| This dissertation examines the cultural logics of the production of commercial film and television. Through multi-sited fieldwork, I focus on the media workers and the production processes within and between the two production sites of Hollywood and Hong Kong, attending to the social relations around commercial image production. Production processes of profit-oriented, mass-produced film/television media are worthy sites of study since they reveal meanings about cultural practices, global flows of capital, labor, and technology, and identity formation. I explore how media workers who create spectacle contend with the cultural and ontological complexity of such labor. I argue that media workers labor between worlds of fiction and non-fiction, life and death, the sacred and the profane.;I also found that on the production floor of sets and studios, media workers are simultaneously producers and receivers, and in fact comprise an immediate audience, mediating in the immediate. I argue that in the heart of such commercial film/TV industries, which are ostensibly organized to achieve maximum profit accumulation, the "imagined," abstract audience "out there" sometimes recedes from the commercial production sites -- implicit yet not primary. My findings suggest that media workers mediate the images for their own pleasure, their drive to display their talents, their sense of competition, and in many cases, simply to find future employment. By studying production, "the audience" becomes de-centralized, not in the way usually conceptualized by anthropologists and media scholars as multiple and contesting consumers. Rather, production ethnography reveals that media workers are themselves an audience. |
