Behind the Screen ― Inside European Production Cultures

Production studies has developed into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry of film and television "production cultures," going beyond traditional examinations of authorship and industry structure. Studying production as culture involves gathering empirical data about the lived realities of people involved in media production - about collaboration and conflicts, routines and rituals, lay theories and performative actions. This volume broadens the scope of production studies by analyzing geographic and historical alternatives to contemporary Hollywood. At the same time, it invites disciplines such as ethnography, aesthetics, or sociology of art to reconsider established concepts of film and media studies like creative agency, genesis of a film work, or transnational production.

Petr Szczepanik is Associate Professor at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He is a researcher at the National Film Archive, Czech Republic and editor-in-chief of the journal Iluminace. In 2009-2010, he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. He is the author of Canned Words: The Coming of Sound Film and Czech Media Culture of the 1930s (2009) and has co-edited several books on the history of film thought, including Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908-1939 (2008).

Patrick Vonderau is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. He is an editor for the journal Montage AV and a co-founder of NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies). His most recent books include Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media (2012), The YouTube Reader (2009), and Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (2008).