggle to do this now that half their business has disappeared overnight. Such is life in the informal media economy.

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Cyberlockers like Megaupload have reshaped the online distribution landscape

6 The Grey Internet

So far in this book we have encountered a range of film circuits operating outside the world of formal distribution. Many, like the DVD street markets profiled in the previous chapter, are clearly piratical despite the cultural services they provide to populations priced out of legal markets. Each circuit has its own specific relationship to the film industry, articulating the formal and informal spheres in a certain way. Each also generates its own everyday practices of film consumption, creating new experiences, pleasures and dangers, and instituting new kinds of social and economic relations between distributors and audiences. These shadow economies of cinema are fundamental to how film is consumed and enjoyed worldwide. In this chapter we turn our attention to online distribution circuits situated between the formal and informal realms, in a grey zone of semi-legality. Having forever changed the way many of us access movies, the internet is now generating an expanded range of viewing platforms that integrate legal and black markets. The lines between the formal and informal are very faint here. The abiding logic is the repurposing of otherwise legal online infrastructures for informal uses, which is characteristic of internet commerce more broadly. This results in much confusion on the part of audiences and industry alike. Many users of the services I discuss in this chapter would not describe themselves as pirates, and in all likelihood some are unaware they are involved in copyright infringement. Let me offer you an example of the kind of scenario I have in mind. Imagine you are a bored teenager stuck at home on a rainy day. You open up your web browser and search for ‘online movies’. This leads you to a site called Best-Movies-Free-Online.ru, which promises ‘thousands of free online films … a great collection of interesting, powerful, hilarious, full-length movies’. On the site you find links to over 1,000 titles, helpfully arranged into categories such as romance, documentary and action. Advertisements for familiar brands and products down the side of the page give the site the appearance of legitimacy. You browse through the list of titles until you find a movie that takes your fancy, and then you click on a link which leads you to an external video-hosting site where you watch the entire movie for free, split into multiple parts and interrupted by an advertisement every ten minutes. Or perhaps Best-Movies-Free-Online provides a link to a ‘cyberlocker’, or file-hosting site, where you download the movie in full as an AVI file. What we have here is a new kind of distributive architecture for disseminating cinema. The mode of film consumption described above is increasingly popular among The Grey Internet

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internet users, especially young people for whom Google is the default vehicle for film acquisition. It does not involve illegal file-sharing, but nor is it fully legal. Rather, it relies upon a complex ecology of intermediary services – linking sites, video streaming services and cyberlockers – which connect internet users with audiovisual content outside the channels laid out by film industries. The end result is that users can access movies online without generating any revenues for rights-holders via services which may appear to some users to be perfectly lawful, but which in fact operate at the very edges of legality, at best. Much to the horror of the Hollywood studios, this shadow online economy of film distribution is becoming the norm rather than the exception. Industry groups like the MPAA note with alarm the ‘growing share of unlawful conduct’ that is channelled through cyberlockers like TopFile, Rapidshare and Mediafire, streaming sites like YouTube, Dailymotion and Megavideo, and various ephemeral linking sites which organise this fragmented system into a browsable and searchable database.1 Like the better-known BitTorrent protocol, many of the new grey intermediaries are sheltered to some degree by the ‘Safe Harbor’ provisions of US copyright law, which indemnifies online services against some infringing activities on the part of users. But as the proprietors of these sites know very well, a great deal of the activity they facilitate is copyright-infringing, and this is a key driver of advertising revenue. Hence these intermediary services represent a new combination of the formal and the informal, combining legal display ads and subscription payments with illicit access to unauthorised content, plus the odd half-hearted attempt at copyright enforcement. Rather than passing judgment on the ethics of this distributive infrastructure, the present chapter seeks to shed some light on how this system works and how movies are being accessed and enjoyed today by a growing number of people in broadbandenabled areas.

MAPPING THE ONLINE DISTRIBUTION ECOLOGY It may be useful at this point to make some basic distinctions between the various distribution services that together make up the online distribution ecology. My focus in this chapter is on the ‘grey’ services that sit somewhere in between legal online movie rental/download-to-own services, like iTunes and Netflix, and the more proudly piratical peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent (see above). Some brief comments about the interactions between each of these elements are in order. The relationship between the formal and informal spheres online is characterised at one level by a kind of push-and-pull, with formal operators ceding ground to pirates as new distributive innovations emerge and then trying to recapture it using whatever means are at their disposal, and at another level by interdependence. Technological platforms and types of user activity move in and out of the zones of informality and formality according to changes in law, consumer practice and industry structure. This has implications for where and how the formal can be distinguished from the informal, as the boundary between the two is a constantly moving line. What we think of as ‘digital piracy’ is not just copyright-infringing activity but also that which falls outside what the film industry and intellectual property law defines as the legitimate channels of 96

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Figure 1

The messy world of online cinema

Peer-to-peer movie piracy (including BitTorrent)

Online video, linking sites, cyberlockers

Extra-legal (mostly illicit uses)

Semi-legal/‘grey’ (licit and illicit uses)

Video-ondemand, iTunes, download services

informal

formal Legal

distribution at certain points in time.2 The rise of grey intermediaries further complicates this scenario, throwing into the mix a new set of commercial and putatively legal services which work to deformalise online media markets while also opening up new commercial spaces and lines of business. These qualifications duly noted, let’s begin our investigation at the formal end of the spectrum. There is now a wide range of legal services – including digital rental and download-to-own websites, ad-supported free streaming sites, media players and devices with built-in movie rental capabilities – which distribute films over the internet legally. This industry is still in a state of flux. With a growing number of operators fighting over what is still a small revenue pie, online film distribution has yet to cohere into a stable and profitable business. But amid this chaos, we can begin to see glimpses of what a future industry structure might look like. One model for legal online distribution involves standalone websites offering paid movie downloads and rentals. In this model, users visit a specific site, set up an account (paying with a credit card) and then either download their requested movie as a digital file to be viewed with special software, or stream it via their browser. Movielink and Cinemanow are the two best-known movie download sites, and their respective fates are instructive. Movielink – launched in 2002 when Sony, Warner Bros., MGM, Paramount and Universal teamed up to create a one-stop online shop for Hollywood content – was plagued by technical problems, poor management and consumer disinterest. Burning through US$150 million in start-up funding with little to show for it, Movielink was acquired by Blockbuster in 2008 and no longer exists as a standalone entity.3 Cinemanow is still in operation, offering around 14,000 features for online rental and purchase. Initially set up by Trimark in 1999 and then acquired by Lionsgate Entertainment, it is currently owned by the US-based big-box consumer electronics retailer Best Buy. In recent years, Movielink/Blockbuster and Cinemanow have been joined by Amazon Instant Video and Walmart Moviecentre, the current paid-download market leaders. These sites cater only to American audiences, but there are many equivalents abroad, including the UK-based Mubi, the Australian service BigPond Movies (operated by the national telecommunications giant, Telstra), the German site MediaMarkt (a European The Grey Internet

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equivalent of Best Buy) and France’s L’Harmattan TV (an offshoot of the publishing house L’Harmattan). The range of movies offered on these sites varies widely. Bigger operations like Movielink/Blockbuster and MediaMarkt are resolutely mainstream. Mubi specialises in world cinema, as does another popular site, Jaman, which has a Bollywood focus. Second-tier sites like Cinemanow, Movieflix and Greencine are the online equivalent of the DVD discount bin, stocking independent straight-to-video fare and, in many cases, porn.4 They cannot afford the steep fees for premium content, so their strategy is to license content under non-exclusive deals for as little money as possible. In sites like this you will also find a large amount of public-domain content which has fallen out of copyright, from Nosferatu (1922) to 1940s hygiene films. Some sites even charge consumers for movies that are freely available in open-access digital archives. While perfectly legal, this is a common practice among bottom-end and informal distributors. Download and streaming sites were once considered the future of movie distribution. A service such as Movielink seemed the obvious way to harness the distributive capacities of the internet, the presumption being that customers who enjoyed browsing the web and watching movies would naturally love watching movies in their browsers. Yet they have been far less successful than expected. Most of the companies who tried their hand at this distribution model have failed. A long line of start-ups – Cineclix, Pop, Spotflix, IFilm, Reeltime, Anytime, Mediatrip, Sightsound, Vongo, Vizumi, Clickstar and Jalipo, to name a few – burst onto the scene in a blaze of hype then vanished. Throughout the 2000s, this particular model of online distribution was joined by a new breed of more convenient and competitive services, including free video streaming sites (see below), media players and media hardware with inbuilt movie rental facilities. Of the media players, the most successful by far is Apple’s iTunes, which now commands over two-thirds of the US online movie market.5 Apple’s approach has been to take the hassle out of digital media distribution by building a self-contained media portal through which users can buy movies safely, easily and cheaply, and watch them in the same interface. When it began offering movie downloads in 2008, iTunes was already part of every iPod-owner’s home entertainment ecology and daily routine. This integrated approach has been replicated by other media companies as they embed online movie rental services within electronics hardware. New-generation gaming consoles (Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3), digital video recorders and set-top boxes (Tivo, Roku, Apple TV), digital television sets and mobile phones now have builtin features for quick and easy movie downloads. All the user needs to do is select a film and confirm, with payment made through a pre-registered credit card or mobile account. This kind of model uses the internet as a delivery technology but the portals are sealed off from the messiness of the web itself, with all its glitches, viruses and scams. The journalist Virginia Heffernan compares these ‘walled gardens’ to the gated estates found in wealthy US suburbs, which offer their residents an aura of exclusivity, order and safety.6 The popularity of iTunes suggests many consumers prefer the sealed-off walled garden experience to the jungle of internet video-on-demand. An alternative approach is the combination of mail-order DVD rental with online streaming, as pioneered by Netflix in North America and Lovefilm in the UK. Netflix in 98

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particular has had a huge impact on the development of legal online distribution industries. Since 2006, when it introduced streaming to complement its mail-order rentals, Netflix subscriptions have sky-rocketed. Some 20 million customers are now signed up.7 Netflix offers subscribers a range of plans, including streaming-only packages and deals mixing online and mail-order delivery. The most popular is the allyou-can-stream plan, which offers subscribers digital access to thousands of titles from the Netflix catalogue. This has been the number one driver of consumer demand for legal online distribution in the USA, where Netflix streaming now reportedly accounts for around 20 per cent of peak-time internet traffic.8 While the success of Netflix – which in 2011 had a market value of over US$10 billion – would seem to suggest a bright future for legal online distribution, it must be stressed that the revenues these services generate for studios and other rights-holders are still a fraction of what they make from their traditional partners (cinemas, DVD retailers, pay-TV providers and broadcasters). The rationale of the Hollywood executives, so often dismissed as technophobes and luddites, has been to preserve the integrity of the existing distribution structure for as long as possible in the face of technological upheaval – and given how vital these revenue streams are to their annual profits it is not hard to see why. We must also be careful about extrapolating from the situation in the USA, where uncapped broadband services are relatively cheap and accessible. Most other nations have yet to experience the same kind of take-up of legal streaming and download services. Finally, we must remember that the majority of online movie access still takes place informally. Piracy is still the main game in online cinema. How can we account for this persistence of the informal? One issue to bear in mind is the fact that pirate and ‘grey’ services offer value that is hard to beat. Compared to BitTorrent, many legal services simply do not offer a user-friendly, value-for-money experience. Most carry a patchwork of titles from certain studios and not others, meaning that there is no one-stop shop for online movies. Even iTunes and Netflix have huge holes in their catalogues where one would expect to find certain new releases and classics. Thus, for consumers, trying to legally view a digital copy of a film online typically requires jumping from one website or portal to another to another, only to find that the movie is not available in your region or that you don’t have the right kind of hardware. There are also a number of other annoying problems with legal digital distribution: consumers face a blackout period, ranging from weeks to months, between a movie’s theatrical season and its availability online; films often take hours to download; and rights restrictions mean that consumers outside the USA are cut off from much of the most popular content. At the other end of the spectrum, these burdens of formality do not apply. Peer-topeer networks typically offer fast download speeds9 and a vastly increased range of titles, including many niche films that are not available through legal channels. A network like BitTorrent is not beholden to the complex licensing agreements that restrict many films from being sold legally in certain territories, so it does not discriminate on the basis of a consumer’s location. Informally circulated films can also be transferred easily from one computer or device to another, without having to deal with the copy-prevention technologies that frustrate consumers. All this adds up to a compelling value proposition to tempt even the most law-abiding consumers. The Grey Internet

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A great deal of ink has already been spilled about the challenge posed by decentralised networks to established models of media distribution.10 BitTorrent is the latest in a long line of peer-to-peer services which, while putatively legal, can easily be adapted for piratical purposes. Unlike Napster, the bête noire of the US record industry, BitTorrent has no nervecentre that can be easily shut down. Content is shared by users on a many-to-many basis and traffic is not routed through a central hub. As a result, BitTorrent is very difficult to regulate. Grey video-hosting sites, linking sites and cyberlockers, however, have a different structure and encourage different kinds of uses. One of their strengths is that they do not use open peer-topeer networks, and are therefore less vulnerable to surveillance and enforcement. Illegal exchange of data occurs between individual users and private websites, many of which are based in nations with lax systems for intellectual property enforcement. The kind of enforcement model deployed by the US record labels against Napster users in the 1990s – which relied on data gathered over open networks – does not work when people stream content from a website or use file-hosting services. The Hollywood studios and other major distributors are now focusing a great deal of their efforts on these rogue sites, which they see as the next frontier for online piracy. For our purposes, these services present an opportunity to consider some of the novel articulations of the formal and the informal in online film distribution, as well as the policy challenges this poses to mainstream film industries. Having mapped out some of the broad characteristics of the new distributive ecology, let us now consider some of the key elements that make up the grey zone – linking sites, video-hosting sites and cyberlockers – in turn.

LINKING SITES The fictional Best-Movies-Free-Online.ru service that I referred to earlier is a linking site, a pirate intermediary that allows users to access a wide variety of unauthorised content hosted elsewhere on the internet. Linking sites operate as an indexing and aggregation service for both legal and pirated content, but with an emphasis on the latter. TVDuck, Kino.to, MoviesLinks.tv and other linking sites do not store pirate content on their own servers, but direct viewers to video-hosting sites and pirate servers, often based in Eastern Europe, the Netherlands and China, where movies can be accessed for free. Many linking sites incorporate user ratings and recommendation functions, and have sophisticated methods for keeping their links up to date. At the time of writing, the legal status of these sites is unclear.11 Most rights-holders see linking sites as a cowardly attempt to cash in on copyright infringement while retaining a thin veneer of legal defence. As one MPAA lawyer put it, ‘It’s really just a different style of helping people pirate. Because they organize links to content that’s posted elsewhere, they really are pointing people to the content and telling them, “Go here and you can get it for free.” ’12 Rights-holders also resent the fact that these sites muddy the waters of the internet, jamming up people’s search returns and making it harder to find the legal alternatives online. An internet search for the name of a popular TV show or movie, preceded by ‘watch’ or ‘stream’, invariably generates hundreds of results for linking sites, many of which lead the user to an 100

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illegal stream of the show after bombarding them with a certain number of ads. When I last checked, a ‘watch Desperate Housewives’ search produces only one legal option – ABC.com – amid an ocean of informal alternatives. It is no wonder, then, that rightsholders see these sites, which generate substantial advertising revenues, as parasitical. However, linking sites also perform an essential service for internet users. By indexing all video content, formal and informal, they are doing something that mainstream search companies are increasingly reluctant to do – provide uncensored access to the web’s online video content. Under pressure from rights-holders, Google is starting to introduce changes to its search process with the aim of making it harder for web users to find pirated content. At the same time, it is directing users more actively towards legal services.13 The outcome of this policy shift could be a reduction in the accessibility of pirate material through mainstream search engines, so linking sites help to fill this gap in the infrastructure which underpins the pirate economy. For example, one of my favourite grey linking sites offers a carefully curated index to 1,500 video documentaries on topics ranging from the history of economics to the mating habits of polar bears, most of which have been illegally uploaded to video-hosting sites. It even has rating and recommendation functions, based on previous viewing history, to guide your choices. Although all the content indexed on this site is already out there on the internet, it can only be accessed if you know what you’re looking for – so in this sense the value-add is the expert filtering and categorisation. A good linking site is like a video store owner, offering recommendations for the customer who’s not sure what they want to watch. No equivalent in the formal sphere works anywhere near as well for this purpose. Here, as elsewhere, the informal online economy is providing workarounds for the shortcomings of its formal counterparts. This is not to say that linking sites do not create their own problems. Much of the linking industry is operated by unsavoury businesses that use deceptive tactics to increase traffic to their sites. The more hits they receive, the more they can charge for ads – so they aim to attract users by whatever means necessary. Some sites lure users in with promises of free content, make them navigate through pages of ads, then redirect them to external gambling or dating sites. Some are riddled with spyware and viruses; others sell your registration details to third parties. In almost all cases, the user is never more than a few clicks away from hardcore porn. In this way, an innocent search for Gilmore Girls (2000–07) or Modern Family (2009–present) episodes can bring the unsuspecting user into contact with all manner of internet nasties. This, it seems, is the price to be paid for the free filtering that linking sites provide. The grey economies of online video make these strange juxtapositions part of everyday internet use.

