Cinema, Television and History : New Approaches [1 ed.] 9781443868877, 9781443853798

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Cinema, Television and History

Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches

Edited by

Laura Mee and Johnny Walker

Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches, Edited by Laura Mee and Johnny Walker This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2014 by Laura Mee, Johnny Walker and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5379-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5379-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................. viii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Cinema, Television and History Laura Mee and Johnny Walker Part I: New Meanings, New Methods Chapter One ............................................................................................... 12 TV and Cinema: What Forms of History Do We Need? John Ellis Part II: Recontextualising Cinema and Television History Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 26 “We Must Go About it in Our Own Way and Have Complete Control”: The British Film Industry and the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau, 1919-1938 Alex Rock Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 47 From Cathy “Queen of the Mods” to Paula “Pop Princess”: Women, Music Television and Adolescent Female Identity Hazel Collie Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 67 The Polish TV Fictionscape: From Programme Importation to Domestic Revival Sylwia Szostak Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 85 Maintaining a Critical Eye: The Political Avant-garde on Channel 4 in the 1990s Steve Presence

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Part III: Rethinking Histories of Cinema and Television Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 104 “These People Are the Enemy!”: The Moral Responsibilities of Film and Television History within the Humanities Dieter Declercq Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 121 The Trans/national Divide: Towards a Typology of “Transatlantic British Cinema” During the 1930s and 1940s Nathan Townsend Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 142 “Marvellous, Awesome, True-to-life, Epoch-making, a New Dimension”: Reconsidering the Early History of Colour Television in Britain Helen Wheatley Part IV: Rethinking History through Cinema and Television Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 164 Known Pleasures: Nostalgia and Joy Division Mythology in 24 Hour Party People and Control Caitlin Shaw Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 182 “Media Virgins vs. Political Lions”: Historicising the Gender Politics of Question Time Jilly Boyce Kay Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 200 Rethinking History through Documentary: Paradise Lost and the Documented Case of “The West Memphis Three” Thomas Joseph Watson Part V: The Impact of New Technologies Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 222 DVDs, Streams, Comment Threads and Developing a Television Canon Abby Waysdorf

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Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 239 Using Social Media to Build Hidden Screen Histories: A Case Study of the Pebble Mill Project Vanessa Jackson Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 260 Historical Subjectivity and Film Style: Re-enactment and Digital Technologies in Contemporary Historical Cinema Adam Gallimore Contributors ............................................................................................. 281

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people who have played a part in bringing this project together. Professor Steve Chibnall, director of the Cinema and Television History Research Centre at De Montfort University, supported and subsidised the conference from which this book stems. A team of postgraduate researchers from the Centre planned and programmed the event alongside the editors, including Eve Bennett, Jilly Boyce Kay, Hazel Collie, Dieter Declercq, Alex Rock and Caitlin Shaw. It is to these coorganisers, and our other postgraduate friends and colleagues in the CATH Research Centre, to whom we dedicate this collection. We would like to further extend our gratitude to Professor John Ellis and Dr Helen Wheatley for delivering insightful and thought-provoking keynote talks, and to Dr Jamie Medhurst, Dr Claire Monk and Dr James Russell, for taking part in the final plenary panel. Thanks are also due to Carol Koulikourdi at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for approaching us with the initial suggestion for this collection. Finally, we thank each of our contributors for writing excellent chapters. We are very grateful to each and every one of you.

INTRODUCTION CINEMA, TELEVISION AND HISTORY LAURA MEE AND JOHNNY WALKER

Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches was inspired by a conference, “Re-thinking Cinema and Television History: Texts and Contexts”, which was co-organised by the editors and held at De Montfort University in April 2012. The book offers a snapshot of work within the academic study of film and television today, and considers where or how notions of “history” are situated within these related disciplines. It is fortunate to have contributions from a number of leading scholars, although most of the authors featured here are, at the time of writing, postgraduate students or early career researchers. As such, whilst the book is primarily concerned with the concept of “history”, all contributions look to the future study of film and television. This introductory chapter offers a brief overview of the concerns which prompted the organisation of the initial conference, before discussing some of the key themes that emerge across this volume.

Fractures The aim of “Re-thinking Cinema and Television History” was to address two fractures that we, as postgraduates researching film and television, had recognised across the academy. The first was the (still somewhat prevalent) divide between the study of film and the study of television (and their respective institutions). The second was the divide between historically informed, empirical approaches, and theoretical, text-based approaches to such studies. Television has often been positioned as cinema’s “other”. Whilst, in the 1970s, the emergence of “film studies” seemed derisory to other, wellestablished humanities disciplines, the emergence of a “television studies” was largely greeted with a similar snobbery from film scholars. Partly, this was due to standards of film theory being deemed incompatible with

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potential studies of television: to talk of cinema was to luxuriate in the discussion of a single text or body of work. It was to pontificate over auteurs, artistry and the forming of canons. To talk of television was to talk of an ephemeral medium, of quantity not quality. Television was also “gendered” and marginalised, defined by its audience and associated with domesticity (Ellis 1992; Brunsdon 1997; Mulvey 2007), while the study of film, so often preoccupied with singular texts rather than audience experience, became increasingly centralised as the major “screen” discipline. Over the last three decades, however, television studies has grown into a “legitimate field of study in which ‘the terms of debate’ have been formulated, if not fully reflected on” (Wheatley 2007: 1). Meanwhile, the focus of film studies has expanded to recognise the importance of audiences and industry, and continues to consider both text and context. To this end, both film and television (and their associated “histories”) are considered as “equals” in this collection, though we recognise what makes each medium distinct, and continue to respect the different approaches which guide scholarly research in these areas (Ellis 1992: 23). For all their differences, it is an unquestionable reality that both film and television are ever evolving, constantly embracing new forms and technologies, and always offering audiences new ways to watch—from the advent of home video in the late 1970s to more recent developments in the digital age. These changes only serve to complicate once easily defined notions of “film” and “television”, reducing the importance of the role of both cinematic exhibition and broadcast scheduling in how we categorise films and television programmes. Most films are now consumed—via television—on DVD or through VoD platforms, while a good percentage of television shows are first viewed after initial broadcast, often online via laptops, tablets and smartphones. Moreover, the emergence of “cinematic” and “quality” television shows in light of series such as The Wire (HBO, 2002—2008), Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008—2013), Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010—present), and Les Revenants (Canal+, 2012—present) continue to challenge what is meant by both “cinema” and “television” in the twentyfirst century. In this volume, instead of being simply overwhelmed at the rapidity of these developments, we take the opportunity not only to consider cinema and television in some of their more traditional senses, but also make moves toward new contextual understandings. Before we do this, however, we need to address a second fracture. The fracture is an old one, and has plagued the study of film and television for many years: namely, the binary opposition between “history” and empirical approaches on the one hand, and “theory” and more text-based approaches on the other. James Chapman (2003) sees this dichotomy, in

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relation to the study of film at least, as being linked to the growth of two separate but connected disciplines: film studies—and its allegiances with English literature’s “textual concerns” (18)—and film history—with its “contextual concerns” (ibid.). He argues: The crucial difference between film studies and film history is that whereas film studies opens up a wider range of possible interpretations (there are different ways of reading films that can elicit all sorts of meanings that may or may not have been intended by the makers and understood by contemporary audiences), film history is an empirical discipline that deals not in speculation but in research. The film historian sets out to assemble, assess and interpret the facts concerning the production and reception of films (Chapman 2003: 19).

In other words, film studies is typically concerned with the film as text, whilst film history examines the historical context in which the film emerged, and the context in which it continues to exist. A similar suggestion can, of course, be made for studies of television. Whilst we, as the editors of the present volume, recognise that the study of film and television is informed by a variety of positions, we have been reluctant to impose our own preferred methodological lines of enquiry on our contributors. To this end, rather than see film/television “studies” and film/television “history” as binary opposites, we recognise that film and television history shares “interpretative” elements with the textual analyses used in film and television studies. Indeed, they must share these elements if they are to “belong to the order of discourse” within which “history” is shaped (White 1992, 37). To talk of history is to talk of the past. But it is also, for scholars of film, or television, or both, to talk of the present. It is to talk of the interminable task of discovering histories, writing historical narratives and the practices of historiography, and, indeed, assessing how varied notions of “history” function within the contemporary film and television industries, and how this influences their textual outputs. Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches is intentionally fluid in its approach and encouraging of a wide range of methods to a variety of topics. The brief given to our authors, simply, was “cinema and television history”, and we welcomed both the empirical and the theoretical, as well as those studies which merged these approaches. As a result, this book is as much about how films and television shows interpret history as it is about the endeavours of the practising historian. It is a book about how historical events are adapted across film and television as the basis for a story, by creative personnel within the creative industries, as well as how the historian determines historical events through exploration of the

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archive. Divided into five parts—“New meanings, new methods”, “Recontextualising cinema and television history”, “Rethinking histories of cinema and television”, “Rethinking history through cinema and television” and “The impact of new technologies”—the book is knowingly broad and diverse in terms of the case studies featured within it, and the means through which these examples are examined, explored, and utilised in their respective chapters.

New approaches Prompting theoretical considerations which pervade many of the chapters within this volume, Part I begins with a question from John Ellis: “what forms of history do we need?” How scholars define, tell, and even retell the histories of film and television becomes ever more complex as works continue to appear or are rediscovered, and as cinematic and televisual forms evolve and are redefined within the wider context of moving image media in the digital age. In his chapter, Ellis reflects upon particular forms of history and how these can be applied to film and television now— considering the moving image as historical evidence, as documentary, as text and as data, and suggesting both personal and public justifications for historical analysis. Ultimately, Ellis argues, we “need” history to help us come to terms with change, and to see changes as never-ending processes: historiography plays an essential part in celebrating and revisiting what has gone before, rather than simply forgetting or mourning its loss. Part II develops from these wider theoretical reflections with a series of case studies which recontextualise specific cinema and television histories within their socio-political or cultural contexts. Drawing on new archival research, Alex Rock provides an account of the influence of government agencies on cultural production, through an investigation of the relationship between the Metropolitan Police and the British film industry in the 1920s and 1930s. While previous studies have considered the part that police public relations policies have played in shaping the film industry and its output, this chapter focuses more specifically on the formation of the Met Press Bureau in 1919 and the role of Public Information Officer. The bureau was established as an opportunity for collaboration, communication and greater transparency between the police and the film industry – but, as Rock shows, it ultimately acted as an agency of control, manipulating both production and publicity of British cinema right up until the Second World War. Based on her research on female television audiences, for which she interviewed a number of British women across generations about their

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memories of television, Hazel Collie explores the part played by music programmes in shaping adolescent female identity. Moving away from studies of women’s television which focus almost exclusively on genres traditionally considered “feminine”, such as drama and soap opera, Collie’s chapter instead shows how women who navigated their teenage years throughout various eras of popular music television identified with both programmes and presenters, suggesting an importance beyond the joy of simply seeing their favourite performers on the small screen. Female stars, especially presenters such as Cathy McGowan and Paula Yates, were often seen as inspirational role models and played a significant part in how adolescent females formed identities through their tastes and style, and even helped to shape their relationships with family and friends. Music television is shown to be key in how teenage girls situated themselves within the youth culture of their times. Sylwia Szostak’s chapter provides an overview of Polish fictional television, charting its development from dependence on imported programmes to domestic production in the post-Soviet era. The problematic notion of a “national” television is explored here, and Szostak argues that the advent of a specifically Polish form of television fiction did not negate the importance of foreign shows – on the contrary, domestic production has been aided by transnational media and its influences, and adapting or imitating other formats, particularly those of American programmes, has proved especially successful. This type of cultural borrowing illustrates how, rather than threatening the validity or commercial potential of domestic output, foreign models can in fact be usefully exploited in the creation of new local productions. Steve Presence brings Part II to a close with a chapter on oppositional documentary on British television in the 1990s, focusing on the radical Channel 4 programme Critical Eye (1990-94), exemplary of a form which has received limited historical recognition. Presence suggests that programmes like Critical Eye mark a comparable difference to more recent trends towards perceived impartiality in British documentary. The chapter considers the connections between the aesthetic and political avant-garde, the former prevalent on Channel 4 in the 1980s before the shift to the latter in the 1990s. The first Critical Eye programme, The Battle of Trafalgar (1990), which documented the Poll Tax riot of March 1990, is analysed in detail here to show the fundamental purpose of oppositional documentary as providing an alternative account of events to those offered by the police, media or government. Recalling historical accounts through forgotten or critically ignored oppositional forms is,

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Presence argues, ultimately essential if we are to fully understand the political potential of film and television. Part III is concerned with “rethinking” histories of film and television—that is, considering historical cinematic or televisual moments in a new or previously under-discussed way. Dieter Declercq reflects on the potential for historiographical studies of film and television, as part of the humanities, to challenge neoliberal hegemony in contemporary society and culture. The documentary Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible (JeanRobert Viallet, 2010), which charts the development and eventual success of reality television in France, is analysed here to illustrate how the genre can be seen as representative of western neoliberal ideology. Declercq shows how this is evident in both its production context, as the television industry evolved through fierce marketplace competition and government intervention, and in the competitive nature of the format itself, humiliating citizens in manipulative contests to determine the survival of the fittest, for little more than financial gain. Ultimately, he argues, the socio-economic critique found within a documentary like Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible is one which should be considered a moral responsibility of the humanities, and of scholarly work on film and television specifically. Nathan Townsend draws from a rich history of scholarly work on the concepts of both “national” and “transnational” cinemas to discuss a more specific range of films—what he terms the “Transatlantic British Cinema” of the 1930s and 1940s. Townsend explores the relationships between key British studios and Hollywood, observing a scale of interaction between the two industries that challenged traditional notions of competitive market dynamics. Simultaneously, the practice of these studios produced hybridised texts which, while often explicitly “British” in content, adopted many of Hollywood’s cultural and aesthetic values. Beginning with a discussion of chromophobia, or the “problem” of colour and attitudes toward it, Helen Wheatley’s chapter explores the history of colour television in Britain and examines the approaches of policy and programme makers during its inception and early adoption, as well as considering how colour television was initially marketed. A particularly “British” style of colour television, Wheatley argues, can be observed in early colour programmes and is especially apparent in television drama. Vanity Fair (1967-68), among others, is used here as an example of how colour was often considered as having one of two purposes: either to offer potential layers of expressive meaning beyond the surface image, or in contrast as an appealing, but ultimately superficial, aesthetic addition. While meanings of colour can only be considered subjective, this chapter concludes that the makers of early colour

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programmes did indeed strive to use colour in what they considered meaningful ways, and as such there is further scope for work on the impact of colour television. In Part IV, film and television texts are revisited to explore notions of nostalgia, cultural memory, and the representation of historical moments. Caitlin Shaw’s chapter compares the way in which two very different films portray British post-punk icons of the 1980s, and analyses how they each contribute to a particular mythology of one of the era’s most celebrated bands. Michael Winterbottom’s irreverent 24 Hour Party People (2002) charts the exploits of Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, responsible for signing Joy Division, while Control (Anton Corbijn, 2007) more seriously reflects the brief career and death of frontman Ian Curtis. By comparatively analysing narrative and aesthetic, Shaw illustrates how the two biopics respectively challenge the band’s sombre discourse and the myth of Curtis as martyr, before embracing a late-2000s moment of post-punk nostalgia to recover and reinstate these ideas. Shaw uses critics’ and audience reactions here to suggest that, ultimately, issues of authenticity and reverence are perhaps less important to audiences (and filmmakers) than nostalgic and idealised representations of subversive celebrity and musical eras. Jilly Boyce Kay considers the historical debates and controversies surrounding the BBC’s Question Time. This chapter moves away from historiographical accounts, which largely focus on the topical debate programme’s male presenters, and thus reduce arguments to those of a masculinist nature even while considering the under-representation of women. Instead, Kay concentrates on the position of key female personnel (notably editors and producers) to consider the programme as a site of unequal power, competition and gender politics, and discusses Question Time as representative of similar struggle and inequality across the wider public political sphere. Personal memoirs and other archival print materials are used to illustrate the chasm between male and female power, influence and opinion throughout the history of the show’s production. Considering the programme across the decades in which it has been broadcast highlights how gendered power relations consistently change over time, yet always remain unequal. Thomas Joseph Watson uses a series of three documentary films, the Paradise Lost trilogy, to consider the possibility of a construction of history itself through the cinematic form. The films follow the cases of three West Memphis teenagers accused of murdering three young boys, charting events over eighteen years: from initial investigations and their subsequent incarceration, to the eventual release of the accused. Watson

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describes how the films were fundamental in both critiquing the American judicial system and contributing to the eventual conclusion of the case itself, often using unprecedented or previously unaccepted methods of documentary filmmaking. In significantly shaping events surrounding the case and its ultimate results, Paradise Lost can be seen to challenge both the expectations and conventions of documentary, and the trilogy asks us at once to not only reconsider historical “fact”, but its representation as well. Part V is concerned with the impact of new technologies on cinema and television histories – both on- and off-screen. Bringing the collection into the digital age, Abby Waysdorf considers how both technological developments in the video industry and the creation of online communities have helped to form television canons. Extensive television series such as The X-Files or Star Trek: The Next Generation were once available for repeated viewing by the average fan primarily via syndicated televisual reruns, before owning an entire series became possible (if somewhat costly) with DVD, and the later advent of VoD made watching at will entirely affordable and accessible. Simultaneously, the growth of the online population, and the internet as a location for the “savvy” television viewer, has provided a forum for the discussion and endorsement of long cancelled cult TV shows. Waysdorf uses the specific example of the popular culture website The AV Club’s “TV Club Classic” section to show how professional reviewers and increasingly critically-minded fans come together in analysis and debate of available series, canonising “worthy” shows and cementing and sustaining their credibility and appeal. Vanessa Jackson’s chapter considers the role of digital and especially social media in creating and managing community archives through a case study of the Pebble Mill Project. Jackson, as a former employee of the once prolific but now defunct BBC studio in Birmingham, founded a website and associated Facebook group to document accounts of production and working cultures at the studio. Her project exemplifies the potential for archives set up outside of the institutional domain, namely the preservation of historical accounts which may otherwise be lost, allowing for a wider selection of people’s memories and accounts, and the preservation of artefacts (photographs in particular) perhaps otherwise considered unworthy inclusions for more official archives. Questions regarding accuracy and the reliability of sources are discussed, and the collaborative nature of the project is also considered with regards to both its benefits and potential drawbacks. Ultimately, the project illustrates how informal digital archives built over social media can assist media historians in accessing previously “hidden” histories.

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Concluding this section, and the book, by shifting the attention back to film, Adam Gallimore considers how technological developments in contemporary cinema can affect the fictional representation of historical events. Focussing on digital editing and filming practices, this chapter draws examples from a number of recent films, with a particular emphasis on The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005) and Public Enemies (Michael Mann, 2009), to illustrate a more subjective approach to historical representation. Adopting digital practices and employing modern stylistic devices can evoke a more “realistic” tone and complicate subjectivity – in turn offering new forms of narrative construction and ways to address the audience. New technologies, Gallimore argues, allow filmmakers to recount history as a particular narrative of past events, outside of the conventions of classical filmmaking. As illustrated in this introduction, the chapters which follow encompass a wide range of topics and a variety of approaches to their discussion. Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches is, in itself, a historical document: one that reflects a specific moment in the study of cinema and television and their institutions, and one that challenges historical fixity, however approached.

Bibliography Brunsdon, Charlotte. 1997. Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes. London: Routledge. Chapman, James. 2003. Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present. London: Reaktion Books. Ellis, John. 1992. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura. 2007. “Introduction: Experimental British Television”. In Experimental British Television, ed. Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton, 1-16. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wheatley, Helen. 2007. “Introduction: Re-viewing Television Histories”. In Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography, ed. Helen Wheatley, 1-12. London: I. B. Tauris. White, Hadyn. 1992. “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth”. Probing the Limits of Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 37-53.

