Exploring Promotion and Film Culture: Promotional Materials and the Cultural Spaces of American Indie Film.

Pearson, Erin (2023) Exploring Promotion and Film Culture: Promotional Materials and the Cultural Spaces of American Indie Film. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

The aim of this project is to explore the co-constitutive relationships between promotional activities, the materials that result from them, and American indie film culture of the “Sundance-Miramax” era of independent cinema (circa 1980-2010). It will challenge and expand on the conceptualisation of film cultures as being somehow divorced from the structuring activities of the promotional industries. The utilisation of a spatial lens offers a unique approach that considers how cultures are rendered by promotion in discursive, practical, and material terms. Four case studies of indie promotion are examined through an approach that mixes critical discourse analysis with theories surrounding space, place, and economic geography. Following a historical timeline covering significant formative nodes in indie’s development as a film culture, Chapter One explores the relationships between Business-to-Business (B2B) trade press and the developing regional industrial infrastructure from which indie film culture emerged. Chapter Two considers the role of film trailers in discursively and textually forming a unique value proposition for indie films, as standing in some opposition to notions of “mass mainstream” promotion and filmmaking. Chapter Three examines celebrity branding and public relations in fashion magazines, with particular emphasis on the ways that an “indie” star image is formed through place-based and geographic symbols. Last, Chapter Four analyses out-of-home advertising at Sundance Film Festival, to reveal the ways that material advertising and brand image offer conceptual metaphors for learning about the film culture and its structuring practices. Overall, the project offers renewed insights into the history of indie film culture, alongside a new approach with which to consider its mutually productive relationship with promotional industries, its infrastructural development, and the discursive formations that render it into a relatively cohesive cultural and consumer category.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies (former - to 2024)
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	09 Oct 2024 11:07
Last Modified:	09 Oct 2024 11:07
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/96970
DOI:

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