The view from out West: embeddedness, inter-personal relations and the development of an indigenous film industry in Vancouver
Section snippets
Context
The ‘cultural turn’ in geography has provoked a growing concern with the dialectical relations between cultural and economic systems (Crang, 1997). There is increasing recognition that the two spheres are not autonomous and independent, and equally, that there is no deterministic relationship between the two. Instead, culture and economy are mutually constitutive, with ‘economic’ processes such as production, consumption and regulation being perhaps best seen as part of a circuit of culture
Conceptual concerns: the embodiment of multi-scalar economic processes
My analysis in this article is framed by two conceptual debates, the first surrounding the embeddedness and embodiment of economic processes in networks of inter-personal relations, and the second focusing on the social construction and ‘nestedness’ of scale. The concept of ‘embeddedness’, which has received increasing attention from economic geographers since a seminal paper by Granovetter 1985; (see also Granovetter, 1992), is central to my argument. This notion suggests that economic action,
The international level: US dominance of Canadian film and television culture
At the broadest level, Vancouver producers must firstly be situated within a North American film, television and media market that is dominated by US corporations.8 Canada is uniquely dependent on, or receptive to (depending on your viewpoint) US cultural products. This dependency is at its most apparent in terms
The national level: centralist biases in government and broadcaster funding?
Producers can also look to initiate projects within their Canadian networks. However, the structure of Canadian funding schemes seems to work against Vancouver producers, and this is most visible in terms of Federal funding. It is important to bear in mind the broader context here. There have long been concerns that the Federal Government has been orientated towards the interests of central Canada, and in particular, the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and so the distribution of film funds can
The local level: limited resources in a maturing industry?
Vancouver producers are also embedded in a web of locally constituted relations, the majority of which are concerned with securing the necessary services in order to make a project, rather than funding negotiations, which are by necessity undertaken on a national or international basis. The work of Cox (1998) is useful in capturing the different nature of network relations within Vancouver. He distinguishes between spaces of dependence, which represent “more-or-less localized social relations …
Conclusion
In this paper I have endeavoured to show how Vancouver producers are embedded in qualitatively different networks of inter-personal relations operating across different spatial scales. A key argument is that the economic processes that surround the material realities of making indigenous films in British Columbia are actually embodied in a group of key individuals and their personal networks. The ability of Vancouver producers to make indigenous or high Canadian-content material depends on
Acknowledgements
This research was carried out with funding from a Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral scholarship. I would like to thank Lily Kong, Jenny Robinson and the anonymous referees for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.
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