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This chapter discusses China's home-video market for TV drama. It examines what happens when TV dramas are consumed on DVD, focusing on the ideological and commercial significance of the DVD market of TV drama for contemporary society. The chapter begins with an examination of a number of issues in the development of China's audio-visual market since the 1980s, and provides statistics to support the claim that there is a marked polarization in audio-visual publications. It also discusses recent trends in illegal recording, and examines anti-piracy offensives by the state and the video industry. The chapter concludes with a close look at consumers of TV drama on video and the socio-ideological implications of using video as an alternative medium to broadcast television.

This chapter deals with the consumer electronics industry: the devices consumers use to receive, record, amplify, and display media information. Without them, electronic media would not exist. Together with content production and distribution systems, media devices form a triangle of media industries. Here, the market concentration of telephone, radio, television, DVD players, camcorders, cable television consumer equipment, satellite receivers, CD players, and MP3 players is analyzed. The media consumer electronics industry in the United States is large and diverse in terms of its products. In 2004, its US volume alone was $63 billion. Some firms appear to be niche players, usually sitting at the high-end of the price scale. As for the low and medium price ranges, the market is dominated by around seven or eight large, efficient firms which enjoy enormous economies of scale and scope. Several large firms have been acquired or operated primarly as a brand. There is little middle ground in the industry.

Red light emitting p-n diodes (LEDs) became prominent in the 1960s based on GaAsP and GaP, finding application in alpha-numeric displays and as indicator lamps. Much improved brightness became available from AlGaAs in the 1970s, together with orange and yellow emission from InGaAlP. Modest efficiencies in the green were also available from GaP doped with nitrogen. Blue emission could be obtained from SiC, but only with very poor efficiency. Full colour had to wait until the middle of the nineties when Akasaki, then Nakamura in Japan developed bright blue and green diodes based on InGaN. This enabled the fabrication of white light emitters either by combining red, green, and blue LEDs or by using a blue LED to excite a suitable phosphor. Current LEDs are some five times more efficient than tungsten lamps and are set to replace them for general lighting in the foreseeable future. Nakamura also developed a blue laser diode for application in the DVD player.

This chapter uses a historically and geographically mobile approach to map a range of films and filmmakers often absent from discussions of extreme cinema. The chapter starts with an exploration of the extreme works of directors like Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman and Roman Polanski, stressing their importance to the creation of an extreme art aesthetic. The chapter focuses on the paratextuality of these filmmakers, and studies DVD and Blu-ray versions of their more extreme texts. Focusing closely on how exploitation marketing traditions co-exist with their art film counterparts on these objects, the chapter highlights the complexity of extremity’s commercial identity. The chapter takes the same approach to its study of European exploitation cinema. Using home entertainment paratexts to highlight influential films, the chapter investigates companies such as Arrow Video, Vipco, Anchor Bay, BFI and Redemption DVD, paying special attention to their handling of a range of directors, including Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, and Jean Rollin. The chapter underscores the crucial role exploitation cinema had in shaping extreme art cinema and highlights the contradictory role extremity performs within the commercial sphere.

This chapter presents a detailed analysis of Nosferatu (1922). It begins by describing the two DVD editions of the film released respectively by the British Film Institute in 2002 and by Eureka/Masters of Cinema in 2007. Both versions replicate the tones and tints revealed by the surviving nitrate copy of the film, thus giving the viewers the chance to truly appreciate the various narrative phases and nuances in the story. The chapter then looks at a generic narrative template structured around four phases that although often subjected to variations, could be employed as a blueprint in the reading and analysis of horror films. This template is usually composed of an onset, a discovery, a confirmation, and a confrontation stage. These phases and their inevitable diversions from the basic model could be superimposed on Nosferatu and used to conduct an in-depth reading of the film's narrative developments.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the death of film, which began in the late 1970s. The process has been technologically driven, founded on the emergence of home videotape recording, and soon after that, home computing, leading to film's redefinition at the end of the 1990s in the launch of the DVD. The chapter also argues that the cinema of complexity — the emerging punk cinema — is today the cinema of supplementary-ness born out of the supplementary-ness of videotape and CD-ROM technology, in which activities beyond the visual and aural content of the primary medium are highlighted in its consumption. Complexity, or the grouping together of similar ideas, activities and actions, makes the centre of the DVD not the film itself but what has, until now, been considered auxiliary material in the practice of film viewing.

