TV Documentary Research Articles

The effects of anti-corruption videos on attitudes toward corruption in a Ukrainian online survey

ABSTRACTThis paper presents the outcomes of an anti-corruption educational intervention among Ukrainian students based on an online experiment. More than 3,000 survey participants were randomly assigned to one of three different videos on corruption and its consequences (treatment groups) or a video on higher education (control group). The data suggest a high level of academic dishonesty and misconduct among young people, but also a negative attitude toward corruption in general, highlighting the ambivalence of corruption in the country. We find that one video, which presented a thrilling story abut a victim of corruption related to common bribery in an accessible way, was effective in promoting awareness of the negative consequences of corruption. In contrast, the other two treatment videos, which more closely followed the style of TV news or documentaries on corruption, did not generally promote negative attitudes toward corruption. Presenting corruption issues in a catchy way therefore appears to matter for the effectiveness of such interventions.

テレビ・ドキュメンタリーが社会に与えた影響 : 保育行政を事例に

テレビ・ドキュメンタリーが社会に与えた影響 : 保育行政を事例に

An Austrian Auden: A Media Construction Story

ABSTRACTW. H. Auden (1907–1973) was one of the most acclaimed writers in the English language in the twentieth century. When he divided his final fifteen years between the United States and Austria, in between foreign fame and local unknownness the poet materialised as a celebrity in Austrian television: it is a peripheral, small-nation media audience which the September-1967 episode of the documentary feature series Das österreichische Porträt [The Austrian Portrait] addresses and projects.This paper investigates that televised biographical representation in terms of Stuart Hall’s conceptualisation of the narrative construction of identity, with the help of tools from British Cultural Studies and film studies. The case study especially considers how – through audio-visual strategies that add up to a metaphorical manoeuvre – the Anglo-American poet’s life and work in Austria are storied along those of Austrian poet Josef Weinheber, whose entanglement with National Socialism gets blanked out in the film.It is in the specific context of a peripheral celebrity culture, and peripheral celebrity life writing, that the foreign identity is thus metaphorically translated into local frames of reference. The case study also has implications for TV documentary as a life-writing (or life-depiction) genre as regards its audio-visual rhetoric in the context of a discursive truth effect and the naturalised codes of televisual representation.

Far from (The Sense of) Equilibrium: Some Cognitive Aspects of Our Way of Life in the Present Era

One of the most interesting concepts of our modernity belongs to the - considering the scenario where we are, and the crisis not only economic that we live. The is often a discipline among the others, following an anthropocentric vision where the Mankind is, more or less consciously, on the top respect to all the others species, and overall quite out of the ecosystem. The fundamental value of the ecosystem for the life is at least underestimated or leave to the tv documentaries, in which often the main argument is the risk of extinction of some kind of animal; some fragile ecosystem and so on – in any case: far from our everyday life. In last two centuries, the Mankind has deeply modified the life environment - and this happens with an intensity so high that the scientists (ecologists, anthropologists and so on) have named this period Anthropocene, a pretentious name probably for the shortest era in the history of our planet. In contrast with the concept of superficial ecology that is still, like a silent background, at the basis to the book Limits To Growth(however fundamental), commissioned, at early '70 in the last century, by Aurelio Peccei. A study in which the role of Mankind was at the top of the evolutionary chain, both to the capacity of determining the own destiny (and for the others species) and for the vision, that is still now, anthropocentric. A vision to forget if we want to have more possibilities of surviving on the planet.

Про контекстуальну пертинентність перекладацьких відповідників(на матеріалі документальних тревел-фільмів)

Про контекстуальну пертинентність перекладацьких відповідників(на матеріалі документальних тревел-фільмів)

When fat meets disability in poverty porn: exploring the cultural mechanisms of suspicion in Too Fat to Work

There has been a distinct neglect of dis/ability in socio-cultural analysis of poverty porn. This paper applies framing analysis to reality TV documentaries that feature larger bodied, disabled, welfare claimants to examine how cultural literacies of fatness and ‘obesity’ are drawn upon to cast suspicion upon disability welfare claimants in so-called poverty-porn. With a focus on Channel 5's Benefit Britain series, Benefiits Too Fat to Work we demonstrate that enduring and harmful representations of ‘obesity’ are put to the work of securing public consent for a post-welfare society in the UK.

