Erik Barnouw Research Articles

“American Homespun Fascists”: Seán O’Casey and the Returning Veteran at the American Negro Theatre

This article explores four works produced by the American Negro Theatre (ANT) for stage and radio between September 1945 and July 1946 – Arthur Laurents’s The Face (1945), Samuel J. Kootz’s Home Is the Hunter (1945–46), Erik Barnouw’s The Story They’ll Never Print (1946), and Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1946) – arguing that they collectively constitute a coherent, if uneven, set of responses to what ANT co-founder and director Abram Hill had called in September 1945 “one of the most pressing questions facing the world today: What is the reaction of the returning Negro GI to his land of democracy?” This essay identifies the interrelatedness of these four works and draws on archival sources to pay close attention to the production of Juno (which has never previously been discussed at length or in connection with the ANT’s other returning veteran dramas). Analysing the ANT’s Juno as an oblique “returning Negro soldier drama” that critically retools what Judith Smith terms “trading places” stories of the immediate post-war years, this essay further contends that the company trod a fine line between an explicit and an implicit critique of the United States, protesting against “American homespun fascists” and asserting the ordinariness of African American soldiers. While this strategy sometimes risked opacity, it invited astute audiences to make connections that were inferred rather than asserted and thus circumvented accusations of anti-Americanism.

Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s GoPro Sensorium: Leviathan (2012), Experimental Documentary, and Subjective Sounds

Ethnographic film is documentary's avant-garde. Who is more self-conscious than an anthropologist with a movie camera?-J. HobermanFilm language is language of moving, seeing, and hearing. More than any other medium or art form, film uses experience to express experience.-Ilsa Barbash and Lucien Taylor (1)The term documentary, at first glance, can be considered an oxymoron at worst or a hybrid category at best that in either case illuminates assumed dialectical tensions between formal experimentation and cultural representation.1 Experimental documentary filmmaking conflates this dichotomy at level of aesthetics, or as Stella Bruzzi puts it, aestheticization of a given reality (9). The use of expressive, cinematic techniques, often celebrated in fictional filmmaking as an imaginative means for filmmaker to engage and enhance emotional involvement of viewer with filmmaker's stories and characters, often meets critical resistance when applied to documentary forms, including those whose origins are not necessarily related to their cinematic incarnations. Erik Barnouw, for example, in his seminal book Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film (1993), categorizes documentaries into nonfiction conventions or trends that existed before advent of documentary filmmaking with terms such as explorer, reporter, advocate, poet, and observer, among others. Barnouw's classification relates closer to the essay, diary, autobiography, notebook, editorial, evocation, eulogy, exhortation, description or report (Nichols, Introduction 72). These conceptual, and largely literary, nonfiction templates provide a reference point for how experimentation in popular imagination can be preconceived as counterintuitive to nonfiction's enterprise for verifiable knowledge. Elsewhere, John Corner points out that application of documentary aesthetics not been surprisingly framed by an interest in cognition, in how documentaries construct and project knowledge and use of this by viewers (20-21). Rather, in documentary's quest to capture visible evidence of its social subject, use of expressive cinematic techniques in nonfictional modes-such as dynamic dolly camera movement in Alain Resnais's Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog] (1955); stylized, noir-like cinematography and reenactments in Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988); and kinetic music video editing with staged musical numbers in Alma Har'el's Bombay Beach (2011)-short-circuits this supposed link to unmediated knowledge. In more extreme visual measures, experimental documentary bypasses it altogether.The use of formal experimentation with cultural representation does more than just dismantle universal impulse toward discourse of objectivity in mainstream documentary filmmaking-it is also a discourse that itself has lost creditability with wider acceptance, or at least acknowledgment, that any form of documentary filmmaking is inherently subjective. Theorists such as Trinh T. Minh-ha notably refute definitions of documentary as a filmic form or approach altogether, despite its cinematic tradition, due to its untenable conflation of fixed notions of truth with meaning. She argues that [t]ruth, even when 'caught on run,' does not yield itself either in names or in (filmic) frames; and meaning should be prevented from coming to closure at what is said and what is shown (92). documentaries can offer, at best in her estimation, is a visual representation of a meaning that is already once removed from what it purports to signify. She provocatively asks: What is one to do with films which set out to determine truth from falsity while visibility of this truth lies precisely in fact that it is false? (92). Although this debate continues, experimental documentary offers recourse in its acknowledgment of fluctuation of both truth and meaning in a nonfiction filmic form. …

Book Review: C. Francis Jenkins, Pioneer of Film and Television, by Donald G. Godfrey