This chapter states that the Video Recordings Act and the ‘extreme pornography’ provisions of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 need to be understood as measures that transcend matters of narrow party policy. It then elaborates what kinds of material are still likely to find themselves cut from films, and more particularly DVDs, in contemporary Britain, even in the adults-only ‘18’ and ‘R18’ categories, and, more importantly, explain the reasons behind such acts of censorship. Sexual violence is a theme that has continued to preoccupy the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), and is one of the most common reasons for cuts at the ‘18’ and ‘R18’ levels. 2009 saw the passing of the Coroners and Justice Act, sections 62 to 68 of which criminalise possession of what is termed a ‘prohibited image of a child’.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Ken Russell's The Devils (1973). The 1970s proved to be a prolific period for Russell, but the decade closed with both the advent of home video and his slide in reputational and commercial terms, meaning reduced demand was in place for audiences to (re)discover Russell's earlier work via the new small-screen format. Russell's output in the 1980s was largely dismissed by audiences and critics alike, while the following decade saw the director turn out a series of boilerplate TV movies. Little was done in the way of seriously reappraising his body of work until the early 2000s, when his TV films on composers Delius and Elgar were released on DVD and work on a director's cut of The Devils began. While this did not immediately bring about that much interest in Russell's other films, it did prove to be the starting point for The Devils in regaining the recognition which had been absent for the best part of three decades. It is a film which provides plenty of material for analysis and discussion, and while this has always been the case, it is now especially timely given the exposure and acclaim the film has received in recent years.

This chapter examines how Splat Pack director Eli Roth uses the DVD format as a platform to shape audiences' interpretations of his films. Focusing on the DVD releases of his horror films Hostel and Hostel: Part II, it considers how Roth makes claims for the subversive and oppositional nature of his work. In particular, it looks at Roth's use of ‘quotes’ in his films to encourage viewers to consider the films in the light of world events, in this case, Abu Ghraib and the Iraq War. It argues that Roth's efforts to control interpretations of his films are undermined by multiple tensions between the films' content and the claims he makes for them. The digital remediation of Roth's Hostel films, as well as their attendant instability, make them much more complicated and collapse ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ to create a new narrative that is about Roth fashioning an image of himself. The chapter also analyses the national security subtext of Roth's Hostel films and suggests that they were not reactions to, or reflections of, post-9/11 trauma, but emerged from a specific context in which a film's success depended on its being watched over and over again.

Music video aesthetics have seeped into other genres, and music video directors like Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze are altering the landscape of feature films. But there are no archives for music video, and music video’s history remains uncharted. Focusing on the Palm DVD Music Video Director Series, this chapter considers music video directors as auteurs. Music video has become a site for directors to develop style and technique. Directors have a hand in every phase of production: the making of storyboards, the casting of extras, shooting, and editing. Directorial styles diverge because there are no schools for making music videos nor industry internship programs, nor are there communal video-making practices like making music videos in garages. This chapter examines differences among the Palm Series directors (Mark Romanek, Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, Spike Jonze, and Hype Williams) in order to argue for the value and limits of music video auteurship.

This chapter examines the role of two types of affectivity mediated through sound that can be seen as helping to position the comedy fan as part of a particular kind of audience formation. Recorded laughter has played a long and important role in broadcast comedy, simulating ‘liveness’, providing cues for the viewer’s laughter and locating them within an electronic ‘community’. Recorded laughter, however, was until recently largely seen to be in decline, its absence a marker of quality, its presence seemingly a deliberate and significant choice as opposed to a default mode. The DVD commentary, on the other hand, offers what Thomas Doherty calls an ‘imaginary friendship’ between viewer and artist, not community but ‘a new order of intimacy’. This mediated intimacy takes on particular force in comedy – as a League of Gentlemen fan comments, ‘it’s like listening to a great private conversation between best friends’. The commentary might constitute a comic performance in its own right, one that rivals the ‘main feature’ as a source of entertainment. Even when the commentary works against this – The Mighty Boosh’s are more like hearing a joke from which one has been excluded - the listener may still long for this affective inclusion. This chapter, then, examines these two technologically mediated structures of feeling – community and intimacy.

