Creative industries, spatiality and flexibility: The example of film production

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1990s, film production in Sweden was heavily centralised in Stockholm. Today, film production in Sweden has decentralised to include three regional film production centres located far from the capital region. The article aims to understand this decentralised location pattern, focusing on the aspects of flexible film work and film workers. The implications of the regionalisation of film production in Sweden for film workers and for regions are explored. Labour and work practice flexibility create important conceptual lenses through which the investigation and analysis were developed. The major empirical source of data was a questionnaire survey of film workers. From the empirical data, different structures of the film industry in the main film regions are discussed. The results show that the geography of film workers diverges from that of film work, reflecting spatial mobility among film workers and willingness to be involved in projects some distance from their county of residence. Multiscalar relations in film work and film projects appear to be the organisational norm within film production. The results also show that it is difficult to generate sufficient income from film production, and most workers are dependent on incomes from sectors outside the film industry.

Keywords:

• creative industries
• feature film production
• film work
• flexibility
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

Funding for this research was granted by the Nordic Council of Ministers via Nordregio, and The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. The authors wish to thank Sara Östberg (Nordregio) for invaluable research assistance, particularly regarding the web survey, Elisabeth Wengström (Swedish Film Institute) for continuous help and collaboration, officers at the regional resource and production centres, and last but not least, all film workers who responded to the web survey. We are also grateful to comments from two anonymous referees.

Notes

1. ‘Filmen som näring och exportindustri’. Unpublished report commissioned by Filmproducenternas Branschkansli in collaboration with the Swedish Film Institute.

2. The Swedish Film Industry Catalogue is an unpublished electronic database made available by the Swedish Film Institute.

3. Our definition of film workers in the survey was based on the criteria that the centres used to compile their own lists of film workers. The criteria for listing in the Film Industry Catalogue are stricter. It is important to note that actors are not included in any of these inventories. However, the latest issue of the Catalogue is two years old so it may contain individuals who are no longer active film workers. Film workers in the Stockholm region tend to register in the Catalogue, and as the Stockholm regional resource centre holds no registry of its own it is therefore likely that film workers from this region are under-represented in our list due both to the inaccuracy of the Catalogue and the fact that it has a stricter selection of film workers that can be included.

4. In the trade there are rumours that some film workers register as residents in the three film regions to be able to be included as ‘local’ staff in film projects. This is a difficult issue to investigate. Nothing was found in our survey to indicate that such a strategy explains the pattern of film workers working in Stockholm but living elsewhere.

5. http://www.sfi.se/ (accessed December 2006)