VIDEO-HOSTING SITES Video-hosting sites, where user-uploaded content can be streamed for free, are at the centre of the grey internet. There is a very wide variety of these sites, catering to different territories, linguistic communities and market niches. The lion in the ring is, The Grey Internet

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of course, YouTube, which was founded in 2005 and bought by Google the following year. There is now a YouTube equivalent in almost every market: Vimeo, Metacafe, Liveleak and Veoh for English-language users; Tudou and Youku in China; Dailymotion in France; RuTube in Russia; Trilulilu in Romania; and so on.14 Some of the more unusual YouTube spin-offs have included AqsaTube, a video-hosting site for Palestinian militants, and YouPorn, a site for naughty amateur videos.15 YouTube and its competitors are now the first ports of call for many users seeking movies online. Promoted as platforms for sharing user-generated content, they operate in a legal grey zone. While some of the content they host is perfectly legal, a very significant amount of it infringes copyright, including clips and full episodes of TV shows, advertisements, music videos and even entire films. This entanglement between the formal and the informal is structural. Video-hosting sites are financially reliant on commercially produced content. They know that unauthorised Seinfeld (1994–98) and Spiderman clips are as important to their traffic flows as home videos of Maru the cat. More page-views create more advertising revenue, so these sites have a clear financial incentive to make it as easy as possible for users to upload pirated content. As a result, most copyright holders would like nothing more than to see these sites outlawed. However, under the aforementioned Safe Harbor provisions of US copyright law, video-hosting sites are not held responsible for infringements by users, provided that they act quickly on producers’ take-down requests.16 This creates mixed incentives for video-hosting sites. The key to survival in this part of the online distribution economy is to make your service as attractive as possible to users (including illegal uploaders) while placating regulators and rights-holders by removing this content when requested. Studios and distributors are engaged in a constant cat-and-mouse game to identify and remove unauthorised content. Keen to prove it is a good corporate citizen, Google/YouTube has been busily inventing tools that make this process easier for rights-holders. In 2008 it introduced an algorithmic Content ID system, which detects unauthorised uploads by running them through a huge database and searching for matches. If uploaded content is deemed to be infringing, rights-holders can choose one of three options: block the upload, track how the uploaded content is used, or monetise it through revenue-sharing advertising deals. Of course, the system is not foolproof and there are accusations that it results in unnecessary blockage of noninfringing material.17 From the perspective of copyright holders, however, Content ID represents YouTube’s first attempt at a durable system for reclaiming revenues ‘lost’ to informal distribution. The tracking and monetisation options offered by YouTube and others are, effectively, formalisation of the informal. Tracking allows rights-holders to access a breakdown of who is using the content and where. Data retained by YouTube includes the geographic location of users, how many people have clicked the ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ buttons, age and gender demographics and so on. For many copyright holders, this represents invaluable market intelligence. As we saw in Chapter 3, data-gathering is an essential part of formal media enterprise, and the presence or absence of this knowledge is a key defining feature between formal and informal media systems. As Sean Cubitt argues, there is a very strong informational aspect to media distribution, to the point that ‘money and data are decreasingly indistinguishable’. This information 102

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feeds back into future distribution strategies in the form of ‘vital data confirming the performance of products in the marketplace, and thereby shaping both the future handling of the current product and what further products will be commissioned’.18 User-uploaded online video, and the formalisation strategies that have emerged in its wake, now provide sophisticated tools for generating this industrial knowledge. The third option, monetisation, involves revenue-sharing of money paid to YouTube by third-party advertisers. This revenue is split between YouTube and the rights-holder, providing compensation for the use of the content in a roundabout fashion. While major distributors see this as better than nothing, they are angry that they now have their business dictated to them by IT companies. Film distributors feel they have lost control of how their content is used and must rely on compensatory gestures from the online video-hosting sites which caused the problem in the first place. For the erstwhile giants of global entertainment, this is a bitter pill to swallow. A recent high-profile lawsuit by Viacom International (owner of Paramount, MTV and Comedy Central) against YouTube brought some of these tensions into the public arena. Since YouTube shot to global prominence in the mid-2000s, Viacom executives have watched its users upload proprietary content en masse without authorisation. Aghast at the number of hits these clips were attracting, they decided to do something about it. In March 2007, Viacom lawyers initiated proceedings against YouTube/ Google in a US District Court, seeking damages of US$1 billion for repeated copyright infringement.19 Listed in their complaint were 150,000 clips from Viacom properties like The Daily Show (1996–present), Mean Girls (2004) and South Park (1997–present), which had collectively attracted more than 1.5 billion views on YouTube. Viacom argued that YouTube’s business model was inherently piratical, accusing it of ‘deliberately buil[ding] up a library of infringing works’, and ‘appropriat[ing] the value of creative content on a massive scale … without payment or license’.20 It was a sentiment shared by many media companies, to whom YouTube and Google are nothing more than thieves. Viacom failed to convince the judge of this position, and the ruling came down in YouTube’s favour in late 2010. From a public relations perspective, the most damaging outcomes of the failed suit were the revelations that Viacom had gone to great lengths to use YouTube for promotional purposes even while the case was underway. Internal Viacom emails proved that some of the alleged ‘pirate’ content had actually been uploaded to YouTube at the request of Viacom marketing staff, who were desperate to create brand awareness for their programmes. According to Google’s chief counsel, For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately ‘roughed up’ the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s [a chain of copy shops in the USA] to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt ‘very strongly’ that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.21

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This bizarre interdependence between formal and informal distributors is increasingly characteristic of the online video economy.22 YouTube, while proclaiming to be a space to ‘broadcast yourself’, is heavily reliant on the attractions of professionally produced content; at the same time, TV networks, major studios and record companies depend on YouTube’s formidable marketing muscle. What we are witnessing here is a fundamental reconfiguration of the boundaries between legal media trade and the black market. The willingness of major rights-holders to tolerate informal distribution activity, and their capacity to monetise it, will be the key variables in the evolution of online video over the next decade.23 It is worth noting that similar developments in online video are taking place in other parts of the world. China’s online video economy, in which a plethora of big and small companies compete for a slice of the action, is a particularly interesting case. It is commonly presumed that copyright protection in the PRC is a contradiction in terms, but recent developments there reveal complex models for IP exploitation. The two market leaders in online video, Youku and Tudou, have recently introduced a raft of products which allow media companies to control how their content appears online and to stake a claim in the ad revenues accruing from its presence there. In February 2009, Tudou introduced ad revenue sharing with select TV and film partners. The following year Youku opened up its database in a way similar to Google, allowing rights-holders to block, monitor and monetise content. A range of other initiatives are on the horizon, all of which reflect an attempt to align pirate practice, consumer behaviour and advertising markets.24

CYBERLOCKERS Let us turn now to the final link in the grey internet, cyberlockers, which are rapidly taking over from BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks as the preferred way to access pirated content. A cyberlocker is essentially a file-hosting site – a form of cloud storage. Cyberlockers have been around since at least the early 2000s. One of the earliest services was Apple’s iTools, which provided free online hosting for personal content. Now there is an increasing number of these sites. Among the most popular are Rapidshare (based in Switzerland), Megaupload (the sister site of Megavideo and Megarotic, based in the Netherlands) and the Italian site Hotfile. Visitors to a cyberlocker site access content through a central server which acts as an intermediary between sender and recipient. Users set up an account, upload a file from their hard drive to the cyberlocker, and generate a URL from which other users can download the same file. The cyberlocker makes its money from advertising, and typically requires downloaders to click through a few pages of ads before the file is transmitted. There is also a subscription revenue stream – heavy downloaders pay around US$10 per month on some popular sites – but occasional and light use is typically free. Cyberlockers are used for a wide range of tasks, many of them non-piratical. For example, sending a large graphics file from a design studio in Auckland to a printing press in London would once have involved posting a Zip-disk or using an international courier. Now a cyberlocker will do the job in a few minutes, and for free. Rapidshare, 104

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YouSendIt and their ilk have revolutionised business-to-business transactions. But they have also revolutionised the pirate economy. While cyberlockers are, in theory, supposed to be used for the transfer of documents and personal materials, they can just as easily be used for sharing MP3s and video files. For this purpose, they are fast, easy, efficient and (importantly) anonymous: user IP addresses cannot be tracked as easily as in open peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent. Using cyberlockers, people can exchange files away from the prying eyes of rights-holders. The formality or informality of cyberlocker services varies to a considerable degree. Many are reputable and difficult to adapt to pirate purposes. Others (notably the Swiss site Rapidshare) are predominantly used for copyright infringement. Rapidshare hosts more than 10 million gigabytes of data and can service up to 3 million downloaders at any one time.25 Taking out a paid membership to Rapidshare provides improved access to this archive and is an increasingly popular choice among heavy downloaders. The most controversial aspect of the Rapidshare business model, however, has been its Rapidpoints system, which rewards uploaders according to how many times the content is downloaded. Rights-holder groups argue that this openly encourages piracy because users are given an incentive to share sought-after content like blockbuster movies and Top 40 albums. The Rapidpoints system was abandoned in 2010, but other sites still offer similar incentives. Megaupload, a particularly murky operation, rewards users with cash payments – up to US$10,000 – if they generate enough traffic.26 Needless to say, the rise of cyberlockers has unnerved copyright industries. Many of the enforcement strategies designed to combat peer-to-peer piracy do not work in the grey zone. For example, three-strikes anti-piracy legislation in France and Spain, under which the internet accounts of repeat peer-to-peer offenders are shut down, can neither detect nor prevent anonymous cyberlocker piracy. Like video-hosting sites, cyberlockers are a global phenomenon: in Mexico there is the enormously popular Ba-k.com, in Korea there are numerous cyberlocker sites known locally as ‘webhards’ and so on.27 This makes enforcement even more difficult, as users can switch from one to another. Some cyberlocker sites, especially the bigger ones, will act on take-down notices from copyright holders, removing offending content and rendering links to that content useless; but by the time one offending file is removed an identical file can be posted elsewhere. Linking sites update their URLs, and the game begins again. Putting aside the question of property rights for a moment, let’s take a closer look at how cyberlockers are being used by consumers. As mentioned earlier, many heavy downloaders are now paying subscription fees, typically around US$10 per month. This provides unfettered access to the data stored on the site and improved search functionality. So, in effect, these services are evolving into pirate versions of commercial legal subscription services like Spotify, which offer consumers unlimited access to a vast collection of music for a monthly fee. This shift to cyberlocker subscriptions is a significant development, with implications for the ongoing debates about business models in high-piracy environments. It suggests that many consumers are in fact happy to pay intermediary services for unlimited access, which should mean that converting cyberlocker users into legal subscribers will not be too difficult. It also suggests that the problem is not to do with willingness to pay but with the restricted offerings of the formal alternatives in many territories. In addition, these recent developments underscore what is arguably the defining characteristic of the internet The Grey Internet

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economy in terms of its impact on film distribution: the dispersal of revenues through a large pool of licit and illicit operators, from linking and torrent sites to ISPs and mobile phone providers, many of whom are not involved in the media content business per se. It is no wonder that the erstwhile giants of the film industry are unhappy. From Napster to BitTorrent, and then from BitTorrent to cyberlockers, the trend within today’s online pirate economy is towards increasing fragmentation. Paradoxically, this is combined with integration into purportedly legal services. In these grey economies, giants like Google and small fly-by-night operators work side by side. This reveals a deep interdependency between the formal and the informal, between legality and illegality. When distributors must secretly leak content to videohosting sites while retaining plausible deniability, when pirate websites carry paid advertisements for Sony and Hewlett Packard, it becomes increasingly difficult to speak of piracy and legal distribution as two separate things. Attention to the new grey intermediaries discussed in this chapter – linking sites, cyberlockers, video-hosting sites and various other services – can help to provide a more complex picture of how movies circulate online and how the political economy of distribution is changing.

INFORMAL ENFORCEMENT ON THE DIGITAL FRONTIER I would like to conclude our journey into the grey internet by drawing the reader’s attention to a new breed of entrepreneurial intermediaries that are starting to appear on the online cinema scene. Like the companies discussed above, these grey operators seek to monetise consumer demand for online movies – but they go about it in a rather different way. Throughout this chapter we have seen how opportunistic internet businesses are devising new ways to profit from online cinema by aggressively inserting themselves in between consumers and the content they seek. The typical business model is to attract consumer ‘eyeballs’, if only for a few seconds, and sell advertising space. However, this is not the only way to make money from consumers’ desire to watch movies online. It is also possible to open up a similar space for revenue-generation at the level of enforcement, as a growing number of small businesses at the edges of the media industries are discovering. As we will see, their activities are often highly unethical. What I’m referring to here is the emergence, in response to new market opportunities around digital copyright enforcement, of commercial anti-piracy outfits. There is now a small army of specialist contractors – P2P traffic analysts, forensic IT engineers, content protection experts, intellectual property litigators – playing a largely undocumented role in the war on piracy. They work as freelance guns-for-hire, moving from one contract to the next, selling market intelligence, technical anti-piracy solutions and other products and services to rights-holders for use in enforcement campaigns and political lobbying. This is a globally dispersed industry, and a fastgrowing one.28 Take for example the Bangalore-based Aiplex company, which conducts distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on major pirate sites like The Pirate Bay. Working on behalf of Indian film companies, Aiplex turns the tools of the pirates against them by crashing servers and making it more difficult for consumers to pirate certain 106

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content.29 Similar strategies have been used in the USA, where companies like Media Defender (now Peer Media Technologies) and Overpeer have flooded peer-to-peer networks with fake and defective media files. The objective is to annoy would-be pirates and drive them towards the legal alternatives. Other anti-piracy companies, like Web Sheriff, send out tens of thousands of cease-and-desist notices to blogs and torrent sites. These anti-piracy innovators have built business models on the back of consumer copyright infringement. There is a deliberate veil of secrecy around them, which makes scrutiny of this new line of business difficult. Entrepreneurial anti-piracy enforcers are guns for hire, hawking their services to companies desperate for an anti-piracy magic bullet. Many of their activities are subject to minimal regulation, as the law has yet to catch up with this part of the digital economy. More than a few anti-piracy enforcers learned their trades as hackers and renegade programmers.30 Now they sell this knowledge to copyright holders and the various content protection specialists with whom they collaborate. The pattern is that players with deep knowledge of the mechanics of the online pirate economy move in and out of the informal realm, offering their services to pirate websites and copyright industry bodies alike. Here, as elsewhere, there is much traffic between the formal and the informal. The most entrepreneurial anti-piracy operators are branching out into new areas, finding ways to monetise piracy outside the realm of conventional copyright-industry enforcement regimes. The most controversial of these entrepreneurial anti-piracy ventures is the ‘speculative invoicing’ scheme pioneered by law firms in Germany and the UK, and subsequently rolled out to the USA and Singapore.31 The aim with this business model is to monetise peer-to-peer piracy by suing downloaders en masse. Operating on a commission basis and assisted by specialist IT providers, entrepreneurial law firms monitor peer-to-peer networks and record the IP addresses of internet users sharing the music or movies of the clients they represent. Then they launch a mass lawsuit, in which thousands of defendants are sued at once. The alleged pirates are tracked down through their ISPs, and each receives a stern letter demanding payment of up to US$2,000 to settle the matter out of court. After a sufficient number of defendants have paid up, the lawsuit is dropped or gets mired in technicalities. The settlement revenues are split between the lawyer and the rights-holder, with the lawyer taking the lion’s share. These cases are not intended to proceed to final judgment. Speculative invoicers use the courts to lend force to the initial damages claim, but the settlement transaction is completed outside the formal legal system, as a private arrangement between two parties. The aim is to exploit the illegality of piracy to open up a new revenue stream, tied not to the commercial value of the media commodity in question but to the alleged pirates’ willingness to pay to avoid going to court. As a result, speculative invoicing makes it possible, in theory, for film producers and distributors to generate more money through settlements than they could ever have made through conventional releasing channels. As one lawyer involved in this business in the UK boasts, ‘We’re creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel.’32 Speculative invoicing is popular with distributors of hardcore pornography, whose pirate customers are particularly eager to settle quietly. The Electronic Frontier The Grey Internet

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Foundation estimates that 75,000 American internet users have been caught up in porn-related stings.33 The technique has also been used on behalf of independent feature film producers (including the German schlockmeister Uwe Boll) and small-tomedium outfits like Nu Image (producers of The Expendables [2010]). In 2010 the US Copyright Group launched the biggest mass lawsuit to date, targeting more than 20,000 alleged pirates of Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker (2008). Acting on behalf of the film’s production house, Voltage Pictures, the US Copyright Group sought settlements of US$1,500 per person, opening up what they hoped would be a multi-million dollar revenue stream.34 Speculative invoicing is the legal version of a mafia shakedown. The purpose is to intimidate people into paying up as quickly as possible. It is not, then, about deterrence; nor is it part of the repertoire of mainstream intellectual property enforcement. Driven by entrepreneurial lawyers rather than rights-holders, speculative invoicing is highly controversial, and most major film distributors are keeping their distance. Even the MPAA feels that suing individual users generates too much negative publicity, which is why it focuses its enforcement efforts on ISPs and commercial DVD pirates. As a result, the speculative invoicing strategy is mostly used by smaller law firms and low-level producers. Lawyers peddling this product in Europe, the USA and the UK can approach rights-holders on a no-win, no-fee basis, offering them a guaranteed way to make some cash. For many rights-holders in a post-GFC economy, an offer like this is too good to refuse. The end result of this model is the disarticulation of enforcement from deterrence, as freelance anti-piracy stings become lucrative ventures in their own right. Antipiracy entrepreneurs like the US Copyright Group make the major studios seem like voices of moderation, and their speculative invoicing stings are creating strange new faultlines and alliances in the copyright wars. In some cases, big media is even stepping into the fray on the side of the consumer, as when a Time Warner-owned ISP refused to hand over the names of alleged pirates of The Hurt Locker.35 The general trend is a bifurcation in anti-piracy policy, as PR-sensitive major players stick to established methods of deterrence and cowboy operators seek out new market openings wherever and whenever they arise. By implication, it may no longer be accurate to view the copyright wars as a twosided battle between consumers and big media. While it is appealing to view hardline copyright enforcement in terms of corporate hegemony – a formal state–industry apparatus stamping out the informal energies of user networks – this is only one of the dynamics in play now. In true cockroach-capitalist style, new small-time bounty hunters and freelance enforcers have emerged to pursue the commercial opportunities opened up by the intellectual property enforcement drive. Some of these companies work closely with the major studios, but many (such as the US Copyright Group and ACS:Law) exist within the cracks of the legal and media industries, teaming up with minor distributors at the lower rungs of the film industry heirarchy. Like the pirates of Maguindanao (see Chapter 3), some of these informal operators are deeply unpleasant. But viewed through the lens of formal–informal relations, their emergence is unsurprising. Opportunities to monetise copyright violation will increasingly attract these grey operators. Wherever there are scraps, there are bottom-feeders. 108

