ABSTRACT
Cinema once performed a similar function to that of broadcast TV: it provided forms of entertainment and information to a large proportion of the population of a number of Western countries and many other nations as well. A form of industrial production was developed to service this large market, but it never became as organised and subdivided as that of broadcast TV. In particular, the series form always remained marginal to cinema production. Series like the newsreel March of Time (1935-51) or the serial Flash Gordon (1936) were not the main attractions of the programmes in which they appeared. Series production is rather more characteristic of the earlier period of film production, before American dominance of the market was assured, with series like The Perils of Pauline (1914) or Feuillade’s Fantomas (1913), Les Vampires (1915-16) and Judex (1917). The characteristic form of film production is that of the single film, highly differentiated from the other films which surround it. In this sense, film production can be described as craft production rather than industrial production. Cinema’s typical production is the single film rather than the series, a prototype rather than a group of similar products. Cinema has often directly provided TV with prototypes for series: M*A*S*H, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, Flamingo Road. This is one aspect of the coexistence of cinema and TV which has developed over the last thirty years. But before the 1950s, cinema existed as an entertainment medium which
had no direct competitors in the home other than radio. During this period, film’s craft production of prototypes was organised into a form of industrial production (loosely called ‘the studio system’) which no longer exists except in isolated instances (China, Hong Kong). This system has, however, left a powerful legacy. Its conception of the film commodity still dominates current conceptions of what ‘a film’ is, at all levels of industry and criticism. So besides the general conception of the film commodity that springs from the particular conditions of the current cinema, there is the continued dominance of a conception that springs from a rather different form of cinema production. In this sense, the cinema commodity is a rather more difficult form to describe, because there are different tendencies within it.