PART I: NEW MEANINGS, NEW METHODS

CHAPTER ONE TV AND CINEMA: WHAT FORMS OF HISTORY DO WE NEED? JOHN ELLIS

Moving image and sound, the media of cinema and television, have a brief past when compared to most other human activities. But the question of their histories, what they might be and how to tell them, is now a pressing one. The old models are no longer working well: it is becoming harder to mount a “history of film” even though the first attempt at a comprehensive audiovisual Story of Film (2012) has only recently appeared. The task becomes ever more daunting, not simply because more works continue to be produced and more of what was produced in the past is rediscovered. It is not a problem of growing corpuses; it is a problem of systemic change. There is now much more to moving image and sound than cinema and television. New media appear, and so the old are remediated. New histories therefore have to explain and account for features that the old histories took for granted, including fundamental features like the length of a feature film or the nature of a TV schedule. In this context, we need to ask what forms of history are now appropriate for cinema and television, and what forms will be appropriate for new audiovisual media. History is a branch of storytelling, one of the central features of our culture. Historical narratives are distinct as narratives only because they depend on evidence; otherwise their cultural place is similar to that of fictional narratives. Story-telling spectacularises what it tells, as much in verbal accounts as audiovisual ones. To tell a story is to package up into an acceptable form that which is difficult in life; to put up there on the screen the things that we prefer not to face down here. Storytelling abstracts and externalises, making other the people, the behaviours, the times and places that we live in. Storytelling, whether fictional or historical, is a practice of ordering and attribution of meaning. Stories bring structure to events which often appear chaotic to those experiencing them. A narrative provides a sense of ending: a point from which all the

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actions within the narrative finally “make sense”. The ending of a narrative attributes meaning retrospectively, reordering the elements into a satisfying whole. The ending of a narrative also has a moral function: it allows—or even insists—on judgements of human behaviour, on good and evil, on adequacy or inadequacy, on mistakes and their subsequent correction. Bad deeds may often remain unpunished in life, but storytelling allows the retribution that the ordinary way of the world is too compromised to allow. Narratives also permit a distinctive point of view to their users. A viewer or reader often has a superior view to that of any one of the characters, and sometimes even that of all the characters. This superior viewpoint is not necessarily one of omniscience: any detective or suspense narrative involves the withholding of information from the user. Sometimes a character can be “ahead” of the viewer or reader. Narratives depend on differential knowledge during their progress towards their ending, and the user is as caught in this play as any of the characters. However, the ending exists only for the reader or viewer: it makes sense for the observer. The user of a narrative is the point where the narrative makes sense. The characters, with the rest of their “lives” to lead, do not necessarily perceive the ending as an ending at all. For the user, however, there are no more pages; the film runs off the spool; the file is used up. The ending of a narrative is the point of final meaning-making. The function of narratives lies in this moment. Narratives attribute meaning and order to events whose meaning often eludes the fictional participants. In doing so, they explain the world and provide insight into hidden logics of human activity. This is why storytelling is such an important, popular and enduring social activity. Historical narratives depend on evidence and do not have recourse to invention, as fiction often does. However, historical narratives are no different in their retrospective attribution of meaning and moral order to events. Historical narratives create meaning, order, causality and structure. They are also no different in their creation of a superior viewpoint for their users. Historical narratives are, however, even more explicit than fiction in their explorations of causality. Just as the classic denouement of the country house murder mystery is the gathering of the characters for the detective’s final explanation, so too do historians gather all their users for the final explication: the balance of forces, the attribution of responsibilities, the reflection on the role of the actions of individuals, the examination of underlying causes. Histories explain past events by gathering and organising evidence of that past. So perhaps it is useful to begin an examination of the possible

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histories of film and television by asking what moving images and sounds themselves provide in the way of evidence. Film and television artefacts are often surrounded by documentation (although the archival researcher is usually aware of the destruction of much more that would have been useful). But this documentation is no different from the written sources that have long been the staple of historical studies: published writings, business records, accounts, blueprints, letters, oral history interviews etc. However, moving images are new and difficult for the study of history, so I shall concentrate my attention on film itself as historical evidence.

Evidence From the point of view of historiography, many films may purport to be fictional, but all films are documentaries. To say that “all films are documentaries” is by no means an original observation. Indeed a simple Google search reveals that this idea has been attributed at various times to: Bill Nichols, Jean-Luc Godard, Goddard, Werner Herzog, Chris Marker, Jean-Marie Straub… all of whom, with the possible exception of Goddard, could well have said it. Before examining the idea that all films are documentaries, therefore, it is necessary to observe that the imprecision about the source of this idea reveals the sine qua non of any history. History has to be based on research and on the most thorough examination of all available evidence, rather than plausibility or the nearest available reference. Therein lies the essential difference between history and story; and the reason for the time-consuming labour of historians. Accuracy, or adequacy to the evidence, is not simply a matter of accumulating everything that seems relevant, or knowing where to look for more. It is also about finding a way back into the perspective of the time. In order to elucidate or explain the underlying forces that finally made sense of a period, it is also necessary to develop a feel for the experiential chaos of the moment. This can also be a route to discovering the forgotten (rather than hidden) causes. The recent flush of historical research around British TV in the 1980s (and particularly the “radical” Channel 4) provides a good example.1 The early reception of Channel 4’s output as either “Channel Swore” or “Channel Bore” is well-known. At the time, this sense of unease and inadequacy was attributed to the programmes and their makers. The viewing of examples from the archive 1

See for instance, Weissmann 2009, Johnson 2012 and The Channel 4 and British Film Culture project at the University of Portsmouth (http://www.port.ac.uk/research/cccr/projects/c4_bfc/).

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will often confirm this (though an aspect of the current research consists of revaluing texts dismissed too glibly at the time). However, the channel itself also had a role in creating an impression of amateurism and inadequacy, and this tends to be forgotten. A dispute between the actor’s union Equity and Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) over the payment of residual fees had produced a boycott by Equity members of spot advertising on Channel 4 (Brown 2007, 51-2). Advertising was sold by the ITV companies on Channel 4’s behalf, so the management of Channel 4 were powerless to resolve the dispute. Yet this dispute had a marked effect on the look and feel of the early days of broadcasting. With no mainstream advertising available, Channel 4 breaks were filled with a mixture of “back in a moment” cards and spot commercials produced without actors, often featuring “have a go” company executives themselves. These already dubious works were repeated beyond reason, so the overall look of early Channel 4 was of amateurism, despite the quality of significant amounts of its programming. A close understanding of the “look” of the early Channel 4 reveals a neglected historical fact of TV in that era: the role of organised labour. The role of talent organisations and trade unions was important at other levels as well. It governed the access that could be given to would-be programme makers with no existing professional experience. At the time the technicians’ union Association of Cinema and Television Technicians (ACTT, now known as BECTU) operated a closed shop in key technical areas including that of director. The power of ACTT lay in its ability to “black out” a channel by calling out on strike the technicians who controlled the broadcast signal. They had already done this successfully in 1979 when ITV was blacked out for eleven weeks. So Channel 4’s management was justifiably afraid that such a tactic could be used again in the event that a programme made with non-union labour was to be broadcast. So non-union labour was used judiciously and in consultation with the relevant ACTT officials. This produced, among other phenomena, the “Workshop Agreement” which lay behind much of the radical work that appeared on Channel 4 in slots like The Eleventh Hour (1982-88). Trade union activity of this kind is no longer a major feature of politics in the UK. The conditions of trade union activity have been fundamentally changed by legislation in the 1980s and 1990s, and trade union membership has drastically declined in the face of casualistion of work. The way that it permeated the early 1980s, and the major imprint it had on the early Channel 4, are now easily missed by historians who are more attentive to other matters. However justifiable my claim might seem to be, however, the evidence for it still requires reassessment. My assertion of

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Chapter One

this aspect of Channel 4’s history is based on memory (including of some of those adverts: “Go bag a Bickerton” being one). Memory is merely one kind of evidential raw material for a historian, to be balanced against all other forms of evidence. The evidence here should include an examination of the texture of the broadcast stream of Channel 4 in 1982. Recordings of the broadcast stream (as opposed to individual programmes) are rare, of course, but in this case they would provide evidence of the overall visual poverty of a Channel 4 with ad-breaks deprived of the normal range of spot advertising. This case demonstrates, therefore, that the historian’s work depends on the balancing of different evidences (from the feel of the broadcast flow to the broad political context) to enable the search for causes neglected or overlooked by modern observers.

All films are documentaries To repeat, then, from the point of view of historiography, many films may purport to be fictional, but all films are documentaries. The truth of this observation becomes clear in the examination of fiction feature films. Such films document in three ways: in their performances; in the construction of their fictions; and in the evidence they provide in unnoticed ways. All fiction films are documentaries of people acting: this was Godard’s insight. Films are full of people pretending to be other people, and spaces pretending to be other spaces. The pretences have to be plausible in order to work, and plausibility depends on the prevailing beliefs of the time: its ideologies as some would put it. So fiction films will provide an insight into the regimes of personhood that were prevalent in our period. They will show what was considered public, private and offlimits completely, the aspects of human life that were considered necessary in order to present a person on the screen. Movies articulate the “structures of feeling” of a time, as Raymond Williams put it so well (Williams 1961; see also Matthews 2001). So they will show to the future what constituted plausible behaviour for our period. Already we are finding styles of acting from the 1930s to be “implausible” or “theatrical”, especially in British films where accent and enunciation carry class connotations. Most researchers tend to ignore these aspects of older films and concentrate on the fictions themselves, so a survey of accent and performance styles is yet to be constructed. It would have to be informed by the scattered written sources that record contemporary reactions to the voices and performances in specific films. Films are also documentaries of their period in the sense that their narratives are rooted in their times. This does not, however, mean that

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17

social trends can be read off from groups of movies as is sometimes the case with social studies of movie genres (see, for instance, Geraghty 2009). There are too many levels of mediation, from the fashions in genres to the worldview of the particular social strata that created and marketed the movies. The relationship to social trends is at best a metaphorical one: points of comparison may exist between the narration of a movie and social developments. But comparison does not imply connection, any more than to say “I smell a rat” indicates the presence of rodents or the exercise of the sense of smell. Movies are rooted in their times because of their worldview rather than their ostensible content. They demonstrate the general preoccupations of the times, the limits of what was thinkable, the horizons of common sense and accepted belief: all of which framed the actions of individuals and groups at the time. In short, movies are rooted in their times because of what went unnoticed in them at the time, rather than any message that they claim to carry or are alleged to carry. Other material also goes unnoticed when a movie or a TV show is newly minted. Later viewers may notice the happenstance of the shooting, the ephemeral things in the background, which were taken for granted at the time. The pounds, shillings and pence; the London Routemaster buses; the clothes that people are wearing, the food they are pretending to eat: all these gain in significance as movies age. This is the grain of the times, the unnoticed and the everyday, which have a powerful evocative effect in retrospect. At its most powerful, this can invert the reading of a movie. The background becomes the foreground, the clothes become more important than the wearer of them. In addition, there are the materials that are caught by the involuntary action of camera and microphone which were not eliminated in the edit. These chance actions in the margins of the frame can become more fascinating than the action at the centre. This way lies both nostalgia (the regretful recall of a lost past) and deconstruction (the reinterpretation of texts away from the confines of their original context). At this point, then, we leave behind the idea that all films are documentaries, to find another notion equally productive of historical approaches: the idea that all films are texts.