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CONCLUSION It is now a commonplace to insist that the internet has forever changed film distribution. In this chapter, I have shown how this statement is more or less true, but not in the way that many commentators expected. While celebrating the democratising nature of the web, we must also be alert to subtle consequences of the online tug-of-war between formality and informality. In the market space opened up by the failure of legal online distribution, grey operators are reshaping distribution strategy and consumer practice alike. This field is characterised by highly unusual configurations of mainstream media business, piratical activity and entrepreneurial enforcement. The interdependencies described in this chapter – between video-hosting sites and copyright-infringing users, between Russian cyberlocker sites and mainstream online advertising companies, between hardcore porn producers and entrepreneurial lawyers – reveal the interlacing of the formal and the informal in the digital age. Informality, then, is about more than loss, leakage and theft. As we have seen throughout this book, informal distribution is generative as well as allocative.36 An array of new participants are now involved in online distribution, from linking sites to rights-management companies. While many of these have nothing to do with the film industry per se, they are still a part of the digital distribution ecology. An expanded model of how film circulates today must take into account these various intermediaries and secondary industries. More than a discrete sector of the film industry, distribution is the movement of media through space and time, and in an online context this movement is increasingly facilitated by businesses that do not feed back revenues to producers. These shadow economies are increasingly central to the political economy of cinema in a digital age.

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Konstantin Tovstiadi – http://socialchicks.net

Conclusion: Coordinates for Studying Distribution in a Digital Age

Moving from fly-by-night distribution companies to itinerant pirate DVD vendors, from video bootleg rings to illegal streaming sites, Shadow Economies of Cinema has provided glimpses of the incredible diversity of moving image circulation. We have seen that informal networks are key drivers of film distribution globally, and that they play a central rather than peripheral role in film culture. The kinds of stories told in this book about how movies reach their audiences do not start and end with the legal film industry, but try to expand our definition of film business to include a wider array of participants and practices. At the heart of this hidden world of film distribution are markets, especially grey and black markets. Cinema’s shadow economies are commercial zones of small-scale trade and competition. Pirate street markets, informal rental businesses and other distributive architectures that are so integral to the global media landscape are spaces in which profit-orientated distributors play a vital role, inserting themselves between consumers and content and shaping the cinematic engagements thus generated. It is these structures – these ‘cockroach-capitalist’ networks1 – that most effectively muster the generative energies of the informal economy. Throughout this book I have tried to take these networks seriously without making moral judgments about the nature of the circulation they facilitate or the texts they provide to audiences. The aim has been to examine the wider film industry in all its crookedness and contingency, and to consider the research possibilities that arise when we move informal systems to the centre of the analytical frame. In this sense I have sought to open up some key terms in media industry studies – distribution structures, business models, piracy and so on – to some new perspectives. It is my hope that the reader emerges with an enlarged sense of what being a film distributor might entail. As we move further into the internet age, a new set of technological platforms are emerging for cinema distribution. With them come new challenges and analytical priorities for film and media research. In the remaining pages of this book, I want to raise a few questions – and offer some tentative suggestions – as to how we might interpret recent developments in digital distribution in relation to larger political and economic contexts. Specifically, I want to consider how decentralised, user-driven networks are changing both the distribution landscape and how we imagine and describe this landscape. Clearly, the emergence of technologies that give ordinary people access to the means of distribution – peer-to-peer platforms, social networks, hosting sites for Conclusion

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user-generated content and other technologies for content ‘sharing’ – raises questions that film studies must confront, and that it cannot confront on its own. We have not yet settled on the appropriate way to make sense of and theorise this new environment – and there is much at stake in how we go about this. Which ideas about digital culture should be at the heart of film studies metaphors and models? How are we to define the cinema audience vis-à-vis the user or the file-sharing ‘swarm’? How do conversations about digital film distribution connect to wider conversations about informational freedom and digital democracy? In what follows, I make some broad suggestions about how to effectively and critically analyse distribution networks in digital contexts. I also offer a few comments on where the informal markets studied throughout this book fit into the picture.

FROM PIPELINES TO SWARMS I want to begin by discussing a certain idea about the nature of digital networks – a shibboleth of sorts – that crops up in various places, from Time magazine to policy white papers to media education journals, and which has to do with the ostensible dissolution of established distribution structures in a broadband age. The basic argument goes something like this: new internet technologies – especially BitTorrent, user-driven content-sharing sites (YouTube, Flickr, Dailymotion) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Orkut, RenRen) – have forever changed the way we communicate, replacing top-down corporate content delivery with a many-to-many model of dispersed circulation and sharing. Twentieth-century distribution and exhibition platforms are anachronisms in an age when the perceived value of content is determined by the whims of the crowd, which registers its preferences via user reviews and recommendations, re-Tweeting of links and social bookmarking. This new circulatory structure has fundamentally changed how we encounter and experience the moving image. Cinema, it is argued, has been liberated from studio pipelines and now circulates freely as data pushed around the internet by waves of user activity. The audience has become the most powerful distributor of all. Now, as Geert Lovink puts it, ‘We are no longer at the mercy of cranky reviewers and mono-cultural multiplexes.’2 This argument, and its variants, can be found in many areas of media business and scholarship. It is especially popular among the trend forecasters who advise film industries on how to respond to the challenge of digitisation. The following breathless claim by media futurist Mark Pesce, which places the digitally networked consumer at the centre of the contemporary media universe, is broadly representative of this line of thinking: The ability to ‘hyperdistribute’ a programme – using BitTorrent to send a single copy of a programme to millions of people around the world efficiently and instantaneously – creates an environment where the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. This seems counter-intuitive, but only in the context of systems of distribution which were partand-parcel of the scarce exhibition outlets of theatres and broadcasters. Once everyone, everywhere had the capability of ‘tuning into’ a BitTorrent broadcast, the economics of

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distribution were turned on their heads. The distribution gatekeepers, stripped of their power, whinge about piracy. But, as was the case with recorded music, the audience has simply asserted its control over distribution … This is about the audience getting whatever it wants, by any means necessary.3

This affirmation, indeed celebration, of the new powers bequeathed to the networked consumer is a common refrain in media catering to the creative classes, like Wired magazine and TED.com. It has parallels in areas of academic media studies, especially in cultural studies-influenced audience research. A growing number of scholars now see in platforms like YouTube a new kind of audience empowerment, allowing everyday people to become fully fledged content distributors and to actively shape media culture in unprecedented ways. This approach to user-driven distribution seeks to redeem the creativity and agency of audiences – especially fans and young people, long seen by media scholars as disempowered groups in need of redemption – as they shift their creative energies to the distributive sphere. A key proponent of this argument is Henry Jenkins, who since the 1990s has been writing lucidly on everyday engagement with cinema and television by fans, and has arguably done more than anyone else to legitimise appropriative and copyrightinfringing amateur production practices as innovative forms of ‘participatory’ culture. For Jenkins, skirmishes over distribution are part of a wider struggle by audiences to reclaim the fecund possibilities of new media for the purposes of expression, collaboration and communication. In his most recent work, Jenkins has been shifting his attention to practices of circulation, outlining a theory of circulatory culture for the digital age. Central to this theory is the idea of ‘spreadability’, which refers to the capacity for ‘easy and widespread circulation of mutually meaningful content within a networked culture’.4 An example cited by Jenkins is Nina Paley’s 2008 animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues, which was released under a Creative Commons licence and has circulated widely through peer-to-peer networks, YouTube and online streaming, despite never receiving a conventional theatrical release. Success stories like this conjure up an appealing vision of democratic distribution facilitated by decentralised network structures. The implicit argument here is that today’s audiences, freed from the rigid schedules of broadcasters and theatre chains, will find their own way to the movies they seek. Furthermore, they will share them with their friends, actively contributing to the promotion of content that is meaningful to them. In this way, the boundaries between consumption, production and distribution that are characteristic of an industrial-era media environment become forever blurred. These attempts to understand user-driven distribution and its challenge to existing structures are important. As I argued at the beginning of the book, we need to complement top-down models of distribution with bottom-up perspectives, and a diversification of our analytical vocabularies can only be a good thing in this regard. But there are dangers here as well. In drawing attention to some of these, I do not want to inflate what are admittedly fine differences into major disagreements – but at the same time, I feel we need to be aware of the risks presented by loose talk about the democratisation of distribution. In the wake of Wikileaks and the so-called Facebook/Twitter revolutions of the 2011 Arab Spring, metaphors used within media Conclusion

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scholarship are increasingly taken up by journalists and politicians as they seek to make sense of current events. In this way, media studies knowledge assumes centre stage in wider debates about democracy and globalisation. We therefore have an obligation to take this position of power seriously and to avoid entrenching certain ways of thinking about the movement of media as self-evident truths when they are, in fact, value-laden assumptions.

RETHINKING INFORMATIONAL FREEDOM Let us look a little closer at the political dimensions of the digital distribution debate. There is an implicit claim being made in the arguments of Jenkins and others which begs to be tested. In their accounts, sharing – involving the unfettered circulation of diverse content and bottom-up participation by users – is distinguished from a putatively passive, hypodermic-needle model of distribution, associated with the topdown delivery of media content from producers to consumers via secure product pipelines. It is also seen as something qualitatively different from commercial piracy. Sharing is productive, creative, generative – a driver of media literacy and cultural participation. While offering a welcome respite from the anti-piracy propaganda of the entertainment industries, this celebration of digital sharing is problematic in the way it constructs a hierarchy of moral value for media distribution, with locked-up structures of delivery at one end and free circulation at the other. In distinguishing between a pejorative definition of distribution, characterised by top-down control, and a ‘democratic’ idea of user-driven circulation, associated with gift economies, participatory culture and reciprocity, the aforementioned theorists transport into the field of media studies a Cold War paradigm of enlightened openness versus authoritarian opacity. This is not a useful binary. Nor is it a new one. The celebratory discourse around sharing and user creativity is rooted in a tradition of liberal thought that stretches back to the seventeenth century and that still shapes the boundaries of the debate around networked technologies, especially in the USA. With its emphasis on individual expression, creativity and collective growth through free exchange, the current discourse around digital networks brings us back to a key tenet of liberal philosophy: the idea that political freedom and market freedom are in important ways coconstitutive, and that collective advancement lies in unfettered growth, free speech and free trade. In this way, the mantra of openness that is central to a variety of seemingly progressive movements becomes intertwined with a political philosophy based, ironically, on property rights. This is a strange paradox, and it ought to be brought out in the open rather than swept under the carpet. It is one of the reasons why I find the current discussion about free circulation a little frustrating. At present, the debate is characterised by a wide variety of claims – about the political economy of media, communication rights, the nature of creativity, the new economy, consumer protection and so on – rolled together into a master narrative of digital freedom, eliding the often competing assumptions on which each is based. What I’m referring to here is not just the idea 114

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that ‘information wants to be free’ but also the conviction that unfettered circulation, in and of itself, is the answer to the structural inequalities that scar the media distribution landscape. If we were to trace the take-up of these ideas further it would lead us in many different directions – to Pirate Parties in Europe, to free culture groups on college campuses in the USA, to the free software movement, to liberal copyright reformists like Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain, to consumer rights campaigners, to hacker subcultures.5 These ideas also connect in important ways with ideologies that, especially outside the USA, read to the right of the political spectrum. For example, there is also a strongly libertarian edge to the current discourse on digital distribution, grounded in uniquely American notions of individual freedom, small government, low taxes and so on. Thus, when mobilised in certain ways, the idea of free circulation becomes associated not only with free speech but also with free markets – or rather, a very particular (and historically specific) ideal of the free market, one that excludes the untidy realities of informality analysed throughout this book. In this view, freedom of information and free markets become inextricably linked, making it difficult to imagine futures in which these two things are not co-dependent. We therefore need to be more careful about how apparently progressive discourses of freedom and openness are mobilised within debates about the distribution of audiovisual media, and how they connect with, and possibly aid, conservative political projects using similar vocabularies. Another problematic aspect of the current discussion about digital distribution is its tendency to reduce complex questions of access and engagement to an assertion of audience sovereignty – in Pesce’s words, ‘the audience getting whatever it wants, by any means necessary’. There’s something in the tone of this statement, not least the appropriation of Malcolm X’s ‘any means necessary’ line, which sits uncomfortably with me. I am not convinced the aggressive assertion of consumer preference – the right for people to watch what they want, when they want, how they want – should be elevated to the level of political struggle, even ironically. A great deal of the current commentary on media distribution is deeply invested in this kind of talk, which seeks to reframe the timely consumption of film and other media as something akin to a human right. If we accept this as the basis for our claims, then the conversation soon becomes about how best to cater to the viewing preferences of the most vocal segments of the global audience, while more difficult questions about infrastructure, equity and cultural capital get pushed to one side. It becomes, then, a conversation about early adopters – elite users who are already well served by existing distribution structures – rather than a conversation about cultural power and cultural politics in a global frame.6 As the political theorist Jodi Dean argues, fetishising informational abundance for its own sake (the more circulation, the better) is not necessarily the best way to ensure social and political change.7 A distinction must be made between the unprecedented scale of networked communications – the fact that more content circulates now than at any point in history – and the highly uneven levels of engagement within this communicative field by different kinds of users and audiences. Proliferation is not the same thing as political participation. To be sure, an enormous range of media is now at the fingertips of those who know how to find it, legally or otherwise, and we have seen Conclusion

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this consistently throughout the preceding chapters. However, this is not the same thing as saying that we are now living in an age of distributive democracy, and that these riches are available to all. Nor should we assume that the many-to-many distribution model of the internet necessarily entails a higher level of audience agency than was present in older structures. As we move further into the internet age, we need to come up with ways of talking about media distribution that do not reproduce problematic assumptions about the nature and desires of global audiences. We need a broader conception of audience activity that does not privilege internet users and patterns of activity most commonly found in the USA and other first world nations. We need to resist the temptation to ascribe a uniform moral value to types of distributive activity that are extremely heterogeneous in terms of the content circulated and the motivations of those doing the circulating. And we need to remember that putatively new forms of audience activity such as file-sharing are usually extensions of much longer traditions of media consumption and circulation, and that they interface not only with ‘old’ media industries but also with informal systems of commerce and trade. Hence we return once more to grey and black markets, and to their functional centrality within media distribution. Much as we might like to imagine the international film distribution business as a purely formal economy (as per most film industry research), or alternatively as a free economy of digital sharing and reciprocity (as per the cyber-libertarian script), informal networks of commerce and trade are vital to cinema’s global circulation. As the preceding chapters have established, this field of small-scale, profit-orientated operators – from shady streaming sites to street vendors – is the missing piece of the puzzle for media industry analysis. Placing it at the centre of our analysis opens up a different understanding of how the film business works, in which all kinds of markets – the good, the bad and the ugly – can be productively studied. This is a project of materialist analysis, in contrast to the idealist ways of thinking that have shaped much of the work on film circulation to date. Informality has always been a feature of media markets, and in all likelihood it always will be. In foregrounding this aspect of international film commerce and showing how it shapes everyday viewing cultures in various parts of the world, I have merely tried to bring media industry studies into line with other fields that study the circulation of commodities through heterogeneous and frequently unruly markets, thus tracing the outlines of a closer engagement between cinema studies and wider social science. To be sure, film scholars have fought hard to establish the specificity of film as a medium, foregrounding its unique properties and powers. But perhaps it is now time for cinema studies to open up a dialogue with other fields that specialise in cultural circulation, from anthropology to economics, and to see what can be gained from such an engagement. Shadow Economies of Cinema is really just a minor case study for this larger project. Much remains to be done, and I look forward to seeing how our knowledge of informal media networks – and their articulation with other kinds of commodity circuits – evolves over the coming years. It is my hope that future research in this area will help to fill in some of the blanks within the picture that has started to emerge, providing more detailed and sophisticated renderings, empirical and theoretical, of the dynamics 116

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of these media systems. In this way we may come to know the informal better, and to find ways of integrating this knowledge into our frameworks for media and cultural analysis. The pay-off could well be a different way of thinking about the relationship between distribution, consumption and everyday life. In following the transnational movements of films through informal networks, we see glimpses of the extraordinary messiness of the global cultural economy and, perhaps, new coordinates for cultural theory.

