Although research on the particular national economic impact of American film began as
early as 1937 (Legg and Klingender 1937), it was not until the end of the Second World
War that research began on the international film industry (
1945). However,
pioneering study was available only in French and German. Another quarter
century passed before there was any English-language study of the international context of
national film policies. Thomas Guback’s 1969 analysis of the American film industry in
Western Europe has already been referred to. It was the first study of the post-war,
overseas activities of the Hollywood film industry and had begun life as a thesis under the
supervision of Dallas Smythe, the ‘father’ of political economy research on mass
communications (Wasko et al. 1993). The study was not a lone one. Instead it was soon
joined by a series of others, operating within a ‘cultural dependency’ paradigm, and
examining such areas as the overseas reach of American television and the cultural import
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of Disney comics (Schiller 1969; Wells 1972; Mattelart and Dorfman 1975). This
‘cultural dependency’ research has been critically reviewed elsewhere and there is no
need to rehearse that discussion here (Schlesinger 1987; Tomlinson 1991; McAnany and
Wilkinson 1992). In any case, some of the conceptual problems of the approach have been
raised above. Despite these difficulties, Guback’s study of the relationship between
Hollywood and the largest Western European film industries is a major work of film
policy research. The continuing value of that study lies in the detail and clarity of
Guback’s diagnosis of the prevailing situation in national film industries in Britain, Italy,
Germany and France in the 1960s. His account of the film policies not only of
the Hollywood majors and the particular national governments but also of the US
government itself is a model piece of research into the political economy of a cultural
industry at a particular moment in time.
The other major study that forms a backdrop to the present collection was published in
France in 1983 and appeared in English in 1984 (Mattelart, Delcourt and Mattelart 1984).
International Image Markets grew out of the report of a French government mission to
explore the feasibility of a ‘Latin audio-visual space’ that would include several European
and South American countries. Again, the study is of most interest and continuing value in
the details it produces about the international film and television industries in the 1980s.
Equally, the book is at its weakest in its assumptions about the homogeneity of an ‘audio-
visual space’, the latter being a modern label for ‘national cinema’ or ‘national television’.
(Schlesinger 1993).