Early history of making-of films: film production cultures in West German television coverage

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dennis Göttel
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491435950

The research project addresses films widely known as making-of films as historical documents which depict the labor of filmmaking itself. The project focuses upon the period from the 1950s to 1980 as an early stage of this genre. Within this time frame, representations of filmmaking occur mainly via editorial coverages about ongoing film shootings in the form of television reports. This research project confines itself to the analysis of making-of films in West Germany. In contrast to featurettes produced and broadcasted in the US, West German making-of films of that period arise from journalistic reporting in the context of public broadcasting television and rather independently of the marketing of film production companies. Hence this research project positions itself at the point of intersection of historical film and television cultures. The projected body of making-of films is a desideratum in film and media studies. It will be assembled by making inquiries in television archives and registered within a database containing the metadata of these films. The second stage of this project will examine making-of films as sources for historical film production studies: with a triangulation of methods of source review, motif analysis and discourse analysis, modes of audiovisual representation of film production in the time frame of 30 years will be considered. Finally, the research project understands making-of films of that time period as popularization of creative labor and therefore as indicators of wider social and cultural transformations of capitalist production cultures since the 1960s. In this respect, the research project contributes to the study of early post-Fordism visual culture.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants