Week 2 - The Political Economy of Film and Television: Production and Consumption

In this week’s lecture and seminar workshop we looked at The Political economy of Film and Television: Production and Consumption. Using the key readings we explored the relationship between political economy, the public sphere as well as power and discussed how these can often affect the production and consumption of products.

The lecture further explored the wide differences between the size, concentration and media corporations (Long, P. and Wall T 2012:179). This showed how almost every process of the creation and release of a product within the TV and Film industry differs due to the size of the company and how big it is, in terms of finance and importance.

Ang Ien’s second chapter of Desperately Seeking the Audience, further maps out these differences and also suggests “the paradigms of audience-as-public and audience-as-market are thus only relatively conflicting”. ‘We never conceive of ourselves as belonging to markets, rather we are placed in market categories or identified as part of a target group by others’ (McQuail, 1987:221). This shows us that the political economy in the TV and Film industry just like in many others is extremely important for many reasons and can control a lot of things including the groups of audiences. It also suggests that since audience members themselves may or may not categorise themselves in a particular group of the public that these institutions can’t stop to control audience whether they are categorised in a certain group or not.

My found reading is Television production: issues of exploitation, commodification and bias in UK television labour markets. This article was written by Gillian Ursell (November 2000) and analyses the features and conditions currently characterising work and employment for independent workers in UK television production. Gillian does so by comparing the two at different abstractions in order to understand the findings in a deeper manner.  This shows similar approach to that of Long (2012: 186-187) as Gillian states the constitutive role of workers in these companies.

To further my knowledge and to develop my own research it would be interesting to look at and compare two films, one produced and exhibited by one of the big six to one of a semi-independent company to see in detail how the financial side may in fact affect production and consumption decisions.  An example of two films I could look at Ex-Machina in comparison to the production and consumption of a film such as Age of Ultron.

References:

1.Long, P and Wall, T (2012) Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context (2^nd Edition), London: Pearson. Pp.: 172-185

2.Chapter 2 “Audience-as-market and audience-as-public, in Ang, Ien (1991) Desperately Seeking the Audience.  London: Routledge.

3.Gillian Ursell http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/016344300022006006

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