Economies of film

While reading the article "Making Films Asian American," by Sarah Projansky and Kent A. Ono, I found one aspect very interesting. The article focused alot on the economic side of cinematic production, an issue I think has been largely overlooked in other essays but nonetheless is a vital factor in this question of authorship. The article asserts that among other things, the filmmaker is "a laborer within global capitalist economy that continually masks the relationship between workers and products." I think the economic setting in which a film or any form of cultural text is created can potentially have a huge effect on the ways in which authorship is percieved. As the article states on pg. 266, "The flight from the auteur as sanctified origin of textual meaning parallels the postmodern cultural effect of libertating products from any and all sites of production and cultural contexts...labor is alienated from the existential moment of human production and products forever circulate as exchange value versus use value."

What's interesting is that film in general might have more at stake than other cultural forms. A full-length feature film can cost millions and millions of dollars and it is entirely up to the public whether or not the film is to make money. If a film flops, the studio is out big money. On the contrary, if a book doesn't sell, the publisher is out the cost of the first print (pennies on the dollar compared to film). The same goes for music and studio art. Since cinematic production can be so much more of a financial risk, it is not surprising that directors often find their creative agency suffering under the grips of capitalism.

The bottom line is that films, more often than not, are created to make a profit and thus must appeal to the widest audience possible. I think this economic pressure upon cinema can work in two ways. To use Michael Moore as an example, he has two options. He could tone down the anti-conservative nature of his films in order to get a wider audience thus allowing his views to reach more people. But in catering to these economic interests he would have minimized the social importance of his films as they are now in a sense, censored through capitalism.

It seems to me that the authors of film are up against a double-edged sword, what exatly this means for the authorship of film I think we are only beginning to see in the Projansky and Ono article.