ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that analyses of credit sequences can provide generative insights into film production. Credit sequences are valuable for exploring: linguistic choices, formal elements, production aesthetics, industrial practices and hierarchies, shooting locations, audience address, and state-regulations. Credit sequences can assist us in engaging with scholarly debates on language and nation-building. Scholarly discussions about production and authorship can be approached through an investigation of credit sequences. Song sequences in films attach the playback singer’s voice to the actor’s body, thus providing us with an ideal body; and the credit sequence makes visible this division of labor. An analysis of how the credits are organized shows that this division generally favors the visual star rather than the aural one. Investigations of histories of cinema largely rely on archival documents and interviews. While these are important sites for documenting and analyzing cinema’s histories, an examination of paratexts such as credit sequences shows that materiality is imprinted on the film.
