An advertisement for the Samsung VM-A680 video-phone, featuring a beautiful woman standing beneath a movie marquee that reads ‘We All Have a Movie Within. What's Yours?’ offers a promise of the phone as movie-camera, and the user as star:

The advertisement ends with the phrases ‘Your life. Now showing’, giving new meaning to Andy Warhol's prediction that, in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. And the digital film festival, Resfest 2004, offers a section on ‘Handheld Cinema’: ‘After years of hype, finally PDAs, mobile phones and portable entertainment devices can play short films … [T]here's already a group of inspired filmmakers pushing the boundaries and crafting unique moving images just right for the micro-screen’ (RES Magazine 2004:9).

New punk cinema developed during a time when irony became a mainstay in popular culture in the post-1970s era. As such, the moments of intense emotion and melodrama in key films, Magnolia, The Idiots, Breaking the Waves, Fight Club, and Blair Witch Project can be read through conflicting registers that blur the boundaries of sincerity, irony and camp. In his 1993 essay ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction’, David Foster Wallace offers one of the more challenging and insightful readings of the commodification of irony in post-war US culture, especially as it is expressed in literary fiction (notably metafiction) and television. For Wallace, the first wave of post-war irony – being shown the difference between the way things appear to be and the way things are – worked to expose the ‘absurd contradictions’ (Wallace 1993: 35) and hypocrisies of American culture. Television – with its ubiquity, repetition of images and ability to ‘repeat’ shows over and over again – is for Wallace the ultimate ironic medium, because it has helped to transform us into knowledgeable viewers, that is, viewers who can see through the very narratives that constitute television.

The Golden Age of Hollywood

Charting a revision of – or diversion from – a particular kind of cinema presumes that cinematic trends are coherent and that such trends can be identified through a series of texts, authors and what can loosely be defined as distributors. This is often less instructive than it initially appears, and can sometimes lead to broad and occasionally meaningless generalisations. Contemporary critical writing, however, distinguishes classical narrative cinema as the zenith of the Hollywood studio film of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, exemplified in the work of Frank Capra (Mr Smith Goes to Washington [1939], It's a Wonderful Life [1946]), Howard Hawks (Scarface [1932], The Maltese Falcon [1940]) and John Ford (Stagecoach [1939], The Grapes of Wrath [1940], The Searchers [1956]). Though directors such as Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock had produced films that constituted a departure from the classical model (Welles's Citizen Kane [1940]) and Hitchcock's Rope [1948] spring to mind as deliberate attempts at formal innovation), the studio film thrived on the founding principles of an often reworked and imminently recognisable formula. I use the phrase ‘founding principles’ to avoid the oversimplified (and yet perennial) notion that a single homogeneous film structure constituted an entire cinematic tradition, which is clearly not the case. This essay will not take the position that the studio film offered one product in a variety of disguises. It was rather a rich and complex body of texts (reflecting numerous aesthetic traditions) that informs a contemporary American cinema as much as it offers a vital point of departure.

Contesting Realities

In the United States, punk cinema, like the sonic and cultural matrix from which it arose, has long been defined by a ‘do-it-yourself aesthetic. Employ-ing a myriad of relatively inexpensive film-making techniques, from location-shooting with amateur performers to cut-rate special effects and rudimentary editing, talented visionaries, such as Nick Zedd, Beth B and Richard Kern, created a multitude of challenging works. Revelling in film's materiality and artifice, these visual artists critiqued the dominant culture's economic, social and political logics. Consequently, in their distinctly counter-cinematic structure, a narrative and visual style marked by the ‘desire to play unrestrained within the terrain of the visual, free from the political, social, cultural, and financial constraints of dominant cinema’ (Sargeant 1999: 9), many of the earliest cinematic productions linked with the US punk rock scene resemble the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other prominent ‘New Wave’ and avant-garde directors of the 1960s. This freedom from, and at times outright rejection of, commercial film-making practices allowed for the exploration of previously ‘taboo’ subjects and images, frequently culminating in visually arresting reconsiderations of conservative notions of ‘obscenity’ and ‘taste’.

Not all of punk cinema's foundational texts fall exclusively within the domain of the ‘experimental’ or avant-garde, however. Several of this cinematic tradition's offerings mobilise familiar documentary and cinéma vérité aesthetics to present fictional and ostensibly ‘non-fictional’ accounts of marginalised identities and stigmatised subcultural practices. Of the numerous directors to apply an overtly verist aesthetic, Penelope Spheeris is perhaps one of the most widely known.

Introduction: digital television and global media markets

The arrival of digital television across three platforms – terrestrial, satellite and cable – in 1998 augured a new era of broadcasting in the UK. In 2004, over 10 million households in the UK, more than 40 per cent of the potential UK audience, had access to digital television (DCMS, 2004). The UK has trailblazed the expansion of digital television, not only in Europe but across the world. This has been heavily supported by the British government, which has consistently promised a complete ‘switch-over’ to digital television within the first decade of the twenty-first Century. As the quote from Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell indicates, the British have long enjoyed a proud tradition of innovation in television delivery and programming. The digital television era has proved no exception, but it is a dramatically different television landscape that is now presented compared to the oft-cited ‘golden years’ of British television in the 1960s and 1970s. Digital television brings with it some potentially dramatic effects on the broadcasting market beyond the mere promise of better-quality pictures and the transformative experience of interactive viewing, or ‘viewsing’ as it has euphemistically been labelled. The broadening of channels and choice within the television spectrum, from twenty-five channels in 1989 to more than 200 channels in 2003, also demands an increase in programme supply.

Introduction

As any manager in a media business will tell you, getting a good media lawyer goes a long way to finding financial success. Why? Well, increasingly, the definition, control and exploitation of intellectual property is getting more central to the media's operation but harder to actually understand. The mention of copyright to many executives in the media industry often initiates a sharp intake of breath and a nod of resignation that it is a ‘murky world’ best left to legal experts. The boom in media law, particularly in connection with intellectual property, reflects broader shifts in the media marketplace and significant transformations in technology and methods of distribution. Law firms with specialist arms providing consultation and conveyancing in intellectual property are now commonplace and have become the cutting edge of legal practice in the media industry.

Introduction

The music industry is often overlooked in the analysis of media industries. Indeed, music is often viewed outside the general pantheon of what is meant by ‘the media’. Upon close inspection, however, it is clear not only that music is a major media industry in and of itself, but furthermore that it weaves itself into the very fabric of all audio-visual media, and even has a significant presence within print-based media in terms of reviews and promotion. The potential areas in which music can be produced, recorded and performed are far more expansive than any other. For example, just think about where in your everyday life you might expect to hear a piece of music: on the radio or in the car; on television across the whole range of genres or in film; or on a specific occasion, at a concert or nightclub.

In the examples above, music takes a leading role in the core activity of entertainment. A report by the DCMS on the state of the British music industry found that it generates £3.2bn in value to the UK economy and earns £1.3bn through exports (DCMS, 2001). Alternatively, think of where music enters your life in a more indirect way: when you enter a shop, a bar, a cafe, a hotel or even a lift; when you are put on hold on the telephone or hear the call of a mobile phone; or when you enter someone else's home or even the workplace.

Introduction

A film director tries to prevent a major international media conglomerate from rebranding a cable television station using his adopted name. A pop star prepares to do battle with a football club over the ownership of a nickname that its fans have been using for more than seventy years. A long-retired athlete makes a complaint to Ofcom and then threatens to sue a telecoms company for parodying his likeness from the 1970s in a highly successful advertising campaign. An ageing rock star threatens to take out an injunction to prevent a music journalist with the same name from writing a column in an American journal. Welcome to the crazy world of ‘image rights’ and a power struggle waged by celebrities to control all forms of publicity associated with their name and likeness.

In this chapter, we shall discover the inroads into media rights that have been made by, or on behalf of, leading entertainers and sports stars. As we have seen in other areas of media activity, the concept of image rights opens up wider philosophical questions around intellectual property that have a direct impact on the political economy of the media.

The cult of celebrity takes up increasing amounts of media output, and it is not difficult to see why stars and their agents seek to control this particular aspect of their ‘brand’ value. As Lane (1999: 48) notes, ‘celebrity seems to exert a disproportionate influence on the Zeitgeist’, and in ‘this merchandising melee, traders and celebrity are left squabbling over entitlement to the financial spoils’ (Lane, 1999: 49).