Précis dhistoire de la radio et de la télévision (French Edition)

The newsreels, an essential communication element during the war on the face of regimen, especially in Goebbels' Germany, became before everybody, through television, a historical document for new studies. As it is seen in a wide and critical manner, it is rescued and thus widely given a different meaning that enables new reflections. Furthermore, virtues and limitations of the program, as we will point out, testify the manner of treatment given to the cinema by the historian, a treatment that has been absorbed for a long time, criticized in its limitations, and enriched by several historians in the entire world, including Brazil.

This is a work of more than 40 years of reflections, re-visitations, and contextualization of the imbrication between works with movies - analysis and performance - and his historiographical contributions, in order to understand how they culminated in the TV show that he hosted and, from this point, analyze three TV shows. History, Historiography, and Cinema 8. When documentaries of historical themes that make use of file images are seen, there is a discord between the locution text and images.

Pictures seem to have been chosen as a illustration of an idea that came before the images. A few times, even due to the difficulty with documents, information is strictly visual and presented without a text. If in the pictures of the first three countries, the reception is more friendly, in the loser country, it is not dismal as expected by what it is known through bibliography, which surprised the historian as previously mentioned. Using a superposition of these different pictures obtained in the newsreels, Ferro developed a historiographical discussion: The relation between History and Cinema, as developed by Marc Ferro in the beginning of the s, was determined through the nature of phenomena that he analyzed, such as the Russian Revolution or Stalinism.

These events are marked by the political dispute of the historiographical construction and supervision of the documentation. Movies gave him the opportunity of accessing the information that was then difficult to obtain through other sources. As he was becoming more experienced with soviet files, he observed that the artistic and fictional characters of cinema made it difficult for institutions to control his content. They made the control by bureaucrats that are used to seeing the real danger in the sound, instead of in the image, more difficult.

Political control occurred on the words, on what the characters used to say, while moral censure cut what the movies showed. If there was censure, there was also a content escaping it. In addition, cinema, based on images, allowed seeing the fragments that were not said to emerge, despite the controls.

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The historian had access to a new and different documentation from that found in files controlled by the State or Communist Party when he analyzed such fragments. In this s historiographical formulation, it is possible to see the influence of psychoanalysis, often used as an interpretational instrumental of cinema, 12 and also the prevalence of the ideology prevalent in the same decade with its hidden contents, so the historian was in charge of unraveling them, returning them to historical knowledge.

We will further discuss more examples. In , as the consultant of a documentary about World War I, contact with newsreels made him notice that "images do not produce the same past representations of written files". This allows "legitimizing the image as a historical source compared to the already known sources".

Today, almost 50 years after the appearance of studies about Cinema and History, it is possible to analyze the historicity of how and why movies began to be an interest of historians in France: There is a historical historicity that causes movement that links an interpretational practice to a social practice". The cinematographic machine does not fall from the sky [ Without holding on to the quality of these statements, they were the criticisms of how cinema was seen at that time. In order to do so, Cahiers from the s refers to Russian filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, besides reflections about the cinematographic technique - seen as bourgeois, because they reproduced the renaissance's perspective and "natural" idea, and that is why the "real" of what it is seen.

In , cinema directed to anti-imperialist fights was a dominant theme: With the aim of having a point of view about these issues, the magazine interviewed Michel Foucault, "whose systematic work is to replace what the official text represses, what is being agitated hidden in the damn files of the dominant class". There are much more effective ways, i. I also believe that control for teaching, TV and cinema was a way of re-codifying popular memory that exists but does not have a mean to be formulated.

Then, people are shown with not what they were, but what they should remember they were. The magazine tried to dismantle the cinematographic language mechanisms so that its working is clear and it could be reverted into a "conscious and engaged" cinema, having power over "reality effect" of the image for the fair cause. The soviet cinema, Nazi documentaries and movies, and Vichy 21 or Elia Kazan cinemas are some of the themes in which historical and filmic constructions were studied. Using a superposition of these different pictures obtained in the newsreels, Ferro developed a historiographical rationale.

While cinema was being re-analyzed regarding technique, themes, and political involvement, there was a debate in light of the constructions of views of History, of new information and versions, in the seminar. Therefore, not only how the movie was involved - a "historical agent" 22 - but also how it historically happened in and out of the movie was analyzed: Cinema was not supposed to become an ideological weapon, like the magazine used to state, but it tried to understand how this happened and understand it as a "counter-analysis", a vehicle of new historical construction and mainly dissonance.