All films are texts Film and TV texts continue to be enjoyed and examined long after their first release. They remain productive of meaning, and increasingly that productivity becomes an activity of reinterpretation. Texts can be reused away from their original contexts of interpretation, either in the knowledge of that context or even with little grasp of their origins. Much

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reinterpretation takes the form “they didn’t notice but NOW I can see”, a deliberate reading against the grain which often reveals some of the unnoticed aspects that defined the readability of the film on its first release. Interpretations that genuinely reuse a text without much knowledge of its origin are possible but less frequent: more often than not the text simply becomes banal or incomprehensible. This is usually the case for the complex and complete film or TV text: the longeurs of construction usually discourage reuses that are historically unaware. However, this is much less the case for fragments of texts. Shots, sequences sounds and lines of dialogue can be used for all kinds of purposes beyond their original textual context. Digital availabilities have intensified this process as it is much easier to retrieve archival material and to reincorporate the desired fragments into a new text. Shots from feature films of the 1930s and 1940s are often used in archive-based programmes to provide evidence of the look or feel of a period, or to illustrate aspects of the commentary in a generalised way. I am sometimes taken aback by recognising the actors, at least, and sometimes the actual film: the blurred line between fact and fiction seems to have been crossed. There is nothing to differentiate these particular shots as being derived from fiction rather than documentary. However, given the habitual use of reconstruction in documentaries of the period, this may not be a fundamental problem. But it demonstrates the problems that could emerge as fragments of previous texts are more commonly reused. This is one of the results of a general digital empowerment in the field of the audiovisual. Digitisation and online availabilities may seem immensely empowering because they allow us to see what has hitherto been impossible to access. But these processes are no respecters of history. Digitisation implies a radical dehistoricisation. It reforms all texts as data, stripping away all the signs of analogue specificity which carry clues to the original textual nature of the footage. It becomes extremely difficult to establish the original technical platform and institutional context of a piece of footage once it has become digital data. If you are lucky, this information is diverted into metadata, which may or may not accompany the data on its onward journey. It is becoming difficult to trace whether a production was made on film or tape, for broadcast or for public screening, for a general or restricted audience. When an extract is taken from this new digital form for new digital uses, then the relationship to origin becomes more difficult or even impossible to trace. Digital access also reshapes what used to be called audiences. In digital information systems there are no audiences: everyone is a user. Analogue processes brought absolute physical limitations: transfer from one platform

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19

to another was laborious even when it could be done. Any manipulation for new purposes required special skills and equipment. Digital systems have drastically reduced (though emphatically have not eliminated) such restrictions. The result is that audiences have become users. The social organisation of individuals to constitute a particular form of viewership has fallen away. Systems of organised viewing are being replaced by individual users accessing material in circumstances that they define for themselves. So it is possible for a user to access footage over a range of devices in a multitude of physical situations: they use the footage how they want. They do not have to queue up to watch it in a cinema or to wait for the broadcast slot (two typical ways of organising individuals into a viewing audience). Users can also carry out any number of operations whose designation with terms such as “rip” and “burn” imply some kind of physical change rather than simple consumption. This process is often subject to restrictions, many of which are motivated by the desire to maintain the integrity of the text or to limit the circulation that the digital enables. For the purposes of this argument, however, the one indisputable result of the transformation of audiences into users is that it is far more difficult for audiovisual creatives to ensure textual integrity for the artefacts that they produce. It seems as though the integrity of the text is under threat. However, it is worth remembering that this has always been the case with cinema and TV. No broadcaster could ever ensure that people at home would be watching a programme from beginning to end, and broadcast texts show the marks of this realisation in their segmentations, repetitions and breaks. All of these established features of broadcast texts are attempts to ensure that they remain comprehensible when consumed without much regard to textual integrity. Classic cinema practices included the radical cutting down of films for reruns as second features; the institution of continuousrun cinemas meant that audiences could wander in and out when they felt like it. Practices such as the director’s cut indicate that the limits of textuality have long been malleable within traditional cinema. The uses to which archive footage has been put in TV documentaries often does not respect textual origins, as we have seen. These are, however, all professional practices, undertaken within an organised industry by an elite of professionals. Digital processes now mean that it is easier for anyone to cut and paste pieces footage from one text to another; this is no longer the province of a professional elite. The problem, then, is that anyone can mess around with a text with no regard to its integrity. Previously, this activity was subject to professional standards and limits, but is so no

20

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longer. Those who simply regret this process are regretting the decline in importance of an elite: it also establishes fresh uses.

All films are data Digitisation means that films and TV become data rather than texts. Their potential uses are no longer determined more or less absolutely by their origins. How does this impact on the processes of researching and telling their histories? When footage becomes data, it can be used well beyond the confines of the entertainment industries. The scanning, classification and searching of old movies and TV means that the footage can be used as data for medical research: they offer a wealth of visual and audio data on the ageing process which have not yet been explored; they offer geophysical data; information on the organisation of urban spaces etc. Moving image data has rich potential for such forms of reuse, but only if its origins are understood. The radical implication of regarding all films as data is to say that all films are equal. The digital says that all data is just data: it provides no inherent way of discriminating between qualities of data. So history is needed to reassert the intrinsic nature of the data being used. History reasserts the metadata which gives sense to data by asserting its origins and its limitations. Any use of digital data in research requires that the parameters of the data are clearly understood: the conditions of production of the data have to be made clear. Otherwise, inappropriate questions will be asked of the data, and unsupportable conclusions may be drawn. A site such as http://www.euscreen.eu presents much European material from the period when news was shot on film. It therefore includes many sequences that are now silent: the place for the lead-in commentary by the news presenter. This often provided contextual evidence that is now lost; it also gives an erroneous impression of television at the time. We should equally be aware of how styles of editing have changed, especially in cinema. The speed of cutting increased, rendering old footage pedestrian to modern eyes. As David Bordwell (2006) has pointed out, this is more than a question of shot length. Techniques of the spatialisation have been developed, allowing more fluid reinterpretations of space, eliminating the need for an overall viewpoint in favour of a constant supply of details from which the overall space of the action is simply inferred. This in turn allows for a greater compression or expansion of time. So we can begin to speculate that moving images are beginning to develop a different way of making sense of space and time which may have profound effects on their data value to other forms of research.

TV and Cinema: What Forms of History Do We Need?

21

A new kind of history is needed, one that, fortunately, is already being created. This does not interpret the texts so much as explain the circumstances in which material was produced and for which it was produced. So this is a history of the technologies and cultures of both production and consumption. We are losing touch with the practices of the entertainment cinema of the 1930s and the 1940s with its use of live attractions as well as cinematic spectacle (live performances, talent shows, bingo and other competitions) and its emphasis on creature comforts (the seats where you could be served with afternoon tea; the double seats for the romantic), all of which were important in constructing an audience ready to see a film, that is to concentrate on the screen and the narrative rather than their physical and emotional problems. If this was an escapist cinema, then that escape came as the result of a substantial level of cultural work beyond that of making movies. The movies themselves had an explicitness and address that aimed to weld disparate viewers together into an audience, but more was needed in exhibition practices. All of this cultural work has disappeared from modern cinematic practice. What once was everyday has become remarkable and surprising: the cult of Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975); the singalongs with Mamma Mia! (2008); the applause and tears at Les Misérables (2012). The history of the circumstance of consumption is more a feature of film studies in the USA than the UK, despite the pioneering work of Annette Kuhn and others (see, for example, Kuhn 2002 and Griffiths 2012). Robert C. Allen’s work on the cinemas of North Carolina goes into fine grain detail about the evolution of cinemas in Wilmington, showing that the highest paid cinema employee at the Joyland Theatre in 1910 was Dessie Jones a 13 year old pianist, as well as the ugly effects of segregation on the viewing opportunities of black audiences well into the 1950s.2 For television, my new research project called ADAPT (The Adoption of new Technological Arrays in the Production of Broadcast Television) will attempt to produce an account of the technological and organisational bases for television production from 1960, emphasising the predominant styles of material that they produced. These are histories which have been called forth by their times: in previous decades, the history of technologies or exhibition practices were seen as rather marginal activities, the province of the amateur and the collector. The move to the centre of such marginalised interests then raises the further question of the historian’s motivation for their work. 2

For details of this research, see “Mapping movie going in North Carolina” (http://docsouth.unc.edu/gtts/).

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Why this history? Film and television history is, in part, an activity of intelligent revaluation. It allows discrimination to take place, prioritising what should be rescued from the back of the digital vault and returned to attention. This revaluation will be based on principles which should be made explicit. It may take the form of arguing that a particular body of work is important because it fits into an established canon and should take its place there. Or again, it should cause a reinspection of the values underlying a particular canon. Another justification for revaluation is that the body of work, however defined, is newly relevant to us: it is relevant to our lives as citizens, enriching to experience this emotional catharsis, to meet these characters, to understand this kind of a story. Whatever argument is made, it has to be explicit: historians do not work simply for themselves, their appeal is to the attention of others. There is a second motive, which governs the historian’s choice of a particular area of study. In early stages of film and TV history, perhaps, the luxury of choice was severely restricted by difficulties in accessing material to study, and the limited number of existing accounts from which to develop a theme. This is no longer the case, so the historian has to be aware of their motives for undertaking the study of a particular period or body of work. It is remarkable how many researchers are interested in the time of their birth or immediately before. There seems to be a vogue for doctoral studies of the 1970s and 1980s for instance, and I am aware that I am attracted particularly to the cinema of the period immediately before my birth. Anyone acquainted with Freud’s essay on the Family Romance (1909) will recognise this as a fascination with myths and explanations of origin: where did I come from, why was I born, and are my origins in some way problematic or not as they have been explained to me? Historical work needs both a public and a personal justification if it is to be successful.

