Fanfilms: An Uncomfortable Category?

Abstract

Despite their notable popularity, fan-made movies or fanfilms have received little scholarly attention compared to written, graphic, performative or even audiovisual fanworks, to the point that one could say that they are a somewhat “uncomfortable category.” While fans’ audiovisual practices such as vidding, remixes, recuts or machinima are well adjusted to fandom theories, fanfilms tend to recreate a narrative canon, as well as some values of production, toying with formal codes identical to the source texts. The technical complexities of its more ambitious exponents also imply a greater barrier, which entails a specialization and a hierarchical organization of equipment within the limits of industrial activity. The main purpose of this article is to further the knowledge on fanfilms in their diversity, considering continuities and differences regarding certain attributes—also “canonical”— of fan creations, as well as audiovisual self-production, in order to make a contribution to the still scarce scientific literature on the subject. For this purpose, we analyze different example cases from an initial corpus and go into detail about the activity in a case considered as paradigmatic—the Hive Division collective. As reflected in the paper’s conclusions, fan-made films require reconsidering suppositions from both fields, such as legitimacy or authenticity, reevaluating motivations and observing the similar challenges faced in connection with other creative fan practices.