Terms in Popular Science Communication: The Case of TV Documentaries

Science documentaries on television aim to provide easy and entertaining access to research findings. To do so, producers need to know how to explain complex content for non-expert audiences in a comprehensible way. At the same time, they have to decide what aspects of a subject might be relevant for viewers, or how the subject matter could be rendered more interesting by employing strategies such as personalisation or emotionalisation. One specific decision concerns the use of terms. Both existing research and journalistic handbooks suggest that terms should be or are, in fact, avoided in popular science contexts. However, there is only little empirical research on the topic. This contribution seeks to test several pre-existing hypotheses on terms in documentaries for adults and show how often terms are used and whether/how they are explained when they appear. Examining terms in four English and four German science documentaries, the analysis points out which communicative resources are used to facilitate the comprehension of terms, and where an explanation seems to focus primarily on entertainment rather than ease of comprehension. The results challenge some of the previous views on terms in popular science communication and reveal that documentaries display highly idiosyncratic strategies when it comes to the use of terms.

Usability tests for personalised subtitles

Abstract Over the past decade, subtitles have developed along with broadcast and broadband technology. Viewers nowadays enjoy new opportunities to customize subtitles to best meet their personal preferences or needs. This study aims to identify end-user subtitle setting preferences, to investigate whether these settings have an effect on content comprehension, and to explore subtitle usability for two groups of participants, those under the age of 65 and those over 65. In an experiment, three subtitle features were open to customization: the position, the box and the size of the subtitle, before and after participants watched an on-demand TV documentary produced by the Catalan public broadcaster TVC. Results confirm a preference for bottom and medium subtitles. Furthermore, while the under 65 segment made satisfactory use of the system, the over 65 segment experienced different levels of usability and reported different capabilities and problems.

Reception

The cinematic and televisual reception of the ancient world remains one of the most active strands of classical reception study, so a new addition to the Wiley-Blackwell Companions series focusing on Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen is sure to be of use to students and scholars alike (especially given how often ‘Classics and Film’ courses are offered as a reception component of an undergraduate Classical Studies programme). The editor, Arthur Pomeroy, himself a respected and prolific ‘early adopter’ of this branch of scholarship, has assembled many of the leading names in cinematic reception studies (including Maria Wyke, Pantelis Michelakis, Alastair Blanshard, and Monica Cyrino), alongside a good number of more junior colleagues, resulting in a varied and rewarding compendium that will provide a useful accompaniment to more detailed explorations of this field. (Some, though not all, chapters offer further reading suggestions, and most are pitched at an accessible level.) The twenty-three contributions span the ‘canonical’ and already widely treated aspects of screen reception, from 1950s Hollywood epics to adaptations of Greek tragedy, as well as ranging across material which has only more recently began to attract the attention it deserves, such as TV documentary, or adaptations for younger audiences. The volume is not as easily navigable as it might be, with the four-part division of the chapters sometimes seeming a little arbitrary. (So, for example, a chapter which discusses ‘The Return of the Genre’ in films like Gladiator appears under the heading ‘Comedy, Drama, and Adaptation’, when it might have been better placed in the first section, on ‘The Development of the Depiction of Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen’.) But rich discussions are not hard to find, especially in those chapters which show how cinematic receptions are indicators of more widely felt concerns relating to our reception of the past, as in Blanshard's assessment of ‘High Art and Low Art Expectations: Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture’. Michelakis’ chapter on the early days of cinema is also a valuable distillation of some of his recent work on silent film, crisply and concisely setting out the plurality of approaches that must inform our understanding of the cinematic medium (for example, spectatorship, colour, and relationships to other media). More broadly, the collection makes a solid and welcome attempt to put this pluralism into practice, with Pomeroy stressing ‘the complexity of understanding film’ early in his introduction (3). Chapters focusing on music, and costumes, for example, allow us to see productions ‘in the round’, a panoptical perspective which is still too readily avoided by much classical reception scholarship. (It is also good to see at least one chapter which ranges beyond screen media in the West.) Other vital areas of film and TV studies could arguably have received more attention. Some contributors touch on the importance of assessing audience receptions of these films, or the impact of marketing and other industrial considerations (such as screening practices), but more chapters dedicated to these approaches might have been a more sustained reminder to readers of just how widely screen scholarship can (and often needs to) range. To that end, a particularly significant chapter in the book – one of only 3 by non-Classicists – is Harriet Margolis’ account of how film historians might evaluate ancient world film. Newcomers to this field should pay particular attention to this, and to Pomeroy's introductory comments on how we should regard film as much more than a quasi-literary medium.

