Janet Staiger

Bio: Janet Staiger is an academic researcher from University of Texas at Austin. The author has contributed to research in topic(s): Hollywood & Film studies. The author has an hindex of 16, co-authored 61 publication(s) receiving 1952 citation(s). Previous affiliations of Janet Staiger include Kansas State University & New York University.

The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960

Abstract: Shows that Hollywood films operate within a set of assumptions, shared by different genres, directors and studios, about how a film should look and sound. Details how these conventions came to standardize the whole filmmaking process itself.

Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema

Abstract: Employing a wide range of examples from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Birth of a Nation" to "Zelig" and "Personal Best", Janet Staiger argues that the historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism and philosophy of cultural products. She maintains that as artifacts, films do not contain immanent meanings, that differences among interpretations have historical bases, and that these variations are due to social, political and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. After proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. The author pays attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent developments in post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, and includes a discussion of current reader-response models in literary and film studies as well as an alternative approach for thinking about historical readers and spec

Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception

Abstract: Film and television have never been more prevalent or watched than they are now, yet we still have little understanding of how people process and make use of what they see. And though we acknowledge the enormous role the media plays in our culture, we have only a vague sense of how it actually influences our attitudes and desires. In Perverse Spectators, Janet Staiger argues that studying the interpretive methods of spectators within their historical contexts is both possible and necessary to understand the role media plays in culture and in our personal lives. This analytical approach is applied to topics such as depictions of violence, the role of ratings codes, the horror and suspense genre, historical accuracy in film, and sexual identities, and then demonstrated through works like JFK, The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Psycho, and A Clockwork Orange. Each chapter shows a different approach to reconstructing audience responses to films, consistently and ingeniously finding traces of what would otherwise appear to be unrecoverable information. Using vivid examples, charting key concepts, and offering useful syntheses of long-standing debates, Perverse Spectators constitutes a compelling case for a reconsideration of the assumptions about film reception which underlie contemporary scholarship in media studies. Taking on widely influential theories and scholars, Perverse Spectators is certain to spark controversy and help redefine the study of film as it enters the new millennium.

Media reception studies

Abstract: Acknowledgments1 Introduction 2 Social Scienti?c Theories 3 Linguistic and Cultural Studies Theories 4 Fans and Fan Behaviors 5 Viewers of Stars, Cult Media, and Avant-Garde 6 Minorities and Media 7 Violence, Horror, and Sexually Explicit Images 8 Memories Selected Bibliography Index About the Author

The Politics of Film Canons

Abstract: Canon formation in film, as in any other area, can be located in a variety of projects. In film criticism, whether popular or academic, some films will be chosen for extensive discussion and analysis; others will be ignored. In theoretical writing, arguments are buttressed by films cited as examples of points. In histories, films are marked as worth mentioning for one reason or another (e.g., influence, aesthetic significance, typicality). This occurs not only for historiographical reasons (every causal explanation invariably privileges particular linkages or conjunctions), but for practical reasons as well: a history including every film would be trapped by the Tristam Shandy contradiction of constantly losing ground to the increasing number of films added daily to the list of those to be covered.' Even filmmakers are involved in canon formation. Those films chosen to be reworked, alluded to, satirized, become privileged points of reference, pulled out from the rest of cinema's predecessors.2 As ideal fathers, these select films are given homage or rebelled against. That canons exist in film studies and that canon formation is involved with the political sphere is evident.3 Much less evident is the shifting politics, past and present, of the factors contributing to canon formation. In attempting to identify and characterize some of these factors, as well as the limitations they impose on our understanding of cinema, I will consider which films our critics, theorists, historians, and filmmakers have chosen for study and why certain shifts have occurred in our canon even over the short period of cinema's existence-now only ninety years. In addition, I will be suggesting that escape from canon formation will be difficult to achieve. Competition in academics and the film industry reinforces canons and canon-making. However, my project is not to encourage a stance of relativity or political pluralism upon recognizing that all canonical projects are tied into a political activity but rather to make those politics self-evident, to find the political centers of particular enterprises. For even in revising and decentering dominant canons, new centers appear. My hope is to encourage as knowledgeable, humane, and progressive a choice as possible among the various politics.4

The Resource-Based View of the Firm in Two Environments: The Hollywood Film Studios From 1936 to 1965

Abstract: This article continues to operationally define and test the resource-based view of the firm in a study of the major U.S. film studios from 1936 to 1965. We found that property-based resources in th...

Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess

Abstract: Richard Abel, author of two distinguished works on French film and theory, teaches at Drake University. Carolyn Anderson teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Edward D. Castillo is a California Cahuilla Indian and chair of Native American Studies at Sonoma State University. Darius Cooper teaches at San Diego Mesa College. David Desser, our Book Review Editor, teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana.

A Core/Periphery Perspective on Individual Creative Performance: Social Networks and Cinematic Achievements in the Hollywood Film Industry

Abstract: The paper advances a relational perspective to studying creativity at the individual level. Building on social network theory and techniques, we examine the role of social networks in shaping individuals’ ability to generate a creative outcome. More specifically, we argue that individuals who occupy an intermediate position between the core and the periphery of their social system are in a favorable position to achieve creative results. In addition, the benefits accrued through an individual’s intermediate core/periphery position can also be observed at the team level, when the same individual works in a team whose members come from both ends of the core/periphery continuum. We situate the analysis and test our hypotheses within the context of the Hollywood motion picture industry, which we trace over the period 1992–2003. The theoretical implications of the results are discussed.

Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Industrial Development: Geography and the Creative Field Revisited

Abstract: Creative destruction is a central element of the competitive dynamic of capitalism. This phenomenon assumes concrete form in relation to specific geographical and historical conditions. One such set of conditions is investigated here under the rubric of the creative field, i.e. the locationally-differentiated web of production activities and associated social relationships that shapes patterns of entrepreneurship and innovation in the new economy. The creative field operates at many different levels of scale, but I argue that the urban and regional scale is of special interest and significance. Accordingly, I go on to describe how the creative field functions as a site of (a) entrepreneurial behavior and new firm formation, (b) technical and organizational change, and (c) the symbolic elaboration and re-elaboration of cultural products. All of these activities are deeply structured by relations of spatial-cum-organizational proximity and separation in the system of production. The creative field, however, is far from being a fully self-organizing entity, and it is susceptible to various kinds of breakdowns and distortions. Several policy issues raised by these problems are examined. The paper ends by addressing the question as to whether industrial agglomeration is an effect of producers’ search for creative synergies, or whether such synergies are themselves simply a contingent outcome of agglomeration.

A new map of Hollywood: the production and distribution of American motion pictures.

Abstract: Scott A. J. (2002) A new map of Hollywood: the production and distribution of American motion pictures, Reg. Studies 36, 957–975. In this paper, I offer a reinterpretation of the economic geography of the so-called new Hollywood. The argument proceeds in six main stages. First, I briefly examine the debate on industrial organization in Hollywood that has gone on in the literature since the mid-1980s, and I conclude that the debate has become unnecessarily polarized. Second, I attempt to show how an approach that invokes both flexible specialization and systems-house forms of production is necessary to any reasonably complete analysis of the organization of production in the new Hollywood. Third, and on this basis, I argue that the Hollywood production system is deeply bifurcated into two segments comprising: (1) the majors and their cohorts of allied firms on the one hand; and (2) the mass of independent production companies on the other. Fourth, I reaffirm the continuing tremendous agglomerative attracti...