Transforming film product identities: The status effects of european premier film festivals, 1996-2005

According to an ecological conception, identity inheres in expectations, assumptions, and beliefs held by sets of relatively homogeneous actors, called audiences, who can be internal or external to organizations. Although higher level, institutional processes and occasions for interaction are invoked as mechanisms by which these audiences define and enforce their preferred prescriptions, field level processes have been largely ignored in this literature. Our study addresses this gap by linking ecological identities, more specifically product identities, with field level events. We focus on a sample of films produced across the globe and premiered at the three major European film festivals, respectively Berlin, Cannes and Venice. Since premier festivals, by definition, pass judgment on films, via nominations and artistic recognition in the form of awards, prior to their release to the public, they offer an opportunity to study the effect of these field-level judgments of films as precursors to market reception.