C. Francis Jenkins, Pioneer of Film and Television. Donald G. Godfrey. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 304 pp. $50.00 hbk. $16.50 ebkMedia historians have not overlooked Charles Francis Jenkins, but neither have they given his story its due. Don Godfrey corrects this imbalance by probing traditional sources and cultivating evidence buried in unusual records -including Jenkins's 283 patents. As a former biographer of television visionary Philo T. Farnsworth, Godfrey is well qualified for this undertaking. With C. Francis Jenkins, Pioneer of Film and Television, Godfrey continues to question original documents to set right the earliest records of media history. The result makes up for omissions in seminal works, such as Erik Barnouw's A History of Broadcasting in the United States, and expands better developed later works, such as Gary Edgerton's The Columbia History of American Television. Godfrey involves the reader in Jenkins's milieu, humanizes the prolific inventor, and recovers details of his pioneering inventions in motion picture technology, RadioVision, and the evolution of mechanical to electronic television. C. Francis Jenkins is a much-needed improvement to existing histories and an indispensible reference for any future treatments of media technology.Anyone who has ever used SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) time code owes a note of thanks to Charles Francis Jenkins, who in 1916 founded the Society of Motion Picture (and as of 1950, Television) Engineers. Godfrey explains, [SMPTE] helped guide film from an awkward novelty into a technology with scientific and entertainment purposes. . . . One major problem among pre-World War I competitors was that each utilized different systems. The answer was standardization. Jenkins favored engineering cooperation (not unlike Edwin H. Armstrong) over the profiteering, patent hoarding of the likes of David Sarnoff. Godfrey chronicles Jenkins's SMPE initiative amid other chapters on early film experiments, motion picture cameras, automobile inventions, radio transmission of photographic images, and as founder of the short-lived Jenkins Television Corporation, on the cusp of the Great Depression.Godfrey accomplishes several goals in this biography of the blue-eyed, redheaded Quaker farm boy, who was born in Dayton, raised in Indiana, and worked as a West Coast laborer before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1890. Jenkins clerked for the U.S. Life-Saving Service and poured himself into inventing. It was Jenkins, Godfrey explains, who pushed for large-screen movie projection, instead of the individualized peepshows of his day. Jenkins reportedly demonstrated his camera-projector, the Phantoscope, in 1894 in Richmond, Virginia. Godfrey recounts how Jenkins projected moving images of Annabelle the Dancing Girl. The sight of the young lady's naked ankle appalled ladies, but the Phantoscope revolutionized the industry by giving film its intermittent, frame-by-frame illusion of motion.Jenkins contended with partnership squabbles typical of the era, notably with Thomas Armat. Godfrey's impressive analysis clarifies the dispute, concluding Jenkins originated the Phantoscope before partnering with Armat, was confused about dates of his demonstrations, and damaged his credibility through careless claims. …

Database Documentary: From Authorship to Authoring in Remediated/Remixed Documentary

The engagement with documentary from its inception as a film form is frequently a set of references to documentary auteurs. The names of Flaherty, Grierson, Vertov and later Ivens, Leacock and Rouch are immediate signifiers of whole documentary film practices. These practices have given rise to histories and criticism that have dominated discussion of documentary and provided the foundation for more nuanced thinking about problems of the genre. One of the seminal texts in the field, Documentary by Erik Barnouw (1974) celebrates the auteur as the structuring principle for his historical review of documentary. It may be a reflection of the influence of this book, that so much of documentary criticism reflects the auteur approach as a starting point for analysis.
 The shift towards a new documentary format, the Database Documentary, challenges the concept of an auteur in its presentation of documentary materials. This format relies on a remediation technique that recalibrates documentary media within new distributive networks supported by the web and enhanced by converged and designed visual and sonic interfaces. The reception modalities are necessarily removed from the familiar forms of projection and presentation of documentary film and television.
 The research focus for this paper is how the concept of authorship (the “auteur”) is transformed by the emergence of the relatively new screen format of the database documentary.
 The paper reviews some of the more recent examples of Database Documentary, the contexts for their production and the literature on new conceptions of documentary knowledge that may be drawn from these examples. An analysis of the authoring program, Korsakow and the documentaries that have been made using its software will demonstrate the route documentary has travelled from authorship to authoring in contemporary media production.

William l. Shirer and the blacklist: the drive against a liberal radio commentator

By the spring of 1947, William L. Shirer, who at the time was a well-known radio news commentator, had lost his job at CBS in New York. The network provided no concrete reason for his firing yet Sh...

