Keynote lecturers

Katharine Sarikakis, University of Vienna

Good things come in small packages, they say. Multiple challenges in the production and consumption of film are now beyond the historical market-centred dilemmas of large-scale vs. small-scale economies. They encompass not simply numbers representing degrees of commercial success or productivity, but also constitute an ever-increasing complexity of tangible and intangible factors, which are hard to measure and even harder to govern. Technology does not simply enable easier productions or faster access to film any more, but is also entering spaces of meaning-making, until now the exclusive terrain of human makers. Distribution systems escape the centralised governance of physical theatres but instead specialise for at-home delivery at one’s own taste, language, and purchase power. The argument around diversity in content and language seems almost absurd when considering the, seemingly, almost infinite possibilities to create, share and access films and AV content. Numerically, small geographical spaces and countries have been historical learners and innovators, due to their need to survive vis à vis the dominant, semi-fordist Hollywood cinemascapes. These new challenges can be good news for small cinematic spaces, including small countries and linguistic and cultural regions. Let us rethink the ways in which small spaces can be leaders in setting global trends of where audiences and citizens want to ‘go’: with this talk, let us explore the sanctity and beauty of ‘smallness’ in cinematic spaces as these derive from expectations and claims within, from and by ‘smallnesses’ found in the work of youth, the social and cultural fringes and small geographical countries. What policies are necessary to support the immediacy of ‘small’, and what possibilities exist for small spaces to be enjoyed widely?

Katharine Sarikakis is Professor of Communication Science with specialisation in Media Governance, Media Organisation and Media Industries at the Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Austria. She leads the Media Governance and Industries Research Lab, which aims to research and analyse issues, contexts, actors and impacts of media and cultural governance and their underexplored interconnections to citizenship, autonomy and control as they are articulated in the shapes of media landscapes and the relation of citizens-at-large to dimensions of interlocution.

Katharine has served the academic community continuously in elected leadership positions since 1998 as the founder and then chair of the Emerging Scholars Network of the International Association of Media and Communication researchers (IAMCR). She was the youngest ever elected vice-president of the IAMCR which held Consultant Level A with UNESCO in 2000. Katharine has served also as elected Chair and vice Chair of the Communication Law and Policy Division of the International Communication Association (ICA); the founding and twice elected Chair of the Communication Law and Policy Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). She has served also as an elected member to the ECREA Executive Board, an elected Member of the International Council of IAMCR. She is the Co-Editor of the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics. More information can be found here.

Petr Szczepanik, Associate Professor, Charles University, Prague

East-Central Europe has recently become a key region for transnational streamers’ production growth, with local original production booming in Warsaw and US-based SVOD production of a certain type moving to Prague and Budapest. Unlike other growth regions of the global digital economy (Latin America, East Asia), East-Central Europe lacks organic integrity in terms cultural exchange and is defined largely by geopolitical and economic commonalities. The talk investigates how Netflix’s and other streamers’ investment strategy builds on the preexisting geography of media production and how it reshapes it, creating new hierarchies through flows of content, labor, and capital.
With 40 million inhabitants, Poland has become the most important SVOD market of the region, Warsaw production offices of Max, Netflix, Canal+, SkyShowtime, and Viaplay having already delivered or promised investment in numerous high-end local originals. From Prague and Budapest, the recent SVOD production boom looks quite different though. Instead of local SVOD originals, both cities have become home to large volumes of US-based SVOD footloose production since around 2018 due to their financial incentives, well-developed infrastructure, and labor pool. Warsaw has become a semi-peripheral media capital in terms of original local production, while Prague and Budapest compete for US-based mobile production spending. This hierarchy manifests in patterns of cross-border media flows, too. While Polish originals travel widely across Netflix’s territorial catalogs, East-Central European licensed content remains largely limited to national libraries or a couple of neighboring countries within the region.
Based on an internal dataset of the Czech Film Fund’s rebate program, SVOD catalogs’ analysis, and on interviews with various industry actors operating from Prague, Budapest and Warsaw, the talk proposes a new conceptualization of the streaming economy from a peripheral perspective. It builds on theories of platformization and platform imperialism, economic geography of global media, and streaming production studies to argue that streamers’ uneven investments not only reproduce traditional inequalities in the global market, but also enforce new hierarchies among peripheral and semi-peripheral media capitals as well as among national and transnational production cultures. It also demonstrates that combining concepts of platform imperialism critique with the micro-level production studies might help in increasing sensitivity to the internal contradictions of global media industries, and in developing critical vocabularies for studying on-the-ground impacts of their globalization and digitalization.

Petr Szczepanik is an associate professor at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic), and his research focuses on East-Central European screen industries, their production cultures and platformization. He co-edited Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Culture (Palgrave, 2013) and Digital Peripheries: The Online Circulation of Audiovisual Content from the Small Market Perspective (Springer, 2020). His latest book is Screen Industries in East-Central Europe (Bloomsbury, 2021). He is a member of the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (https://gmicp.org). He has been engaged in public policy development and collaborated with various public institutions, including the Czech PSB and the Czech Film Fund.