Study of the associations between Cinema and History, as seen, is a worry inserted in its time, with date and place. A significant part of Ferro's texts about such theme was written in that period; therefore, it carries a lot of this, revealing emphasis that was a long time ago surpassed by bibliography and its posterior texts.

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In , unraveling issues were in agreement with the theme of the historian's researches, due to the phenomena that he had studied and movies that he had seen: Stalinism, Nazism, Vichy movies - they were all products of the tension between what could be done and what could be shown. Before this filmic universe, in which movies try to pass political messages and take possession of History, it is possible to understand the role of the ideology in this conceptual universe to understand cinema.

Then, in , in The Watched History , 24 emphasis was given to appropriation and control over History work. It deals with "focuses" and their possibilities in the construction of pluralist views, varying from silences and parties to popular memory and cinema. The multiple focuses occur after duality.

The idea of control over History, of its abuses, takes the place of ideology and unraveling. When Ferro considered cinema as the "focus" of views about History, he was worried about the kind of construction that the moviemaker was able to produce. Ferro discusses about the historicity of rebellion and revolution concepts since until the Chinese Revolution and observes how throughout History the cinema has applied them.

In the French Revolution, at the post-war works, he declares "that French movies are never totally favorable [ The theme of a movie has less importance than its treatment. Moviemakers that deal with a revolutionary phenomenon try to value it, instead of putting it under question. But moviemakers' revolutionary action happens in another way. Thus, the issue is "finding through imagination a real path to understand History and make it intelligible". It was a docudrama 30 with fictional scenes that re-established important issues, such as the moment when diseased were isolated or the creation of a hospital.

During that period, his works included studies on Russia and former Soviet Union, as well as other Arabian countries, especially the former French colonies, French history, and finally, the constant reflection about history writing. All these aspects, however, were never disassociated from the audiovisual study and its role in the development of these histories. Since the s, due to local circumstances of larger access to university, there was a demand for historical productions. Not only books or novels of vulgarization, but also other works were produced by experts.

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Many historians start writing in newspapers. The apogee of this influence became more pronounced in the s. According to market researches, in this period, the French audience began to enjoy reading and listening to radio of historical themes. According to the author, "the indicators converge: In , there was the launch of "a quality vulgarization magazine" called Histoire , with 80, weekly copies, and also the development of collections of pocket books that are written by the same new historians, amongst them Marc Ferro.

However, television shows such as Alain Ducasse raconte and Apostrophes , from , were the ones that weekly commented on book releases, a privileged disclosure and fame place for such authors, and it also allowed increase in the number of books. Even though from a decrease in interest in History and stagnation in the number of readers was seen, his prestige was still not enough to raise George Duby to the direction of the FrenchGerman La Sept.

Later, Ferro was promoted and experts with different nationalities took part in the program, following the scope of countries discussed in newsreels, replacing the German historian. The broadcast follows the calendar from September in the past and present, highlighting the most significant events every week. The progression of the program depended on the cession of files, of interviewees and experts, and of the relation between images that were seen and the lived present.

It aired from September to June , with a total of episodes. Originally, it should be in only until June or June , period of the armistice between the defeated France and Germany, which started to occupy a part of the French territory. Since the audience's interest was great, the program remained on air. However, other newsreels were needed, once a "defeated army does not record their defeat". The minute programs were filled with 40 minutes of newsreels.

There were more images than commentaries. Newsreels used to be fully broadcasted in the beginning, but due to their extension, they started to be broadcast interrupted by participants' remarks. Owing to the multiplicity of the themes, the amount of information, and diversity of experts, in this article, I have chosen to present the first three programs. They have the format that was kept with some alterations and many of the issues that will be discussed later.

I will make their description based on their serial format, on the topic of their images, and on the intervention manners of historians, thus allowing observing their functioning, characteristics, limitations, and contribution. In the text "Criticism about the cinematographic current events, Parallel History ", 38 Ferro analyzes these and other issues involving the work with filmic files. This means material aid authenticity, filming angles - if the cinematographer is in front of an enemy warlike target, the image was certainly acted - until reaching the content analysis and other necessary procedures for this paper when he declares that: Furthermore, in these broadcasts, experts did not withhold on the cinematographic shapes that gave meaning to the analyzed content although they may have done in others 40 , and "the recorded file is also a file of many ways how to record", 41 therefore I added this aspect to my analyses.

