Subcinema: mapping informal film distribution
Creators: name: Lobato, Ramon
Publisher: name: Swinburne
Year: 2024

description: This thesis investigates the politics of film distribution from a transnational perspective. Distribution, the most profitable sector of the film industry, is a rich site for cultural analysis. Distribution networks do more than deliver content to audiences; they shape film culture in their own image by regulating our access to cinema, creating demand for future production, and structuring our habits and tastes. The existing literature on film distribution focuses almost exclusively on multiplex, arthouse, and home video circuits. This thesis aims to broaden the scope of distribution research by taking into account informal, nontheatrical networks in grey and black economies. Providing evidence of the empirical significance of these 'invisible' global markets, I offer a new model of media circulation (subcinema) which I develop through three case studies of film industries in Africa, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. The broad argument is that analysing film from the vantage point of distribution can open up a space for a different kind of transnational film studies, one founded on a materialist model of how audiences access cinema. The first chapter of the thesis critically reviews existing scholarship on film distribution and draws on political economy, anthropology, film history, and media economics to develop a theory of distribution as a cultural technology. The second chapter examines the evolution of the Hollywood distribution model and the strategies used by the major studios to sell their product to domestic and international audiences, highlighting the bottlenecks that are characteristic of the conventional 'windowing' system. In chapter three, I set out a broad theoretical framework for the study of informal film distribution, developed in dialogue with the social science literature on informal economies, and I identify the six key characteristics of subcinematic networks---instantaneity, deterritoriality, invisibility, textual instability, distraction, and 'cockroach-capitalist' structure. The remaining chapters analyse three informal/semi-formal distribution systems from a comparative perspective. In chapter four, a case study of the straight-to-video release model used for low-budget American and Australian genre films explores the complex transnational economy in which these films are financed and circulated, and the challenge this fast-and-cheap film culture poses to theories of cultural value. In chapter five, the unique system of Nigerian video film distribution is analysed in terms of its efficiency as a circulatory network and as a driver of social and economic change. In chapter six, competing discourses around media piracy are interrogated through an analysis of black-market DVD trade at Tepito market in Mexico City, a case study which foregrounds the importance of pirate literacies. Combining industrial analysis, cultural theory, and interviews with distributors, these case studies critically theorise subcinematic networks in terms of their social and political impact, the challenges they pose to existing theories of reception and spectatorship, and their feasibility as alternative industrial templates for future film industries.