Diversity on U.S. Public and Commercial TV in Authorial and Executive-Produced Social-Issue Documentaries

Where are diverse makers and subjects most likely to be found in U.S. TV documentary? This study compares commercial and public TV series, and also anthology formats (“authorial” series) and executive-produced formats. A content analysis for characters and makers showed that public TV authorial series are more diverse than either commercial or other public TV series. Independent documentaries have diversity value both in commercial and public TV settings.

Course design investigation and trial on the subject of self-regulated learning using video content and online report submission

PurposeThis study aims to propose and evaluate a course design to promote university students’ understanding and intentional use of the concept and strategy of self-regulated learning (SRL).Design/methodology/approachThe course is designed on the basis of the experiential learning model. It is intended that the students reflect and conceptualize their own learning experience and prior knowledge by combining them with SRL theory. The course design exploits TV documentaries describing junior high school students struggling to achieve good results, as well as online essay submissions with which university students are expected to interpret the documentaries from the viewpoint of SRL theory. All the submitted essays are distributed to students to give them a chance to compare their own ideas with those in the essays written by other students to deepen their thoughts.FindingsThe course was taken by first-year university students. The results of a questionnaire administered to 112 students indicate that the students could associate their own experience with SRL theory and deepen their understanding on SRL.Originality/valueCompared with previous intervention procedures, the course design activating student’s own leaning experience through TV documentary viewing and essay submission would be an effective, efficient and practical way especially for university and adult students to make them aware of and able to use SRL theory.

War memorial: The Calling Blighty films and remembrance

The Calling Blighty series of nearly 400 films were messages from servicemen in India and Burma to be shown to families in local cinemas at the end of the Second World War. They are remarkable because of their cinematic quality and the men’s direct address to camera, and the 64 remaining films reveal much about family memories, public remembrance and representation of the Northern voice on screen. Along with Marion Hewitt of the North West Film Archive, the author has been engaged in an ongoing project to find the relatives of the men of the ‘Forgotten Army’ in the films and recreate the screenings. These ritual ceremonies of remembrance have been augmented by a media memorial, a Channel 4 TV documentary about the project and creative critical reflection through an experimental artist’s film, drawing on the archive material. This analysis of the project looks at the relationship of the Blighty films to wartime film and documentary, in particular, as well as soldier self-representation, and their implications for both family and communal remembrance.

American Realities on Public Television: Analysis of Independent Television Service’s Independent Documentaries, 2007–2016

Fifty years after the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act, this study examines the way in which TV documentaries produced by the Independent Television Service (ITVS)—the largest public funder and coproducer of independent documentaries in the U.S. public broadcasting system—represent the America they are mandated to portray. The study examines the geographic, demographic, and topical diversity of ITVS documentaries against U.S. Census and polling data. Using quantitative content analysis of ITVS film archival data, this study of a decade (2007–16) of U.S. public television documentaries ( N = 342) shows that the representation of American realities on public TV broadly reflects U.S. Census demographics and Americans’ social concerns, as reflected in a decade (2007–16) of aggregated Gallup monthly “Most Important Problem [Facing the Country Today]” poll data. ITVS-funded filmmakers are disproportionately female and diverse, and they come from 33 states and the District of Columbia. Films portray life in all quadrants of the United States, in both rural and urban communities. These public TV documentaries represent a geographically, racially, and ethnically diverse America.