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Appendix: A Film Distribution Research Guide

Distribution circuits can be difficult to research. Most of the necessary information and data is not on the public record and can be found only in sources catering to entertainment industry professionals, or obtained anecdotally. However, there are still many useful sources that provide insight into how formal and informal circuits operate. The following guide offers some starting points for your research journey. Further resources, especially those dealing with informal circuits, can be found in the Notes.

INDUSTRY SOURCES Formal distribution industries have their own channels for reporting and discussing industry practice. While these industry sources lack a critical perspective, they are often the only way to track current developments. They also constitute what John Caldwell has identified as an industrial ‘self-theorisation’, providing insight into how film industries represent and understand themselves. Trade papers are an important source of information about both formal and informal film circuits. Key Hollywood trade papers such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter provide vital information on box-office openings, industry developments and recent sales. Screen Digest is a UK-based trade source with a strong emphasis on new research and data, with coverage of global markets. The online newsletter Film Business Asia is an excellent source of news for Asia-Pacific film industries. World Screen, Screen International and Film Journal International provide an international perspective. The now-defunct Video Business was an essential guide to video and DVD distribution. A great deal of the material in these publications comes from the PR departments of film companies, so care must be taken when citing data. Smaller national industries may not have dedicated trade papers, but most have some equivalent publication. Many of these are online, such as the Australian subscription-based newsletter Screen Hub. Magazines targeting aspiring independent film-makers such as The Independent (formerly Independent Film and Video Monthly) and Filmmaker also cover contemporary developments in distribution.

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• • • • • • • • • •

WHERE TO BEGIN: Film Business Asia: www.filmbiz.asia Film Journal International: www.filmjournal.com Filmmaker: www.filmmakermagazine.com The Hollywood Reporter: www.hollywoodreporter.com The Independent: www.aivf.org Screen Digest: www.screendigest.com Screen International: www.screendaily.com Screen Hub: www.screenhub.com.au Variety: www.variety.com World Screen: www.worldscreen.com

‘Insider’ accounts of film industries may contain valuable information, although most focus exclusively on Hollywood. Edward J. Epstein’s books The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood and The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies are useful sources, as is his blog The Hollywood Economist. Industry exposés and memoirs provide another rich source of information, gossip and data. Journalistic accounts of the inner workings of film industries can also be illuminating. The integrity of this information for academic research should not be assumed, but nor should it be automatically discounted. WHERE TO BEGIN: • Peter Bart and Peter Guber, Shoot Out: Surviving Fame and (Mis)fortune in Hollywood (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2002). • Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). • Frederic Dannen and Barry Long, Hong Kong Babylon: An Insider’s Guide to the Hollywood of the East (London: Faber & Faber, 1997). • Jake Eberts and Terry Ilott, My Indecision is Final: The Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films (London: Faber, 1990). • Edward J. Epstein, The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood (New York: Random House Film Journal, 2005). • Edward J. Epstein, The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies (New York: Melville House, 2010). • Edward J. Epstein, The Hollywood Economist, http://thehollywoodeconomist. blogspot.com • David Mamet, Bambi vs Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business (New York: Pantheon, 2007). • David McClintick, Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (New York: Morrow, 1982). • Julie Salamon, The Devil’s Candy: ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ Goes to Hollywood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991). • Andrew Yule, Hollywood A Go-Go: An Account of the Cannon Phenomenon (London: Sphere, 1987).

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Industry handbooks offer useful information on distribution models, contracts and agreements. Jeff Ulin’s The Business of Media Distribution provides an up-to-date overview of the industry, while two books by John W. Cones (The Feature Film Distribution Deal and Film Finance and Distribution: A Dictionary of Terms) are also recommended. Lee Beaupré’s essay ‘How to Distribute a Film’ – written in the 1970s as a research report for Francis Ford Coppola – is a valuable historical document. WHERE TO BEGIN: • Lee Beaupré, ‘How to Distribute a Film’, in Paul Kerr (ed.), The Hollywood Film Industry (London: Routledge/BFI, 1986), pp. 185–203. Originally published in Film Comment, July/August 1977. • Mark Steven Bosko, The Complete Independent Movie Marketing Handbook (Los Angeles: Michael Wiese Productions, 2003). • John W. Cones, Film Finance and Distribution: A Dictionary of Terms (Los Angeles: SilmanJames Press, 1992). • John W. Cones, The Feature Film Distribution Deal: A Critical Analysis of the Single Most Important Film Industry Agreement (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997). • Bill Daniels, David Leedy and Steven D. Sills, Movie Money: Understanding Hollywood’s (Creative) Accounting Practices, 2nd edn (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2006). • Gregory Goodell, Independent Feature Film Production: A Complete Guide from Concept Through Distribution (New York: St Martins Griffin, 1998). • Mark Litwak, Reel Power: The Struggle for Influence and Success in the New Hollywood (New York: Morrow, 1986). • Mark Litwak, Dealmaking in the Film & Television Industry: From Negotiations to Final Contracts (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2009). • Schuyler M. Moore, The Biz: The Basic Business, Legal, and Financial Aspects of the Film Industry (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2007). • Stacey Parks, The Insider’s Guide to Independent Film Distribution (Burlington: Focal Press, 2007). • Andrew Sparrow, Film and Television Distribution and the Internet: A Legal Guide for the Media Industry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). • Jason E. Squire (ed.), The Movie Business Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). • Jeff Ulin, The Business of Media Distribution: Monetizing Film, TV, and Video Content (Burlington: Focal Press, 2009).

Policy documents, including grey literature, can be rich sources of data and analysis. Key international policy bodies such as UNESCO and the European Audiovisual Observatory regularly commission studies on film distribution and exhibition. Countries with strong cultural policy traditions have an array of film policy bodies at national, state and city levels: in the United Kingdom, key policy players include the British Film Institute, the (now-defunct) UK Film Council, Film London and so on; in Australia, Screen Australia, the peak national body, is joined by state agencies like Film Victoria and Screen New South Wales. Most of these organisations have copious amounts of information on their websites, along with downloadable research reports. Many also publish special guides for film-makers that explain and survey the distribution landscape. Appendix

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The typical purpose of official film bodies such as these is to promote the industries they represent. However, one can also find other kinds of official documents that provide insight into the mechanics of distribution. Transcripts of court cases and judgments are usually made available to the public, and this material can often contain otherwise unavailable data about film sales and distribution contracts. From time to time governments also commission independent enquiries into specific aspects of the film business, providing more rigorous analysis than is typically found in sources catering to the industry itself.

• • • • • •

WHERE TO BEGIN: British Film Institute: www.bfi.org.uk European Audiovisual Observatory: www.obs.coe.int Screen Australia: www.screenaustralia.gov.au UK Film Council: www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk UNESCO www.unesco.org Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (France): www.cnc.fr

Private-sector research is another rich source for data and analysis. Some industry bodies, including the British Video Association and the International Video Federation, publish annual reports about the activities of their member companies. Commercial consulting firms (IBIS World) and specialist media industry analysts (Digital Consulting Group, Dordona) publish their own reports containing up-to-theminute research about screen markets and industries. While some of these reports are not released to the public and are usually expensive to obtain, they often contain valuable information.

• • • • •

WHERE TO BEGIN: British Video Association: www.bva.co.uk Digital Consulting Group: www.digitaltechnologyconsulting.com IBIS World: www.ibisworld.com International Video Federation: www.ivf-video.org Dordona Research: www.dordona.co.uk

ACADEMIC SOURCES Academic literature on film distribution is scattered across a number of disciplines. The largest body of work can be found in film history. Much of this work focuses on the commercial strategies of the major US studios in the domestic and international markets. Reflections on the practical and methodological aspects of film history can be found in work by Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, and David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. For a more recent overview, see Richard Maltby et al. and Paul Grainge et al. WHERE TO BEGIN: • Robert C. Allen, ‘Relocating American Film History: The “Problem” of the Empirical’, Cultural Studies, January 2006. 122

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• Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: Knopf, 1985). • Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). • David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction (Boston: McGrawHill, 2003). • Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). • Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986). • Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich and Sharon Monteith, Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). • Joshua M. Greenberg, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) • Thomas Guback, The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America Since 1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). • Thomas Guback, ‘Non-market Factors in the International Distribution of American Films’, in B. A. Austin (ed.), Current Research in Film: Audiences, Economics, and Law (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985), pp. 111–26. • Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: California University Press, 2006). • Richard Maltby, Daniël Biltereyst and Philippe Meers, Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). • Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 1999). • Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). • Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–34 (London: BFI, 1985). • Various authors, History of the American Cinema, 10 volumes (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1990–99). • Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). • Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988). • Justin Wyatt, ‘The Formation of the “Major Independent”: Miramax, New Line and the new Hollywood’, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 75–90. • Justin Wyatt, ‘Revisiting 1970s’ Independent Distribution and Marketing Strategies’, in Chris Holmund and Justin Wyatt (eds), Contemporary American Cinema: From the Margins to the Mainstream (Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 2005), pp. 229–44.

Scholars using a political economy approach have produced rigorous analyses of the film economy. American domination of international screen markets is a recurring theme. Global Hollywood and its ‘sequel’ Global Hollywood 2 (by Toby Miller et al.) are key texts in this field.

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WHERE TO BEGIN: • Ronald V. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property (Boulder, CA: Westview Press, 1996). • Nicholas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication: Global Culture and the Economics of Information (London: Sage, 1990). • Robert McChesney, ‘Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism’, Monthly Review, March 2001, www.monthlyreview.org/301rwm.htm • Robert McChesney, The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008). • Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood (London: BFI, 2001). • Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell and Ting Wang, Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI, 2005). • Janet Wasko, ‘Hollywood, New Technologies and International Banking: A Formula for Financial Success’, in B. A. Austin (ed.), Current Research in Film: Audiences, Economics, and Law (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985), pp. 101–10. • Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).

Studies of non-US cinema distribution are frequently embedded within national and regional cinema histories. There is also a growing body of work on the film festival as a distribution platform. WHERE TO BEGIN: • Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). • Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson, British Cinema: Past and Present (London: Routledge, 2000). • Michael Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). • Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). • Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, The Screening of Australia (Sydney: Currency Press, 1987). • Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). • Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005). • Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2010). • Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009). • John A. Lent, The Asian Film Industry (London: Christopher Helm, 1990). • Richard Porton (ed.), Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals (London: Wallflower Press, 2009). • Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See (London: Wallflower Press, 2002). 124

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• Kenneth Turan, Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

Media and economics literature has much to offer in the way of data. Media economics textbooks date rapidly, but feature good coverage of the distribution sector. Arthur de Vany’s Hollywood Economics diagnoses and explains the risk-averse nature of contemporary Hollywood. Allen Scott’s studies of the economic geography of film distribution and production are indispensable. Sedgwick and Pokorny’s edited collection An Economic History of Film is also highly recommended. WHERE TO BEGIN: • Alan B. Albarran, and Syliva M Chan-Olmsted, Global Media Economics: Commercialization, Concentration and Integration of World Media Markets (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1998). • Arthur de Vany, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry (London: Routledge, 2003). • Gillian Doyle, Understanding Media Economics (London: Sage, 2002). • Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen and Adam Finn, Media Economics: Applying Economics to New and Traditional Media (London: Sage, 2004). • Charles Moul (ed.), A Concise Handbook of Movie Industry Economics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). • Bruce M. Owen and Steven S. Wildman, Video Economics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). • Allen J. Scott, On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005). • John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny (eds), An Economic History of Film (Oxford: Routledge, 2005). • Harold L. Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis, 6th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Another useful body of research can be found within work on distribution platforms or technologies. For example, there is a long-established tradition of distribution research within television studies. Similarly, there have been many excellent studies of the VCR, which provide unique insights into the economic history of video distribution and the contractual arrangements governing this sector of the industry, and other media technologies such as the VCD. WHERE TO BEGIN: • Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, The Television Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2004). • James Bennett and Niki Strange, Television as Digital Media (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2011). • Denise D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington, Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market (New York: New York University Press, 2008). • Douglas A. Boyd, Joseph D. Straubhaar and John A. Lent, Videocassette Recorders in the Third World (New York: Longman, 1989). Appendix

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• Darrel William Davis, ‘Compact Generation: VCD Markets in Asia’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2003. • Gladys D. Ganley and Oswald H. Ganley, Global Political Fallout: The VCR’s First Decade (Cambridge: Harvard University Center for Information Policy Research, 1985). • John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka and Stuart Cunningham, New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). • Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, Television Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era (London: Routledge, 2009). • Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). • Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 2003).

Studies of informal distribution are far less common than work on the formal film economy. Media anthropologists study media circulation and reception from a groundlevel perspective across various global sites, as exemplified in Ginsburg et al.’s edited collection Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. S. V. Srinivas’s study of the Indian B-circuit is a must-read, as is the work of Ravi Sundaram. The six-country study Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, edited by Karaganis and published by the Social Science Research Council, is the most authoritative study on global piracy authored to date. Other important writers on piracy include Shujen Wang and Brian Larkin. Many other studies of informal circuits are referenced throughout Shadow Economies of Cinema and in the bibliography. WHERE TO BEGIN: • Stuart Cunningham and John Sinclair (eds), Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas (St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1999). • Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). • Kelly Hu, ‘The VCD Experience’, in John Nguyet Erni and Chua Siew Keng (eds), Asian Media Studies: Politics of Subjectivities (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 55–72. • Joe Karaganis (ed.), Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2011). • Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2008). • S. V. Srinivas, ‘Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, January 2001. • Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2009). • Shujen Wang, Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

While research into distribution has tended to emphasise empirical matters over critical analysis, some notable works provide theoretical perspectives on distribution. Key scholars include Janet Harbord, Sean Cubitt, Charles Acland, Jeffrey Himpele and Brian Larkin. Beyond media studies, the field of cultural anthropology has also examined the circulation of signs and symbols within and across cultures. 126

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WHERE TO BEGIN: • Charles Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2003). • Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 3–63. • Sean Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’, Cultural Politics, June 2005. • Jodi Dean, ‘Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics’, in Megan Boler (ed.), Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 101–21. • Janet Harbord, Film Cultures (London: Sage, 2002). • Jeffrey Himpele, ‘Film Distribution as Media: Mapping Difference in the Bolivian Cinemascape’, Visual Anthropology Review, Spring 1996. • Jeffrey Himpele, Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). • Brian Larkin, ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy’, Public Culture, Spring 2004. • Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2008). • Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, ‘Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity’, Public Culture, Winter 2002, pp. 191–213. • Greg Urban, Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2001).

OTHER SOURCES The vast majority of information about distribution structures, formal and informal, never makes it onto the public record, so it is often necessary to speak directly to the people involved. Interviews with distributors and pirates generate fascinating insights into how the distribution economy works. Most national film agencies, such as the BFI, publish contact details for distribution companies on their websites. Many distributors will appreciate your interest in their work and are usually more than happy to talk about their business (although those in the informal sector may be less willing to volunteer information). Websites and blogs are a rich source of information on various aspects of distribution, especially digital distribution. There is very strong coverage of intellectual property issues at websites such as ArsTechnica.com and IP-Watch.org. Information on social media platforms, file-sharing and other informal digital circuits can be found at TorrentFreak.com, AllThingsD.com and Wired.com. Noteworthy bloggers in this area include Greg Sandoval (http//news.cnet.com/media-maverick/), Eriq Gardner (http://reporter.blogs.com/thresq/), Edward Jay Epstein (http//thehollywoodeconomist. blogspot.com/) and Mike Masnick (www.techdirt.com).

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Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Sean Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’, Cultural Politics vol. 1 no. 2 (2005), pp. 193–214. 2. Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–34 (London: BFI, 1985); John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: US and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Parallel to this is an emerging body of work on film festivals as distribution networks, including Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Film Festival Networks: The New Topographies of Cinema in Europe’, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), pp. 82–107; Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007); Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009). 3. John Sinclair, Liz Jacka and Stuart Cunningham, New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Michael Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Albert Moran, New Flows in Global TV (Bristol: Intellect, 2009). 4. Nicholas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication: Global Culture and the Economics of Information (London: Sage, 1990), p. 162. The passage is italicised in the original. 5. Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’. 6. For example: Steve Jones, ‘Music That Moves: Popular Music, Distribution and Network Technologies’, Cultural Studies vol. 16 no. 2 (2002), pp. 213–32; Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, ‘Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity’, Public Culture vol. 14 no. 1 (2002), pp. 191–213; Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw (eds), Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). 7. Exceptions, such as India’s sprawling black market in cable TV connections, certainly exist. Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2009).