Why history? The final set of motivations relates to the object “history” itself. History has a greater presence in some cultures than others. The USA, for instance, could be seen as a culture on the run from its history. The suppression of the foundational genocide of Native Americans is still evident, and many aspects of American culture are still influenced by the heritage of waves of immigrants eager to remake and forget. Indeed, the popular notion of individual freedom and self-determination could be seen as dependent on

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the downgrading of historical accounts, since they tend to show that actions are impelled by forces that, at the time, remain obscure to those who have to act. Other cultures, including Europe and China, tend to reach back into their past to provide justifications for present actions. History often lies at the core of the self-account that attempts to guide and justify actions. These will often be heavily influenced by myths of origin. This again will provide a public justification: a more personal justification also exists in the psychic function of history. We need history (rather than story) as a means of reconciliation with the ceaseless processes of change that take place both around us and within ourselves. With change comes loss, inevitably. Objects and neighbourhoods are destroyed, friends disappear, important causes lose their urgency. And with any loss comes a backward pull of regret. Yet their images and sounds remain: the recorded sounds and images of those pasts now lost can still be accessed. The opening of the archives makes this even more possible. These sounds and images have a particular power because they capture the accidental and the incidental as well as what we saw at the time as important. The sense of loss that they provoke can sometimes take us unawares. The role of history here is an important one. At its most pathological, the sense of loss can lead individuals (and maybe groups or even societies) into a reluctance to act that can, at its worst, be debilitating. Well-researched history can provide a counterbalance to this disabling level of loss. History can demonstrate that change is a ceaseless process, not only a destructive one. Change produces the situations whose loss we regret: this is why we trace complex causalities. History also brings forward the elements of any situation that did not figure in the picture, and the elements whose disappearance we celebrate rather than mourn.

Bibliography “Mapping movie going in North Carolina”. Going to the Show. http://docsouth.unc.edu/gtts/. Bordwell, David. 2006. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown, Maggie. 2007. A Licence to Be Different: the Story of Channel 4. London: BFI. Freud, Sigmund. 1909 [1959]. “Family romances”. In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 9, 253-241. London: Hogarth Press. Geraghty, Lincoln. 2009. American Science Fiction Film. London: Berg.

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Griffiths, Trevor. 2012. The Cinema and Cinema-going in Scotland, 18961950. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Johnson, Catherine. 2012. Branding Television. London: Routledge. Kuhn, Annette. 2002. An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I. B. Tauris Matthews, Sean. 2001. “Change and theory in Raymond Williams's Structure of Feeling”. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 10 (2): 179-194. University of Portsmouth (Centre for Cultural and Creative Research). Channel 4 and British Film Culture. http://www.port.ac.uk/research/cccr/projects/c4_bfc/. Weissmann, Elke. 2012. “Drama counts: uncovering Channel 4's history with quantitative research methods”. New Review of Film and Television Studies 7 (2): 189-207. Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus.

PART II: RECONTEXTUALISING CINEMA AND TELEVISION HISTORY

CHAPTER TWO “WE MUST GO ABOUT IT IN OUR OWN WAY AND HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL”: THE BRITISH FILM INDUSTRY AND THE METROPOLITAN POLICE PRESS BUREAU, 1919-1938 ALEX ROCK

This chapter investigates the methods employed by the Metropolitan Police (hereafter ‘Met’) to manipulate cultural productions, making use of source materials held at the National Archives, Kew, which detail the use of public relations within the force between the two twentieth-century world wars. In doing so, this chapter builds upon extant research by a body of scholars who have indicated the importance of studying the methods by which police forces manipulate the production of culture (Chibnall 1977; Reiner 1992; Chermak and Weiss 2005; Mawby 2010). One such method, now commonplace, involves the employment of a Public Information Officer (PIO) to execute public relations (PR) policy. While the aforementioned scholars have fruitfully researched the influence of the PIO role within police forces, in a number of wildly differing contexts and time periods, the history of the PIO role itself remains a neglected object of study. The present chapter addresses this oversight by providing a history of the formation of the Met Press Bureau in 1919 and its early dealings with the press and the British film industry. Established as a conduit for information between the Met and the press as a means of ostensibly improving transparency, the Bureau instead became a mechanism for control of written and visual media. It was not until the Second World War that the opportunities for collaboration between the police and the press were fully realised, with success for both parties. The Met Commissioner responsible for the formation of the Press Bureau, Nevil Macready, reflected on its purpose in his memoirs:

The British Film Industry and the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau

27

Another innovation that was started during the year 1919 was the institution of a press room at Scotland Yard, where at certain hours each day pressmen could get reliable information on any subject of public interest connected with police activities in the metropolis. The leakage which occurs in all public offices was very noticeable in police circles when I first went to the Yard, and I found that it was partly due to the temptations offered to the police by people connected with the press, who paid either in cash or in kind for the information, often inaccurate, which they extracted. One well-known man in newspaper circles told me that this source of information cost him £1,000 a year. From the police point of view it was all wrong that officers should take money, or its equivalent, on any pretence whatever, as, while the information given was at times harmless enough, the principle was vicious and might at any moment lead to a public scandal. (Macready 1924, 416)

Apart from its stated intention to resolve an endemic culture of bribery within the Met, the Press Bureau also proposed to improve transparency between the machinery of the state and its subjects. Macready mentions that the Press Bureau “helped in some measure to dissipate the clouds of mystery in which Scotland Yard was supposed to be enveloped” (Macready 1924, 417). Publicly, the Commissioner and the Home Office were open about these two purposes upon which the Press Bureau was founded, but private internal correspondence indicates that the Bureau aspired to manage public perception of the police. Instead of maintaining accountability through transparently presenting the work of Scotland Yard to the media, the Press Bureau instead managed the release of data in order to construct an ideologically loaded depiction of the Met in the press. On 27 September 1919, Commissioner Macready wrote to Sir Edward Troup, Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, to request permission to form the Press Bureau. To be housed in a basement room at Scotland Yard and staffed on a part-time basis by Macready’s secretary, George Rivers-Bodilly, the proposal to form the Bureau indicates the controlling ideas behind its formation. Macready wrote: I understand that, in the past, the policy has rather been to discourage communications with the Press, and the result has been that certain Papers spend sums of money to procure information which is often inaccurate, and which – especially in intricate cases – tends to hamper the Police in their work.1 1

Sir Nevil Macready, letter to Sir Edward Troup, 27 September 1919. HO 45/24442, Public Record Office, The National Archives (hereafter PRO TNA). Note: all references of this sort will be contained in footnotes from here on.

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The introduction of the Press Bureau must be situated within the unique context of post-war Britain. After the trauma of the Great War, various British institutions—including the Bank of England—were attempting to introduce Press Offices and it was felt that a similar body might assist in dissipating the culture of secrecy surrounding Scotland Yard.2 The Police Strikes of 1918 and the ensuing campaign for the unionisation of the Metropolitan Police provide further reasons as to why Macready chose to accommodate the press: in calling a strike, the banned National Union of Police and Prison Officers (NUPPO) had despatched Macready’s predecessor, Sir Edward Henry. By getting the press “on side”, Macready may have speculated that he could manipulate national sympathies against police unionisation. It was also during the latter half of the First World War that the propaganda potential of cinema for the government had been realised: On 28 May 1917 Topical Budget, a minor British newsreel with an audience of little more than half a million, found itself taken over by the British government, renamed War Office Official Topical Budget, and over the next year and a half widening that audience to over three million at home and abroad. It became the chief channel for British film propaganda. (McKernan 1992, 19)

For Luke McKernan, the takeover of the newsreel provides “one of the first instances of the authorities accepting the popularity of the cinema and making it work for them” (ibid., 28). The Topical Budget was founded by William Jeapes of the Topical Film Company. Jeapes and Topical were crucial in developing cinema’s domestic propaganda potential; Topical was sold to the newspaper magnate Edward Hulton in 1919 and was immediately awarded the task of producing an official film of the activities of Scotland Yard. The “Official Film”, as it was known during production, provides the earliest example of collaboration between an independent film production company and a domestic state control agency, and its primary purpose was to improve the image of the police following a period of negative press coverage involving strikes, ‘Third Degree’ interrogation practices and a culture of police bribery and corruption (Carter Wood 2010).

2

The Bank of England—traditionally an institution which viewed the press with some skepticism—began to manage its public image in the years immediately following World War I by control-releasing certain information to the press in order to construct a positive image of the monetary policies introduced in this period (Sayers 1976, 373-85).

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An article by Herbert Ponting was published in the Manchester Guardian on 11 September 1917 concerning the educational possibilities of cinema and the methods by which the British educational system may make use of it.3 This article was passed to the War Cabinet and proved the inspiration for Sir Edward Carson, a Conservative Minister and Unionist leader, to organise a conference in January 1918 to “consider certain questions connected with the utilization of Cinematograph films for purposes of Propaganda”.4 The government subsequently proposed the introduction of liaison officers to be appointed by “Departments and Committees which are interested in the production or utilization of Cinematograph films”.5 It is clear then, with regards to the nationalisation of Topical Budget, the January 1918 conference and the introduction of Press Offices at both the Bank of England and the Met, that a movement towards the manipulation of cultural productions by governmental control agencies was gaining momentum.

“Interviewed by a responsible official”: The transparency/control dichotomy Despite this, the relationship between the media and the state was fractious. The memo proposing the formation of the Press Bureau makes this clear: I propose, therefore, to set aside one room in Scotland Yard where, at any hour of the day, Press Representatives will be interviewed by a responsible official, be given information on matters on which they seek it, and be supplied with such Police information as it may be of advantage to make public.6

The relationship between transparency and control is perceptible in Commissioner Macready’s proposal and, as borne out by the statistical research of Chermak and Weiss, is still of relevance today. Instead of acting as a means of improving transparency and accountability by openly disclosing non-prejudicial information to the free press, the Press Bureau 3

Herbert Ponting, “Education and the Film: Its Place in the Schools”, Manchester Guardian, 11 September 1917. HO 45/10960/340327, PRO TNA. 4 Sir Edward Carson, letter to the Home Office and Board of Trade, 11 January 1918. HO 45/10960/340327 (see also BT 13/83), PRO TNA. 5 Lieutenant Colonel John Buchan, letter to the Home Office, 28 January 1918. HO 45/10960/340327, PRO TNA. 6 Macready, letter to Troup, 27 September 1919. HO 45/24442, PRO TNA.

