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The introduction advances a theoretical framework for interpreting how New Chinese Cinema auteurs shoot on-location as a mode of “place making,” the experiencing and imaging of rural shooting locations as places. Drawing from poststructural cultural geography, production culture studies, environmental psychology, and critical tourism studies, I demonstrate how production environments are more than blank canvases, but places where cultural meanings are being continually contested. As cultural elites, auteurs make coherent disorienting social changes by engaging in production as lived experiences of nation building, homecoming, and cultural salvage. The rural is thus a stage for auteurs to perform their aspirations for social activism, while location shooting constitutes an embodied and performative practice through which auteurs make meaningful sense of their ever-shifting and often precarious roles of authorship. Consequently, images and representations of the rural in the resulting films cannot simply be classified as signifying one cultural logic or another. Rather, they bear traces of the institutional politics, social tensions, and geopolitical ambivalences negotiated by auteurs during production, thus confounding distinctions between the ideologically complicit and subversive, a reductive binary too often mobilized by scholars when periodizing Chinese and Taiwanese film histories.

This chapter examines the commodification of popular culture in Japan as well as the capacity of the domestic market to manufacture and export anime, movies, video games, television programs, music, and manga. It first considers the structure of Japan's cultural industries and the process of cultural commodification based on examples from music, television, and manga in order to provide a broad picture of the Japanese popular culture markets. It then discusses the main features of popular culture production and the capacity of Japan's cultural industries for production, consumption, and export. It also explores the role of “freeters” and “otaku” in Japan's popular culture production, along with the Japanese government's involvement in the production and export of popular culture and its initiatives to support the sector. It argues that the structure and size of the domestic market and the experience of Japan's cultural industries at home have fostered the competitiveness of Japanese popular culture products abroad.

This chapter discusses the issues about power and commissioners in exhibitions in Great Britain. It explains that exhibition commissioners were the leading actors in the epic nineteenth-century drama of creating imperial and national public cultures. The state called upon these experts for science and art reforms, national education, and the management of public galleries, and they were among the first experts in Britain and its Empire to apply modern scientific, economic, and management techniques to the production of culture.

This chapter narrates the emergence of competing discourses among BBC creative workers over how to implement its 2006 interactive multiplatform initiative. Debates over the roles which multiplatform was supposed to play within the BBC's strategic mission often reproduced assumptions about what makes BBC content appealing to its audience. The shift to multiplatform commissioning and production strategies not only attempted to merge the disparate production cultures of television and digital media, but did so in a setting with a strong broadcasting heritage. Drawing on a range of work on production cultures, particularly Philip Schlesinger's study of managerial style, the chapter asks how these varied production cultures have managed the meanings and possibilities of multiplatform production itself.

The impulse to record and document labor struggle is almost as old as the concept of documentary itself. From the Worker’s Film and Photo League to the activist programming of Labor Beat, documentary has had an intimate relationship with the labor struggle. This chapter addresses the history of labor documentary production in the United States as an expression of radical ideology. Challenging the aesthetic form and content of the mainstream media, the labor movement is a loosely connected network of activists and artists across the country, engaged in efforts to produce media outside mainstream institutions. Specifically, this chapter focuses on elements of labor history that made significant contributions but are now largely ignored and undocumented: the efforts of radical women, rank-and-file amateur videographers, and undocumented workers. Existing on the fringes of the mainstream and counterculture, the work of women in alternative media in the early 1970s reflected a direct relationship between their lived experience, the camera, and political engagement, embodying a liberated agency that is magnified by the documentary camera. The chapter creates a portrait of the documentary commons as it expands and works for citizens in their daily lives. They represent a whole population of radical activists carving out a space for themselves to engage labor and social change with their cameras.

The Department of Army Special Photographic Office (DASPO) was created to document U.S. Army activities during the Cold War, with much of the work centered on the Vietnam War. This chapter, by James Paasche, demonstrates that the production of state and military propaganda required constant negotiations of control between military commanders and the soldiers and media makers on the ground. Further, this chapter attends to the labor practices of an institutional filmmaking unit in the hopes of delineating how the processes of media production must adapt to the fraught contexts of war. In addition, the chapter considers how image making was considered a key component of the U.S. military’s supposed technological superiority during the Vietnam War.

