Talk:Star Film (Dutch East Indies company)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Star Film (Dutch East Indies company)/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Zanimum (talk · contribs) 23:56, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Very cool! I'll review this. Straight off, why is there no mention of the fact that the studio's entire output is considered to be lost? This is discussed on the four film pages, but nothing here. -- Zanimum (talk) 23:56, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

• Fair enough, will add something. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 06:52, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

I've made a couple of teeny changes, but overall, wow. Very strong, complete, great stuff! I can't find anything to comment on, really, it's solid. GA! -- Zanimum (talk) 15:02, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

• Thanks! — Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:12, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

Business info

This article describes the artistic side of Star Film, and this part seems well written. But it has almost no information about the business side of Star Film. A sentence such as "The film was a commercial success, allowing the company to expand." suggests certain facts about this are available. In my opinion, a good article about a company should contain information about the annual revenue, the number of employees, etc. – Editør (talk) 21:27, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

• None of the sources go into any further detail. Very little contemporary information has survived. Biran (2012) goes into detail regarding how almost no documentation survives... from the 1940s, we've got Pertjatoeran Doenia dan Film (I didn't get access to the full print run, but what I have was mostly related to the artistic side... the magazine appears to have been intended for theatre owners and the general public, not the studios themselves), JIF Magazine (for Java Industrial Film, a different company; I don't have any scans of those), a bit of internal documentation from ANIF (Algemeen Nederlandsch Indisch Filmsyndicaat) and JIF, scans of newspaper articles from Dutch archives, and interviews with Bachtiar Effendi, the Wong brothers and The Teng Chun. Jo was not active in film after the occupation, and I haven't found any sources hinting that he even survived the occupation/revolution; thus, no interviews with him. Furthermore, very few contemporary reports that I've found dealt with the business aspect of film studios (there are a few about JIF, but I haven't found anything else); even how much a film made might not have been reported.

The GA criteria require that articles represent what is in the sources, not what would be nice to have but is unverifiable or unknown. That's what this article does. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 00:20, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

If all business information is indeed lost, such facts can't be added and I agree the GA criteria don't require them to be included; but some sentences suggested otherwise. – Editør (talk) 22:04, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

• Those sentences you mention are generally cited to Biran. I am not sure how he reaches his conclusions, but he certainly doesn't include any internal documents to support them. It's possible that he drew general conclusions based on limited evidence (in some places he uses a full opening night to suggest a film was a commercial success, or a letter to the editor as evidence of poor critical reception; he was a film producer by trade, so I'm not too surprised), or that he looked at the film's fairly wide distribution (admittedly somewhat rare for the Indies, from what I've seen), or that the studio was able to hire some relatively well-known individuals. He sadly doesn't go into any more detail than what I've put here, however. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 03:38, 17 April 2014 (UTC)