Farai Mpfunya of the Cultural Fund, for valuable reading material and participation in the research;. It seeks to explore the nature of the skills, infrastructure and organizational networks utilized in film and video production in Zimbabwe. The research is situated within film services (Goldsmith and O'Regan, 2005; Goldsmith et al, 2010) and political economy frameworks that recognize and critique the role of multiple players and services in the film production value chain.
Filmmakers who were purposefully selected for their roles in the four productions were interviewed about their experiences on the film sets.
LIST OF ACRONYMS
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
INTRODUCTION
It is therefore an analysis of the components of the film industry and an additional critique of the content or cinematic fact (Stam et al, 1992). How has the availability or non-availability of 'film services' affected the production of the films King Solomon's Mines (1985), Everyone's Child (1996), Tanyaradzwa (2005) and Sinners. This chapter discusses the rationale of the study based on the research objectives and questions.
A more detailed context is provided in the first chapter to lay the groundwork for discovering the nature of the film service industry in Zimbabwe.
CHAPTER ONE
However, this periodized approach is a possible starting point in the quest to systematically understand the development of the film sector in Zimbabwe. The thesis, in a sense, intersects with the economics and ideology of cinematic fact in Zimbabwe. Exploring the link between film services and the production phase of the film value chain.
Persons who were employed in the production of the films and interviewed in this study are considered to be the richest available sources of data regarding the production of the films and the nature of the film services industry in Zimbabwe.
CHAPTER TWO
As a result, Martin Mhando (2014:5) observed that “the informative nature of film is its defining quality. Some propose definitions of 'African' film based more on the content than on the techniques used in the film (Mhando, 2000a; Paleker, 2008; Mhando, 2014): “The informational nature of film is considered its defining quality. As such, the economic contributions of the film industry have been measured in terms of financial returns over time.
What role has history played in the distribution of technological and financial resources fundamental to the functioning of the industry. For a facility dubbed "one of the most sophisticated on the continent" (Thompson, 2013:37) and hailed by Ukadike (1994) as "the African Hollywood", the CFL appears too briefly in Zimbabwean literature film production. That the donor-funded films are considered "the post-colonial equivalents of the CAFU films".
CHAPTER THREE
As such, the attempt to explore Zimbabwean film services is one that considers the “apparatuses of discourse, technologies and institutions” that produce Zimbabwean. Production, in this scenario, is "the activities necessary to produce a copy of the film." In this thesis, pre-production, production and post-production are considered as part of the production context.
In this thesis, the film services approach is used to analyze pro-filmic factors: “the multitude of processes and activities that actually took place during the shooting of the film” (Barbash and Taylor, 1997:8). Goldsmith and O'Regan (2005:58) argue that “the condition of international importance is partly dependent on the existing local industry and as a result there is a dynamic relationship between the two industries.” This could be directly applied to the involvement of international manufacturing companies in Zimbabwe shortly after independence. In Goldsmith and O'Regan's (2005) analysis, the geographical dispersion of production is made necessary by a global Hollywood that paradoxically necessitates “the dispersion of production and production capacity at the international level, which requires an intense concentration of activity and controlling and coordinating functions in Los Angeles” ( Goldsmith and O'Regan, 2005:18).
In the context of film production, the shadow economy of filmmaking means the exclusion of some stages of the value chain (highlighted in Figure 1.1). Vincent Mosco (2009:24) defined political economy as “social relations, especially power relations, that mutually shape the production, distribution and consumption of resources”. The use of political economy theory in the study of African media is much rarer compared to Western studies, so the assumption that the political economy of communication is "mainly concerned with capitalist society and commercial media systems" (McChesney and that "the political economy of film analyzes the movement of the image as a commodity, produced and distributed within the capitalist industrial structure” (Wasko, 2005:10).
As Willemen (2006:41) acknowledges, “The fact of cinema is circumscribed by the network of industrial institutions which govern and define specific ways of producing and circulating specific objects: film”. The scope of political economy theory in this study includes Robert McChesney's observation that: "the political economy of communication looks specifically at how ownership, support mechanisms and government policies influence media behavior and content".