1

DISTRIBUTION FROM ABOVE AND BELOW

1. Scott Hettrick, ‘Sony Puts its Faith in Church-based Promo’, Video Business, 24 October 2005, p. 6. Note that after its initial success with church screenings, Cloud Ten teamed up

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2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

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with Sony for home video distribution. Other studios are now working with faith-based markets via speciality divisions, such as Fox Faith. Rob Walker, ‘God is in the Distribution’, New York Times Magazine, 13 November 2005, p. 38. Walker notes that the film did have a small theatrical release some months later, in early 2001; however, the church screenings and DVD sales were the primary drivers of distribution. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989), online. This has a more specific character in Marxist discourse. For Marx and Engels, distribution was the intervening process between production and consumption which stratifies capitalist society into workers and the bourgeoisie through its dissemination of economic and social inequality. See Sean Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’, Cultural Politics vol. 1 no. 2 (2005), pp. 193–214. A key text on distributive justice is John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1971). Republican candidate John McCain went so far as to label Obama as the aspirational ‘Redistributionist in chief’ during the 2008 presidential election. Cited in Richard Malin Ohmann, Making and Selling Culture (Hanover: Weslyan University Press, 1996), p. 21. Precursors to the exchanges are sometimes traced back further, to 1896; see Max Alvarez, ‘The Origins of the Film Exchange’, Film History vol. 17 (2005), pp. 431–65. For a European perspective on early cinema distribution, see Frank Kessler and Nanna Verhoeff (eds), Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution 1895–1915 (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2007). Andrew F. Hanssen, ‘The Block Booking of Films Re-examined’, in John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny (eds), An Economic History of Film (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 125–26. A network of high-volume ‘junk exchanges’ also existed – cut-price operators who leased older reels of dubious print quality for around 3 cents per foot, catering to the bottom end of the market. See Alvarez, ‘The Origins of the Film Exchange’, p. 433. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 120. Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robins, ‘Hollywood for the 21st Century: Global Competition for Critical Mass in Image Markets’, Cambridge Journal of Economics vol. 16 no. 1 (1992), pp. 1–22; Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s, History of the American Cinema Vol. 6 (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1999); Edward Epstein, The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood (New York: Random House, 2005). Epstein, The Big Picture, p. 107; see also Jeff Ulin, The Business of Media Distribution: Monetizing Film, TV, and Video Content (New York: Focal Press, 2009). Thomas Guback, ‘Non-Market Factors in the International Distribution of American Films’, in Bruce A. Austin (ed.), Current Research in Film: Audiences, Economics, and Law (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985), p. 113; Janet Wasko, How Hollywood Works (London: Sage, 2003). Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 4. See also Douglas Gomery, ‘Economic Externalities: Looking Beyond Box-Office Returns’, Velvet Light Trap vol. 64 (2009), pp. 105–6; and Ramon Lobato, ‘Invisible Audiences for Australian Films? Cinema and its Many Publics’, Metro vol. 160 (2009), pp. 162–5. Richard Natale, ‘Hollywood’s Numbers Game: The Box-Office Guess-timates’, The Los Angeles Times, 20 December 1999. Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 2.

Shadow Economies of Cinema

16. Ibid., p. 10. 17. Nick Roddick, ‘Cinema on Demand’, Sight & Sound October 2007, p. 14; Dina Iordanova, ‘Rise of the Fringe: Global Cinema’s Long Tail’, in Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones and Belén Vidal (eds), Cinema at the Periphery (St Andrews: St Andrews University Press, 2010), pp. 23–45. 18. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 4. 19. Charles R. Acland, ‘Classrooms, Clubs, and Community Circuits: Cultural Authority and the Film Council Movement, 1946–1957’, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 158. 20. The Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art, with its extensive 16mm film collection of European and experimental works, became the centre of a nontheatrical circulatory network reaching thousands of schools, museums, universities and individual borrowers. See Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). For more on alternative 16mm distribution networks, see Acland, ‘Classrooms, Clubs, and Community Circuits’; Cecile Starr (ed.), Ideas on Film: A Handbook for the 16mm Film User (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1951). 21. Patricia Zimmermann, ‘Startling Angles: Amateur Film and the Early Avant-Garde’, in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1995), p. 143. See also Zimmerman’s Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Jan-Christopher Horak, ‘Avant-Garde Film’, in Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, History of the American Cinema Vol. 5 (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1993), pp. 387–91. 22. Eric Schaefer, ‘Plain Brown Paper: Adult Films for the Home Market, 1930–1969’, in Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (eds), Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 214. Other examples in the paragraph above are also from Schaefer’s essay. 23. Kerry Segrave, Piracy in the Motion Picture Industry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003). See also Chapter 5 of this book for more on piracy. 24. S. V. Srinivas, ‘Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies vol. 4 no. 1 (2003), pp. 40–62. 25. Jeffrey Himpele, ‘Film Distribution as Media: Mapping Difference in the Bolivian Cinemascape’, Visual Anthropology Review vol. 12 no. 1 (1996), pp. 48 and 53. See also his monograph Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 26. Ibid., p. 58. 27. Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex, p. 19. 28. The quote is from Laikwan Pang, ‘Mediating the Ethics of Technology: Hollywood and Movie Piracy’, Culture, Theory & Critique vol. 45 no. 1 (2004), p. 20. See also Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2009). 29. Ekky Imanjaya, ‘The Other Side of Indonesia: New Order’s Indonesian Exploitation Cinema as Cult Films’, Colloquy vol. 18 (2009), pp. 143–59; personal communication, April 2010.

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2

THE STRAIGHT-TO-VIDEO SLAUGHTERHOUSE

1. I use the term ‘straight-to-video’, which is the norm in the UK and Australia, rather than ‘direct-to-video’, the American equivalent. 2. Anita Elberse and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, ‘Superstars and Underdogs: An Examination of the Long-Tail Phenomenon in Video Sales’, Working Paper, Harvard Business School, 2008, p. 35. The data used by Elberse and Oberholzer-Gee is based on a five-year sample (2000–05) from Nielsen Videoscan, the leading monitoring service for the US video sell-through market. Figures for original release windows were as follows: direct-to-video 59 per cent, theatrical 26 per cent, television 25 per cent. Note that around 15 per cent of titles were released in multiple windows simultaneously (day-and-date releases in all windows, simultaneous cable and video releases and so forth), which is why the sum of these figures exceeds 100 per cent. 3. Mark Schilling, ‘Another Shock to the System’, The Japan Times, 23 July 2003; Wheeler Winston Dixon, ‘An Interview with Takashi Shimizu’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 22 no. 1 (2005), pp. 1–16; Anchalee Chaiworaporn, ‘Direct-to-Vid Titles Flood Marketplace (Thailand)’, Variety, 23 June 2003; Sudarat Musikawong, ‘Working Practices in Thai Independent Film Production and Distribution’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies vol. 8 no. 2 (2007), pp. 248–61. 4. Tino Balio, ‘Adjusting to the New Global Economy: Hollywood in the 1990s’, in Albert Moran (ed.), Film Policy: International, National and Regional Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 23. 5. Cited in Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989, History of the American Cinema Vol. 10 (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1999), p. 117. 6. Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 118–22. 7. This is not to say, however, that STV is or ever has been entirely the preserve of independents. For example, the video rental giant Blockbuster for a time produced its own STV/made-for-TV productions, including Richard Lang’s Texas (1994) (Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video, p. 148). The majors (Disney especially) have also been active in STV production. Warner Bros. has a series of what it calls ‘DVD premieres’, a euphemism for straight-tovideo. 8. Ibid. 9. David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, History of the American Cinema Vol. 9 (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1990), pp. 3–4. 10. David Landis, ‘Erotic Thrillers Appeal to Senses and Producers’, USA Today, 25 March 1993. 11. Andrew Yule, Hollywood A Go-Go: An Account of the Cannon Phenomenon (London: Sphere, 1987), p. 61. 12. On the industrial context of erotic thrillers, see Robert Eberwein, ‘The Erotic Thriller’, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities vol. 17 no. 3 (1998), pp. 25–33; Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); David Andrews, Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in its Contexts (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Nina K. Martin, Sexy Thrills: Undressing the Erotic Thriller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 13. Rolf Potts, ‘The New B Movie’, New York Times Magazine, 7 October 2007, p. 18.

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14. Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, p. 149. 15. Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video, pp. 116–18. 16. The recent domination of the DVD sell-through market by TV box sets, along with the role played by cable channels like HBO in film financing, is further evidence of the close links between the STV and television industries. See ibid., p. 117; Gautam Malkani, ‘HBO Banks on UK Homebodies’, Financial Times, 10 February 2004, p. 10. 17. Nick Roddick, ‘Loss of the Money Man’, Sight & Sound July 2011, p. 17. 18. Lisa Oldham Stokes and Michael Hoover, City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema (New York: Verso, 1999); Michael Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 19. Yule, Hollywood A Go-Go, p. 17. Most Cannon films received a minor theatrical release, but their primary circulation channel was video. ‘Globus’ refers to Golan’s business partner in Cannon, Yoram Globus. 20. Roger Ebert, cited in ibid., p. 56. 21. Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video, p. 125. 22. Simon During, ‘Popular Culture on a Global Scale: A Challenge for Cultural Studies?’, Critical Inquiry vol. 23 no. 4 (1997), p. 814. 23. Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience. Both Curtin and Wasser also suggest that the kind of fast-and-cheap film production involved in presale deals created a situation where the virtual guarantee of profits upfront meant that there was less incentive on the part of producers to maintain quality control of their products, contributing to the late-1980s shakeout in the USA and the Hong Kong industry’s deep slump in the mid-1990s. 24. Ding-Tzann Lii, ‘A Colonized Empire: Reflections on the Expansion of Hong Kong Films in Asian Countries’, in Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.), Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 122–41. 25. The major studios do this as well. See Epstein, The Big Picture. 26. Yule, Hollywood A Go-Go, p. 76. 27. These are also markets that have traditionally been more receptive to black lead actors than the USA. Indeed, Williamson’s blackness is played up in his Italian productions – hence the title, Cobra Nero (1987) – but played down in his US-produced postBlaxploitation films. In the poster art for the Williamson vehicle Foxtrap (1986), Williamson is sketched in such a way that he appears white. The racial politics of these B-genres are fascinating, and while I do not have time to go into them here this appears to be a fruitful area for future research. 28. Meaghan Morris, ‘Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema: Hong Kong and the Making of a Global Popular Culture’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies vol. 5 no. 2 (2004), pp. 181–99. Other work in this area includes: Srinivas, ‘Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’; Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Terms of Transition: The Action Film in East-West Perspective’, in Jenny Kwow Wah Lau (ed.), Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), pp. 167–78; Leon Hunt, ‘The Hong Kong/Hollywood Connection: Stardom and Spectacle in Transnational Action Cinema’, in Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 269–83; Andrew Willis, ‘Forced to Fight (1991): American Martial Arts Movies and the Exploitation Film Tradition’, Scope vol. 18 (2010), www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue= jul2000&id=285; and Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu (eds),

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29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

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Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005). Morris, ‘Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema’, pp. 189–90. Ibid., p. 184. Toby Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI, 2005). B. Hills, ‘Gone with the Wind – $40m: The Rise and Fall of a Movie Mogul’, The Herald (Melbourne), 2 May 1998, n.p. Ginnane now divides his time between Australia and the USA, and is the current head of the Screen Producers Association of Australia. Philip Adams, review of Turkey Shoot, The Sun (Melbourne), 27 July 1982, n.p. Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, The Screening of Australia (Sydney: Currency Press, 1987), p. 32. Ibid., p. 31. See also Antony I. Ginnane, Some Scenes Objectionable aka Reel Life–Real Life, draft memoir (forthcoming). Telephone interview with Antony I. Ginnane, 23 January 2008. An IFM office was opened in Hong Kong briefly, but Ginnane pulled out of Asia following the wall street crash 1987. Ginnane, Some Scenes Objectionable, n.p. Telephone interview with Antony I. Ginnane, 23 January 2008. Eddie Romero, who directed several of the IFM productions, is one of the most prolific and prominent directors in the Philippines. See the following works by Franco Moretti: ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, Modern Language Quarterly vol. 61 no. 1 (2000), pp. 207–28; Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). Moretti, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, pp. 207, 208. There was at one point an STV version of the Oscars named the DVD Premiere Awards, later known as the DVD Exclusive Awards. For a perceptive discussion of canon formation, see Janet Staiger, ‘The Politics of Film Canons’, Cinema Journal vol. 24 no. 3 (1985), pp. 4–23. Gavin Smith, ‘Straight to Video’, Film Comment vol. 35 no. 6 (1995), p. 80. Cited in Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video, p. 123. Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI, 2001), pp. 111–12. Note that India’s annual output is in fact much higher than this. According to Screen Digest, 1,288 films were produced in India in 2008, not counting informally distributed titles (see summary at: ‘Get the Picture Box Office Statistics’, Screen Australia website, 2009, http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/gtp/ acompfilms.html). Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). Ibid., p. 130. There is a section of Anderson’s book called ‘Is the Long Tail Full of Crap?’ (Ibid., pp. 115–17) in which Anderson addresses this point, concluding, reluctantly, that the Long Tail is indeed full of crap. However, this isolated moment contradicts the overall rhetoric of the book, which works around the aforementioned, decidedly romantic logic of hidden cultural value.

Shadow Economies of Cinema

3

INFORMAL MEDIA ECONOMIES

1. For example, see Sundaram, Pirate Modernity; Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2008); Jeffrey Himpele, Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics and Indigenous Identity in the Andes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 2. Keith Hart, ‘On the Informal Economy: The Political History of an Ethnographic Concept’, CEB Working Paper No. 09/042 (Brussels: Centre Emile Berheim, 2009), p. 9. 3. For an indicative range of definitions and uses, see: Keith Hart, ‘Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana’, Journal of Modern African Studies vol. 11 no. 1 (1973), pp. 61–89; Philip Mattera, Off the Books: The Rise of the Underground Economy (London: Pluto Press, 1985); Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes, ‘World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics, and Effects of the Informal Economy’, in Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells and Lauren A. Benton (eds), The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 11–40; Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper & Row, 1989); Ananya Roy and Nezar Alsayyad (eds), Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (Lanham: Lexington, 2004). 4. Peter Guttman, ‘The Subterranean Economy’, Financial Analysts’ Journal November–December 1978, pp. 26–8; Edgar L. Feige, ‘How Big is the Irregular Economy?’, Challenge vol. 22 no. 5 (1979), pp. 5–13. 5. Friedrich Schneider and Robert Klinglmair, ‘Shadow Economies Around the World: What Do We Know?’, IZA discussion paper (Bonn: Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit/Institute for the Study of Labour, 2004), http://ftp.iza.org/dp1043.pdf. Note that studies use different methodologies (including cash circulation measurement, electricity use measurement and surveys) and terminology (analogue concepts include shadow economy, subterranean economy and irregular economy). 6. International Labour Office, Employment, Incomes and Equality: A Strategy for Increasing Productive Employment in Kenya (Geneva: ILO, 1972), p. 6. 7. Hart’s paper was presented at a conference in 1971 and published in 1973. It notes, among other things, the heavily gendered nature of the informal economy, which accounted for the activities of 95 per cent of active women in Ghana compared to 40 per cent of active men (Hart, ‘On the Informal Economy’). 8. See S. V. Sethuraman, ‘The Urban Informal Sector: Concept, Measurement and Policy’, International Labour Review vol. 114 no. 1 (1976), pp. 69–81; Ray Bromley and Chris Gerry, Casual Work and Poverty in Third World Cities (Chichester: Wiley, 1979); Cathy A. Rakowski, ‘The Informal Sector Debate, Part 2: 1984–1993’, in Cathy A. Rakowski (ed.), Contrapunto: The Informal Sector Debate in Latin America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 31–50; Patricia Fernandez-Kelly and Jon Shefner, Out of the Shadows: Political Action and the Informal Economy in Latin America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 9. De Soto, The Other Path and The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic, 2000).

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10. Castells and Portes, ‘World Underneath’, p. 15. 11. Howard Karger, Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005). 12. For recent critiques of labour practices in creative industries, see: Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (New York: New York University Press, 2009); David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (London: Routledge, 2010). 13. Often ‘offshoring’ of production has disastrous environmental consequences, as was the case when Danny Boyle’s The Beach (2000) was shot in Ko Phi Phi Ley in Thailand. See Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2. 14. Marina Hyde, ‘Saadi Gaddafi’s Hollywood Adventure’, Guardian, 27 May 2010, p. 3; Eriq Gardner, ‘How to Beat the Indie Financing System’, The Hollywood Reporter, 23 September 2010, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-beat-indie-financing-system-28267 15. Philip Harding and Richard Jenkins, The Myth of the Hidden Economy: Towards a New Understanding of Informal Economic Activity (Milton Keynes: Open Press University, 1989), p. 15. 16. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), p. 191. 17. Rapidly increasing ticket prices in multiplexes since the advent of 3D also drive consumers towards piracy as a no-cost alternative, producing informality where it did not previously exist. 18. This point is developed further, and most eloquently, by Ananya Roy in ‘Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning’, Journal of the American Planning Association vol. 71 no. 2 (2005), pp. 147–58. 19. There are many examples of informal labour organisation on a smaller scale, and such efforts are often very effective. See Arbind Singh, ‘Organizing Street Vendors’, Seminar vol. 491 (2000), http://www.india-seminar.com/2000/491/491%20arbind%20singh.htm 20. This is noticeable in some of the celebratory writing on pirate media distribution, especially file-sharing (see Chapter 5 and Conclusion). 21. Hart, ‘Informal Income Opportunities’; UN-HABITAT, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements (London: United Nations Human Settlements Programme/Earthscan, 2003). 22. Sean Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’, Cultural Politics vol. 1 no. 2 (2005), pp. 193–213. 23. Stuart Cunningham and John Sinclair (eds), Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas (St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1999). 24. These examples are discussed in Kerry Segrave, Piracy in the Motion Picture Industry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003). 25. The large market for Evangelical media in the USA is of considerable interest to the major studios, which see it as a growth area. However, the studios have been obstructed in their efforts to expand into this market by the fact that their analysts ‘have found it difficult to gain the kind of point-of-sale data that can help them decide what types of content work best’. Wendy Wilson, ‘Building Up Data for the Christian Segment’, Video Business, 12 February 2007. 26. Srinivas, ‘Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’. 27. See also the insertion of customised pornographic sequences into Bangladeshi action movies as described by Lotte Hoek, ‘Cut-Pieces as Stag Film: Bangladeshi Pornography in Action Cinema’, Third Text vol. 24 no. 1 (2010), pp. 135–48.

