FAVz039 Industrial Authorship in Film and TV

Faculty of Arts
Autumn 2013
Extent and Intensity
2/0/0. 5 credit(s). Type of Completion: zk (examination).
Teacher(s)
doc. Mgr. Petr Szczepanik, Ph.D. (lecturer)
Guaranteed by
prof. PhDr. Jiří Voráč, Ph.D.
Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Supplier department: Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
there are 12 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
Course objectives
- to explain and illustrate how industrial authorship operates in both contemporary and histroical cases of media production in Eastern and Central Europe
Syllabus
  • The course consists of lectures, discussions and workshops that will be part of the Third Annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference (SIECE). The conference will focus on the broadly defined subject of industrial authorship.
  • Confirmed guests include internationally renowned professors of film and media studies like Dina Iordanova, András Bálint Kovács, Sabina Mihelj and many others.
  • The course will take place in Olomouc, at the Palacký university, on 28 November - 1 December 2013. All travel and accommodation costs will be covered.
  • In recent times, the concept of the author has become somewhat marginalized in screen studies discourse. Yet, John Caughie has suggested that this figure looms large “everywhere else – in publicity, in journalistic reviews, in television programmes, in film retrospectives, in the marketing of cinema”. Caughie goes on to explain that “Sometime around the point at which Film Studies began to be embarrassed by its affiliation to the author, the film industry and its subsidiaries began to discover with renewed enthusiasm the value of authorial branding for both marketing and reputation”. The prominent position that authorship occupies across the region’s audiovisual cultures demands investigation in broader, revisionist terms that offload the Romantic notion of the autonomous Auteur in favor of approaches that confront its collectivity and institutional dimensions, and that respect authorship as a phenomenon that can be subject to acts of branding, contestation, appropriation, repurposing, remixing, and so on . As Derek Johnson and Jonathan Gray recently put it: “The author is a node through which discourses of beauty, truth, meaning, and value must travel, while also being a node through which money, power, labor, and the control of culture must travel, and while frequently serving as the mediating figure standing between large organizations (such as Lucasfilm or Fox) and the audience”. Building from such a position, the 2013 SIECE Conference will broach questions about the industrial dimensions of authorship, considering how it has become part of the cultural, political, and economic fabric of East-Central Europe.
  • Topics for papers and panels include but are not limited to:
  • - Creative agency and industry structure
  • - Social and collaborative creative practice, co-creativity and participation
  • - Institutions as authors
  • - Authorship branding, marketing, and consumption
  • - Authorship as/vs. ownership, authority, and control
  • - Visible and invisible creative labor, distributed creativity
  • - Authorship wars: appropriated, marginalized, denied, dispossessed, censored, concealed, reclaimed authorship
  • - Authorship rituals: credits, awards, “narratives of the self”
  • - The author as archive
  • - Mediations of authorship: technologies and platforms
  • - Repurposing and remixing content, DIY everyday authorship
  • The conference will be preceded by the Czech Society for Film Studies’ pre-conference meeting, which will be held on 28 November in the Czech language. The pre-conference will consist of four workshops, which will be devoted to methodological issues pertaining to Czech film historiography, to biographical research (issues related to the writing person-based studies, oral history, personal archives etc ...), to presentations of ongoing research projects, and to the transformation of The Czech Film Fund.
  • The Third Annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference investigates historical and contemporary dimensions of the region’s audiovisual media industries from all angles – local, transnational, economic, cultural, social, and political – and through a broad range of original scholarship delivered in the form of conceptual papers and empirical case-studies.
Teaching methods
conference papers, discussions, workshops
Assessment methods
Final report.
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
Study Materials
The course is taught: in blocks.
  • Enrolment Statistics (recent)
  • Permalink: https://is.muni.cz/course/phil/autumn2013/FAVz039