Introduction

This Chapter examines how the film industry has represented its work, processes, people and moments of change throughout the history of cinema, with an acute focus on the 2012 moment of transition. In this Chapter, I set forth how a film's ‘Production Aesthetic’ is mobilised and carried forwards within a ubiquity of representational modes that exist around a film's release to meet promotional ends and which are sometimes adopted in forms of resistance and protest.

As Michael Chanan earlier contended, film-industry professionals continue to occupy a unique and privileged position ‘… within the social formation as commentators on or behind the screen’ (1980: 135, my emphasis). In contrast to other industries, the film industry can deploy its own core activity as its dominant tool of communication through which to create its own representations, to frame them, to communicate them and to control their flow and access by the wider public. This is happening in ever-more sophisticated and complex ways – whereby filmmakers inhabit constantly shifting subjectivities in their work as makers, creators, workers, commentators, rights owners, experts and audiences – and it is in the nexus of film-production representations that these multiple identities unify and coalesce. Indeed, John Caldwell contends that we are in a ‘paraindustrial’ era where we see: ‘a media industry that obsessively analyzes and continuously theorizes itself ‘ (2014: 737).

Through an examination of the range of mechanisms that are employed to represent the labour of a film's production, this Chapter expounds that the discursive and political apparatus which frame film production are part of ‘the cinema machine, a dispositive, an arrangement which give apparatus and techniques social status and function’ (Comolli, 1980: 122).

Representational materials and their associated ‘production metaphors’ that are considered within this Chapter include title sequences, electronic press kits (EPK) and their constituent elements: photographic stills, production notes, filmed interviews with cast and crew, making-of documentaries and other supplementary special features. These materials also include representations of key production iconography and production apparatus (such as the clapper board and green screens) and which have been subjected to a reconfiguration as tools of protest on social media networking sites, and as physical props in demonstrations.