Supply Chain Cinema: Producing Workers for Transnational Media Production
Panel 2: State Policy, Industries and Media Landscapes
Most scholarship of filmmaking in the Arab world follows a national cinema approach. Yet a significant amount of the movies produced in the region are international projects, their arrival sometimes motivated by the need for particular, narratively-determined backdrops, and frequently in order to take advantage of various competitive labour, infrastructure or tax affordances, as well as ease of transit and local logistical expertise.
Offshored Bollywood, Chinese and Hollywood projects (such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Independence Day: Resurgence) are now regularly, if partially, routed through the United Arab Emirates, a country with no appreciable national industry of its own, and often without regular viewers even noticing. Film portions shot here avail themselves of the country’s robust logistics industry and accommodating contract-based migrant labour legislation.
To meet the needs of such productions, a specially crafted worker subjectivity adapted to transnationalized conventions and languages of filmmaking becomes crucial to lubricate seamless flows between geographically and culturally atomized sites. In so many ways, the glue that binds a big budget movie derives from standardized modes of practice and means of comportment, which commence with how film professionals are trained. The UAE hopes to prepare larger numbers of these sorts of creative workers and, to aid this mission, has welcomed branch campuses of multiple foreign universities to its shores, providing substantial financial support for, for example, NYU Abu Dhabi. The bulk of these universities’ students are migrants, many wishing to stay on after graduation, not as citizens, but as workers on temporary contracts, including those facilitated by these offshored movies. To what extent does the English-medium liberal arts private university education on offer on such campuses emerge as a complicit cog in the mechanics of cinema’s global supply chain, encouraging conformity to this sector’s needs for hierarchized diversity, entrepreneurship, and flexible uncertainty?
Dr. Kay Dickinson's research is dedicated to thinking through how various media function amid and in resistance to the machinations of transnational global capital. In particular, her recent mongraphs, Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (British Film Institute Press, 2016) and Arab Film and Video Manifestos (Palgrave, 2018) involve themselves in examples, practices and analytical modes from the Arab world. Her articles on popular, experimental and revolutionary Arab media have appeared in Screen, Camera Obscura, Framework and Cinema Journal, she is the co-editor of two anthologies on these topics and has contributed to two film festivals in the West Bank. Competitive fellowships for this research have taken her to Cornell University, as well as to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. In 2019, she was the Distinguished Visiting Professor at MICA (Mudra Institute of Communications) in Ahmedabad, India. At present, she is working towards a monograph entitled Supply Chain Cinema, Supply Chain Education.
A constant concern for labour practices, histories and rights inflects Kay’s work. Her first monograph, Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (Oxford University Press, 2008), sought to understand the film and music industries’ traditions of production, representation, dissemination and consumption in line with the broader employment landscapes of so-called post-Fordism and the rise of the creative economy culture. Supply Chain Cinema, Supply Chain Education, her current project, focuses on off-shored film production within free zones that is facilitated through the principles of logistics.