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28. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 49. 29. Abdoumaliq Simone, ‘Pirate Towns: Reworking Social and Symbolic Infrastructures in Johannesburg and Doula’, Urban Studies vol. 43 no. 2 (2006), pp. 357–70. 30. Ibid., p. 358. 31. Ibid., p. 367. 32. Arif Hasan, ‘The Changing Nature of the Informal Sector in Karachi due to Global Restructuring and Liberalization, and its Repercussions’, in Roy and Alsayyad, Urban Informality, pp. 67–78. 33. Ibid., p. 73. 34. Gladys and Oswald Ganley, Global Political Fallout: The VCR’s First Decade (Cambridge: Harvard University Center for Information Policy Research, 1985), p. 67. For different uses of informal media distribution practices in the Iranian context, see Annabelle SrebernyMohammadi and Ali Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 35. Barbara Klinger, ‘Contraband Cinema: Piracy, Titanic, and Central Asia’, Cinema Journal vol. 49 no. 2 (2010), pp. 106–24. Another example concerns the 2009 film Balibo, an Australian docu-drama about the murder of six Aussie journalists during Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor. Upon its release, the film was banned by the Indonesian government, but pirate copies were almost immediately widely available in street markets. There is some evidence to suggest that the ban may have actually been beneficial for the film’s reputation in Indonesia, adding a layer of intrigue to what would otherwise have been an obscure movie screened only in specialist cinemas and expat clubs. See Nivell Rayda, ‘Balibo Film Ban Backfires Badly’, The Jakarta Globe, 14 December 2009, http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/balibo-film-ban-backfires-badly/347311 36. Cited in John Chesterman and Andy Lipman, The Electronic Pirates: DIY Crime of the Century (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 7. 37. For more on Sixth Generation distribution structures, see Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, ‘Globalization and Youthful Subculture: The Chinese Sixth-Generation Films and the Dawn of a New Century’, in Jenny Kwok Wah Lau (ed.), Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), pp. 13–27. 38. Jeffrey M. Tupas and Jeoffrey Maitem, ‘Bootleg DVDs of Maguindanao Massacre on Sale’, Inquirer, 28 December 2009, http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/regions/view/ 20091228-244373/Bootleg-DVDs-of-Maguindanao-massacre-on-sale 39. A well-informed colleague from a former Soviet state once told me that his nation’s erstwhile prime minister had made a fortune selling and renting out bootleg DVDs, under the auspices of a state-run company during the Soviet era. This has not been documented in the English-language media but, according to my colleague, it is common knowledge in the relevant nation. 40. Joe Karaganis (ed.), Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2011), p. 153. 41. For Pertierra, the social effects of this informal new media landscape include the integration of Cuba into a Latin American audiovisual space (in which the USA plays a significant, but not all-important, role) and a closer engagement with the rhythms of international popular culture. But Pertierra also identifies a ‘retreat into privacy’ for those Cubans with access to hard drives, as their media habits become further removed from

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42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

4

state media and they start to worry about the security of their valuable devices in their homes. The key concern of Pertierra’s informants is not freedom of expression but ‘the widening divide between those who have access to electronic media and those who do not’. Hence, in the Cuban context, informal media provides mobility and freedom as well as introducing new vectors of class difference into a political system founded on the basis of economic equality. Anna Pertierra, Cuba: The Struggle for Consumption (Coconut Creek, FL: Caribbean Studies Press, 2011). Citation is from a draft chapter kindly supplied by author. Paul Haven, ‘Cuba Tries to Drag Shadow Economy into the Light’, Forbes.com, 5 July 2011, http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/07/05/general-cb-fea-cuba-the-secret-economy_ 8549535.html Rana Dasgupta, ‘Maximum Cities’, New Statesman, 27 March 2006, pp. 38–40. Melanie Gilligan, ‘Slumsploitation: The Favela on Film and TV’, Mute, 5 September 2009, http://www.metamute.org/en/Slumsploitation-Favela-on-Film-and-TV; Katia Maciel, ‘The Franchised Favela in Recent Brazilian Cinema’, paper delivered at the Transnational Cinemas and Globalising Societies conference, Universidad Iberoamericana, Puebla, Mexico, 29 August 2008. Augusto Cesar Freitas de Oliveira, ‘O filme do ano: observações periféricas sobre Tropa de Elite’, Achegas.net – Revista de Ciência Política vol. 38 (2008), pp. 5–18. Quote translated from Portuguese in collaboration with the author. Alexei Barrioneuvo, ‘A Violent Police Unit, on Film and in Rio’s Streets’, New York Times, 14 October 2007, p. 3. Sheila Johnson, ‘The Movie That Shook a Country’, Daily Telegraph (London), 18 July 2008, p. 26. LAN houses (high-speed internet cafés) are increasingly common around the country, providing low-cost access to the internet despite the comparatively low level of household penetration. Barrioneuvo, ‘A Violent Police Unit’. In February 2011, 150 police officers swept through the Camelódromo Uruguaiana in a massive two-day anti-counterfeiting raid, the largest ever seen in Brazil. ‘Megaoperação contra a pirataria fecha Camelódromo da Uruguaiana’, Jornal do Brasil, 26 January 2011, http://www.jb.com.br/rio/noticias/2011/01/26/megaoperacao-contra-a-pirataria-fechacamelodromo-da-uruguaiana/. Thanks to Augusto Cesar de Oliveira for his insights into informal markets in Brazil. Michael Gibbons, ‘Dispatch from Brazil: Golden Bear Upset: A Look at the Controversy Behind Tropa de Elite’, Indiewire, 26 February 2009, http://www.indiewire.com/article/ dispatch_from_brazil_golden_bear_upset_a_look_at_the_controversy_behind_tro. See also de Oliviera, ‘O filme do ano’; David Tryhorn, ‘Playing Favela Fast and Loose’, Guardian, 16 September 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/sep/15/worldcinema

NOLLYWOOD AT LARGE

1. Since it first appeared in a series of New York Times articles in 2002, the term ‘Nollywood’ has gained currency in the global news media as a nickname for the Nigerian video industry. The term is used widely in Nigeria, though critics have rightly pointed out that the Californicentricity of this term offers a distorted optic on an industry which has its own

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2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

logics, histories and dreams. For more on this debate, see Jonathan Haynes, ‘ “Nollywood”: What’s in a Name?’, Film International vol. 5 no. 4 (2007), pp. 106–8; originally published in Guardian (Nigeria), 3 July. Joseph Gugler, African Film: Re-Imagining a Continent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 177. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, ‘Information Sheet No. 1: Analysis of the UIS International Survey on Feature Film Statistics’, 2009, http://www.uis.unesco.org/template/pdf/cscl/ Infosheet_No1_cinema_EN.pdf. Note that a precise quantification of Nollywood’s output and revenue is impossible, given the informal nature of the industry. Until recently the website of Nigeria’s National Film and Video Censors Board (www.nfvcb.gov.ng) claimed to have classified 1,588 films in 2007, the most recent year for which figures were available, but its figures are not entirely reliable and many more films circulate without official approval. Onookome Okome, ‘Nollywood: Africa at the Movies’, Film International vol. 5 no. 4 (2007), p. 4. Early academic studies include: Jonathan Haynes, ‘Nigerian Cinema: Structural Adjustments’, Research in African Literatures vol. 26 no. 3 (1995), pp. 97–119; Brian Larkin, ‘Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities’, Africa vol. 67 no. 3 (1997), pp. 406–40; Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome, ‘Evolving Popular Media: Nigerian Video Films’, Research in African Literatures vol. 29 no. 3 (1998), pp. 106–28; Jonathan Haynes (ed.), Nigerian Video Films (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000). A recent edition of Journal of African Cultural Studies (vol. 22 no. 10, 2010), edited by Lindiwe Dovey, stages a productive dialogue between African cinema studies and scholarship on the video boom. See also Mahir Saul and Ralph A. Austen (eds), Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010). Haynes, ‘Nigerian Cinema: Structural Adjustments’, p. 97. The films coming out of the Yoruba travelling theatre tradition (directed by Ogunde, Ade Love and others) were very popular at the end of the 1970s and in the early 80s, with multiple weekly screening at the National Theatre in Lagos and in the major Yoruba cities; but the overall level of production was very low, with only a handful of 35mm and 16mm titles released each year. Emmanuel Sama, ‘African Films are Foreigners in their Own Countries’, Ecrans d’Afrique vol. 4 (1993), p. 54. Gaston Kabore, ‘The African Cinema in Crisis’, UNESCO Courier July–August 1995, pp. 70–3. Haynes, Nigerian Video Films, p. xv. Moradewun Adejunmobi, ‘English and the Audience of an African Popular Culture: The Case of Nigerian Video Film’, Cultural Critique vol. 50 (2002), p. 78. Note that Igbos are dominant in the English-language production sector and in distribution generally. Examples include the Onitsha Market literature and the pulp romances (soyayya) common in northern Nigeria. See Larkin, ‘Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers’. John C. McCall, ‘The Pan-Africanism We Have: Nollywood’s Invention of Africa’, Film International vol. 5 no. 4 (2007), p. 99. VCD stands for video compact disc, a precursor to the DVD format which is still popular in many African and Asian nations.

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15. Brian Larkin, ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy’, Public Culture vol. 16 no. 2 (2004), p. 295. 16. 200 naira is the average price per disc, but films are typically split into at least two separate parts (see following section). 17. Babson Ajibade, ‘From Lagos to Douala: Seeing Spaces and Popular Video Audiences’, Postcolonial Text vol. 3 no. 2 (2007), p. 11. 18. Ibid. 19. McCall, ‘The Pan-Africanism We Have’, p. 96. 20. Chukwuma Okoye, ‘Looking at Ourselves in our Mirror: Agency, Counter-Discourse, and the Nigerian Video Film’, Film International vol. 5 no. 4, p. 26. 21. Alessandro Jedlowski, ‘Beyond the Video Boom: New Tendencies in the Nigerian Video Industry’, paper presented at ASAUK writing workshop, Birmingham, 16 April 2010. Thank you to the author for illuminating conversations about the industry which have informed my thinking about the formal–informal dynamic in relation to Nigerian video. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Justin Akpovi-Esade, ‘At Last, the Hologram Arrives’, Guardian (Nigeria), 4 December 2002, p. 60. Thanks to Obafemi Lasode for the reference. 25. Jedlowski, ‘Beyond the Video Boom’. 26. There have been shoot-outs between police and pirates at Alaba. ‘NCC Impounds N.5billion Pirated Works’, Daily Sun, 16 August 2006, p. 25. 27. Intellectual Property Watch, video interview with Charles Igwe, 12 March 2010, http://vimeo.com/10111557 28. Afolabi Adesanya, ‘From Film to Video’, in Haynes, Nigerian Video Films, pp. 37–50. 29. An example of a popular 35mm Nollywood film is Teco Benson’s 2009 hit Mission to Nowhere. 30. Jedlowski, ‘Beyond the Video Boom’, p. 16. 31. Larkin, ‘Degraded Images’, p. 297. 32. Larkin, ‘Hausa Dramas and the Rise of Video Culture in Nigeria’, in Haynes, Nigerian Video Films, pp. 209–42. 33. John C. McCall, ‘Nollywood Confidential: The Unlikely Rise of Nigerian Video Film’, Transition vol. 95 (2004) p. 101. 34. Moradewun Adejunmobi, ‘Nigerian Video Film as Minor Transnational Practice’, Postcolonial Text vol. 3 no. 2 (2007), http://journals.sfu.ca/pocol/index.php/pct/article/ view/548/405 35. A recent trend has been cheap multi-pack DVDs, in which pirates compile up to twelve or even twenty movies onto the one disc. Many producers complain that this is even more damaging than regular piracy, driving down the perceived value of Nigerian movies in the consumer’s mind. 36. Kareem Fahim, ‘Pirated Films from Nigeria Are Seized in Brooklyn’, New York Times, 1 November 2010, p. A30. 37. Karaganis, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, p. 25. 38. Email correspondence with Tony Kavukattu, director of operations, February 2008. Izogn caters almost exclusively to diasporic Africans in nations with high levels of broadband penetration, mostly in Europe, the USA and UK. While Izogn Movies has also recently introduced a ‘low-bandwidth’ streaming option, there is very little traffic from African

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39.

40. 41.

42.

5

nations. Update: as this book goes to press, the Izogn Movies website is offline and the business appears to have ceased operations. This recalls the ‘degraded’ nature of the pirate video circuits in northern Nigeria, as described by Brian Larkin: ‘it was common to watch Indian films with advertisements scrolling across the bottom of the screen announcing “Al Mansoor’s video” followed by a long list of his many shops in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and other parts of the gulf, along with their telephone, telex, and fax numbers. These videos often found their way to the Kano television station, CTV, where announcements for Al Mansoor’s many video shops sometimes obliterated the Arabic and English subtitles at the bottom of the screen.’ Larkin, ‘Degraded Images’, p. 296. ‘Lights, Camera, Africa: Movies are Uniting a Disparate Continent, and Dividing it Too’, The Economist, 16 December 2010, pp. 85–8. Ibid. For other critiques, see Mawutodzi Abissath, ‘Film as a Force for National Development’, Ecrans d’Afrique vol. 4 (1993), pp. 68–71; Frank Nwachukwu Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Yusuf M. Adamu, ‘Between the Word and the Screen: A Historical Perspective on the Hausa Literary Movement and the Home Video Invasion’, Journal of African Cultural Studies vol. 15 no. 2 (2002), pp. 203–13. Similar critiques have been levelled at the ‘imperialist’ effects of Hong Kong and Japanese media, which have long dominated markets in East and South East Asia. The Taiwanese scholar Dzing-Tann Lii has described Hong Kong as ‘a colonized empire’, arguing that its film industry (in its heyday, at least) ‘not only resists foreign domination, but also “invades” other countries, thereby creating a new type of imperialism’. Ding-Tzann Lii, ‘A Colonized Empire: Reflections on the Expansion of Hong Kong Films in Asian Countries’, in KuanHsing Chen (ed.), Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 122–41. See also Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2002).

SIX FACES OF PIRACY

1. Linda Lee, ‘Bootleg Videos: Piracy with a Camcorder’, New York Times, July 1995, p. D1. 2. Motion Picture Association and Lek Consulting, The Cost of Movie Piracy (Los Angeles: MPA, 2008); Rand Corporation, Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2009). 3. Motion Picture Association of America, ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, http://www.mpaa. org/contentprotection/faq 4. Magz Osborne, ‘Pirates Find More Ways to Plunder’, Variety, 21 June 2003, p. 21. 5. Ronald V. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property (Boulder, CA: Westview Press, 1996); Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently, The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law: The British Experience, 1760–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Simon Frith and Lee Marshall (eds), Music and Copyright (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin, 2004).

