Notes from Region 2

Beyond the Nation State: ‘New Europe’ and Discourses of British Identity in Pawel Pawlikowski'sLast Resort(2000)

“…Hence, the depictions of Margate in the two films, while carrying intimations of being diagnoses of the condition of the British working class, at the same time become, in the instance of Last Resort, a comment on the place of Great Britain in 'New Europe' and the construction of a British identity, which is defined through the processes of pan-European inclusion and exclusion and intranational sedimentation and an unequal distribution of citizens between the centre and the margin based on economic criteria (cf. Stone, 2007;Bardan, 2008). The second process is well exemplified by Williams' London to Brighton, in which a prostitute Kelly runs to Brighton, where most of her underclass friends have already relocated from metropolitan London, to protect her life.…”

“…While such an easy division into postindustrial, post-colonial and First World masculinity (with overlaps between them) may be perceived as a sweeping generalisation, it does highlight the divide between power and privilege and dependence and deprivation. It also, most importantly, establishes the divide based on economic criteria (Stone, 2007), mentioned earlier, rather than national belonging. This insistence on the platonic nature of the relationships, a curious aspect in narrative terms, where traditional narratives usually lead to sexual consummation and marriage, is thus the key to establishing the binary opposition between exploitative and sexually predatory men, pimps in Last Resort and employer in Dirty Pretty Things, and righteous, and by binary necessity sexually disinterested, 'good' men.…”

The DVD region code system: Standardizing home video’s disjunctive global flows

“…Hu (2006) notes that region codes enable media industries to carve up global markets and thus devalue certain territories, facilitate state censorship by allowing states to release different versions of the same film in different territories, and discriminate against immigrants and diaspora groups, since many films from one’s home country will not be released outside their original region. Stone (2007) analyzes the impact of new screen technologies on European cinema through the conceptual frame of referring to Europe as ‘Region 2’, invoking Europe’s designation in the DVD region coding scheme.…”

The Battle Within

“…A well-known example of competitive fragmentation is the propensity of GSM operators to make the mobile phone handsets non-interoperable with competitors' networks, most often for a time-limited period (usually by pre-programming the phones to only accept their own SIM cards) (Valletti & Cave, 1998). Another example is regional coding on DVDs, which limits playback of discs to devices sold in specific geographic areas (Stone, 2007). Whilst affecting the user through a smaller or larger degree of non-interoperability, competitive fragmentation usually will not affect economies of scale significantly (on the production side) as production lines would be equal, and e.g.…”