It is not about a filmic analysis, a procedure that is above the possibilities of an article, but of signaling, inside newsreels, devices that create significant visual meanings with strong appeal to fictional forms and genre. The newsreels as they were called, were created around the s. They are derivations of travelogue , 42 the movie of someone's experience while traveling. This is a derivation, by the way, of presentations of dark cameras and optical equipment originally from the 18th century, which, through drawings and later photography, brought to the spectator visions about the "unknown" world.

This, back then, for European countries that produced movies, the countries and cultures that colonized in Africa and in the Orient, was treated as "exotic". Propaganda is an important part of its elaboration. Current TV news programs have changed this original configuration very little, adding to them the live news reports, "right now and right here", which increases the gender effects of credibility. It is on the effects of credibility that the newsreels used to be based on, on the concept of printed transparent course in the pellicle, in the urgency, and in the manufactured character of immediacy, which not even the expositional documentary used to take advantage.

A vignette with pictures about war opens the show: Hitler speaks and a bomb explodes. The sound with a loud noise provides the images of a serious character. His face is in close up against a white background and he declares: He presents the circumstances of the moment before the start of the war, when negotiations between the English and French did not have a result on the Germans, and describes the non-warmonger atmosphere prevailing in France.

Wenger presents the German scenario. There is emotion in the air and Ferro speaks about his memories about the period. Ferro talks how the movie is constructed in an atmosphere that is still pacific between the French, even though the surprise attack on Poland had imposed mobilization before the perspective of the conflict.

He points out how the linking of actions developed by the newsreels referred to forms and occurrences of the World War I: The focus is on rearguard and defense. In the German pictures, differently, Franz Wenger reports how they show the preparation of war and criticize English and French enemies by intransigence in the negotiations, a reason that makes them, in the Nazi view, in charge of the conflict emergence. A new vignette ends the show with pictures of Reichstag explosion, among others. The format and vignettes that remained until the last broadcast in are present. Ferro presents the circumstances of the week: The countries had given Germany an ultimatum to get out of the Polish territory, which did not happen.

Besides, the French forces were smaller than the Germans: There are pictures of crowds on streets buying newspapers. Summon of members of the military forces in France, England, and Holland exposes a crowd of men at train stations. The music signals gravity and urgency. Men wearing military uniforms kiss their sons that are on their wives' laps, crying. From the window of the train, there are gestures from soldiers that are leaving. In the cities, precautions are taken against air attacks. Children receive gas masks.

In the Parliament, there is a voting for resources to enter in the war. The archbishop from Paris prays for peace around a crowd of believers. Some scenes of Franklin Roosevelt's office, who requested the removal of Germans from Poland: Scenes of combat talk about the aggression to Poland without declaring war and the surprise effect of blitzkrieg flash war. On the streets, children are sent to the countryside: There is a portrayal of cars on the roads, crowded train stations, and urgency emphasized by music. Other pieces of news are about measures as replacement of men mobilized by women and aged people, ensuring the normality of routine life.

Scenes are usually framed in long and medium shots. They are short and pass quickly. On the other hand, oppositely, locution is paused and overjoyed, followed by an emotional musical background. A new segment opens with the picture: As a response to this, images show fusions between French symbols like the Arc de Triomphe or the Notre-Dame Cathedral and men marching together with a martial sound, newspaper pages with headlines, and of voice that talks about the collaboration with England and its First Minister, who declares fighting against injustice and oppression.

As seen, these are images and speeches produced inside a studio with stock shots a pile of recorded scenes. The only original information is the audio of Chamberlain's statement. On the other hand, Daladier's speech, the French Council president, is shown through the picture of men and women in bars listening to the radio - file pictures. From it, one can hear a small extract.

There is no rhetorical use of this official speech, which was not even recorded. When the movie gets into the part " Aux armes citoyens ", it shows soldiers from the colonies until it comes to an end with scenes of the army marching, which are taken in low-angle shot, 48 with the anthem being emotionally sung over heroism icons of the monument of Arc de Triomphe in cl.

Until September 4th, the Reich kept the negotiations, with the only aim of making his population believe that the allies were those responsible for war declaration.