Critical care research and the wisdom of hindsight

Critical care research and the wisdom of hindsight

ОСОБЕННОСТИ АВТОРСКОГО И ТЕЛЕВИЗИОННОГО ДОКУМЕНТАЛЬНОГО КИНО

The article is devoted to studying the peculiarities, basic features and characteristics of author’s and TV documentary films. The paper provides a comparative analysis of the key types of documentary films and their influence on broadcast programming. The research findings allow the author to draw certain conclusions which can be used to study the peculiarities of tele-viewers’ perception of documentary films which differ not only in their structure and properties but also according to their general purpose.

Lessons learned from previous environmental health crises: Narratives of patients with Minamata disease in TV documentaries as the main media outlet

On 16 August 2017, the Minamata Convention on Mercury entered into force to protect human health and the environment from the adverse effects of mercury. Minamata disease is caused by methylmercury...

"Tolkien in Oxford" (BBC, 1968): A Reconstruction

"Tolkien in Oxford" (BBC, 1968):A Reconstruction Stuart D. Lee (bio) On 30th March 1968, from 9.50–10.35pm,1 BBC2 aired the latest episodes of its TV documentary series Release (which aimed to explore "the world of films, plays, books, art, and music"). A colour production, which was strikingly new for its time (BBC2 was in fact the first TV channel globally to broadcast in colour), it consisted of two programmes: the first, titled "Suddenly I know what I have to do…," studied the English sculptress Barbara Hepworth, and the second (longer) episode was titled "Tolkien in Oxford." The latter was described in the Radio Times of the 28th March (9) as a film "about The Lord of the Rings." Quoting in full: In Europe and Asia it's a school set book. In America it's a craze bigger than Batman: one million copies sold in 1967 alone. In Britain, a lot of people have never even heard of it. J.R.R. Tolkien, seventy-six, retired Oxford don, talks about his major work. Readers in Oxford try to explain the phenomenon of the lord of the hobbits, the orcs, and the elves. A literary masterpiece or a pleasant donnish joke? Directed by Leslie Megahey Editor: Lorna Pegram It is extraordinary to think of a time when the people of any country, especially Britain, could be described as not having heard of J.R.R. Tolkien or at least The Lord of the Rings—but such was evidently the case in the Britain of the late 1960s and, as we shall see, the risk of devoting a programme of this standing to someone so relatively unknown as Tolkien was one which was nearly not taken. This article will explore the making of the programme using archives from the BBC and those of the cast and crew, the show's reception and afterlife, its importance in terms of Tolkien scholarship, and, most importantly, will present a reconstruction of the full interview [End Page 115] given by Tolkien during the filming, based on recently discovered documents and recordings. "Tolkien in Oxford" (1968): A Summary The importance of the original programme has already been hinted at in the extract from the Radio Times. By 1968 Tolkien was aged 76 and nearing the end of his life (he would pass away five years later). Indeed, based on our current information, this was the last recording made of Tolkien (either audio or video) that survives. For many scholars of Tolkien, access to this film has been through the web. As part of their Modern Writers interviews the BBC released the original film on its web site,2 noting its length as 26 minutes 32 seconds. It erroneously listed this as the work of one 'John Izzard' (this should read John Ezard), who only assisted on the programme, and credit should go to instead to Leslie Megahey, as noted above in the Radio Times. The online version, however, contained no closing credits, no production information, and no captions. Prior to this version appearing on the BBC site, illegal copies had also appeared on YouTube.3 The programme opened with a drawing of the Eye of Sauron overlaid with actor Joss Ackland4 reciting the 'One Ring to rule them all' poem. Whilst animation was used occasionally in subsequent scenes (notably to present a map of Middle-earth), the vast majority of the programme was live production consisting of interviews with Tolkien (mainly seated in a room in Oxford's Catholic Chaplaincy off St Aldate's, but also walking in Merton College, at a night-time firework display at the Dragon School,5 and various other settings), interspersed with commentary from Oxford students and members of staff. There were also general shots of the city and University. The programme famously ended with an aerial helicopter shot pulling away from Tolkien as he stands alone on the walls of Merton College looking out over Christ Church meadow. It is, however, filled with now very familiar scenes in the visual record of Tolkien. For example, there is his description of the writing down of the first line of The Hobbit (02:46–03...

Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance by Curtis Marez

Reviewed by: Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance by Curtis Marez Freya Schiwy Agribusiness, California, Cesar Chavez, Collaborative Media, Documentary, Farm Workers, Futurism, Gaze, Gender, Labor Struggle, Performance, Race, Unions, Visual Field, Freya Schiwy, Curtis Marez marez, curtis. Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance. U of Minnesota P, 2016. xi 210 pp. Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance compellingly brings into view a plethora of visual and audiovisual interventions in a contested mediascape. Curtis Marez's superb critique traces the history of agribusiness's speculative imaginary and farm workers' appropriation of visual technologies from the 1940s to the present. Bracketed by a substantial introduction and an extensive afterword, Farm Worker Futurism's three detailed chapters offer nuanced readings of the narrative, visual, and audiovisual creations, performances, popular culture, and advertisements that have been a part of the labor struggle in California. Marez clearly articulates complex intersections between capital, patriarchy, and white supremacy as he reads against the grain of the polished imaginary created by agribusiness capitalism, but also exposes the at times contradictory effects of farm worker struggles on the visual field. This analysis is anchored by two key concepts: the visual field and futurism/futurity. Reading agribusiness as well as farm worker projections in the visual field illuminates mediations and struggles over power that occur at the level of what is apparent and what is inferred. When Marez opts to speak of futurism, rather than futurity, he draws attention to the dominant physical and symbolic practices of white patriarchal agribusiness that have projected a high-tech fantasy, cleansed of workers of color and their antiracist labor struggles, but also to the limitations and contradictions of union interventions in the visual field. Marez begins with an analysis of the dominant futurist imaginary of agribusiness advertisements, exemplified by the International Harvester Company and the TV documentary The Big Land (1967). Projecting pastoral family farms into a future evolving before the audience's eyes, images of streamlined machines and buildings visually evacuate material labor conditions and contemporary labor conflicts. Technology did not, however, actually replace working bodies. Rather, as Marez argues, it enabled the concentration of agricultural corporations, the disciplining of the workforce, and the deskilling of labor. As labor was subordinated to the technical proficiency of the machine, capital externalized its risks. Increased profits came at the expense of lost limbs and other severe worker injuries. Marez notes that the struggle in the visual field included, as well, agribusiness's physical alterations in the Central and San Joaquin Valleys through irrigation channels, industrial wells, and the presence of new agricultural machines. Images of the changed environment were again projected in film and on television. State university researchers, in turn, colluded in the idolization of machines and chemical farming as they expanded from wartime pesticide research to applications in [End Page 258] defoliants and agricultural pesticides and the reengineering of fruits and vegetables adapted to handling in bins. Farm workers and those sympathetic to labor struggles contested this visual field with a range of counterimages, including documentaries like Poverty in the Valley of Plenty (1947), Fighting for Our Lives (1974), and Wrath of Grapes (1986). The latter highlighted crop-dusting helicopters that contemporary viewers readily associated with the Vietnam War and the US military presence in Central America. Marez argues that the film successfully opened the horizon from the visually depopulated agricultural fields of central California to the global, neoimperial context of capitalist warfare on brown bodies. El Teatro Campesino's performances and the art and graphics of the artist collective Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) further strengthened this counternarrative. RCAF's work, in particular, builds on the visually impacting spectacle of mass marches led by the United Farm Workers (UFW) that made the labor struggle visible by counting on news coverage's aerial shots. RCAF also created futuristic images of Chicano technologies in flight and on the ground, thus allowing for farm worker futurist alternatives to agribusiness idealization of technology in the service of labor exploitation. With his focus on futurism, Marez's sophisticated reading avoids easy binaries. He emphasizes the ethnic and gender diversity of farmworkers that complicates the reduction of labor struggles to a single ethnic...

‘Southern’ Northern Soul: Changing Senses of Direction, Place, Space, Identity and Time

‘Southern’ Northern Soul: Changing Senses of Direction, Place, Space, Identity and Time

Yun Dongju's images in TV documentaries and entertainment programs

Yun Dongju's images in TV documentaries and entertainment programs