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6. The USA was not a party to the Berne Convention until 1989. Berne’s moral rights (droit d’auteur) provisions were not recognised by the USA – though some legal protections for creators can be found in other areas of US law – and were phased out in the final version of the GATT. 7. John Frow, ‘Public Domain and the New World Order in Knowledge’, Social Semiotics vol. 10 no. 2 (2000), pp. 173–85. 8. Ibid., p. 182. 9. A plurilateral treaty is a type of multilateral treaty, where a limited number of states agree, with very few reservations, on an issue. This can be compared with most multilateral treaties, where there are generally more signatories but the scope of reservations is greater. 10. Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs. Lucas, on record as a strong defender of IP regimes, is still more lenient than some of his contemporaries when it comes to Star Wars fan activity. 11. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2. 12. Ibid.; Nitin Govil, ‘War in the Age of Pirate Reproduction’, Sarai Reader 04 (2004), pp. 378–83. 13. ‘Tipping Hollywood the Black Spot’, The Economist, 28 August 2003, pp. 43–4. 14. Kelly Gates, ‘Will Work For Copyrights: The Cultural Policy of Anti-Piracy Campaigns’, Social Semiotics vol. 16 no. 1 (2006), pp. 57–73. 15. Ben Grubb, ‘Film Industry Hires Cyber Hitmen to Take Down Internet Pirates’, The Age (Melbourne), 8 September 2010, http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technologynews/film-industry-hires-cyber-hitmen-to-take-down-internet-pirates-2010090714ypv.html 16. Shujen Wang and Jonathan J. H. Zhu, ‘Mapping Film Piracy in China’, Theory, Culture and Society vol. 20 no. 4 (2003), pp. 97–125. 17. Karaganis, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies. 18. Majid Yar, ‘The Global “Epidemic” of Movie “Piracy”: Crime-Wave or Social Construction?’, Media, Culture and Society vol. 27 no. 5 (2005), p. 690. 19. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture, pp. 103–6. 20. ‘Rip. Mix. Burn’, The Economist, 2 July 2005, pp. 13–14. 21. Adrian Johns, ‘Piracy as a Business Force’, Culture Machine vol. 10 (2009), pp. 44–63. 22. Ibid., p. 49. 23. Maggie Farley, ‘China Piracy Crackdown Targets US-Linked Firms’, LA Times, 25 April 1996, p. 4. 24. Shujen Wang, Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Douglas Clark, ‘IP Rights Protection Will Improve in China – Eventually’, The China Business Review May–June 2000, pp. 22–9. 25. Cheap Chinese VCD and DVD hardware is not entirely outside the established circuits of transnational audiovisual industry capital, however, as chip and component patent licences have to be leased from the likes of Time Warner, Hitachi, Sony and Philips. Wang, Framing Piracy, pp. 51–3. 26. I first encountered the term ‘cockroach capitalism’ via Darrell Davis (‘Compact Generation: VCD Markets in Asia’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 23 no. 2, [2003], pp. 165–76), who credits Chuck Kleinhans as its source. The term was used in J. K. Galbraith’s The New Industrial State (London: H. Hamilton, 1972). See also Scott Lash and

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27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

John Urry’s concept of ‘disorganised capitalism’, in The End of Organised Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, p. 246; John Naughton, ‘How Sony Became an Ugly Sister’, The Observer, 18 December 2005, p. 6. Cited in Don Groves, ‘Video Piracy Kicks Back Into High Gear’, Variety, 9 September 2002, p. 10. Wired’s reputation has suffered since its involvement in the outing of officer Bradley Manning as the source of the Wikileaks documents, but during the 1990s and 2000s it played an important role in articulating an informal philosophy of informational freedom for its early-adopter readers. Vaidhyanthan, Copyright and Copywrongs. In later work Vaidhyanthan offers a different critique of IP, one which is more self-reflexive and globally focused. See ‘The Anarchist in the Coffee House: A Brief Consideration of Local Culture, the Free Culture Movement, and Prospects for a Global Public Sphere’, Law and Contemporary Problems vol. 70 (2007), pp. 205–10. Michael Strangelove, The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and The Anti-Capitalist Movement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Richard M. Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (Boston: Free Software Foundation, 2002); McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See Lawrence Lessig’s books Free Culture, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2002) and Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the New Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008). Lessig, Free Culture, p. 199. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Lessig, Free Culture, p. 227. Kavita Philip, ‘What is a Technological Author? The Pirate Function and Intellectual Property’, Postcolonial Studies vol. 8 no. 2 (2005), pp. 199–218. Lessig, Free Culture, p. xvi. Roland Barthes, Image–Music–Text (Glasgow: William Collins and Sons, 1977), p. 143. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. 146. Jacques Derrida, ‘Limited Inc a b c’, in V. E. Taylor and C. E Winquist (eds), Postmodernism: Critical Concepts (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 418–19. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 3. Steve Neale, Genre (London: BFI, 1980); Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2. One example is the controversy surrounding the Larrikin Music Publishing Pty Ltd vs EMI Songs Australia Pty Ltd case of 2010, in which the Australian band Men at Work were sued by the rights-holder of a children’s folk song. For commentary, see Steve Collins, ‘Kookaburra v Down Under: It’s Just Overkill’, Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture vol. 7 no. 1 (2010), http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=145 Bettig, Copyrighting Culture. See also Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication (London: Sage, 1995).

Notes

143

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

144

Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, p. 5. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture, p. 9. Ibid., p. 210. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, p. 226. Ibid., p. 222. Laikwan Pang, Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia: Copyright, Piracy, and Cinema (London: Routledge, 2006). Pang, ‘Mediating the Ethics of Technology’, p. 9. Kong Rithdee, ‘Scourge or Saviours? Film Pirates May Be Breaking the Law, Yet They Are Also Providing an Indispensible Cultural Service’, Bangkok Post, 7 April 2006. For a discussion of pirate cinephilia in the Philippines context, see Jasmine Nadua Trice, ‘The Quiapo Cinémathèque: Transnational DVDs and Alternative Modernities in the Heart of Manila’, International Journal of Cultural Studies vol. 13 no. 5 (2010), pp. 531–50. Tilman Baumgärtel, ‘Media Piracy and Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to Youtube (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), pp. 259–71. This observation resonates with early studies of piracy, which highlighted its potential as a driver of cultural imperialism. For example, Chesterman and Lipman, The Electronic Pirates. Larkin, Signal and Noise. Ravi Sundaram, ‘Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India’, Sarai Reader 01 (Delhi: Sarai, 2001), p. 95; Sundaram, Pirate Modernity. Ravi Sundaram, ‘Uncanny Networks: Pirate, Urban and New Globalisation’, Economic and Political Weekly (India), 3 January 2004, p. 96. Ravi Sundaram, ‘Other Networks: Media Urbanism and the Culture of the Copy in South Asia’, in Joe Karaganis (ed.), Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2007), pp. 54–5. Philip, ‘What is a Technological Author?’, p. 207. Ibid., p. 210. Lawrence Liang, ‘Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation’, Sarai Reader 05 (Delhi: Sarai, 2005), p. 12. Lawrence Liang, ‘Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure: Rethining Access to Culture’, SSRN working paper, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1436229 Ibid., p. 4. International Intellectual Property Alliance, Special 301 Recommendations, Mexico, 2008 (excerpt), p 55, http://www.iipa.com/rbc/2008/2008SPEC301MEXICO.pdf ‘Pirated Goods: A Fake for Every Desire’, El Universal, 8 June 2005. Alfonzo Hernández, ‘Tepito: The Transformaton of a Site of of Resistance’, paper given at World Planning Schools Congress, Palacio de Minería, Mexico City, 2006, http://www.barriodetepito.com.mx/detodo/organizaciones/congress_2006.html. For studies of Tepito’s history and economy, see Natalia Grisales Ramírez, ‘“En Tepito todo se vende menos la dignidad”: Espacio público e informalidad económica en el Barrio Bravo’, Alteridades vol. 13 (2003), pp. 67–83; Pablo Piccato, ‘Communities and Crime in Mexico City’, Delaware Review of Latin American Studies vol. 6 no. 1 (2005), http://www.udel.edu/ LAS/Vol6-1Piccato.html; Guillermina Grisel and Castro Nieto, ‘Intermediarismo político y sector informal: El comercio ambulante en Tepito’, Nueva antropologia vol. 11 no. 37 (1990), pp. 59–69; John Cross, Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City (Stanford,

Shadow Economies of Cinema

75. 76.

CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); John Cross and Alfonso Morales, Street Entrepreneurs: People, Place and Politics in Local and Global Perspective (London: Routledge, 2007); Sergio Peña, ‘Regulating Informal Markets: Informal Commerce in Mexico City’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy vol. 20 no. 9–10 (2000), pp. 37–67; Karaganis, Media Piracy and Emerging Economies. John Cross, ‘Pirateria callejero, el estado y la globalización’, paper given at Comércio, culturas e políticas públicas em tempos de globalizaçao, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janiero, Escola de Serviço Social, 2005. The Economist, 10 March 2007. Cited in Ken Bensinger, ‘Muscles in Mexico’, Daily Variety, 10 March 2005, p. 3. International Intellectual Property Alliance, Special 301, pp. 52, 54. IIPA Special 301 reports are annual updates on the worst piracy offenders. The 2008 report nominates thirteen nations for special mention on the ‘Priority Watchlist’: Argentina, Egypt, India, Mexico, the PRC, Peru, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine, Chile, Costa Rica and, surprisingly, Canada (for its lack of legislative reform). I was not able to verify this claim, but I have no reason to doubt it. Both Cross (‘Pirateria callejero, el estado y la globalización’) and Peña (‘Regulating Informal Markets’) note that political donations and other forms of support help to keep the Tepito community on-side with PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and other Mexican political parties. Larkin, ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds. A pseudonym is used here.

6

THE GREY INTERNET

69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

1. Motion Picture Association of America, ‘Response to Request for Public Comment on the 2010 Special 301 Out of Cycle Review of Notorious Markets’, 5 November 2010. Further analysis of this shift is provided in Karaganis, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies. 2. Thank you to Julian Thomas for this insight. 3. Movielink recently ceased operating as a standalone website and has been absorbed into Blockbuster.com. Rafat Ali, ‘Movielink-Blockbuster Deal: Cash $6.6M; BB Paid Netflix $7M For Patent Dispute’, Forbes, 14 July 2008, http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/14/movielinkblockbuster-netflix-tech-cx_pco_0814paidcontent.html; ‘Hollywood and the Internet: Coming Soon’, The Economist, 23 February 2008, pp. 86–8. 4. As Andrew Currah noted in 2004, adult content has been crucial for CinemaNow: ‘The margins on pay-per-view adult titles are much higher than non-adult titles: adult content has a higher price point and only 20 per cent of the gross revenue is returned to the distributor (compared to 60–65 per cent on a lower priced studio title)’. Andrew Currah, The Digital Storm: The Strategic Challenge of Internet Distribution to the Hollywood Studio System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 66. 5. Apple Trumps Sony, Wal-Mart in Online Film Download War’, The Independent, 9 February 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/apple-trumps-sonywalmart-in-online-film-download-war-2208827.html. Note that Apple has a significant commercial advantage over the other businesses, as it can cross-subsidise iTunes from the profits generated by sales of its devices. Many competitors claim that iTunes deliberately

Notes

145

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

146

undercuts them on prices for digital content as a way of adding value to its US$700 iPhones and iPads (the source of Apple’s real profits). Virginia Heffernan, ‘The Death of the Open Web’, New York Times Magazine, 17 May 2010, p. 16; see also Jonathan Zittrain’s discussion of tethered devices in The Future of the Internet. In the USA, Netflix is a mail-order DVD rental and online streaming service. In Canada, it is streaming-only. Sandvine Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report (Ontario: Sandvine Intelligent Broadband Networks, 2010), p. 2. This depends on the number of ‘seeders’. Popular content that is being shared by thousands of users simultaneously will download at lightning speed; more obscure content that is being shared by only a few users will take days to download. For example, Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Movieslinks.tv has been taken offline by US authorities; but other sites have cropped up in its place. There have been at least nine court cases brought against such sites by the Hollywood studios. However, the fundamental question of whether linking to pirated content is illegal remains unresolved. See ‘The War Against Movies and TV Show Linking Websites’, TorrentFreak, 10 September 2010, http://torrentfreak.com/the-war-againstmovie-and-tv-show-linking-websites-100910; Jason J. Lunardi, ‘Guerrilla Video: Potential Copyright Liability for Websites That Index Links to Unauthorized Streaming Content’, Fordham Intellectual Property Media & Entertainment Law Journal vol. 19 (2009), pp. 1077–129. ‘Piracy on Fast Forward’, Law.com, 7 September 2007, http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/ PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1189069353022 Mark Sweney, ‘Google Ramps Up Anti-Piracy Measures’, Guardian, 2 December 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/dec/02/google-piracy-illegal-downloads A quick anecdote about RuTube: one rainy Sunday afternoon, I was enjoying a British World War II documentary featuring extensive footage of the Eastern front. The documentary is not available legally online but of course the informal economy provided a workaround: a Google Video search led me to episodes scattered across a number of different sites, including Trilulilu, Veoh, Google Video, YouTube and RuTube, all apparently uploaded by users in violation of copyright. RuTube was one of the better sites, with a higher-quality image and less freezing than the others, so I spent a few hours there watching episodes of this venerable doco. The price one pays for the free RuTube experience is exposure to advertising in between episodes. This resulted in some jarring spectarorial experiences. One minute I was watching black-and-white footage of starving comrades on the frontlines in the 1940s, then the clip would finish abruptly and RuTube would automatically load an ad for a Russian mobile phone provider featuring glamorous Muscovites playing with their iPhones, thus catapulting me into the post-Soviet turbo-capitalist present. Seconds later, I was back on the World War II Russian front; then at the next ad break I would be snapped back to the present with an incomprehensible commercial for laundry liquid, featuring a handsome Slavic couple in a trendy condominium. The sudden jump between historical periods – not to mention economic systems – was disconcerting to say the least. But I enjoyed these Russian ads almost as much as the documentary itself, and from now on my memories

Shadow Economies of Cinema

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

of the battle of Stalingrad will forever be peppered with the visual totems of post-Soviet capitalism. Noah Shahchtman, ‘Hamas’ YouTube Ripoff, Dead Again’, Wired, 24 October 2008, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/10/hamas-youtube-r; Claire Hoffman, ‘Obscene Losses’, Portfolio, 15 October 2007, http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/cultureinc/arts/2007/10/15/YouPorn-Vivid-Entertainment-Profile/ This is specified in the ‘Safe Harbor’ provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For an overview of the controversy, see Tim Arango, ‘As Rights Clash on YouTube, Some Music Vanishes’, New York Times, 22 March 2009, p. B1. Sean Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’, Cultural Politics vol. 1. no. 2 (2005), p. 202. ‘Viacom International, Inc., Comedy Partners, Country Music Television, Inc, Paramount Pictures Corporation, and Black Entertainment Tellevision LLC v. YouTube, Inc., YouTube, LLC, and Google Inc.’, US District Court for the Southern District of New York, 2007–10, http://news.cnet.com/pdf/ne/2007/ViacomYouTubeComplaint3-12-07.pdf. Viacom sought damages for content uploaded to YouTube prior to the introduction of the Content ID system. Ibid. ‘Broadcast Yourself’, Broadcasting Ourselves ;) – The Official YouTube Blog, 18 March 2010, http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/broadcast-yourself.html Documents submitted to the court can be accessed at http://www.google.com/press/ youtube_viacom_documents.html. For analysis, see Cory Doctorow, ‘Viacom v. YouTube is a Microcosm of the Entertainment Industry’, Guardian, 4 May 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/may/04/viacom-youtube The future of YouTube’s movie delivery services is unclear. In 2010 it experimented with paid downloads, offering five independent Sundance movies for streaming at a price of $3.99 each. At this stage YouTube/Google seems happy to stick to the free streaming model, combined with monetisation policies for rights-holders, rather than to try and compete with Netflix and the other paid/subscription online video services. At the time of writing, Facebook has started experimenting with paid movie downloads as well. Elaine Jing Zhao, ‘Online Video Distribution: China’, unpublished report, Queensland University of Technology, 2010. Randall Stross, ‘Will Books Be Napsterized?’, New York Times, 4 October 2009, p. BU1. Enigmax, ‘The Mega-Money World of Mega-Upload’, TorrentFreak, 6 June 2010, http://torrentfreak.com/the-mega-money-world-of-megaupload-100606 Motion Picture Association, ‘Response to Request for Public Comment on the 2010 Special 301 Out of Cycle Review of Notorious Markets’, pp. 5–6. These remarks draw on Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas, ‘The Business of Anti-Piracy: New Zones of Enterprise in the Copyright Wars’, forthcoming in International Journal of Communication. Ben Grubb, ‘Film Industry Hires Cyber Hitmen to Take Down Internet Pirates’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 September 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technologynews/film-industry-hires-cyber-hitmen-to-take-down-internet-pirates-2010090714ypv.html; Anick Jesdanun, ‘Small Companies Legally Thrive on Internet Piracy’, Information Week, 8 July 2003, http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/ showArticle.jhtml?articleID=10818445 Mark Ishikawa from the controversial anti-piracy agency BayTSP is a former hacker. For another example, see David Kravets, ‘Exclusive: I Was a Hacker for the MPAA’, Wired,

Notes

147

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

22 October 2007, http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/10/ p2p_hacker?currentPage=2 The rights-management company DigiProtect launched some of the first speculative invoicing lawsuits in Germany. In the UK, the (now-defunct) firm ACS:Law has been the driving force behind these suits. In Singapore, a similar action was launched on behalf of the anime distributor Odex by the anti-piracy group BayTSP. The US cases are discussed here. Eriq Gardner, ‘New Litigation Campaign Quietly Targets Tens of Thousands of Movie Downloaders’, The Hollywood Reporter, THR Esq blog, 30 Mar 2010, http://thresq. hollywoodreporter.com/2010/03/new-litigation-campaign-targets-tens-of-thousands-ofbittorrent-users.html Matthew J. Schwartz, ‘Mass P2P Lawsuits Targeted Nearly 100,000 Last Year’, Information Week, 7 February 2011, http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/policy/ showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229201274 The US Copyright Group is a front for the Virginia law firm Dunlap Grubb & Weaver. Copies of the settlement letters can be viewed at http://news.cnet.com/2300-1023_3-100036107.html The reluctance of ISPs to cooperate with mass lawsuits is posing the biggest problem yet for companies like US Copyright Group. Greg Sandoval, ‘Hurt Locker Lawyers Continue AntiPiracy Fight’, Cnet, 4 January 2011, http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20027252261.html Larkin, ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds’.

CONCLUSION 1. See note 26, Chapter 5. 2. Geert Lovink, ‘The Art of Watching Databases’, in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), pp. 9–12. 3. Mark Pesce, ‘Unevenly Distributed: Production Models for the 21st Century’, The Human Network blog, 31 January 2008, http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/2008/01/31/ unevenly-distributedproduction-models-for-the-21st-century/ 4. Henry Jenkins, ‘Spreadable Media: Creating Media and Value in a Networked World’, video presentation, Screen Futures conference, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 12 July 2011. For more on spreadable media, see various texts by Henry Jenkins, including posts on his blog Confessions of an Aca-Fan (especially http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/02/ if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html), and his forthcoming book Spreadable Media, co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. 5. Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet is a passionate polemic against DRM-enabled media platforms (especially those produced by Apple) which seek to turn the free and open networks of the internet into private shopping malls. 6. For more on this point, see Lawrence Liang, ‘Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure: Rethinking Access to Culture’, SSRN Working Paper, 2009, http://ssrn.com/paper=1436229 7. Jodi Dean, ‘Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics’, in Megan Boler (ed.), Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 101–21.

