East Asian screen industries
This book is a valuable and timely contribution to the literature on the recent and broader development of "screen industries" in the emerging non West contexts. By examining a wide range of film enterprises up to the end of 2006 and across the markets in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, the authors weave together a much needed economic and cultural account of the East Asian film markets as an interconnected regional system. The book shows that the internal and evolving regulatory, economic, cultural and technological conditions have triggered a set of dynamics that drive the development of the content sector in the region. While limitation inevitably exists in terms of capturing a full picture of industrial cultural organizational dynamics in the ever changing context, the authors' investigation remains an effective "snapshot" of the complex phenomena at a particular time and space during the evolution. In so doing, the myth, as well as the potential, of the co opetition in content production within the region is also revealed. Such an illustration offers an empirical basis both for practitioners to understand the diversity associated with production practices in the emerging markets of East Asia, and also for scholars to examine the sophisticated theoretical context of the historical, political, cultural, social and economic circumstances in which these practices are situated. It will also benefit policy makers in terms of providing guidelines for managing the evolving creative and media sector. The authors begin with the argument that East Asian screen industries have generated an alternative set of "benchmarks" to the "blockbuster" criterion set by the Hollywood majors. By reviewing major blockbusters developed from distinct markets in East Asia (Korea, Hong Kong and China) they first show that the long term trajectory of the emergence of such benchmarks has "industrial, geographical and legislative aspects" (p. 36) and is fundamentally "conditioned" It requires several supportive infrastructures, such as state commitment, new and flexible means of production, and creative and strategic entrepreneurship. Further it is through their analysis of the "conditions" of the Chinese market the biggest market in the East Asian region, which itself forms another set of cultural political benchmarks to measure the performance of every media enterprise in the Asian Pacific that they show that East Asian cinema's benchmarks differ from traditional benchmarks, which simply take film enterprises as profit seeking, commercial entities; the East Asian benchmarks accommodate and incorporate greater production, organizing and market complexity and uncertainty into the process of cultural production. Subsequent case studies in Chapter 2, on recent Asian blockbusters, further illustrate that East Asian filmmakers are now able to generate a series of production practices of "New Localism" through a complex and flexible web of collaboration. However, despite the fact that whether this "New Localism" is a result of deliberate pursuits of local filmmakers or is the organic outcome of spontaneous interactions and progress remains elusive, the authors make it evident that the flexible business models of independent production in East Asian countries have