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was instead founded upon a principle of control wherein the flow of “such Police information as it may be of advantage to make public”—essentially, propagandist image-management data—was mediated through a partial arm of the establishment. The Bureau was influenced by the prevalent tradition among the higher echelons of the Met of recruiting from the armed forces during the interwar period, and as a result, the Bureau’s impact upon the written and visual media was largely censorial. The illicit NUPPO railed against this recruitment tendency. Macready, for example, was a General in the British Expeditionary Force in France during World War I, immediately prior to his appointment as Met Commissioner. Despite this, Macready possessed a liberal arts background; his upbringing as the son of the noted stage actor William Charles Macready and maternal grandson of an artist had instilled in him a respect for the arts, and he was a committed amateur dramatist.7 He did, however, follow in his predecessor’s footsteps by continuing to appoint former armed forces officers to influential Met positions. George Rivers-Bodilly was a Captain in the British Army and had been awarded several medals in a distinguished World War I military campaign. He retired from the Army in January 1919 to take a post with Macready as his Private Secretary before moving on to the Press Bureau. Rivers-Bodilly’s time at the Press Bureau was characterised by the refusal of almost all press and film company requests, as evidenced by the extant Press Bureau ledgers and files relating to this period. Before the start of the Second World War, only one film was made with the official endorsement of the Met. Topical Film Company’s Scotland Yard 1921: For the King, the Law, the People (Edmund DistinMaddick, 1921) was considered a failure critically and internally within the Met. Using the Press Bureau files, I will now move on to examine, with explicit reference to the “official film” Scotland Yard 1921, as well as a subsequent “unofficial” production, and notable filmmakers and producers who wanted to depict the police in their films, the early attempts at collaboration between the state and the British film industry in order to demonstrate the markedly anti-media stance of the Metropolitan Police in the interwar period.

7

Macready Snr was a leading stage actor and a close friend of Charles Dickens. His diaries provide an excellent insight into the Victorian theatrical scene (Trewin 1967).

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“The official film” The first film made with the express permission and assistance of the Met did not, strangely, fall under the control of George Rivers-Bodilly. This may have been because of the fact that the seeds for the project were sown on 4 September 1919, preceding Macready’s official request for the formation of the Press Bureau by just under four weeks.8 It is also indicative of the early Press Bureau’s limitations: it would appear that Rivers-Bodilly managed the relationship between the written press and the Met, with the relatively new form of visual media embodied by the newsreel and other cinematic narratives falling under the jurisdiction of Major Edmund Distin-Maddick, a pioneer of British cinema exhibition with—again—significant military experience. Distin-Maddick approached the Topical Film Company on the Met’s behalf, proposing the production of an official police film. William Jeapes, founder of Topical, agreed to the proposal put forward by Distin-Maddick: Conditionally that we have the exclusive right of distribution ... we shall be very pleased to undertake the manufacture of all films that you may produce and pay to the Commissioner 50% of all profits that may accrue from the distribution for the Commissioner to dispose of to such Police Charities as he may elect.9

The film to be taken, according to Topical, was to remain “under [the] direction” of Distin-Maddick, and the Commissioner was to be provided with a copy of the film.10 This degree of control may have led to the film’s failure; the filmmakers were ‘directed’ by the police’s PR machinery, and so any independent insight was denied to Topical. Correspondence between the Met and Topical makes it quite clear that the latter were considered contractors by senior Met figures. The film was completed by January 1921 and Commissioner William Horwood, Macready’s successor, composed the following for William Jeapes: Our first view of the Official Film yesterday was most satisfactory, and I am very much obliged for the kind assistance which Major Maddick tells me that you have rendered him.11

8

William Jeapes, letter to Major Edmund Distin-Maddick, 6 September 1920. MEPO 2/6207, PRO TNA. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Brigadier-General Sir William Horwood, letter to William Jeapes, 26 January 1921. MEPO 2/6207, PRO TNA.

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Any indication of artistry is lacking in Horwood’s response. The film, referred to simply as the Official Film, was produced under the direct control of Distin-Maddick, with the “kind assistance” of Topical. The proceeds from Scotland Yard 1921 were directly paid to the Met Commissioner’s Office whereby they were channelled into police benevolent funds.12 The film was not commissioned with the intention of providing insight into the machinations of the Met, or with improving transparency and accountability. The two Commissioners involved in the production of the film, Nevil Macready and William Horwood, chose to retain powerful and far-reaching direct control of the project with the intention of boosting the legitimacy of the Met and the coffers of the benevolent fund. The choice of filmmakers involved in the project— Distin-Maddick and Topical—again provides an example of this; they were as firmly entrenched within the British establishment as the Commissioners themselves. Scotland Yard 1921 did, however, foster a more collaborative relationship between the press and the police for the short publicity period leading up to the film’s release. Horwood even welcomed this, noting in a letter sent to Topical that “[a]ny help we can give in publicity for our mutual benefit we shall be glad to render”.13 Despite this openness, Horwood remained deeply suspicious of the press. On 9 March 1921, in preparation for Scotland Yard 1921’s trade show, Horwood sent the following letter to the editors of all national papers and certain highcirculation local newspapers: I have caused a film to be constructed at Scotland Yard showing some of the work of the Metropolitan Police ... I shall be most grateful if you will see that the subject is treated seriously and kindly, and so help our Public and our Force to appreciate one another.14

The letter concludes with an invitation for the press to see the film at the trade show. Its tone betrays the ideological sentiment behind the film; through embracing the technologies of the cinema and manipulating their

12

Horwood mentions, in a press release announcing the release of Scotland Yard 1921, that, “I have a fund at my disposal for police organisations which I hope this film will assist to swell”. (Brigadier-General Sir William Horwood, circular to the press, 9 March 1921. MEPO 2/6207, PRO TNA). 13 Brigadier-General Sir William Horwood, letter to William Jeapes, 26 January 1921. MEPO 2/6207, PRO TNA. 14 Brigadier-General Sir William Horwood, circular to the press, 9 March 1921. MEPO 2/6207, PRO TNA.

The British Film Industry and the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau

33

meaning-making potential, Horwood hoped to promote the social legitimacy of the police within British society. The letter indicates his fear of a poor reception for the film, and his polite insistence regarding the kind and serious treatment of the film thinly veils a threat to the press; to lose favour with the Met in the early days of official police-press relations risked losing any limited access to the official sources of law-and-order news. Horwood, in the circular, identifies himself as the author of the film (“I”) and reveals his sentiment that the press are an inconvenient buffer between the police and the public. The Times review published three days later demonstrates that Horwood’s polite intimidation proved successful: [Scotland Yard 1921] shows the daily routine of every member of the police force from the highest to the lowest. It is a fascinating record, and will give the public the unique opportunity of appreciating the work which is carried out by the force. The earlier sections of the film deal with the work of Scotland Yard and all its specialized branches, but later on the daily life of the constable from the first moment of his entry into the force is shown in detail. (Anon. 1921, 8)

The production of the film, as made explicit by Sir John Baird, UnderSecretary of State for the Home Department, in the opening speech given at the trade show, was motivated by similar ambitions that led to the formation of the Press Bureau: It is a Film of propaganda to show you citizens of the Metropolis and other places where the Film may be shown exactly what the Police do for you, to create a liaison between the Public and the Force, and to increase ... that kindness of feeling and thankfulness to our “Men in Blue”.15

This need to “create a liaison” between control agencies and British subjects necessitates the development of a relationship with the press, whether they be represented by the national or provincial newspapers or, as is the object of this chapter, the British film industry. However, in opening the doors to Scotland Yard, the Met Commissioner risked the ‘transparency’ of the free press outweighing the ‘control’ of the Met’s agency. John Baird’s choice of words is telling; he understands the need to improve the relationship between the police and the public but fails to mention the body represented by his audience—the press—who of necessity must facilitate the building of the relationship of accountability and acquiescence between the public and the police. His ignorance of this 15 Sir John Baird, draft speech ‘Concerning the Importance of Being A Policeman’. MEPO 2/6207, PRO TNA.

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requirement is emblematic of police policy towards the press throughout the interwar period. The control maintained at the expense of transparency in the making of Scotland Yard 1921 provides one example of this, but so too do other examples of correspondence between the Met and the British film industry. The film was considered a failure and disowned immediately after the advent of sound in British cinema. The Chief Constable of the Cumberland and Westmorland Constabulary wrote to the then-Commissioner, Viscount Byng, in February 1931, requesting a copy of Scotland Yard 1921 with which to illustrate a lecture he had been invited to give at a school.16 H. M. Howgrave-Graham, the Secretary to the Met, wrote in reply that the film “is out of date and as it was never regarded as a very successful or flattering production from our point of view, the Commissioner thinks that it is better forgotten”.17 By August 1933, Howgrave-Graham had decided that the film—the only surviving copy of which belonged to the Commissioner’s Office following a severe fire at Topical’s premises in 1924—should be removed from Scotland Yard. He wrote the following to the War Office: I have discovered in an old cupboard here an old police film which was made just after the war. It was a commercial failure and I don’t suppose anybody is very likely to want it again, but I feel that it should not be destroyed and I want to ask you whether you would take it and keep it for us in your store.18

A reply was not filed, and the film is considered lost. The failure of the film—judged presumably in terms of both profit and positive publicity— could be attributed to the control levied by the Met through the Commissioner’s Office; as demonstrated above, William Horwood was directly involved with the film, and answerable for its outcome. Scotland Yard 1921 provides an example of the state recognising the propaganda potential of the controlled cinematic depiction of its machinery, and also the concern surrounding the influence of the uncontrolled cinematic image. The failure of Scotland Yard 1921 to develop the public image of the Met, and subsequent controversies involving independent crime films 16

P. T. B. Browne, letter to the Viscount Byng of Remy, 10 February 1931. MEPO 2/6207, PRO TNA. 17 H. M. Howgrave-Graham, letter to P. T. B. Browne, 25 February 1931. MEPO 2/6207, PRO TNA. 18 H. M. Howgrave-Graham, letter to E. Foxen-Cooper, 29 August 1933. MEPO 2/6207, PRO TNA.

