ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on a series of interviews with young people mainly in their 20s and mainly from ethnic minorities, all of whom had worked, were working as, or aspired to work as filmmakers in London in 2015/2016. It argues that rather than seeing employment in this field in simply transactional terms, as the exchange of labour in a market, it makes more sense to see these creative biographies as a form of participation in filmmaking as a social field. Having a job was understood in terms of a form of social participation which in turn generated further employment. Participation was significantly a question of identity work, of operating as a character in the social field—rather than simply a question of abstractly developing expertise (with technology or aesthetics) that could be bought or sold, and this approach to skills is in contradistinction to conventional progression through academic credentials; it is structured around participation in three kinds of ‘fields of practice’ in the Bourdieuian sense. The first of these can best be described as a ‘scene’—a cultural grouping or activity or performance or coming together characterised by a collective sense of purpose and engagement. Secondly, it describes young people’s paid work in the film industries—that is, more conventional types of employment. These narratives showed that the market for film is varied and insecure from public relations companies that wanted ‘spontaneous’ footage of events for use on Facebook, to making music videos sometimes financed by drug money, to working in a junior capacity on large Hollywood or British film industry financed films. The final kind of work we observed in these young people was the effort and process that went into the activity of career building as part of their presence in the filmmaking field.
The chapter shows how young people entering this field of work have learnt to think of entry into employment not in terms of simply ‘getting a job’ but more in terms of monetising their participation in a series of fields.
