Published by Rutgers University Press, Media Matters focuses on film, television, and media within a transnational and interdisciplinary frame: environmental media, media industries, media and democracy, information media and global media. It features the work of scholars who explore ever-expanding forms of media in art, everyday, and entertainment practices.

Post-Communist Malaise: Cinematic Responses to European Integration (2017)

Written by Zoran Samardzija

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was supposed to bring about the “end of history” with capitalism and liberal democracy achieving decisive victories. Europe would now integrate and reconcile with its past. However, the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008—the rise in right-wing populism, austerity politics, and mass migration—have shown that the ideological divisions which haunted Europe in the twentieth century still remain. It is within this context that Post-Communist Malaise revives discourses of political modernism and revisits debates from Marxism and seventies film theory. Analyzing work of Theo Angelopoulos, Věra Chytilová, Srdjan Dragojević, Jean-Luc Godard,  Miklós Jancsó, Emir Kusturica, Dušan Makavejev, Cristi Puiu, Jan Švankmajer, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Béla Tarr, the book focuses on how select cinemas from Eastern Europe and the Balkans critique the neoliberal integration of Europe whose failures fuel the rise of nationalism and right-wing politics. By politicizing art cinema from the regions, Post-Communist Malaise asks fundamental questions about film, aesthetics, and ideology. It argues for the utopian potential of the materiality of cinematic time to imagine a new political and cultural organization for Europe.

At Translation’s Edge (2019)

Edited by Nataša Durovicova, Patrice Petro, Lorena Terando
Contributions by Lydia H Liu, John Cayley, Russell Scott Valentino, Naoki Sakai, Deborah Folaron, Margaret A Noodin, Yiman Wang, Martha Pulido, Olga Behar, Elizabeth R Drame, Suzanne Jill Levine

Since the 1970s, the field of Translation Studies has entered into dialogue with an array of other disciplines, sustaining a close but contentious relationship with literary translation. At Translation’s Edge expands this interdisciplinary dialogue by taking up questions of translation across sub-fields and within disciplines, including film and media studies, comparative literature, history, and education among others. For the contributors to this volume, translation is understood in its most expansive, transdisciplinary sense: translation as exchange, migration, and mobility, including cross-cultural communication and media circulation. Whether exploring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or silent film intertitles, this volume brings together the work of scholars aiming to address the edges of Translation Studies while engaging with major and minor languages, colonial and post-colonial studies, feminism and disability studies, and theories of globalization and empire.

Global Cinema Networks (2018)

Edited by Elena Gorfinkel, Tami Williams
Contributions by Elena Gorfinkel, Dudley Andrew, Adrian Martin, John David Rhodes, James Tweedie, Laurent Guido, Karl Schoonover, Frank Ukadike, Patricia White, Luisela Alvaray, Peter Y. Paik, Gilberto M Blasini, Jian Xu, Tami Williams

Global Cinema Networks investigates the evolving aesthetic forms, technological and industrial conditions, and social impacts of cinema in the twenty-first century. The collection’s esteemed contributors excavate sites of global filmmaking in an era of digital reproduction and amidst new modes of circulation and aesthetic convergence, focusing primarily on recent films made across Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Moving beyond the digital as a harbinger of transformation, the volume offers new ways of thinking about cinema networks in a historical continuum, from “international” to “world” to “transnational” to “global” frames.

Voices of Labor: Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood (2017)

Edited by Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson, UC Berkeley Press.

Motion pictures are made, not mass produced, requiring a remarkable collection of skills, self-discipline, and sociality—all of which are sources of enormous pride among Hollywood’s craft and creative workers. The interviews collected here showcase the ingenuity, enthusiasm, and aesthetic pleasures that attract people to careers in the film and television industries. They also reflect critically on changes in the workplace brought about by corporate conglomeration and globalization. Rather than offer publicity-friendly anecdotes by marquee celebrities, Voices of Labor presents off-screen observations about the everyday realities of Global Hollywood. Ranging across job categories—from showrunner to make-up artist to location manager—this collection features voices of labor from Los Angeles, Atlanta, Prague, and Vancouver. Together they show how seemingly abstract concepts like conglomeration, financialization, and globalization are crucial tools for understanding contemporary Hollywood and for reflecting more generally on changes and challenges in the screen media workplace and our culture at large. Despite such formidable concerns, what nevertheless shines through is a commitment to craftwork and collaboration that provides the means to imagine and instigate future alternatives for screen media labor.

Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor (2016)

Edited by Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson, UC Berkeley Press.

Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media industries to reveal the intensifying pressures and challenges confronting actors, editors, electricians, and others. The authors take on pressing conceptual and methodological issues while also providing insightful case studies of workplace dynamics regarding creativity, collaboration, exploitation, and cultural difference. Furthermore, it examines working conditions and organizing efforts on all six continents, offering broad-ranging and comprehensive analysis of contemporary screen media labor in such places as Lagos, Prague, Hollywood, and Hyderabad. The collection also examines labor conditions across a range of job categories that includes, for example, visual effects, production services, and adult entertainment. With contributions from such leading scholars as John Caldwell, Vicki Mayer, Herman Gray, and Tejaswini Ganti, this collection offers timely critiques of media globalization while also intervening in broader debates about labor, creativity, and precarity.

Precarious Creativity grew out of the Carsey-Wolf/Mellinchamp conference held in Spring 2014, which brought together an international group of scholars at UC Santa Barbara to examine the increasingly globalized and interconnected nature of screen media labor in a series of roundtable discussions and a keynote session featuring leading advocates from the VFX community in Southern California. The anthology is also the first to be offered through Luminos, the new open access publishing platform of University of California Press.

Distribution Revolution: Conversations about the Digital Future of Film and Television (2014)

Edited by Michael Curtin, Jennifer Holt, and Kevin Sanson, UC Berkeley Press.

Distribution Revolution is a collection of interviews with leading film and TV professionals concerning the many ways that digital delivery systems are transforming the entertainment business. These interviews provide lively insider accounts from studio executives, distribution professionals, and creative talent of the tumultuous transformation of film and TV in the digital era.

The first section features interviews with top executives at major Hollywood studios, providing a window into the big-picture concerns of media conglomerates with respect to changing business models, revenue streams, and audience behaviors. The second focuses on innovative enterprises that are providing path-breaking models for new modes of content creation, curation, and distribution—creatively meshing the strategies and practices of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And the final section offers insights from creative talent whose professional practices, compensation, and everyday working conditions have been transformed over the past ten years. Taken together, these interviews demonstrate that virtually every aspect of the film and television businesses is being affected by the digital distribution revolution, a revolution that has likely just begun.

Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming, and Sharing Media in the Digital Era (2014)

Edited by Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson, Routledge.

Connected Viewing brings together twelve original essays that critically engage with the socially-networked, multi-platform, and cloud-based world of today, examining the connected viewing phenomenon across television, film, video games, and social media. Research for the anthology originated as part of the Connected Viewing Initiative, a multi-year collaboration between the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Media Industries Project and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment. Collectively, the chapters offer a wide-ranging analysis of shifting business models, policy matters, technological infrastructure, new forms of user engagement, and other key trends affecting screen media in the digital era. Connected Viewing contextualizes the dramatic transformations taking place across both media industries and national contexts, and offers students and scholars alike a diverse set of methods and perspectives for studying this critical moment in media culture.