School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    Secret lives of Asian Australian cinema: offshore labour in transnational film industries
    LOBATO, RAMON ( 2008)
    This article examines some of the material dimensions of Asian Australian cinema through an analysis of selected regional production and post-production flows since 1980, and the debates surrounding them. It begins with a theoretical discussion of the role of labour within the global film industry, before moving on to consider controversies around the offshoring of film production to lower-cost destinations. Specific examples of production relays between Asia and Australia are analysed in the context of models of cultural labour offered by Toby Miller et al. and Ben Goldsmith. The author proposes a definition of Asian Australian cinema that seeks to attend to cross-border collaboration at a variety of levels and to render visible 'below-the-line' Asian Australian interfaces that do not necessarily register on screen.
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    Crimes against urbanity: the concrete soul of Michael Mann
    LOBATO, RAMON (Taylor and Francis, 2008)
    This article examines the contemporary crime film's reimagination of urban space. Through a case study of selected films by Michael Mann, it argues that the extreme stylisation of certain postmodern crime texts functions to aestheticise the industrial infrastructure of late capitalism, and that the genre offers a visual training through which generic sites of commerce, transit and industry (non-place) may be personalised, rendered habitable, and potentially reclaimed.
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    Creative industries and informal economies: the case of Nigerian video
    LOBATO, RAMON (Sage, 2009)
    Since the emergence of its video industry in the 1990s, Nigeria has become the largest film producer in the world by output. Its informal economy now provides around two thousand films a year for a pan-African audience, and the industry has grown rapidly without assistance from the state, NGOs, or the film festival circuit. This article analyses the rise of ‘Nollywood’ through the lens of current debates in media studies. The Nigerian video economy offers compelling evidence for the role of informal markets in creating efficient and economically sustainable media industries. Its success also has implications for current debates around copyright and media piracy. I conclude that reading Nigerian video as a creative industry represents a useful way to rematerialize media studies in the overdeveloped world.