This chapter looks at how the contemporary conception of the digital mash-up became both a recognizable and acceptable part of mainstream media through its early use as a pedagogical tool for commercial editors. One of the most widely known examples of this genre is Robert Ryang’s “Shining,” which used creative editing, a new voice-over, and a rather peppy Peter Gabriel song to transform Kubrick’s thriller into a feel-good father-son melodrama. Ryang’s mash-up was made for a contest held by the Association of Independent Creative Editors, which represents commercial editors. This chapter argues that it is this original context of commercial industrial pedagogy that made it possible for this piece and the mash-up genre as a whole to be hailed by a wider public interested in both its pedagogical and artistic potentials. In the process, the chapter challenges the oppositions that are often made between mainstream “professional” productions and “amateur” mash-ups.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the history of the devadasis in South India. This volume examines the connections between colonial modernity and the production of culture in the courtly milieu and investigates what happened to the devadasi communities after the 1947. It also explores the dance and culture of the courtesans in late colonial Madras, the religious lives of devadasis, and the place of dance in late colonial Tanjore.

Fan remix videos have usefully been called “transformative works,” but focusing on the transformative relationship between sampled video and the originals from which they sample misses the way remix videos function as communicative objects on their own terms. Sampling offers the equivalent of a digital pencil and printing press for audiences to speak through, about, and to big media. This chapter delves into the production culture of fan remix video making, both fan vidding and anime music video editing. Based on interviews with makers, the videos themselves, and primary textual sources from video-making communities, the chapter constructs a framework for analyzing remix videos that derives from the video makers’ practices rather than imported aesthetic or legal theory. This framework allows scholars to compare videos from different traditions of remix based on creators’ motivations for sampling and the communities creators work within.

The convergence around best practice also opens up opportunities for divergence and conflict within and among the enactment of those best practices. Using a production of culture approach, this chapter traces how AIDS organizations in Accra put best practices into practice, and identifies moments of entropy that emerge when designers produce campaigns. In a field that has converged around the value of incorporating formative research into the design process, organizations make themselves distinct by doing formative research differently. These divergences, namely whether organizations collect categorical or narrative data from audiences, lead them to produce campaigns with what I call “categorical” and “narrative” styles. Different styles produce more or less effective campaigns, undermining the intended goals of AIDS organizations. Organizations incorporate “cultural ombudsmen” into the design process who draw moral and cultural symbolic boundaries around the appropriateness of campaign ideas. Obmudsmen, with their veto power, can squash campaign ideas that designers like best and that have the support of communities, putting the practices of formative research and securing buy-in in conflict. This opens campaigns up to entropy, as organizations put out “lowest common denominator” campaigns that may have less resonance and lack organizational support.

The shifts in representation and understanding of white Christianity on prime-time television from 1996 to 2016 can serve as an illustration of one domain that stoked the cultural resentment among many white, middle-class, Christian Americans who held relatively unchallenged cultural and television dominance until the 2000s. Christian representation largely stopped focusing on being faithful in prime-time dramas, and instead, religion became a narrative tool with little connection to lived religion. At the end of this period, this trend began to shift somewhat back toward situating Christianity as a lived—albeit edgy and flawed—religion and faith culture in television dramas because of the exponential growth of television content. The duality between middlebrow Christian associations and the drive for upscale appeal that has been negotiated over the twenty-year period of this book has continued and heightened in its polarization in such a way that Peak TV may herald increased divergence instead of continued negotiation.

Acting as an extended “acknowledgments,” the conclusion addresses the conditions of possibility that enabled research for the book—both the individuals who shared their time and resources, and the institutions, especially archives, that shaped this work. The author also describes a series of interviews and interactions with corporate communications consultants, television directors and producers, trade organization leadership, authors, teachers, and market researchers who guided her investigations into corporate television. It argues that it is necessary to distinguish between the desires of multinational capital and the aims of the people who devoted their lives to television at work, many of whom were (and are) sincerely invested in making the workplace more humane. In following this latter ambition—the workplace as an opportunity to build community, as locus of personal connection and self-actualization—it may be possible to renew attempts to build broad-based worker solidarity by developing the conditions of possibility for just labor.