Distribution

The business of deciding which films reach which rooms, and on what terms. Distribution is the layer between a finished film and an audience: who carries it, who pitches it to exhibitors, who guarantees the print or the file arrives, who splits the takings and in what proportion.

It is the least visible link in the chain and the one that decides most outcomes. A film can be finished, praised, and awarded, and still never be distributed, in which case for practical purposes it does not exist.

In the Philippines distribution was a foreign-owned business before local production existed, and it has never been taken back. Hollywood’s grip on Philippine screens accelerated from 1915, when the First World War disrupted European production, and the pattern set then has outlasted every regime since.

Source: The chronology is the standard one, summarised in Cinema of the Philippines, Wikipedia, and taught here from Nick Deocampo’s TVUP lecture “Gunita: Mga Alaala sa Pinilakang Tabing” (free). Deocampo’s own argument about American influence running through “technology, language, mode of production, aesthetics, and ideology” is in Film: American Influences on Philippine Cinema, Anvil, 2011, which is paid, and in his free Frames Cinema Journal interview.

First used in: 3.1 · The movies got here before we did