Q & A: Poetics of the Documentary Film Interview

Q & A:Poetics of the Documentary Film Interview Leger Grindon (bio) The study of documentary film needs a closer scrutiny of essential formal devices. This essay analyzes one of those practices with the goal of proposing a poetics of the film interview. David Bordwell explains: "A historical poetics of cinema produces knowledge in answer to two broad questions: 1. What are the principles according to which films are constructed and by means of which they achieve particular effects? 2. How and why have these principles arisen and changed in particular empirical circumstances?" (371). The importance of the interview in the contemporary documentary film requires an understanding of its fundamental principles. Many contemporary documentary films are little more than interviews and compilation material. Landmark works such as Shoah (1985) are almost completely interview based, and celebrated filmmakers such as Errol Morris establish their projects firmly on the interview. Interviews rarely operate as a neutral means of verbal explanation. Poetics can demonstrate how cinematic form shapes the interview into more than a simple question-and-answer exchange. Such a method allows analysts to examine the interplay between sound and image and enriches our understanding of the screen documentary, a mode in which content often eclipses the crucial operations of form. A poetics of the interview will make filmmakers sensitive to the impact of their formal decisions and viewers aware of how the design of the interview shapes their response. Historical Origins A poetics arises from historical practice, so how has the interview managed to move to such a central place in the documentary? The prominence of the interview is a noteworthy historical development that helps distinguish the contemporary documentary from its predecessors. From Nanook of the North in 1922 until the transformation of the documentary in the landmark works of 1960, particularly Primary and Chronicle of the Summer, the interview rarely appears. In his 1934 essay, "The Creative Use of Sound," John Grierson discusses sound montage, asynchronous ideas, a choral effect, and sound imagery but makes no mention of the interview (157–63). The interview begins to assume prominence only during the television era and after effective mobile sound equipment becomes employed around 1960. Thomas Waugh has accurately identified the interview as a "basic artifact of television culture" (246), and its verbal lineage can be traced back through broadcasting to radio and print journalism (Bell and Leeuwen 28–59). Two streams of influence have shaped the contemporary documentary interview: the French cinema verité tradition, with roots in ethnography, and the American political heritage, with ties to television journalism. But documentary historians have failed to acknowledge the dual influences and the crucial choices they pose for the filmmaker. A brief review of key documentary histories portrays the important distinction between these two schools of documentary interview. Erik Barnouw emphasizes the French cinema verité tradition. Understanding this tradition depends upon distinguishing between the Anglo-American "direct cinema" and the French cinema verité (Barnouw 240, 254). Direct cinema avoided the interview. Though the filmmaker could record interviews, such as the journalists' with Bob Dylan in Don't Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker, 1967) and the interrogation of students by school authorities in High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1968), the disciple of direct cinema aspired to the filmmaker's nonintervention in the social world under observation. On the contrary, the cinema verité tradition, led by Jean Rouch in Chronicle of a Summer (1960), embraced the interview as a central catalyst in the interaction between filmmaker and subject. For [End Page 4] Rouch, engagement with the world rather than detached observation should guide the documentary filmmaker. As a result, Chronicle of a Summer highlights interview dynamics and employs numerous self-conscious approaches, including the interview subjects commenting on their interviews and the interviewers reflecting on their practice. Furthermore, verité featured the exploratory encounter rather than authoritative statements; the interview subject often expresses doubt, uncertainty, or contradiction in reaching for an elusive understanding. The verité interview was adapted by Chris Marker in Le Joli Mai (1963) and aggressively embraced by Marcel Ophuls in his influential The Sorrow and the Pity (1970). In Ophuls's documentary on the occupation of wartime France, the on-camera confrontation of the filmmaker with...

Review and Criticism: Invited Essay—Where Have All the Historians Gone? A Challenge to Researchers

Although Americans have enjoyed radio for 85 years and television for 65, we find that the overall historical record of this pervasive industry remains appallingly sparse. We argue here for a renewed historical research effort into some important but neglected topics in broadcasting, and specifically in radio. And we suggest only some failings, by no means all of them. There is a world of historical opportunity out there. Only with a fuller picture of the industry's development can we fully understand what happened then--and is happening today. Some versions of media are readily available. There are countless popular fanzine articles and quickie books, usually heavy with pictures, on many popular television series and actors. Old-time radio was similarly recorded, both when it was new as well as since, both literally and historically. In comparison, the closely allied field of motion pictures has been exhaustively surveyed on all levels--and continues to be (for reasons noted below). Yet approaching four decades after publication of his final volume, Erik Barnouw's classic trilogy (Barnouw, 1966-1970) remains our historical bedrock despite the fact that so much more has become available (and, contrarily, has been lost as well) since he researched and wrote his volumes. Closer examination shows that we lack, for example, scholarly biographies of most important technical innovators and business leaders, and precious few serious case studies, let alone histories, of major (let alone lesser) radio and television (or cable) companies. Too often overlooked as well are some of broadcasting's more compelling program genres. How can we effectively learn from the past if we lack much of a record of what that past was? The need for further historical research is both deep and wide. To cite one glaring example, we lack a scholarly history of even one of the national networks, let alone a careful assessment of all of them (a partial exception is found in Bergreen, 1980). As to biography, we do not even have (at least in English) a really solid biography of Marconi! Although the researcher seeking program or social history will find a growing number of books and even more articles (some quite good, and providing important starting points; for surveys, see Keith, 2006, and Sterling, 2006), the scholarly record concerning biographies and company histories is amazingly thin. Helping to underline the seriousness of the problem is the fact that we know more about key 19th-century figures in the telegraph and telephone--such as the telegraph's Samuel F. B. Morse, and the telephone's Alexander Graham Bell, both of whom have excellent biographers (Bruce, 1973; Silverman, 2003). Although we lack good histories of most telecommunications companies, a few exceptions stand out--a fine recent history of Western Electric (Adams & Butler, 1999), for example, or the company-sponsored history of MCI through 1988 (Cantelon, 1993). The historical picture becomes even more dubious when our situation in America is compared to Britain or Europe. Look, for example, at the fine (though company-sponsored) histories of such firms as Ericsson (Meurling & Jeans, 2000). Few American corporations can point to similar records. Often noted before, Lord Asa Briggs's magisterial five volumes on the BBC (Briggs, 1961-1995), carrying that story to 1974, are a model of carefully detailed institutional history. Even Britain's newer commercial television system, now a half century old, has been documented in six scholarly volumes (Bonner, 1998; Potter, 1989-1990; Sendall, 1982-1983). So have many of the key figures in British broadcasting, past and present, especially Lord Reith (e.g., McIntyre, 1993). What, then, is wrong here? Despite careful historical training of several generations of scholars, the development of useful historical models both here and abroad, the appearance of more media research journals, and the development of countless archives (many of them, it would seem, virtually untouched), why do we make such a poor showing when it comes to electronic media biography and company history, among other topic categories? …