But Hitler had been wanting to destroy Poland since April, when he ordered preparation of war against Poland on September 1st. In the meantime, in Danzig, 49 the SS [elite body of the Nazi party] began simulated exercises against German facilities as if they were Polish, creating a pretext for combats. The camera registers in close up a sad kid, a sobering woman, and an old man. The pictures are individualized, paused - the camera withholds, they do not go fast in the editing film.

A fire, an off voice explains that is was a Polish act. The city is a wreck, the voice talks in a teasing tone: The sound of the statement in newsreels was not usual. It was unlikely to be obtained outside a studio because it demanded heavy equipment. Doing it, even as a simulation dubbed in a studio, demonstrates a worry with realism of the pictures and at the same time it creates an alleged true in loco statement.

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English diplomats are in the picture, walking through London and the voice comment is about its fakeness, the breaking of promises, and year-old lies. We see pictures of tanks, conflicts that were always attributed to the Polish, the sound of shots, fires, screams, voices, which were sounds that were added. In the picture, Hitler arrives in Reichstag. In Danzig, there are pictures in long shot of soldiers celebrating.

The troops enter the city and are greeted by the crowd. Screams of joy and words of order are heard edited, superposed to the in loco captured pictures. Nazi flags in the windows declare the occupation and form the scenario for recording the triumphal parade and the party of the occupation of the Polish city by the German army. A new segment shows the safety measures in Germany, similar to what was seen in the French newsreel. Here, however, image focuses only on the weaponry: In the factory long shot, machinegun tubes and rifles are seen. The camera does a long lateral travelling, 50 showing all manufactured equipment.

Then, a derrick in movement dominates the factory from above, exhibiting the several lines of military cars that are still under construction. They are all in straight lines, organized and looking triumphal like in the parade recorded by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the will The image of the factory in long shot, crossed by other horizontal travelling, in which several eager technicians and employees are seen with their aprons on, working under the supervision of military officers wearing their uniforms, closes this segment of the movie. Thus, it creates, in the shape of a mounting line orchestrated rhythmically, the idea of competent technique organization, and of order and preparation.

The officers that go through the rows, however, introduce in the iconography and in the gestural what would be a factory supervisor of the war and oppressive authority that emanates from the Nazi war machine on all the other instances. Meanwhile, in the Polish battlefield, troops break the border mark using tanks, and soldiers on horses and motorcycles. In a picture taken inside a house, we can see those living there on their backs, greeting the passage of the German army.

The film penetrates inside a "free" happy house we do not see their faces! There is an enthusiastic song playing. He early wrote about the television-politics nexus as if foreboding the rise of TV-Prime Minister Berlusconi. Still in Italy, more academic and less famous authors also took television to task 8.

Major publishing houses also translated books attacking television Bourdieu, Postman, or the Enzensberger, all referred below. There were a few successful international anti-television pamphlets. In , Jerry Mander, former advertiser turned advocate of the public interest published his Four arguments for the elimination of television , translated into Italian, Spanish and German and probably other languages.

What a way to go, life at the end of the empire , where television joins climate change as one of the major ailments of humankind. In France, philosophers, while not writing specifically about television, occasionally produced damning statements, often remarkable for their triviality regardless of the rest of their work. The book adapted from the program was most successful.

Among scholars, the American academic Neil Postmanprobably made the biggest splash besides Bourdieu: Amusing ourselves to death was translated into French, German and Italian the year of its publication, among other languages. Those attacks on television share common characteristics. First, and importantly for us, they take to task the medium in itself, not or rarely a specific genre, or a specific regulation let us say, private versus public television.

No other medium was criticized at such a high level of generality.

From this starting point, television is accused of causing deterioration in several fields: Politics was central to their argumentation: The medium is supposed to concentrate huge power. With or without references to sociological work, television is also condemned for encouraging passivity among its viewers but also, somewhat paradoxically, violence.

Whether the harmful effects of television result from the technology itself viewing a flow of images in the home , of the poverty of programs, of a deliberate political manipulation, is not always clear. Furthermore, writing at the time of the quick growth of commercial TV in France, he also criticizes, in passing, the purportedly paternalistic public service television of the past. A personal note, here: An exception should be made for a specific bunch of authors, coming mostly from the television industry, who have kept writing books in praise or defense of television, across the years.