This final chapter explores the enduring legacy and fascination surrounding the Hitchcock branding. Since his death in 1980, Hitchcock has continued to fascinate audiences, scholars, critics and culture in general. By exploring the repeated rereleases of Hitchcock’s work on DVD (despite the relative youthfulness of the format, Psycho has already been released in seven different DVD editions in the UK alone), and Varese Sarabande's series of reissues of Herrmann soundtracks on CD, this chapter looks at how the co-authorship of Herrmann and Hitchcock has been contextualised, narrativised and conceptualised in different ways by the artefacts included in the reissued, remastered and recontextualised versions of Hitchcock’s work with Herrmann (and Herrmann’s work without Hitchcock). Drawing on recent scholarship on the DVD as ‘auteur machine’ by Catherine Grant, and new work on authorship by C. Paul Sellors, the chapter argues that the digital reconceptualization of authorship struggles to account for a notion of collaboration.

Exploring the historical mobility and diffusion of drive-in theatres and their patrons provides an explanatory lens for the shift from theatrical exhibition of exploitation films to their remediation on home video, thus helping explain the mobility and diffusion of contemporary fan cultures that uphold such physical sites as lieux de mÉmoire. The drive-in as a lived place has become increasingly obsolete, its disappearance from the physical landscape allowing it to better function as a symbolic space invested with multiple class-inflected nostalgias. The drive-in's disreputable connotations developed from the mixing of unconventional populations, and especially the influx of working-class viewers drawn by exploitation cinema's populist appeal. Since this populism can conflict with contemporary fans’ claims to subcultural capital, the pastness of the drive-in serves as a spatiotemporal site historically distant enough to contain but not resolve classed cultural distinctions. These distinctions are reproduced in the variety of home video editions that coexist in the marketplace, mediating different class-inflected nostalgias that can complicate the aspirational value typically assumed by new video formats.

Chapter 1 explores regional lockout’s assemblage of technology, distribution, regulation, and culture through the DVD region code. In order to preserve traditional market segmentation practices, Hollywood convinced consumer electronics manufacturers to develop a DRM system wherein DVDs and DVD players are assigned a numerical “region code” based on their respective geographic territories. The codes in the software and hardware must match before the DVD will play. Chapter 1 details the DVD region code’s history, showing how the system was put in place and governed through complex negotiations and alignments among content creators, electronics manufacturers, and governing bodies. The chapter argues that the system is not only a hard-nosed form of technological and distributional control but also a system of symbolic global representation that clusters certain territories together and ranks those clusters within economic and cultural hierarchies.

Chapter 5 explores media free of regional lockout, focusing in particular on region-free DVD. The chapter begins with an analysis of region code circumvention and region-free DVD use by diasporic video retailers in the United States. Interviews with video store owners and employees reveal how region-free DVD can represent both a bottom-up challenge to dominant media industries’ distribution routes as well as a more everyday practice of making cultural resources available to localized diasporic communities. The chapter then explores the use of region-free DVD by cinephiles and film cultists, showing that region-free DVD cultures can also reflect a seemingly contradictory blend of cosmopolitanism and cultural dominance. Ultimately, this chapter argues that while region-free DVD can reflect an oppositional and transgressive orientation toward oppressive global cultural industries, region-free media’s cultural politics are more ambivalent than many of its celebrators might suggest.

This chapter examines how DVD led to the mainstreaming of once marginal ‘Unrated’ horror films. It looks at the emergence of the Splat Pack films after an industrial change in ratings policy. During the DVD era, the film industry's ‘sell-through’ pricing mandates, coupled with DVD's ability to add to — and take away from — the content of a film, allowed ‘Unrated’ movies to make their way to the mainstream. This chapter considers the increasing prevalence of gory, graphic and prolonged violence in films made by the Splat Pack as a reflection of Hollywood taking advantage of a rating system that had changed because of DVD technology. Cinema versions of these films need only feature ‘just enough’ gore, blood and carnage to entice viewers to check out the ‘Unrated’ version on DVD, a product that, the consumer is assured, is ‘uncut’. This chapter discusses the reasons why home video became a viable avenue for the release of ‘Unrated’ films.