The Origins of Asian Film Studies: Seven Pioneers’ Recollections

As we commence our celebratory conference marking a century of Chinese cinema, it is worth noting that Asian film as a field of study has existed about half that time. Although a number of journalistic accounts appeared throughout the early 20th Century, it was in the 1950s that a sub-discipline began to coalesce around the research and writing of some scholars, archivists, and journalists, individuals such as Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai, Donald Richie, Joe Anderson, Régis Bergeron, Jay Leyda, Erik Barnouw, and S. Krishnaswamy. Except for Leyda and Krishnaswamy, all of these pioneers have shared their recollections of the early days of Asian film scholarship through interviews and memoirs published in Asian Cinema . It is from these articles, and Leyda’s foreword to his book Dianying , that this attempt to reconstruct an early history is based.

Televising sin: efforts to restrict the televised advertisement of cigarettes and alcohol in the united states, 1950s to 1980s

Near the end of 2001, the National Broadcasting Company announced a departure in its advertising policy: the network would effectively break the taboo against spirits advertising on television by a...

Review and Criticism: Research Pioneer Tribute—Erik Barnouw (1908–2001): Broadcasting's Premier Historian

Erik Barnouw shaped the writing of American broadcasting history with his landmark trilogy published in the late 1960s. His historical work was responsible for making that subject academically respectable (because of his archival digging, smooth writing style, and having Oxford as a publisher) and laid the groundwork for the generation of historical publication that has followed. His long life in and about the media was a model of shared professional and academic experience. A Varied Career Born in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 23, 1908, Barnouw was the son of Adriaan and Anne Midgely Barnouw. His father was a noted linguist who became a Columbia University professor of Dutch history and literature after the family immigrated to the United States in 1919. Growing up in an educated household, the young boy learned to speak German, Dutch, Belgian, French, and English. Barnouw's early experience was largely theatrical, as he wrote and acted in several plays while studying English at Princeton University, from which he graduated in 1929. Despite strong advice from faculty mentors--and the offer of a fellowship--he decided against graduate school and an academic career, desiring instead to pursue his theatrical interests. But his timing was terrible--the eve of the Depression. After a few months on the theatrical boards, his first media post, as a writer for the new business monthly, Fortune, lasted only a few weeks. He luckily picked up a fellowship to travel overseas, one that allowed several months of studying drama with Max Reinhardt in Vienna. On his return to the United States in 1931, the job situation in theater and most other places appeared bleak indeed. A lucky chance meeting (fittingly, in a speak-easy, as this was during Prohibition) led to employment with an advertising agency active in network radio. Barnouw was charged with directing the Camel Quarter Hour six times a week, although as he later admitted, had never had a radio. I went out and bought [one, and] listened to it all weekend, so I could come to work ... knowing a lot about it. He spent the next 4 years directing six or seven daily or weekly radio series for CBS and NBC. While on a Maine vacation break in 1937, he was offered a chance to teach radio writing at Columbia University's School of General Studies. Given the demand for more writers as dramatic programs expanded, networks were willing to pay tuition for their attendees in such a course. His first book, Handbook of Radio Writing (Little, Brown, 1939)included scripts from the classes and his own writing at the networks. While teaching, Barnouw was a script editor for a CBS series in 1939-1940, and there first crossed paths with Norman Corwin (Poet Laureate of Radio's Golden Age, University of Southern California). Soon to become radio's premier playwright, Corwin recalls: I had the privilege of working together with Erik when I was a freshman employee at CBS. I was assigned to direct a sustaining [unsponsored] variety program under the inviting title of The Pursuit of Happiness, a Sunday afternoon series which enjoyed the services of Burgess Meredith as MC, and presented stars of the stage and screen in song and speech derived from Americana old and new. Erik was among its writers, and in one of his first scripts, he turned in a playlet to which some of the brass at the network took exception. It was not anything radical, just something that I felt Henry Thoreau might have been proud to have written. Today it might be thought of as liberal, which was not yet the dirty political word it was to become. Although I carried no weight, I felt there were absolutely no grounds for objection, and said I would resign from directing the series if Barnouw's script were to be censored. That threat frightened nobody, but apparently gave pause to the objectors, and in that pause Barnouw's script was upheld. …

Harry Potter, Inc.

Harry Potter, Inc.

Network : The Other Cold War

Kathleen Fitzpatrick | Special In-Depth Section Network: The Other Cold War Kathleen Fitzpatrick Pomona College The movie community is now getting clobbered by TV, and lashes out at anybody in its bewildered petulance. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (320) Film subjects and forms are as likely—or more likely—to be determined by the institutional and cultural dynamics ofmotionpictureproduction than by the mostfrenetic ofsocial upheavals. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (322) In 1961, Newton Minow, the Kennedy-appointed chairman ofthe Federal Communications Commission, issued a challenge to the National Association of Broadcasters: I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. (Barnouw 300) Fifteen years later, another television critic, as equally implicated in the medium as Minow, issued a remarkably similar catalog of the televisual experience; his variant ended, however , in a slightly different challenge to the American people: "Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players." The critic was Howard Beale, martyred hero of Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky's Network. And the challenge was deceptively simple: "Turn off your television sets," Beale cajoled. Though few followed his instructions, Beale captured the attention of a nation. In this paper, I will argue that, first of all, Peter Finch in Network, (1976). Beale's challenge is nowhere as simple as it seems, that buried within this challenge can be found the history of the difficult relationship between film and television. Moreover, I hope to suggest through my reading of the film that the intimate ties of the medium of television—and thus the film industry's depictions of television—to the Cold War make Network's message, and the peculiarities of its timing, as public a statement as Minow's, and one far more ideologically loaded. It is of course a commonplace to suggest a connection between the rise of television and the Cold War. From the beginnings , as Erik Barnouw brilliantly narrates in his history of the medium, broadcasting was connected at its root to American military dominance. During World War II, despite the hold that had been placed on the development of television itself, there was nonetheless in production "a navy item closely related in technology to television, but with a name not yet to be spoken, even in a whisper—radar" (Barnouw 89). The most influential of broadcasting executives were directly involved in the war effort , including "Colonel William S. Paley with Psychological Warfare, and Colonel David Sarnoffwith the Signal Corps"(93). And during the 1950s, broadcasting would come, via the Voice of America and the United States Information Agency, and under the guidance of John Foster Dulles, to be used directly but covertly for military purposes. Vol. 31.2 (2001) 1 33 Fitzpatrick | network: The Other Cold War Television's birth as a mass medium can be linked directly totheendofWorldWarn,1 but so can the beginning oftelevision's difficulties. "The peace that had ended World War II," Barnouw points out, "and with it the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, had also ended the homefront truce between left and right. War had been replaced by 'cold war'—at home, by a hunt for traitors, who might be anyone, even your neighbor" (106-107). By the end of 1947, the industry's second full year of broadcasting, it was under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. As Barnouw argues, the entire history and form of television were determined by the war and the red-hunts that followed : "These were formative years for television. Its program patterns, business practices, and institutions were being...

Last of the Great Movie Moguls

After Asian Cinema published Erik Barnouw's essay about the writing of his book on Indian cinema, he offered us this unpublished manuscript on Sir Run Run Shaw. He included the attached 1979 letter he wrote to the editor of American Film which had rejected this manuscript. He was more than willing to let us print it also. - Editor.

Connections and Differences: Spatial Dimensions of Television History

Curtin !Connections and Differences: Spatial Dimensions of Television History 50 I Film & History Television as Historian | Special In-Depth Section A few years ago, I received an unsolicited copy of a public relations videotape from ATT offering an optimistic narrative of how the most recent communications revolution will alter our everyday lives. The opening shot of Connections: ATT's Vision ofthe Future features the title scripted across a brilliant daylight image of a snow-covered Himalayan mountain peak. This shot then dissolves to the misty ambiance of a dimly-lit weaving hut where a mustachioed, elderly man rises slowly from a handloom and ambles across the shop to a low table where a laptop computer is emitting a friendly electronic gurgle, signaling an incoming call. At the touch of a button, the screen lights up with the image of a twenty-something western woman, Lilly, who is telephoning from an airliner somewhere over the Pacific Ocean as she wings her way home to the United States. The conversation (which features simultaneous translation) soon adds a third link, as Lilly's Belgian fiancee joins the transcontinental deliberations regarding a special carpet that is being woven as a wedding present for the young American doctor who, in the words of Shri Nan, "has done so much for our village." By the end of the video, the narrative introduces characters who represent a variety of social, economic, and cultural identities as well as a host ofnew media technologies ranging from satellite teleconferencing to computer-aided design to children's virtual reality games (which can be remotely monitored by doting parents even while they are away at work). In every instance, the video suggests that communication technologies are working to overcome geographic barriers and resolve social tensions. As has been the case for over thirty years, such corporate fantasies of the future prominently feature television as the master technology that connects people across vast spatial expanses, facilitating the circuits of production and exchange, as well as social interaction . Although there is a popular dimension to these fantasies, they are nevertheless inextricably connected to the historical project of capitalism, which is to alter and expand the operating spheres of profitmaking enterprise. Many scholars have described this globalization process from a variety ofperspectives and have marveled at the power of corporate enterprises that organize people and places around the world into an integrated economic system dominated by the abstract logics of commodification and exchange . We see this critique in the work of political economists, such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Alain Lipietz, as well as geographers like David Harvey and Edward Soja.2 Yet the integrative project of capitalism that they describe so well is sometimes mistaken for a process ofhomogenization in the realm popular culture . We encounter this confusion in the cultural critiques offered by scholars like Herbert Schiller, Ben Bagdikian, and Edward Herman and Robert McChesney who contend that the rise ofhuge, transnational media conglomerates has led to the steady erasure ofdifferences and the demise oflocal and national public spheres.3 In their eyes, corporate leviathans have narrowed the spectrum offree expression , serving up a menu ofcultural offerings that range from the inane to the banal. The diverse and animated discourse ofa prior era has been displaced by a bland and indifferent, ifhyperkinetic, stream ofcommercial images. We see a related concern about the fate of public culture in the work ofpostmodern and postcolonial scholars such as ArifDirlik, Masao Miyoshi, and Edward Said, each ofwhom suggests that the homogenizing power ofcorporate media is one of the key attributes of the current era ofglobalization.4 Many historians ofmass media have adopted a similar logic in their work. Histories ofprinting, broadcasting, and cinema have tended to emphasize the ways in which media smooth out cultural differences and foster a national consciousness. Prominent television historians like Erik Barnouw, J. Fred McDonald, and Christopher H. Sterling and John M. Kittross have written the pre-eminent accounts of how television came to dominate national culture by single-mindedly pursuing a commercial logic that tended to favor uniformity over diversity, replication over innovation, and the national over the local.5 Although these tendencies are mitigated somewhat by the rise of cable, the...

