7.4: Multiple Globalizations
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- Petr Szczepanik
- University of California Press
We should avoid the pitfall of misrepresenting knowledge transfer (and spillover) enabled by spatial proximity, interaction, and monitoring as entirely positive or innocent. Contrary to some journalistic accounts, it doesn’t come as an automatic, mechanistic, and unidirectional process. 27 Rather, it is important to recognize that effective knowledge absorption happens only when locals develop their own capabilities, that learning is usually a mutual process, even though it may be perceived in negative terms due to the adverse effects it is seen to have on the local culture. We might also recognize that unlearning can be just as important as learning, especially in a postsocialist working environment. Most of my Czech interview subjects talked about learning. An analysis of their revelations allows us to identify four potential paths of globalizing knowledge transfer as well as the barriers to such a transfer. These are centered respectively on incoming producers, production service providers, local independent producers, and the regional strategy of a multinational corporation (where offshoring and direct foreign investment can transform local production norms and practices). Given the limited scope of this chapter, I will restrict my focus to cases in which significant face-to-face interaction took place between Czech and overseas personnel. Before doing so, however, I offer a brief overview of local production practice and its limitations.
Czech film production is strongly influenced by a small, fragmented marketplace, television aesthetics, and the public broadcaster’s long-standing position as the country’s leading producer-distributor of indigenous feature films and documentaries over the last twenty years. In this period, Czech cinema held a strong market share of up to 30 percent; however, this has started to drop as newly digitized theaters express a preference for Hollywood fare. Czech films rely on location shooting, contemporary topics or nostalgia for the country’s recent state-socialist past, and a bittersweet tone, and they are squarely aimed at families. Many of these low-budget films are considered part of the mainstream locally but travel badly. What is more, bigger-budget films and art-house pictures both tend to fare poorly at the international box office or on the festival circuit, even by the modest standards of other East-Central European nations, such as Hungary and Poland. Czech television programs have also struggled internationally, not least because broadcasters have been reticent to alienate their prime mature, conservative domestic audience with unsettling subject matter or radical aesthetics.
Outside observers and policymakers concluded that knowledge transfer would lead incoming producers to gradually transform the practices and styles of the domestic industry. Such a change would come from sharing a labor pool and infrastructure, and from interaction, observation, and imitation. This being said, overseas producers appear to have little interest in reshaping local production—by, for example, hiring local above-the-line talent or hiring Czechs as department heads. In short, there is no clear evidence of any transformation resulting from their presence. Even the BBC—which practices runaway production via its international branches, BBC Worldwide and BBC America—has not promoted its public service ethics or aesthetics during production. As the experience of Czech crews working on The Musketeers (2014–) suggests, the presence of the BBC is felt in its division of British and Czech workers and its safety regulations. Czech personnel did not even recognize the corporation as the producer of this series, noting no significant differences between working on a BBC venture or other Anglo-American projects. 28
Second, it was anticipated that service providers would eventually diversify into producing Czech-language films. However, despite their claims to the contrary, none of the production service heavyweights—Stillking, Czech Anglo Productions, and Etic Films—has branched out into original feature productions. One of the few exceptions is the former Lucasfilm producer Rick McCallum, whose company Film United provides production services for projects like Canal+’s series Borgia (2011–), while developing its own fully local and coproduced projects, such as a story of Czech anticommunist resistance fighters, So Far So Good (in development). It remains to be seen whether Film United can support high-end Czech genre products.
More typical is the approach of Stillking, a company with solid knowledge of the Czech filmmaking community but evidently little interest in producing or coproducing Czech films. Minkowski, its production head, has met numerous Czech producers but never found a reason to work with them: “We know them and they know us, . . . but we just didn’t find something that makes sense. I don’t think we are the first stop for them to come and produce Czech movies, because we are not really Czech producers.” He admits that the number of American films shot in Prague did not increase the importance of Czech films because “there is no connection there.” 29 On the other hand, Minkowski claims that Stillking trains local crews who can then improve the technical quality of the local product. However, this claim relates only to certain aspects of the production process—primarily art direction, special and visual effects, stunts, and to a lesser extent, makeup, costumes, and camera operation. Stillking-affiliated production managers usually do not work on Czech productions, and Czech above-the-line talent does not work for Stillking.
The rate at which Czech personnel enjoy professional upward mobility within transnational crews differs from case to case, partially determined by the nationality, size, and organizational structure of the coproducer. The smaller and more flexible the company, the more Czechs hold positions close to first-line decision makers, and vice versa. Specializing in bigger-budget projects, Stillking employs a large workforce but typically only one Czech head of department (in production design). In these large crews with their military-like organization, locals usually work under second-line decision makers while operating in a segregated labor sphere. They are largely unaware of the creative effects of their roles. According to Minkowski, this type of segregation is typical of Barrandov’s costume department, where a staff of mainly non-English-speaking women operates in a socially and spatially isolated workspace. 30
Local independent producers represent a third potential path for globalizing knowledge transfer. They work on wholly Czech projects, coproductions, and minority coproductions with European partners, and some provide production services. Often independent producers specialize in partnerships with given countries or regions, as was the case with the Indian film Rockstar (2011). 31 Irregular, limited to practical services and dependent on narrow networks of contacts, such collaborations do not induce long-lasting knowledge transfers that would affect the quality of local products.
A fourth pathway involves a multinational corporation operating on the local market. In 1991, HBO Europe established central offices in the Hungarian capital of Budapest. Soon after, it set up an additional fourteen branches across Europe, all but one in postsocialist countries. Four of these—Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, and Bucharest—opened an original programming department. These were responsible for providing culturally local quality content for the company’s subscription television and HBO GO online services, thus emulating its approach to the U.S. market. 32 A new two-tiered production strategy has come to the fore since HBO Europe recruited the experienced producer Antony Root as its new executive vice president for original programming and production. On the one hand, the company broadcasts low-budget licensed series to test local responses to a property. For instance, it produced adaptations of two Israeli series, In Treatment and When Shall We Kiss , helmed by renowned local directors and featuring established actors, for each of the four national markets noted above. On the other hand, it produces big-budget event miniseries, which, in Root’s words, “put a stake in the ground for a certain kind of quality and values in a show and differentiate ourselves [sic] in the market.” 33 One example of this approach is The Burning Bush (2013), an award-winning three-part drama about the Czech national hero and martyr Jan Palach, who immolated himself to protest the 1968 Soviet occupation of the country.
The screenplay for The Burning Bush was rejected by the Czech public service broadcaster before being acquired by HBO. The series was directed by Polish FAMU graduate Agnieszka Holland, who had previously worked for HBO in the United States. It was written by then-unknown Czech screenwriter Štěpán Hulík, and coproduced by newcomer Tomáš Hrubý. When The Burning Bush received fourteen awards from the national film academy after being released as a theatrical feature, it was apparent that a new approach, based on HBO’s meticulous development process, was emerging. 34 As the company’s Budapest-based head of development suggested, HBO’s gradual development of local talent and adaptation of American-style project development practices were crucial albeit challenging steps to striking a good balance between maintaining the cultural specificities of local fare and increasing its general quality. 35 The success of The Burning Bush generated intense buzz across the Czech production sector, nowhere more than among public service television producers. Embarrassed about passing up this project, they singled out The Burning Bush as a new benchmark to which their own quality serial drama ought to aspire.