Supply Chain Cinema: Producing Global Film Workers

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Description

Why are big budget films typically made across an array of seemingly dissociated sites

Supply Chain Cinema shows how the production journeys of such films exemplify the principles of the supply chain, whose core imperative is to nimbly and opportunistically manufacturing wherever is most amenable and efficient.

Through extensive on-site investigations and in-depth interviews with film professionals, Kay Dickinson delivers nuanced insight into working practices in the UK and the UAE. Among the sites she examines is Warner Bros permanent base at Leavesden Studios near London. From tax breaks designed to attract foreign projects to infrastructures, logistical support and expertise offered, she considers why Hollywood giants elect to make more of their films in Britain than in the USA.

Dickinson goes on to show how the UKs ambitions to enlarge its creative economies has opened up a host of competitive advantages with British higher education increasingly fashioned to conform to the needs of border-hopping enterprise, thus generating a workforce keenly adapted to the demands of blockbuster moviemaking.

Reviews

Supply Chain Cinema is a critical reconceptualization of blockbuster film production and a scathing indictment of the ways in which higher education and skills training schemes have become complicit in producing a workforce amendable to demands of global capital. This is essential reading and a cautionary tale that troubles how governments and universities are responding to the creative economy. -- Kevin Sanson, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Supply Chain Cinema is a vital contribution, arguing persuasively that global film production can now best be understood via supply chain logistics, with all the just-in-time dynamics of inequity and extraction that this entails. Taking us on a journey to both the UK and the UAE, Dickinson foregrounds the voices and experiences of current and future film workers as they are swept up, trained up and then compelled to navigate the vagaries of the creative supply chain. -- Bridget Conor, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Author Bio

Kay Dickinson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Culture and Creative Arts at Glasgow University, UK. She is the author of Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (2018), Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (British Film Institute, 2016), and Off Key: When Film and Music Wont Work Together (2008).