Erik Barnouw as Mentor

Erik Barnouw as Mentor David Culbert (bio) Mentor—Tutor of Telemachus in Homer’s Odyssey. A close, trusted, and experienced counselor or guide. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. “Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II: A Global Perspective,” Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Villa Serbelloni, Lake Como, Italy, Easter 1982. The Center’s cameraman had technical difficulties—this represents the third time we gathered for the mandatory group photograph. Front row: Nicholas Pronay, Peter Kenez, Antoinella Cuccoli, Jan-Christopher Horak, K.R.M. Short, Wilhelm van Kampen, Pierre Sorlin, Frans Nieuwenhof Middle row: Philip Taylor, Erik Barnouw, Namikawa Ryo, Dorothy Barnouw, Elizabeth Strebel, Michael Balfour Back row: Thomas Cripps, Gordon Daniels, David Ellwood, Lubna Culbert, David Culbert, Remy Pithon, Karsten Fledelius I first encountered Erik Barnouw’s name in graduate school while writing about a group of radio news commentators and their impact on American foreign policy in the thirties. It was hard not to know of Erik’s History of American Broadcasting, whose volumes were published by Oxford in 1966, 1968, and 1970, the precise years in which I wrote my doctoral dissertation. Erik was an inspiration both as an historian of mass media, and as a stylist. It thus surprised me to hear from one of America’s most distinguished historians that he considered it a “scandal” that Erik’s three volumes had received the Bancroft Prize in 1971. I said nothing, but at that moment was reminded of how difficult it is to persuade most historians of American history to include the history of media as a legitimate and essential part of our twentieth-century technological society. Direct contact with Erik occurred in early 1974, when I sent him an offprint of my first published article relating to media history. My revised doctoral dissertation had been a finalist for a prize sponsored by the Organization of American Historians, the principal organization for those who teach American history in the United States. After being told by the prize committee’s chairman that my manuscript would be published, something happened. After licking my wounds, I sent an offprint of my article on radio commentator Boake Carter to Erik Barnouw, asking for suggestions he might make as to where to publish [End Page 27] my dissertation, a subject on the mind of every Assistant Professor of History who hoped to publish, not perish. Erik replied almost immediately, in a letter dated February 12, 1974: Your “Croak” Carter article is most fascinating, and a very impressive contribution to the work in this field. Nothing comparable has been done on the leading radio commentators, and I am delighted to learn that you have been examining six of them in the same microscopic fashion, with due attention to social, political, and economic ramifications.... Feel free to mention my enthusiasm, and to quote me. At the time, such an enthusiastic response greatly encouraged me; now I understand some of the ramifications of what that letter represented which eluded me in 1974. For example, when News for Everyman: Radio and Foreign Affairs in Thirties America appeared in 1976, Erik kindly provided a statement which appeared on the dustjacket: “David Culbert has rescued from oblivion an important chapter of mass media history: the rise of radio commentators in the thirties, and their impact on American foreign policy. His research has been relentless, and his appraisals impeccable. Add, for good measure, a delightful literary style.” My involvement with Erik increased dramatically when I came to the Smithsonian Institution’s Wilson Center as a Fellow in 1976–77. Later I learned that Erik’s advocacy of my proposal to write a book about the American military’s use of film in World War II, including Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, persuaded a skeptical council to fill the quota of one Fellow per year in media history with my application. In June 1976 I arrived in Washington to begin work. Erik had written a letter of congratulations, not, of course, indicating what he knew about the circumstances of my appointment: My term at the Woodrow Wilson Center extends through December, so we shall have plenty of opportunity to get acquainted. Your topic...