The British Film Industry and the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau

35

depicting Scotland Yard, may have prevented the Met and the Home Office from directly collaborating with the British film industry for the remainder of the interwar years.

Keeping the Secrets of Scotland Yard A month before the trade show of Scotland Yard 1921, advertisements began appearing in Kinematograph Weekly for an unrelated serial sharing similarities in both content and title with the Met’s official film. The sensationalist advertisements for this serial, which was produced by the rather roughshod Frederick White Company, presented it as an insider’s tale of life in Scotland Yard, promising that “the chief outstanding events in this great detective’s life [the “insider” in question] will be portrayed”.19 The press campaign was noticed by Film Booking Offices (1919) Ltd, Topical’s distribution arm, who, fearing significant competition to their Scotland Yard 1921 product, drew the attention of Commissioner Horwood to the advertisements.20 Horwood sought legal advice in an attempt to either impose an injunction upon the aforementioned “great detective”—who, it materialised, was a recently retired ex-Chief Inspector, Ernest Haigh—or undertake libel proceedings against the production company.21 Solely on the basis of the advertisements, legal counsel was unable to recommend either form of legal action, and instead letters of varying severity were sent to ex-Chief Inspector Haigh, the publishers and editorial board of Kinematograph Weekly, and the Frederick White Company. The letters express the level of anxiety felt by the Met regarding the unofficial serial (not least due to its title), the most severe of which was addressed to ex-Chief Inspector Haigh himself: [The Commissioner’s] attention has been drawn to an advertisement in the “Kinematograph Weekly” for February 3rd, 1921, of a film called “Scotland Yard” which purports to reveal official secrets of Scotland Yard and with which your name is associated. This advertisement is calculated seriously to prejudice the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police Force in the

19 Advertisements from Kinematograph Weekly, undated (presumed late January 1921). MEPO 2/7442, PRO TNA . 20 Arthur Clavering, letter to Major Edmund Distin-Maddick, 3 February 1921. MEPO 2/7442, PRO TNA. 21 Hugh Fraser, handwritten note, 8 February 1921. MEPO 2/7442, PRO TNA.

36

Chapter Two estimation of the public, and to impede its work by destroying public confidence in it. The Commissioner ... desires me in this connection to remind you of the provisions relating to the forfeiture of pension contained in Section 8 of the Police Act, 1890 as amended by Section 5 of the Police (Superannuation) Act, 1906.22

The protectionist fervour expressed by the Commissioner’s Office is indicative of establishment fears of unauthorised depictions of its own agencies and the effects of such depictions. The unofficial Scotland Yard was uncontrolled, unmediated and therefore in sharp contrast to the sterile “Official Film”. The Met’s fear of uncontrollable images of itself in the media is tangible in this case. Haigh’s reply to the Met was apologetic. After speaking to the Frederick White Company on the Met’s behalf, Haigh succeeded in preventing any further publication of the trade advertisements, and requested clarification from the Met regarding his role in the film industry: Before proceeding further with the series of films I should be glad to know whether there is any objection to my working as a film artist in a series of stories, all pure fiction, without disclosing my former connection with the service. The stories which I have written are all clean, of good moral tone, do not depict sordid crimes or murders and most certainly do not in any way prejudice the C. I. Department or tend in the slightest degree to destroy the public confidence that exists therein.23

Haigh defends his motive for working with the Frederick White Company, stating that in doing so, he is attempting to “provide for the education and needs” of his family, which in turn implies that the pension he received was unsuited to maintaining the lifestyle to which he and his family had become accustomed. Despite this, it is clear from Haigh’s correspondence that his loyalties lie with Scotland Yard, although his image and involvement in the Scotland Yard serial may have been exploited by the production company. In another letter, he reveals that a business venture with which he was financially involved had collapsed and he had fallen on hard times, with his “available savings ... swallowed up in paying for a

22

W. H. Kendall, letter to Ernest Haigh, 8 February 1921. MEPO 2/7442, PRO TNA. 23 Ernest Haigh, letter to W. H. Kendall, 9 February 1921. MEPO 2/7442, PRO TNA.

The British Film Industry and the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau

37

few slight house repairs + alterations”.24 It would seem that Haigh fell foul of monetary extravagance; his pension of £304. 7/6 was, by his own admission, “a liberal one”, but his inability to resist the allure of the film industry and the naivety with which he approached his film career seems to have caused him considerable embarrassment: That I should have been so easily enmeshed in Trouble makes me ashamed. The over anxiety I have felt to relieve myself of financial embarrassment is the sole reason... I loathe the work I have so unwittingly accepted and if the question is that my pension is to be forfeited if I continue with such work and saved to me by abandoning it I shall choose without hesitation and make the best arrangements I can with my principals.25

The attempted suppression of the serial continued apace following Haigh’s letter. A meeting was arranged between the Frederick White Company, Haigh and Scotland Yard, which, revealingly, was represented by Edmund Distin-Maddick amongst others.26 Distin-Maddick’s involvement indicates the reasoning behind the proactive suppression of the unofficial Scotland Yard film; as it would be released so close to the Official Film, the Commissioner seems anxious that audiences should not confuse the two. Whether Frederick White’s Scotland Yard came to be titled so in an attempt to benefit from the publicity of the Official Film is unclear, but Horwood seems less concerned with the actual title itself as with the content of the serial, and its attractive promise (whether legitimate or otherwise) to reveal the Met’s innermost secrets. However, Haigh himself, despite being the author of the serial’s scenario, seemed to have very little control over the way in which the serial was advertised. In his defence, he wrote, “I had no idea that my work was to be advertised as it was. I was not even consulted on the point and when the true facts came to my knowledge I took such steps as I could to put things right.”27 Despite the attempted suppression of the film by the Metropolitan Police, Frederick White’s Scotland Yard serial was trade-shown in the first week of May 1921, two months after the trade show of the Official Film 24

Ernest Haigh, letter to W. H. Kendall, 13 February 1921. MEPO 2/7442, PRO TNA. 25 Ibid. 26 W. H. Kendall, account of meeting 14 February 1921 between Ernest Haigh, H. B. Parkinson, Kendall, ‘Mr. Muskett’, and Major Edmund Distin-Maddick, 15 February 1921. MEPO 2/7442, PRO TNA. 27 Ernest Haigh, letter to W. H. Kendall, 13 February 1921. MEPO 2/7442, PRO TNA.

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and three months after the initial publication of the offending Kinematograph Weekly advertisements. Whether or not the serial was picked up for national release is unclear, particularly given the lukewarm reception accorded to it in the national press. The Daily Telegraph’s review of the serial compares it unfavourably with a Sherlock Holmes serial tradeshown in the same week but, tellingly, blames not the producers or Ernest Haigh for its “tame and insipid” content, but the machinations of state: No doubt if [Haigh] was absolved from the trammels of professional secrecy, and given a free hand, the man from Scotland Yard could also make our flesh creep.28

The Met’s proactive approach to the suppression of Frederick White’s Scotland Yard contrasts with their enthusiastic embracing of Topical’s production; however, the failure to prevent the release of the former, alongside the latter’s inability to generate either significant income for the Benevolent Fund or the right kind of publicity of the police, seemed to have set in motion a hands-off approach to future projects involving the British film industry. Scotland Yard, particularly under the Commissionership of William Horwood, demonstrated an aversion towards the British film industry, setting in motion a series of policies which remained relatively untouched until the end of the Second World War and the appointment of Harold Scott to the position of Commissioner.

The “1927 Principles” Stung by their inability to collaborate on a successful British entertainment film, the Met’s distrust of the film industry grew under the Commissionership of William Horwood. Upon his retirement in November 1928, Lord Byng was appointed his replacement. With the change of regime, filmmakers again began to approach the Met for facilities, emboldened by the introduction of the Cinematograph Films Act (1927): a protectionist piece of legislation intended to reverse the decline of the British film industry, to encourage filmmakers to produce more films in Britain and the Empire by imposing “a statutory obligation on renters and exhibitors to acquire and show a minimum ‘quota’ of British films out of the total number they handled, British and foreign” (Dickinson and Street 1985, 5). This would forcibly create a marketplace for British productions within the domestic exhibition circuits. In introducing such legislation, the state was 28 Anon., untitled review of new serials, Daily Telegraph, 5 May 1921. MEPO 2/7442, PRO TNA.

The British Film Industry and the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau

39

encouraging British filmmakers to undertake a production drive. However, when producers approached state control agencies such as the Met, they were met with a response that contradicted the spirit of the Films Act. One such filmmaker was Norman Lee.29 Lee, writing on behalf of H. B. Parkinson Film Productions, addressed a letter of complaint directly to the then Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, in which he detailed his prior treatment by the Met when shooting on location. Lee contends that Horwood had not accorded “sufficient facilities for filming London” to production companies eager to put the capital on screen.30 He lists five experiences of such difficulties, including being “hunted by detectives in Hyde Park” whilst attempting to film there, being refused permits to film Billingsgate Market, Westminster Abbey and Regents Park, and also being refused collaborative facilities for a film based on the work of the London fire brigade.31 His fifth example indicates the hostility towards filmmakers from the higher echelons of the Met: I wrote to Scotland Yard and asked if I might make notes for a scenario connected with a river police story, such notes to be the result of a ride in a police boat. I guaranteed that the Police should appear in the very best possible light and that no interference with duty should take place while my investigations were going on. I received a blank refusal. In reply I sent a protest to Sir William Horwood who did not answer.32

The situation improved somewhat following Norman Lee’s protestations. A series of rules, informally known as the “1927 principles”, had governed the treatment of film companies by the Met since 1927. I would speculate that these may well have been drawn up in response to the Cinematograph Films Act (1927) as a means by which the Met could be seen to be supporting the British film industry. The principles, reiterated by the Metropolitan Police Secretary H. M. Howgrave-Graham in a private memo to the Home Office reflecting upon Lee’s letter, stipulate conditions under which permission for facilities and collaboration might be granted to film companies. The conditions require that prospective collaborators are affiliated with “bona-fide firms”, that only the “ordinary work of police is portrayed”, that all completed films are submitted to the Met prior to 29

Lee would go on to become best known as the co-writer of Hitchcock’s The Farmer’s Wife (1928). He would later direct Bulldog Drummond At Bay (1937) along with a series of Edgar Wallace adaptations. 30 Norman Lee, letter to Stanley Baldwin, 11 January 1929, MEPO 2/2259, PRO TNA. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid.

