Page 19 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Policy and Industry 3

mainstream outlets for marginal independent films. New digital fi lm

equipment made independent filmmaking cheaper at the same time; more

people now had access to filmmaking, and the number of independent
productions grew. In response, mainstream companies such as Sony
Pictures Classic and Warner Independent began to scour the independent

film festival circuit in search of the new zeitgeist. What followed was a long

string of small strong films designed for educated audiences that ranged
from adaptations of the novelist Henry James to fanciful historical repro-
ductions such as Shakespeare in Love to quirky and critical foreign fi lms

such as Il Postino ( The Postman ). Anarchism, the political flavor of choice
amongst the avant - garde, began to assume a place of some importance in

films such as The Matrix and V for Vendetta . If one compares the character
of the Joker in the 1989 version of Batman with the same character in the
2008 version, one notices a palpable difference between a homey goof - off
mainstream audiences might chuckle over and a hardcore anarchist with
decidedly non - mainstream ideas about what constitutes fun.
While the culture industry for film might be accused of playing too

powerful a determining role, largely shaped by the financial mandate to
make a profi t at the expense often of intellectual and aesthetic integrity, it
also demonstrates, for the same reason, a remarkable ability to expand,
change, and absorb the new and the different, even when in theory the new
challenges the basic assumptions of the economic system.
If the relation between culture understood as fabricated object and
culture understood as a way of life is often economic in character, it is often
also a matter of government policy. Many governments seek to counter the
power and influence of private economic entities, which play a sizable role in

determining what culture is made, by creating “ public ” television and radio

networks. One of the first, the British Broadcasting Corporation, was estab-
lished in the 1930s self - consciously with the goal in mind of offsetting the
influence of “ popular ” and privately owned, for - profit American radio pro-

gramming, which was perceived by the British as “ lowbrow ” or as appealing
to tastes that had not been made sophisticated by education. Lowbrow
entertainment would be more likely, for example, to be characterized by
bodily humor and might lack complex narratives or characters.
The struggle between governments and private economic players con-
tinues to the present day. One of the most important recent confl icts
concerns the effort by France to protect indigenous cultural production,
especially in film and television, from being weakened or destroyed by

much stronger private sector cultural producers such as the American