CHAPTER FOUR
Self-reflexivity questions "the complex relationship between the processes of knowledge production and the various contexts of such processes and the involvement of the knowledge producer" (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2000:5). The filmmakers' perceptions are actually their own interpretations of the activities in the film service industry, but their spoken words are also subject to the researcher's interpretation. In this study, four films used as examples help to understand the nature of film services in Zimbabwe.
A conceptual framework: explains “the most important things to be studied—the key factors, constructs, or variables—and the hypothesized relationships between them” (Miles and Huberman, 1994). In this research, the case of the films King Solomon's Mines, Everyone's Child, Tanyaradzwa and Sinners is made in the political, socio-economic context. Interviews provided the contextual evidence of what happened in the production of the films used as case studies in the research.
James Chapman in his Chronicle of Film and History Studies notes that there has been an approach that documents "the historical conditions in which films were made" by analyzing both their production and reception. Service providers involved in the making of any of the four films that make up the study. The visual image processed in cinema stands for something that is no longer there or as Metz (in Easthope, 1993) says, 'made present in the mode of absence.' Thus the image stands for what it represents - for what the film is about (Benjamin, 1935) and the efforts that produced it (context of production/film services).
To explain this further, another term used by Stam et al (1992) is; that of aesthetic norms "the historically evolving sets of alternatives available to the filmmaker, the set of more or less probable substitutions within a functional context". At the heart of hermeneutics lies the claim that "the meaning of a part can only be understood if it is related to the whole" (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2000:53).
CHAPTER FIVE
An analysis of the film services used in King Solomon's Mines indicates that it was a "one-off, fly-by production," which. King Solomon's Mines (1985), compared to two earlier adaptations of the same title, has been criticized for its story being "lost in effects" (Goodman, 198528). Some of the effects seen in King Solomon's Mines were not computer generated, but done by hand.
One of the famous scenes in the film involves a large clay pot into which Quartermaine and Jessie are thrown, to be boiled alive. Some of the familiar names in the movie include Fidelis Cheza (Mr Zonde), Walter Muparutsa (Uncle Ozias), Madzikatire, Peter Kampira (Zato) and Simon Shumba (Pastor Phiri). Everybody's Child was one of the last films to enjoy the infrastructure of film services installed by the state.
Mastering the film at The Film Lab only shows that the film world will follow the installations of the technological infrastructure. It is clear that financing was a major problem in the production of Tanyaradzwa and the poor financing negatively affected the aesthetic standards of the film. The camera zooms in and out and does not provide a steady close-up of the actress in the scene.
The chaotic nature of Sinners' production is typical of film production theorized within a shadow economy. You get the feeling that some of the actors normally wouldn't talk the way they do in the movie. At the same time, the thematic concerns of films are influenced by the robustness of the film services used in production.
Both chapters aid the efforts of this thesis; to determine the nature of the film service industry in Zimbabwe.
CHAPTER SIX
One can observe that there may be a film industry of sorts in Zimbabwe, but not one that fulfills the desires of filmmakers and certainly not one that conforms to canonized definitions. However, it is clear that video and film are part of the same continuum of the 'national' cinematic and cinematic fact. It is therefore problematic to regard them as "industrial" films in the same way that one might identify products from the car industry or the classic studio productions of Hollywood.
Most observers who dispute the existence of a film industry in Zimbabwe either base their definitions on privileged Western contexts, or compare the film services used in it. To follow the definition above, it is important to consider the productivity of the film sector in Zimbabwe. This distinction between filmmaking and the film business is at the core of the film services approach.
Some recent productions include: Marrying the Devil (Dimingo, 2014) and When Evil Strikes (Mazonde, 2016) which follow Nollywood's dramatic style and themes of tradition (evil) versus evangelism (good). If the film industry is characterized by chaos and confusion, this is a reflection of the state of affairs as far as cultural policy frameworks are concerned. The absence of government and corporate support has made the Zimbabwe Cultural Trust one of the critical service institutions as far as film production in Zimbabwe is concerned.
On the one hand, filmmakers feel that their sector deserves larger grants due to the capital intensity of the sector. As a result of the foregoing, the country's competitiveness in terms of attracting film production has decreased over the years.
