Out of the Blue: the dark side of creative enterprise

This paper draws on an archive of media texts that document the making of the film Out of the Blue. Within these media accounts are statements made by a group of residents resisting the film project, and the film‐makers responding to this resistance. We employ a Foucauldian informed discourse analysis to read these statements of resistance as a starting point to examine the power relations within contemporary knowledge generation processes of creative industries. We theorise creative industries as a discursive object located at the intersection of three discursive formations: ‘creativity’, ‘enterprise’ and ‘place’. Through analysing the particular place–identities of Aramoana engaged by the resisting residents and the film‐makers, we are able to suggest how this film project came to be discursively constituted as creative enterprise. In so doing, we find that the resisting residents’ statements work to disrupt the taken‐for‐granted ‘goodness’ of film enterprise, and creative industries more generally.