148

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Bibliography

161

Index

10BA tax scheme 30 8mm film format 89 16mm film format 6, 13, 19, 56, 89 20th Century-Fox 11, 23 35mm film format 11, 56, 61 A Trip to the Moon 14 action cinema 24–32 see also genre ACS:Law 108 Afghanistan 47 Afman, Frans J. 27 Africa Magic 65 Aiplex 106–7 Al Qaeda 73 Alaba International Market 61 Amazon.com 60 Amazon Instant Video 97 American Film Institute 33 American International Pictures (AIP) see Corman, Roger, Filmways/AIP American Pie (1999) 25 Anderson, Chris 35 see also long tail The Anna-Nicole Show (2002) 26 anthropology 5, 16, 39–41 anti-capitalism 80–2 Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) 71

Index

Anytime 98 Apple 98 see also iTunes AqsaTube 102 Arab Spring 113 archiving 34–5, 88 Association of Movie Producers (Nigeria) 60 The Asylum 25, 35 Atlantic Releasing 23 audiences 5, 6, 51, 59 audience measurement 12–13 Australia vii, 28, 30–2, 41, 71, 73, 97 Avco Embassy 23 AVH: Alien vs Hunter (2007) 25 B film 5, 9, 15, 23–4, 26, 28, 30, 34, 44 Ba-k.com 105 Balogun, Ola 56 Bangkok International Film Festival 83 Barthes, Roland 78 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 74 Beijing Bastards (1993) 47 Benin 58, 63 Benkler, Yochai 77 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works 71 Best Buy 97–8

Beta video format 22, 89 ‘Betamax case’ (1984 Sony Corp vs Universal City Studios) 72–3, 75, 81 BigPond Movies 97 BitTorrent 6, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104, 105, 106, 112 Black Caesar (1973) 28 Black Cobra (Cobra Nero) series (1987–91) 28–9 black market 14 blaxploitation see genre Blockbuster 35, 45, 97 see also video stores Blood for Tears series 62 Bloom, Noel 23 Bolivia 16–17 Boll, Uwe 108 Bollywood 18, 56, 57 see also India box-office revenue 12–13, 51, 55 Braveworld 31 Brazil 39, 49–52 Bring It On (2000) 25 British Film Institute 33 Bronson, Charles 27 Bulgaria 31 Buñuel, Luis 89 Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia 69

163

cable television 22, 39, 46, 65 Cameron, Kirk 9 Cameroon 45, 58, 63 Canada 24–5, 28, 31 Cannes Film Festival 27 Cannon 23, 27–8, 34 canons 33 Carolco 23 A Case of Honor (1991) 30 censorship 16, 43, 47, 52 Chad 58, 63 Chan, Jackie 15, 73 China 47, 55, 69, 75, 100, 102, 104 Christian film 9, 44, 88 Cineclick 98 Cinemanow 97 Cissé, Souleymane 56 City of God (2002) 49 class 46, 66 Clickstar 98 Cloud Ten Pictures 9 Coalition of Nollywood Guilds and Associations 60 Coase, Ronald 74 Cobra (1986) 28 ‘cockroach capitalism’ 75, 111 Cold War 114 The Colour of Pomegranates (1968) 47 Columbia Pictures 75 Comedy Central 103 Confessor, Rod 31 Content ID system 102 Coppola, Francis Ford 16 copy protection 75 copyright 6, 67, 69–92, 96, 102, 106–9 Corman, Roger 18, 24, 31 The Corpse Had a Familiar Face (1994) 26 corruption 90–2 Crary, Jonathan 45

164

Creative Commons 113 Credit Lyonnais 27 crime fiction 32–2 Cuba 26, 48 cult cinema 19 cultural capital 16, 79, 115 cultural imperialism 28, 56, 66, 81 cultural politics 14–19 culture jamming 76 cyberlockers 95–6, 97, 104–6 The Da Vinci Treasure (2006) 25 The Daily Show (1996–present) 103 Dailymotion 96, 102, 112 Dangerous Guy (1994) see Drunken Master II De Laurentiis, Dino 23, 27 de Soto, Hernando 40 The Dead Pool (1988) 28 Deadly Affair (1995) 57 Death Wish (1974) 27 Delta Force 2: The Columbian Connection (1990) 28 Democratic Republic of Congo 66 Demonstone 30 deregulation 74–6 Derrida, Jacques 78–9 Desperate Housewives (2004–present) 101 diasporas 43, 55, 56, 63–5 Dickens, Charles 72 Die Hard (1988) 28 digital downloads 11, 97 Digital Millennium Copyright Act 72 direct-to-video see straightto-video Disney 23 Dirty Harry (1971) 28 distraction 45 distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks 73, 106

Domitilla (1997) 61 download-to-own 97 Dracula (1992) 16 drive-ins 44 drugs 41, 46, 49, 52, 69, 85, 89 Drug Wars: The Cocaine Cartel (1992) 26 Drunken Master II (1994) 15 East Palace, West Palace (1996) 47 Eastern Films Management 31 economic informality see especially 39–52, 59–66 Ejiro, Zeb 61 Ekeinde, Omotola Jalade 55 Electronic Frontier Foundation 76, 107–8 Elite Squad see Tropa de elite enforcement (intellectual property) 12, 59–66, 69–72, 91–2, 106–8 erotic thrillers see genre espionage 42 Evil Angels/A Cry in the Dark (1988) 28 The Expendables (2010) 108 exploitation film see genre, see also stag film Facebook 112, 113 Family Home Entertainment 23 Farina, Dennis 26 The Fatal Image (1990) 26 favelas 49–52 file-hosting websites see cyberlockers file sharing 51–2 see also peer-to-peer, BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay Film and Video Producers and Marketers Association of Nigeria 60

Shadow Economies of Cinema

film clubs 14 film councils 14 Film-makers Association of Nigeria 64 film societies 14 film studies 1–2, 33, 45–6 FilmDallas 23 Filmways/AIP 23 Flight of Fury (2007) 25 Footloose (1984) 47 formalisation 11, 41, 59–67, 78, 80, 102–3 Foucault, Michel 78 Fox, Vincente 87 France 29, 55, 102, 105 Franklin, Richard 30 Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) 71, 80 Gaddafi, Muammar 41 Gaddafi, Saadi 41 game consoles 98 General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade (GATT) 71, 80 genre 23–4, 25, 26, 28–9, 30, 32, 33, 57, 79–80, 95 action 21, 28–9, 30, 57; blaxploitation 23, 28; boxing films 88; drama 28, 57; erotic thrillers 21, 23, 25; exploitation films 19, 23–4, 30–2, 48, 49; horror 19, 23, 29; martial arts films 15, 25, 29, 88; melodrama 26, 56; mockbusters 25, 35; science fiction 30, superhero films 28, 88; war films 28, 30 Germany 55, 97, 107 Ghana 57, 58, 63, 66 Ginnane, Antony I., 30–2 Glamour Girls (1994) 57 globalisation 31, 51, 63, 87, 114

Index

Glover, Danny 63 Golan, Menahem 27, 34 Google 96, 101, 102, 103, 106, 112 Greece 71 Greencine 98 Hamas 73 hard drives 48 Harry Potter series (2001–11) 89 Hart, Keith 40 Hausa films 57, 58, 63 Hemdale 23, 31 Hemmings, David 31 Hezbollah 73 Highlight 31 HMV 65 Hollywood 3, 9, 11–13, 14, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 32, 36, 41, 43, 44, 50, 52, 55, 56, 58, 61, 72–3, 75, 81, 88, 96, 99, 100; New Hollywood 23 home video 21, 22, 23, 36 Hong Kong 15, 27, 28, 29, 56, 73, 76, 82 horror film see genre Hotfile 104 human geography 39 human rights 47 The Hurt Locker (2008) 108 Huston, John 72 IFilm 98 IFM World Releasing Inc. 30–2 Igbo films 58 Imanjaya, Ekky 19 Imcine 89 IMDB.com 33 In the Realm of the Senses (1976) 16 India 15, 44, 55, 58, 73, 106 Indonesia 19 Infernal Affairs (2002) 16

informational freedom 114–17 Institute for Economic Affairs (United Kingdom) 74 intellectual property (IP) 11–12, 70–1, 80–1, 96 see also copyright International Film Management 30–2 International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) 88 International Labour Office 40 International Video Entertainment 23 internet 11, 45, 48, 51–2, 65, 76, 82, 89, 95–109, 111–17 see also Anytime, BigPond Movies, BitTorrent, Cinemanow, Cineclix, Clickstar, cyberlockers, Dailymotion, Facebook, file sharing, Flickr, Google, Google+, Greencine, Hotfile, IFilm, Jalipo, linking sites, Mediafire, MediaMarkt, Mediatrip, Megaupload, Megavideo, Movielink, Napster, Orkut, peer-topeer networks, The Pirate Bay, Pop, Rapidshare, Reeltime, RenRen, Spotify, Spotflix, streaming video, TopFile, Twitter, video-hosting sites, Vizumi, Vongo, YouSendIt, YouTube iPod 98 Iran 18, 36, 47 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 73 Island Alive 23

165

Italy 28–9, 71 iTools 104 iTunes 60, 96, 97, 98, 99 Izogn Movies 65 Jalipo 98 Japan 22, 55 JC Films 89 Jenkins, Henry 113–14 Karaganis, Joe 64 Kenya 40 Kill Bill (2003/4) 81 Kino.to 100 Kitano, Takeshi 36 L’Harmattan TV 98 La Paz 16–17 Lady Terminator (1989) 19 Lagos 1, 61, 63 Lai, Leon 73 laissez-faire 74–7 Lashka-e-Toiba 73 Lau, Andrew 16 Lee, Spike 69 Left Behind trilogy 9, 13, 19 see also Christian film legal studies 82 Lessig, Lawrence 76, 80, 115 Liang, Lawrence 84–5 libertarianism 70, 84, 115–16 Liberty 31 Lightning Video 23 Lii, Ding-Tzann 28 linking sites 96, 97, 100–1 Lionsgate 97 Lithuania 31 Liveleak 102 Living in Bondage (1992) 56 long tail 35–6 Lorimar 23 Los fauyqueros de Tepito (1982) 89 Lovefilm 65, 98 Lucas, George 72

166

Macrovision 75 made-for-TV movies 26 Magnum Entertainment 23 Maguindanao Massacre 11/23/09 48, 108 Malcolm X 115 Malcolm X (1992) 69 Manhunter (1986) 26 marketing 44 martial arts film see genre mass P2P lawsuits 106–9 Marxism 40, 80–3 MCEG 23 measurement 12–13 media archaeology 18 Media Defender see Peer Media Technologies Media Home Entertainment 23 Mediafire 96 MediaMarkt 97–8 Mediatrip 98 mediocrity 34 Megarotic 104 Megaupload 104, 105 Megavideo 96 melodrama see genre Mercenary for Justice (2006) 25 Metacafe 102 Metallica 72 Mexico 22, 24, 31, 41, 105 Mexico City 1, 6, 70 see also Tepito market Miramax 23 MGM 23 ‘mockbusters’ see genre Modern Family (2009–present) 101 Monterey Home Video 23 Moretti, Franco 32–3, 35 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) 69, 72, 75, 80, 87, 96, 100 Movielink 97–8 MoviesLinks.tv 100

MTV 103 Mubi 97 Mui, Anita 73 multiplexes see cinemas music 47, 64, 71, 105 music video vii, 48, 102 Mystics in Bali (1981) 19 Napster 6, 100, 106 narcotraficante films 22, 41, 89 National Film and Video Censors Board (Nigeria) 60 neo-liberalism 41, 42, 87, 90 Netflix 65, 96, 98–9 New International Division of Cultural Labour 29 New Line Cinema 22, 23 New World 23, 31 Nielsen 12, 44 Niger 63 Nigeria 5, 22, 55–67, 73, 83 Nigerian Copyright Commission 60 Nigerian video industry see Nollywood Nintendo Wii 98 Nnaji, Genevieve 55 Nnebue, Kenneth 56 Nollywood 5, 55–67 see also Nigeria Nollywood Foundation 63 Nollywood Movies (television channel) 65 Norris, Chuck 26 Nosferatu (1922) 98 Nouah, Ramsey 55 Nu Art 14 Nu Image 108 nuclear plants 48 offshore production 30–2, 41–2 Ogunde, Hubert 56

Shadow Economies of Cinema

Okoye, Chukwuma 59, 62 Ong, Marilyn 31 Orion 23 Ôshima, Nagisa 16 Osuofia in London (2003) 63 OVA (original video animation) 22 Pacific Cine Films 14 Parajanov, Sergei 47 Paramount 23, 97, 103 Peer Media Technologies 107 peer-to-peer networks 3, 45, 97, 99, 105, 107 see also file sharing, BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay People’s Republic of China see China Philippines 24, 28, 31, 32, 48 Pickpocket (1998) 47 piracy 1, 6, 14, 16, 42, 43, 49–52, 69–92, 106–9; as access 82–5; as authorship 78–80; as free enterprise 74–6; as free speech 76–7; as theft 72–4; handicam bootlegs 18 The Pirate Bay 106 pirate markets 6, 19, 47, 48, 49–52, 57, 58, 59, 95 see also Tepito market Pirate Modernity 83 Playstation 98 pornography 14, 23, 24, 25, 26, 88, 101, 102, 108, 109 postcolonialism 82 postmodernism 78 poststructuralism 78 Poverty Row studios 25 Prism Entertainment 23 Prohibition 41 psychoanalysis 45 public domain 71–2, 98

Index

The Queen of Black Magic (1983) 19 Race for the Yankee Zephyr (1981) 31 raids see enforcement Rapidshare 96, 104–5 region coding 75 regulation 4, 11, 14–16 Rentrak 44 Roku 98 Romania 24, 25, 102 Rolling Stones 71 Rothrock, Cynthia 25 Runs–Zones–Clearances system 11 Russia 48, 69, 102 RuTube 102 Safe Harbor 96, 102 San Francisco 41 Santa (1932) 88 Santo (Mexican film series) 88 satellite TV 65, 69 Savage Justice (1988) 30 Seagal, Steven 25, 26 Seinfeld (1994–98) 102 Sembène, Ousmane 56 sequels 25 Serbia 27 set-top boxes 98 The Siege of Firebase Gloria (1989) 30 Sightsound 98 The Simpsons 9 Singapore 45, 107 Sita Sings the Blues (2008) 113 Skyscraper (1996) 26 Slumdog Millionaire (2008) 49 Smedley, Oliver 74 Smith, Anna-Nicole 26 Snakes on a Train (2006) 25 Sony 23, 75, 97, 106 see also ‘Betamax case’

South Africa 45 South Korea 71, 105 South Park (1997–present) 103 speculative invoicing 107–8 Spiderman 102 Spider-Man 3 (2007) 45, 50 Spotflix 98 Spotify 105 stag film 6, 14 see also pornography star system 21, 25, 55–6 Statute of Anne 71 straight-to-video 5, 9, 19, 21–36, 39, 44, 55, 90, 98 streaming video 63, 96, 97–8, 113 Street Crimes/Dead Even (1992) 26 street markets 49–52, 57, 59, 61, 69, 76, 85–92 studio era see Hollywood Sudan 58, 63 Sundaram, Ravi 39, 83 Switzerland 104 Taliban 47 Tanzania 66 taxation 28, 30, 40, 42, 43 TED.com 113 television 11, 22, 43, 47, 48, 63, 65, 89, 102, 103 see also cable television television studies 2, 12 Telstra 97 Tepito market (Mexico) 70, 85–92 The Terminators (2009) 35 Thailand 24, 69, 83 Thief (1981) 26 Three the Hard Way (1974) 28 ThrillerVideo 23 Time magazine 112 Titanic (1997) 47 TiVo see set-top boxes

167

168

To The Limit (1995) 26 Togo 63 TopFile 96 Transmorphers (2007) 25 transnational production 28–32 Trenchard-Smith, Brian 30 Trilulilu 102 Trimark 97 TRIPS (Agreement on TradeRelated Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) 71 Tropa de elite (Elite Squad) (2007) 39, 49–52 Tsotsi (2005) 49 Tudou 102, 104 TVDuck 100 Twitter 112, 113

V-cinema 22 Valenti, Jack 72 VCR 14, 22, 47, 58, 72 Veoh 102 Vestron 23, 31 VHS video format 19, 21, 22, 57, 83, 89 see also home video Viacom 103 Video Club Owners Association of Nigeria 60 video clubs 1, 46, 58–9, 60 video-hosting sites 101–4 video-on-demand 96–9 video stores 6, 27, 35, 39, 45, 97–8 Vidmark 23 Vimeo 102 Virgins from Hell (1987) 19

Ukraine 31 UNESCO 55 Universal Studios 23, 97 urban studies 5, 39 Usai, Paolo Cherchi 34–5

Walmart Moviecentre 97 Warner Bros. 75, 97 Web Sheriff 107 Weintraub Entertainment Group 23

The Who 71 Wikileaks 113 Williamson, Fred 28 windowing 11–12, 43 see also Hollywood Wired magazine 76, 113 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 71, 75, 80 X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) 45 Xbox 360 see gaming consoles Xianke 75 yielding 28 Yoruba 58, 63 Youku 102, 104 YouPorn 102 YouSendIt 105 YouTube 96, 102, 103, 112, 113 Yuan, Zhang 47 Zhangke, Jia 47

Shadow Economies of Cinema