Virtual Toasts: Birthday Greetings and Other Salutations

Virtual Toasts: Birthday Greetings and Other Salutations Ulises A. Mejías (bio), Pat Aufderheide (bio), Sally Berger (bio), True Boardman (bio), Desi K. Bognár (bio), Pearl Bowser (bio), Mike Budd (bio), John Columbus (bio), Norman Corwin (bio), Harrison Engle (bio), Marina Goldovskaya (bio), Leonid Gurevich (bio), Lawrence W. Lichty (bio), Jason Longo (bio), Christine McDonald (bio), Scott MacDonald (bio), Juan Mandelbaum (bio), Laura U. Marks (bio), Erika Muhammad (bio), Bill Nichols (bio), Dorothy Olsen (bio), Harry Rasky (bio), Daniel Reeves (bio), Jean Rouverol (bio), L. Somi Roy (bio), William Sloan (bio), Datus Smith (bio), George C. Stoney (bio), and Mary Ann Watson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. A Birthday Celebration for Erik Barnouw at the 1996 Robert Flaherty Seminar. From left to right: Margarita de la Vega Hurtado, Pearl Bowser, Philip Wilde, Kathy High, Patricia Zimmermann, Erik Barnouw, Juan Mandelbaum, William Sloan. Seated: Michelle Materre. The following are a series of contributions to this Festschrift from a wide collection of friends, colleagues, and students of Erik Barnouw. We call them “virtual toasts,” imagining we are gathered together at Erik’s birthday banquet, offering toasts, reminiscences, and thanks to our guest of honor. Pat Aufderheide It’s a wonderful thing to know someone who is truly wise, as Erik Barnouw is, and even more wonderful when that wisdom comes in so genially unpretentious a package. His tales of the early years of Flaherty Film Seminars, told to people from another era at the vastly different events that those seminars have become, have never had a tint of rose-colored nostalgia, while at the same time they compellingly recall the great social promise of documentary film. His insights on today’s filmic shenanigans maintain the same equanimity and generosity. His participation at Flaherty, like his participation in other conferences, festivals, and events that have subtly shaped our networks of social action, has bridged our gaps of aesthetic-historical amnesia gracefully; his stories have been told in a spirit of possibility. In the same way, his histories of film and television have been more than authoritative records of movements and experiments in modern mass communication. They have given us, as students, colleagues, researchers, and journalists, large narratives that frame the passions and patterns of a time within an exemplary humanism. We stand in his debt, and he doesn’t even want to collect. Pat Aufderheide is a Professor in the School of Communication at American University [End Page 177] Sally Berger In 1994 Eric Barnouw programmed the Fortieth Anniversary Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. As International Film Seminar’s (IFS) first president from 1960 to 1968 and a legendary documentary historian, his participation generated great excitement. Erik’s classic book, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, had served as a constant guide since college, drawing me into the field of independent media. 1994 was my last year as Executive Director of IFS; I was stepping down after six years. As documentary form receives widespread attention today, it is easy to forget that this was not always so. In prior decades, Erik was a lonely trailblazer bringing recognition to this field. Born in 1908, Erik’s life experiences span the century—yet Erik always remains young, flexible, and resourceful. At the 1994 Flaherty Seminar in upstate New York, Erik provided a much-needed diplomatic role when the young renegade video artists and the older film afficionados were at odds over issues of representation. Erik’s life personifies “six degrees of separation” in independent media, where people are passionate about improving the world through storytelling and communication. Erik joins people together. During my second year as Executive Director of IFS in 1990, Erik co-programmed the Flaherty Seminar in Riga, Latvia, during the height of perestroika in the former Soviet Union. It was the first Flaherty Seminar in Eastern Europe. Besides discussing Vertov, Flaherty, and new documentaries from the East and West, our Latvian hosts tutored us in the wordy art of toasting, which subsequently evolved into a Flaherty Seminar tradition. The Seminar’s traditional closing night banquet is palpably warm and oddly nostalgic, as new-found compatriots who have come together intensely must part after only a...

Erik Barnouw Chronology and Selected Bibliography

Erik Barnouw Chronology and Selected Bibliography Chronology 1908 Born in The Hague, Netherlands 1919 Family immigrated to the United States Entered Horace Mann School for boys 1925–9 Attended Princeton University 1928 Member of University Players, Falmouth Mass. Wrote Triangle Club musical, Zuider Zee, with Joshua Logan Became United States citizen 1929 Traveling fellowship in Europe 1931–5 Erwin, Wasey & Company, advertising 1935–7 Arthur Kudner, Inc., advertising 1937 Worked with Norman Corwin on “Pursuit of Happiness” 1937- Taught at Columbia University 1938- Contributed to “Cavalcade of America” 1939 Married to Dorothy M. Beach 1940 Son Jeffrey born 1942–4 Script editor, NBC 1944–5 Educational director, Armed Forces Radio Service 1945 Daughter Susanna born Series editor, “Cavalcade of America” 1946 Advisor to East and West Association Theatre Guild, adaptations for television and radio 1947–9 President of Radio Writers Guild 1948 Wrote “VD: The Conspiracy of Silence” Organized Center for Mass Communication at Columbia University 1949–53 Secretary of Authors League of America 1951 Daughter Karen born Mercury Records release of “That Ignorant, Ignorant Cowboy” with Tom Glazer 1954 Co-founder, Writers Guild of America 1957–9 Producer-writer, “Decision: The Constitution in Action TV” film series 1959 Gavel Award, American Bar Association, for Decision 1960–8 President of International Film Seminars 1961 Fulbright Award, India 1969 Guggenheim Fellowship 1970 Producer of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945 1971 Bancroft Prize, for The Image Empire Elected to Society of American Historians Fable Safe, made with Robert Osborn 1972 John D. Rockefeller III Fund grant for research in Asia Silver Dragon Award, Cracow Festival, for Fable Safe 1976 Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Smithsonian Institution 1977 Consultant, Library of Congress 1978 Indo-American Fellowship 1978–81 Library of Congress, chief of Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division 1982 Eastman Kodak Gold Medal, Services to film and television 1983–9 Editor-in-chief, International Encyclopedia of Communications 1984 Litt. D., Columbia University 1985 Vermont Peace Film Festival, award for Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945 International Documentary Association scholarship and preservation award 1987 Death of Dorothy Beach Barnouw 1989 Marriage to Elizabeth Prince Allen 1994 Jury chair, International Documentary Festival, Amsterdam 1997 Keynote address, Prix Italia meeting, Ravenna, Italy Selected Bibliography Books and Monographs Open Collars: A Play of Undergraduate Life at Kingston University. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1928. Handbook of Radio Writing: An Outline of Techniques and Markets in Radio Writing in the United States. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939. Mass Communication: Television, Radio, Film, Press: The Media and Their Practice in the United States of America. New York: Rinehart, 1956. The Television Writer. New York: Hill and Wang, 1962. Indian Film. Co-author, S. Krishnaswamy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. A Tower in Babel. Vol. 1, A History of Broadcasting in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. The Golden Web. Vol. 2, A History of Broadcasting in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. The Image Empire. Vol. 3, A History of Broadcasting in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. The Magician and the Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. House with a Past. Montpelier, Vt.: Vermont Historical Society, 1992. Media Marathon: A Twentieth-Century Memoir. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Conglomerates and the Media. New York: The New Press, 1997. Works Edited by Erik Barnouw Radio Drama in Action. New York: Rinehart, 1945. International Encyclopedia of Communications. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Editor-in-chief. Articles, Prefaces, and Addresses (A Small Sampling) “Radiator Pipe Broadcasters.” Saturday Evening Post, 24 May 1941. Story about unlicensed stations erupting at a number of Eastern colleges. “Letters from Lynn Fontanne.” Library Columns, 1946. Correspondence with the actress about her vehicles on “Theatre Guild on the Air.” “Bridge for a Cultural Gap.” Saturday Review, 16 June 1951. Story about Columbia University Press decision to “publish” films and recordings for mass media distribution. “In Moscow with a Tape Recorder. Variety, 9 May 1973. “So You Think TV is Hot...

So Their Eyes Won't Glaze Over: How Television News Defined the Debate over the Smithsonian's Enola Gay Exhibit

So Their Eyes Won’t Glaze Over: How Television News Defined the Debate over the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay Exhibit Thomas Cripps (bio) Figures Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Opening title card from Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945. Photo courtesy Erik Barnouw. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Film still from Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945. Photo courtesy Erik Barnouw. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. “Enola Gay” on the plane’s fuselage: video frame from the “ABC Nightly News With Peter Jennings,” January 30, 1995. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. “Enola Gay,” video frame of newsreel footage from the “NBC Nightly News,” August 30, 1994. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 5. Video frame of Stanley Goldberg, on the “ABC Nightly News With Peter Jennings,” November 17, 1994. “Well,” he says slyly, “I guess I’m un-American then.” Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 6. Video frame of Barton Bernstein, on the “ABC Nightly News With Peter Jennings,” November 17, 1994. “Scandalous,” says Bernstein, but so fine is his subtlety that it is lost. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 7. Video frame of Martin Harwit, from “Nightline,” October 25, 1994. “Well, primarily we’ve added more historical background and rounded it out that way.” Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 8. Video frame from “Nightline,” October 25, 1994. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 9a. Video frames of Jack Giese and Martin Harwitt, on the “CBS Evening News,” September 25, 1994. Giese argues, “The exhibition does not have balance and context.... They portray Americans as the aggressors... even racist aggressor.” Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 9b. Video frames of Jack Giese and Martin Harwitt, on the “CBS Evening News,” September 25, 1994. Giese argues, “The exhibition does not have balance and context.... They portray Americans as the aggressors... even racist aggressor.” Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 10a. Video frames from “Nightline,” October 25, 1994. Herman Harrington (left) and Hugh Dagley. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 10b. Video frames from “Nightline,” October 25, 1994. Martin Harwitt (left) and Michael Heyman. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 11. Video frame from “Nightline,” October 25, 1994. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 12. Video frame of William Detweiler, on the “ABC Nightly News with Peter Jennings,” January 30, 1995. Detwiler proposes the Smithsonian “...bury all this historiographical stuff in a ‘seminar’ where it belongs.” Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. The semicentennial of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 has come and gone—and with it the opportunity for thoughtful Americans to view a sweeping Smithsonian exhibition of it. The curators had intended to celebrate the contribution of the aircrew of the B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, to the urgent matter of shortening the final Pacific phase of World War II as well as assessing the impact of the bombing as an initial event of the atomic age. However, the exhibition fell victim to an angry skirmish in the American culture wars of the late twentieth century. As Congressman Newt Gingrich (R-GA), only just taking on the post of Speaker in a Republican-dominated House, told a conference of state governors: “The Enola Gay fight was a fight, in effect, over the reassertion by most Americans that they are sick and tired of being told by some cultural...

Lineage and Genealogy in the Scholarship of Erik Barnouw

Lineage and Genealogy in the Scholarship of Erik Barnouw

Watercolor Paintings

Watercolor Paintings Erik Barnouw Click for larger view View full resolution “View from Dining Room,” Fair Haven, 1991. Click for larger view View full resolution “Guest Room (the Blue Room),” Fair Haven, 1992. Click for larger view View full resolution “The ‘Temple Schoolhouse’,” bought at auction ($85) which became the House With a Past, published 1992. Click for larger view View full resolution “Village Green, Fair Haven, as Seen from 6 West Park Place,” 1990. Click for larger view View full resolution “Hello Asia!” Card announcing engagement of grandson Ben Barnouw to Faye Chen and inviting her Taiwan relatives to the wedding in California, 1996. Copyright © 1998 Ohio University School of Film