Film credit

This dissertation explores the aesthetic, industrial, and legal considerations that determine the rhetoric, structure, and function of screen credit in American film industry. Appearing in the opening credits that precede the film, and in the final crawl that follows the film, credits are the names and job titles that which individuals or corporations were responsible for what contributions to a motion picture, creative or otherwise. Credits, in their form, syntax, and function, appear fairly straightforward. Yet they are subtended by a number of wide-ranging regimes and complex structural systems: visual experimentation within the collaborative creative practices of film production; collective guild and union bargaining with film producers (as well as one-to-one negotiation between film employees and employers); and a labour law backbone that regulates and reinforces these negotiating regimes. Accordingly, this dissertation argues against considering credits solely in relation to the films that they inaugurate (or follow), and instead posits that credits are semi- autonomous entities, properly intelligible in their own right. By reading the opening credits and final crawl, we learn about the aesthetic values and industrial function of the American film industry in ways that can often surpass analysis of the diegesis itself. ❧ Focussing primarily on the era immediately following the Paramount Decrees of 1948, this dissertation highlights a period when credits assumed greater importance within the American film industry. The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed a proliferation in the visual experimentation of opening title sequences, particularly through the creative efforts of Saul Bass, Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro. These practitioners, who moved from commercial advertising into the cinema, imported discourses from other artistic and business practices into their title sequences—including typography, print design, lithography, and fine art. These artists and others also used title sequences to engage with and challenge the conventions of and boundaries between cinema and the visual arts practices that flourished during this period. When the Paramount Decrees ordered the Hollywood studios to divest themselves of their holdings, credits also assumed greater importance to industry professionals. Without the institutional memory guaranteed by vertically integrated film studios, media professionals, working within more ad-hoc production environments characterized by more fluid employment relationships, increasingly relied on credits to certify their professional résumés. The mid-1960s dispute over the possessory credit testifies to the importance of credits during this period and beyond, as writers and directors engaged in a legal battle over who should have the right to the credit “A Film by...” This protracted controversy, which embroiled the Directors Guild of America, the Writers Guild of America, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, reveals how credits became a deeply coded matrix built on decades of legal manoeuvring and industrial practice, with meanings that go far beyond the surface. Credits became laden with fraught and vital semantic differences, which are inflected by a long historical tail of professional relations in the industry. This semantic evolution is also reflected in the evolution of the final crawl, i.e., the protracted list of names and titles that follow virtually every feature film. The history of the final crawl, which dates back to the late 1930s, is a history of below-the-line industry workers, whose contributions became recognized with greater frequency. In addition to their numerical proliferation, these job titles have also changed in their valence—Sound Editors have become Sound Designers, for examples—which have elevated the creative esteem of positions that were previously seen as mere “craft” inputs. The history of credits in cinema is therefore tending towards ever-greater stature garnered for its practitioners, ranged against the perceptions of film critics and audiences who viewed this proliferation of credits as an example of distasteful Hollywood self-aggrandizement. ❧ This dissertation argues that credits are a vital tool for understanding the American film industry because the opening titles and final crawl are the only two places in narrative film where its aesthetic, industrial, and legal determinations are written directly onto the screen. The structure and function of credits have broader consequences and determinations into how film texts come to be made, and reveal the machinery of creative labour that goes into making any motion picture.