They often adopted, as a kind of provocation, a resoundingly positive title for their books. How can we explain this remarkable negative libidinal investment in television? One could of course simply claim that the attackers are right, in several ways: TV programs do have little cultural value; their accumulation in the brain of people does provoke bad effects. Obviously, I beg to differ, but I will not debate programs, in general or specifically.

Neither will I quote the numerous pieces of research which have all expressed scepticism regarding any strong, widespread effects of television. Ironically, the only indisputable effect of mass communications, and television in particular, might have been the massive production of a discourse on effects. I will link our critics to a tradition which can be called, broadly, deterministic. They come from various intellectual milieus, and yet, all converge when it comes to make absolute claims about the effects of television.

Unless one shares their dark determinism, the explanation cannot be found in the medium itself, but, rather, in a conjunction of sociological and psychological factors. Such a powerful collective hatred, shared by an international educated class, is over-determined. I will propose four explanations which can be jointly used. Contempt is key to distinction here. Historians told us how the medium was soon and quickly, considering the early high price of TV sets adopted as popular entertainment In various countries, the rate of non-owners has long remained the highest among university professors.

My three remaining explanations could partly hide a rationalization of the contempt of elites for television, happy to discover that everybody has a reason for hating the medium. It applies well to television, although Hirschman does not mention it. Television as a material, durable good requires especially in its early days a strong financial investment, but does not provide corresponding gratifications. However, dissatisfaction with television has an additional, paradoxical characteristic.

But not in the case of television: It could be tempting to offer a class-based explanation: Without dismissing this explanation, one will note that viewers of different statuses and classes have debated the addictive power of television viewing, which requires more than a purely class-based explanation. From an explanation about the characteristics of consumer goods, maybe combined with class, we move to a more general psychological explanation, contrasting, then again, television with cinema.

Importantly, Houston insists that she writes about US commercial television, and its constant flow of multiple channels based on the promotion of consumption. Yet, as we will see, her claim could be generalized to public service television, inasmuch as it has also tried to attract the viewer constantly, especially as soon as competition existed between channels including as few as two or three. Houston contrasts the remarkable completeness of the cinema experience with television. Ignoring the viewing on films on the small screen, Houston analyzes cinema viewing as a specific, collective, dream like experience, paid for each time, outside the home, in dedicated places.

Television does not offer a specular position, a moment of fulfilment through identification with characters of a given story, but something very different: I want the cinema experience again, of television we say: Like Houston, he insists on the dialectics of desire and frustration. This analysis can be connected with sociological surveys of the level of satisfaction linked to different activities. People claimed to be more willing to give up on TV to do something else. Finally, a fourth explanation can be tied to a major characteristic of television, one which was sometimes constructed as its defining promise From the start, however, liveness could be staged: This weakness of television liveness is reinforced by the specific problematization of the concept of liveness within theater and performance studies.

In one of the first major theoretical statements about this type of liveness, Peggy Phelan 29 prioritized the authentic, ephemeral liveness of performance, as opposed to the false, vicarious television experience. This long period of hate for television might be coming to an end, although vigorous pamphlets are still written against the medium. As a recent French example: How did the discourse of television change?

When the Internet is compared to other media, it is, mainly, to the printing press. Although audiences, including internet audiences, still watch many programs which belong to the traditional genres of television including the most recent, reality television , the idea of the flow of genres, organized in a schedule, on a few channels, and viewed on a dedicated television screen, is now considered as a past experience, at least for the young generations of the Western world. This has allowed some commenters to turn television into a good medium as it became or was felt to become a past medium, which could easily trigger nostalgia in a contemporary age obsessed with memory and increasingly defined by a longing for an idealized past.

Nostalgia, however, is a complicated feeling, including in relation to the experience of media. Conference announcement in France. The first way television could retrospectively be constructed as a good medium is tied to its capacity to draw mass audiences, once considered one of the major sources of its evil power.

In the USA, and later in France, this aspect of television was redeemed and the drawback became an advantage: In the s, the common mass consumption of the same programs with high ratings, if not highly rated was increasingly seen as a factor of social integration, not a political or social threat. In Western Europe, institutional nostalgia partly overlaps another theme, the lament about public service television or broadcasting , which started at about the same time.

Television researchers who focus on specific content would probably contest, then again, such sweeping statements. The notion of the forum or agora needs much refinement to be operationalized, and nostalgia is not a good emotional place to start such an investigation. Some programs focus on past experiences, and viewers experience mediated nostalgia nostalgia for an actual past experience: