European Television Research Articles

Het archief als netwerk: Perspectieven op de studie van online televisie-erfgoed

Sonja de Leeuw The archive as network. Perspectives on studying online television heritage Increasingly television heritage is being digitized and made accessible to non-industry users, enabling ‘the archival turn’: the study of online archives so as to revisit the dominant discourses in television historiography. This article discusses both conceptual and practical perspectives on online television heritage within a broader European framework. It starts from the notion of connectivity, pointing to the development of the archive as a network of connections and continues to address the dynamics involved in the transformation of the television archive into an online presentation including the most relevant actors. With the help of examples from Dutch and European television heritage projects the article discusses how the new archive is capable of mediating between the past and present, between history and memory, between curatorial perspectives and popular uses. It concludes on the challenges that (European) online television heritage offers in the field of television historiography and theory.

Het archief als netwerk: Perspectieven op de studie van online televisie-erfgoed

Sonja de Leeuw <em>The archive as network. Perspectives on studying online television heritage</em> Increasingly television heritage is being digitized and made accessible to non-industry users, enabling ‘the archival turn’: the study of online archives so as to revisit the dominant discourses in television historiography. This article discusses both conceptual and practical perspectives on online television heritage within a broader European framework. It starts from the notion of connectivity, pointing to the development of the archive as a network of connections and continues to address the dynamics involved in the transformation of the television archive into an online presentation including the most relevant actors. With the help of examples from Dutch and European television heritage projects the article discusses how the new archive is capable of mediating between the past and present, between history and memory, between curatorial perspectives and popular uses. It concludes on the challenges that (European) online television heritage offers in the field of television historiography and theory.

El documental televisivo: un género en peligro de extinción en Europa

In the fifties it seemed obvious that the natural habitat of documentary films was television, and the genre and the medium evolved simultaneously for decades. Since then, however, the imposition of commercial imperatives on television has led to the modification of the original qualities of the genre and has meant the gradual disappearance of documentary films form the program grids. This article analyses the current state of the issue, quantifying and analysing the documentaries shown during the primetime slot in the 5 major European television markets. The results demonstrate a minimum presence of documentaries in Europe, with the sole exception of the United Kingdom.

La réconciliation par les ondes De l’histoire franco-allemande à l’information europèenne

La chaine de television culturelle europeenne ARTE fait partie des dispositifs mis en place au debut des annees 1990 pour accompagner le processus de construction europeenne et contribuer a rapprocher les adversaires d’hier. La volonte de reconciliation des peuples prend corps d’abord dans un magazine franco-allemand d’histoire dans l’emission Histoire parallele, pour glisser au debut des annees 2000 vers l’emergence d’une emission d’information tournee vers le present et l’avenir, Zoom Europa. Cette emission hebdomadaire met en lumiere un changement de polarite avec le passage d’un horizon bilateral, oriente vers une etude du passe, vers un traitement europeen de l’information courante. Cette «vitrine de l’Europe institutionnelle», prise dans les contradictions que sont l’injonction a l’europeanisation et le poids des contraintes locales, disparait neanmoins apres trois annees de diffusion. Cette etude empirique du cas d’ARTE illustre en ce sens les difficultes d’emergence d’un «espace mediatique europeen».

Die Realitäten der Reality Shows in Honduras

Zusammenfassung Das Meeresschutzgebiet Cayos Cochinos (MNMCC), eine Inselgruppe vor der Karibikküste von Honduras, ist zwischen 2006 und 2014 Kulisse für den Dreh von zwölf Reality Shows des europäischen und kolumbianischen Fernsehens gewesen. Der Honduran Coral Reef Fund (HCRF) gestattet die Dreharbeiten in dieser ökologisch sensiblen Zone aufgrund ihres Potentials, Arbeitsplätze in den lokalen Garífuna-Gemeinden zu schaffen und die Destination touristisch zu vermarkten. Die Verteilung der Einnahmen ist jedoch unausgeglichen und nicht transparent und begünstigt in erster Linie den HCRF. Um seine operative Funktionsfähigkeit zu gewährleisten, sieht sich der HCRF zunehmend gezwungen, Zugangsrechte zu den natürlichen Ressourcen an Drittparteien, insbesondere an Fernsehgesellschaften, zu veräußern. Die selektive Anwendung der etablierten Normen ist Ausdruck einer ambivalenten Politik, die die ohnehin konfliktiven Beziehungen zu den lokalen Garífuna-Gemeinden weiter belastet.

Portal web de la Compañía Radio Televisión de Galicia, un ejemplo de adaptación de las páginas web de las televisiones

This study shows the evolution of the Company’s Radio Television de Galicia (CRTVG) website during the last four years, specifically between 2010 and 2013. During the analyzed period, advances in the network have been quite abundant, causing televisions have had to adapt the functionality of your portal. A figure that has become important in this field has been the conventional television viewer with the emergence of web pages has become user. This we are very aware of the television as more and more possibilities for the user to feel involved. CRTVG, in the early years of the Internet, was a Spanish television more concerned about this new path that opened. This can be reflected in who was the first European television live broadcast its signal in real time over the internet and one of the first Spanish to have website. In this research work as has been described as the adaptation of the content, interactivity and usability of the website CRTVG, during the four years analyzed.

‘Maybe your story is not different from mine’: Memory, history and progress in the Galician series Libro de familia

Abstract Television is a privileged conduit for current events, for an unstoppable flow of live news, but it is also a suitable place to reflect on the past and to build a certain position towards history. In the last decade, there has been a revival of historical fiction in European television that has revealed a nostalgic approach to collective memory. Television series propose a review of the twentieth century’s official European history, but from the everyman perspective. The Galician public channel Televisión de Galicia (TVG) aired Libro de familia (José María Besteiro) in 2005 for the first time, and the audience quickly ensured its place in the schedule for the following seven years due to personal identification with the protagonists of the series. The success of this portrait of a rural family in Galicia during the 1960s raises some issues related to collective memory, official history and the ideology implicit in a fictional portrait of the past.

The Great Époque of the Consumption of Imported Broadcasts

This article shows how Polish audiences “domesticated” West European television content available with satellite dishes and semi legal cable TVs during the turnover of the 1980s and 1990s. Based on analysis of viewers’ memoirs and content of magazines dedicated to satellite television, this article discusses how Poles considered channels available with Astra satellite as an attractive entertainment juxtaposed with dull national broadcaster TVP. As this article shows, they primarily “domesticated” German late night erotic shows symbolized by Tutti Frutti and music video available with MTV Europe.

Editorial

This thematic issue invites its readers to reflect upon two central questions. If we speak about socialist and post-socialist television in Europe, then: What is ‘socialist’ about television in Europe? How do we approach ‘television’ in (post)socialist Europe? These questions come with issues of definition, approach and positioning of this area of study within a broader European agenda.

Introduction: Private television in Europe: Connecting to the future

Abstract

European Television Archives, Collective Memories, and Contemporary Art

The article discusses three moving image artworks produced since 2009, by Finnish artist Laura Horelli, Serbian artist Bojan Fajfrić, and Slovenian artist Aleksandra Domanović, featuring material from television archives in Finland or the countries of Former Yugoslavia. These artworks include fragments of educational programs, coverage of political meetings and title sequences for evening news programs, broadcast during the 1980s or early 1990s. All three artists focus on familial and national connections to the archived material, and use practices of re-editing, re-enacting and re-mixing to situate television in relation to other technologies of media storage and retrieval. As these three artworks focus on failures, absences and gaps in television memory, they offer a counterpoint to the notions of collectivity often emphasized in theorisations of the media event (Dayan and Katz, 1992). The article also considers the work of Fajfrić, Horelli, and Domanović in relation to a broader interest in television history and archives, evident amongst contemporary artists and curators since the mid-2000s.

Linked European television heritage

The EUscreen project represents the European television archives and acts as a domain aggregator for Europeana, Europe's digital library. The main motivation for its creation was to provide unified access to a representative collection of television programs, secondary sources and articles, and in this way to allow students, scholars and the general public to study the history of television in its wider context. In this paper, we present the methodology followed for publishing the EUscreen dataset as Linked Open Data.

The Vienna New Years Concert as a media phenomenon

This paper is aimed at drawing attention to the problem of the media representation of artistic music, through the case study of the television broadcast of the New Year's Concert in Vienna. The text contains a brief historic summary of the concert and its broadcast within the European television network, Eurovision. Using this year's broadcast (2013) as an example, certain aspects are marked that potentially represent a starting point for further interpretations of the New Year's Concert and, generally, the relationship between artistic music and media.

Live From Moscow

On April 14th, 1961, television viewers across Europe watched live images of Yuri Gagarin being celebrated on the Red Square in Moscow. The broadcast was made possible by the linking of the Intervision and Eurovision television networks, which was the result of cooperation between broadcasters on both sides of the Iron Curtain. By looking into how the co-operation between the OIRT and EBU was gradually developed between 1957 and 1961 this article engages with the interplay between cultural, legal and technological aspects of broadcasting and how the transnational broadcast of Gagarin’s return to Moscow was made possible. The article furthermore argues the need to understand early television in Europe as a dialectic between the national and the transnational and shows how the live transmission network binding the East and West together was the result of an interplay between structures provided by transnational organisations such as the OIRT and EBU, and initiatives by national broadcasting organisations.

Editorial

Doing European television history is as much a theoretical and methodological challenge as it is a practical one. This novice field of study requires first and foremost answers to a few fundamental questions: How do we define European television? What tools do we employ to engage in television research that goes beyond or against national borders of television in Europe? How do we integrate Europe in a field of research that has been predominantly Western?

Reading Between the Lines: a Transnational History of the Franco-British ‘Entente Cordiale’ in Post-War Television

In 1950 and 1952, the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) and Radio Television Francaise (RTF) realized the first transnational television transmissions ever. The so called “Calais Experiment” (1950) and the “Paris Week” (1952) were celebrated as historic landmarks in European television and celebrated as a new “entente cordiale” between the two countries. This article aims at highlighting some of the tensions that surrounded the realization of these first experiments in transnational television by embedding the historic events into the broader context of television development in Europe and by emphasizing the hidden techno- political interests at stake. In line with current trends in transnational and European television historiography, the article analyses transnational media events as performances that highlight the complex interplay of the technical, institutional and symbolic dimension of television as a transnational infrastructure.

Comunicar Europa / Communicating Europe. Spain, Television Co-productions And The Case Of Pepe Carvalho

This article will look into the case of a European television co-production: Pepe Carvalho (1999), a Spanish-Italian-French series based on the adventures of private detective created by writer Manuel Vazquez Montalban. Taking account of production and reception issues, it will address the complexities of using media in the process of European construction. The main objective of this text is to observe the manner in which cinema and television are interwoven into the collection of actions that are working towards the idea of Europe as a community, looking into processes that give meaning to the collective transmission of European values. The article will focus specifically on the way in which critics and media scholars collaborate as spurs or brakes in the processes of ‘comunicar Europa’ / ‘communicating Europe’.

Tele-clubs and European Television History Beyond the Screen

This essay looks into the intellectual life of tele-clubs, the collective television watching experiment prominent in France in the 1950s, and its role in television studies. The article explores different directions by analyzing tele-clubs as a moment in television history itself and based on that, searching for a new method of studying television history.

Live From Moscow: The Celebration Of Yuri Gagarin And Transnational Television In Europe

On April 14th, 1961, television viewers across Europe watched live images of Yuri Gagarin being celebrated on the Red Square in Moscow. The broadcast was made possible by the linking of the Intervision and Eurovision television networks, which was the result of cooperation between broadcasters on both sides of the Iron Curtain. By looking into how the co-operation between the OIRT and EBU was gradually developed between 1957 and 1961 this article engages with the interplay between cultural, legal and technological aspects of broadcasting and how the transnational broadcast of Gagarin’s return to Moscow was made possible. The article furthermore argues the need to understand early television in Europe as a dialectic between the national and the transnational and shows how the live transmission network binding the East and West together was the result of an interplay between structures provided by transnational organisations such as the OIRT and EBU, and initiatives by national broadcasting organisations.

South Park boys and Sex and the City women: Television trade, narrowcasting and the export of gender categories

This article analyses the export of the gendered ‘demographic logics’ of American television to four European countries: France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. As American and (later) European television landscapes have become increasingly fragmented, television targets increasingly specific audiences. Through interviews with cultural intermediaries and document and website analysis, three gendered categories were found representing central ‘target audiences’ for today’s narrowcasting that came to Europe from Hollywood: the housewife, the Sex and the City woman, and the South Park boy. This article traces the emergence of these categories, and their uneven diffusion in European television landscapes, highlighting the dynamics of transnational diffusion of cultural categories. It shows how gendered audience categorizations provide a strategic site to employ the notoriously elusive concept of intersectionality in actual empirical analysis. This analysis of imported gendered categories underscores the similarity between the logic of narrowcasting and the analytical stance proposed by intersectionality theory, allowing us to critically analyse the politics of narrowcasting.