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release for “examination”, that no “stunts” are arranged as part of the filming, and also “that photographs or films are not used as part of a story (in the sense of fiction)”.33 Of course, compliance with these stipulations proved impossible for almost all prospective productions. Indeed, even Scotland Yard 1921 would have failed these strict guidelines, having depicted the work of Hendon Police College alongside sports events and the interior of the Criminal Record Office. Though these principles were drawn up with the intention of benefitting potential collaborators, Howgrave-Graham seems to have been unaware of the impossibility of obeying such stipulations whilst producing a commercially viable collaborative project. Introducing his series of rules, he declared that “[w]e get so much publicity of the wrong kind that I can’t help feeling it might be to our advantage to have a little of the right kind”.34 Howgrave-Graham, having played an important role in the introduction of these guidelines, defended his refusal to grant Lee production facilities for his river police film on the basis that it would contravene the clause involving the use of images of the police in a fictional narrative.35 However, following a meeting involving Norman Lee, H. B. Parkinson and the Permanent Under Secretary of State to the Home Office, Sir John Anderson (later to give his name to the Anderson Shelter) and his Assistant, A. L. Dixon, the Home Office intimated that there was “some little margin”36 between the Met’s position regarding the use of images of the police in a fictional narrative and the Home Office’s belief that the police should “be as helpful as possible”37 towards British film companies. Lee was, eventually, granted permission to film a variety of street scenes, including incidental images of police patrols, in April 1929 for a film whose plot involved “the Atlantic having been flown by two Englishmen”.38 His

33

M. Howgrave-Graham, memo to ‘S. of S.’ (presumed Under-Secretary of State for the Home Office), 23 February 1929. MEPO 2/2259, PRO TNA. 34 Howgrave-Graham, private minute to Horwood, 6 December 1927. MEPO 2/6978, PRO TNA. It is worth noting that the Met appeared to not differentiate between the two types of requests they received from film companies – the 1927 principles applied to both applications to film within public areas of the Met district and also to prospective collaborative projects involving the production of a narrative that depicts aspects of the Met on screen. 35 Howgrave-Graham, letter to A. L. Dixon CBE, 26 February 1929. MEPO 2/2259, PRO TNA. 36 Dixon, letter to Howgrave-Graham, 5 April 1929. MEPO 2/2259, PRO TNA. 37 Ibid. 38 Inspector W. Irwin, Police Report filed at Bow Street Station, 9 April 1929. MEPO 2/2259, PRO TNA.

The British Film Industry and the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau

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project involving the work of the river police failed to come to fruition, but his earlier lobbying of the Prime Minister had led to film companies being more likely to have requests for filming in public places granted. His protestations were not enough to encourage the Met to banish the memories of the two 1921 Scotland Yard films, and to attempt a collaborative project. The appointment of Lord Trenchard to the post of Commissioner in 1931 again led to a review of the 1927 principles. This review separated the two types of approaches from film companies received by the Met. Whereas, previously, applications to film street scenes within the Metropolis and applications for support and guidance in filming the police were covered by the same rules, Trenchard began to separate them. In a private minute discussing the particular 1927 rule that forbids applicants from taking “films or photographs [for use as] part of a story”,39 Trenchard clarifies as follows: It does not matter what the rule was supposed to mean; what I would like it to mean is that no facilities shall be given to photograph any part of Scotland Yard if the intention is to weave such pictures into one of these horrible film plots. It is quite another matter for film companies to take photographs in the street, and I have no objection provided obstruction is not caused. This does not involve filming the police with a view to making a ‘story’ about them: if they happened to come into the picture it would only be in an incidental way.40

As a result of this clarification, more freedom was accorded to film companies in their attempts to film the capital, but not without some controversial moments. For example, Warner Bros First National Pictures approached the Met to request permission to film “certain exterior shots in the vicinity of Barclay’s Bank, Twickenham” for their production, The Blind Spot (John Daumery, 1932).41 The film’s plot involves a bank robbery, and the exterior shots that were to be taken consisted of the six robbers approaching the bank. The Warners foreman responsible for handdelivering the introductory letter to Twickenham Police Station mentioned

39

Anon., memo ‘Summary of applications for facilities to make films depicting Police work, etc.’, undated (possibly 1938, or early 1939). MEPO 2/7442, PRO TNA. 40 Lord Trenchard, Minute 2, 19 February 1932. MEPO 2/6978, PRO TNA. 41 Mr. Royce, letter to Twickenham Police Station, 12 April 1932. MEPO 2/7392, PRO TNA.

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as much to Inspector Bradford of the station, who forwarded a report of the verbal information gathered, along with Warners’ introductory letter, to the Commissioner’s Office.42 Trenchard’s secretary wrote in response that the Commissioner “will raise no objection to the proposal ... provided that no obstruction is caused”.43 However, Trenchard was concerned at the content of the film and wrote to the Home Office to recommend that they put some pressure on the British Board of Film Censors to stop the film being shown: “I think that this sort of film does harm to the men of about 18 or 19, as it shows them that these sort of things are fairly easy to carry out if done with determination.”44 However, it transpired that Barclays had refused permission to Warner Bros to film inside the branch. Warner Bros circumvented this refusal by filming the bank’s exterior and switching to studio-shot scenes to represent the bank interior. Permission had, in the Met Commissioner’s name, been given to film the exterior of the bank for a film that not Barclays, the Home Office, nor the Met, actually wanted made. This event, occurring a mere six weeks after Trenchard expressed his openness towards film companies shooting street scenes in London, caused film companies to again be regarded by suspicion by the Commissioner’s Office. Stung by the same seed of doubt as his predecessors had been, Trenchard strengthened the 1927 principles by authorising the addition of the following clause: “No facilities will be given to photograph scenes which are open to the objection that they suggest methods of committing crime. Although Police have no authority, provided that obstruction is not caused, to prohibit the taking of such scenes, it is probable that the withholding of Police facilities will make it impossible to continue”.45 Unable to reconcile its twin, and contrary, approaches of transparency and control to a collaborative film project, the Met and its Press Bureau floundered until the war. Table 1 details all written approaches to the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau from film companies requesting assistance in the period immediately following the debacle surrounding The Blind Spot until the end of 1938. All requests for collaboration were refused, alongside requests for the supply of props for studio-shot films.

42

Inspector H. Bradford, Police Report filed at Twickenham Station, 13 April 1932. MEPO 2/7392, PRO TNA. 43 “S.R.” on behalf of the Commissioner’s Office, letter to Mr. Royce, 16 April 1932. MEPO 2/7392, PRO TNA. 44 Lord Trenchard, letter to R. R. Scott, 7 May 1932. MEPO 2/7392, PRO TNA. 45 Lord Trenchard, private minute to H. M. Howgrave-Graham, 5 July 1932. MEPO 2/7392, PRO TNA.

Unknown Unknown Unknown

Zenifilms

Gaumont-British Picture Corporation

British and Dominions Film Corporation Ltd National Progress Film Company

The provision of facilities to film the work of the Met for the newsreel. Several requests were made to this effect. ** That the Met allow special provision for the newsreel’s cameramen to film the Coronation of George VI. **

The provision of facilities for the making of a “crime” film. ** That the Met collaborate on a “film on a large scale about Scotland Yard”. **

The March of Time newsreel The March of Time newsreel Unknown Unknown Unknown

Universal Studios

Universal Studios

National Progress Film Company

The Criterion Films Productions Phoenix Films Ltd

(entries marked * are sourced from TNA PRO MEPO 2/5519; entries marked ** are sourced from MEPO 2/7442.)

That the Met supply a poster referring to bail for display inside a studio set of Hyde Park Police Station. *

The consideration of facilities for a film depicting the work of the Met. **

The Passing Show

British Fine Arts Pictures Ltd Unknown

That the Met provide facilities for a film depicting Scotland Yard “at work”. **

Unknown

British Pictorial Productions Ltd

That the Met provide facilities for a film dealing with the history of Scotland Yard. **

That the Met collaborate on a film project “to ‘tell the story of Scotland Yard’”. **

Unknown

That the Met supply a set of notices, including “Motor Rules and Regulations” and a “Wanted Criminals” poster, along with holder cards for fingerprints. * Request for collaborative facilities to produce a film adaptation of Sir Basil Thomson’s book, The Story of Scotland Yard . Thomson was Assistant Metropolitan Police Commissioner during World War I. **

Request for facilities to collaborate on film about the Met. **

Request to film the “activities of Police, and Scotland Yard in particular”, for 20-minute short film. **

The supply of “two Police notices suitable to hang on the wall in a Scotland Yard office”. *

Request

“Mr Rose”, film producer

6 September 1938 Welwyn Studios Ltd

1938

1938

1937

1936

1936

1936

1936

1936

1935

30 October 1935

1935

Unknown

Bright Lights of London

British and Dominions Film Corporation Ltd

14 September 1932

1934

Film Title

Studio/Applicant

Date of Approach

Table 1: Record of Approaches from Film Companies to the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau

The British Film Industry and the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau 43

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The Met’s relationship with the British film industry in the late interwar years In 1935, Lord Trenchard retired from the post of Commissioner, and Sir Philip Game was appointed in his place. Game remained Commissioner until the cessation of hostilities in 1945. Game retained his predecessor’s suspicion of British film interests, as seen in the table outlined above. His responses to some of the requests for collaboration from the British studios are laced with the same discourses involving the need to control, rather than mediate, independent images of the police as his predecessors. A memo, compiled in late 1938, summarised the previous six years’ correspondence between various interests within the British film industry and the Met Press Bureau. This memo provides evidence of Sir Philip Game’s attitude towards the British film companies so desperate to collaborate with the Met during the late interwar years. For example, the memo reports the following response to Sir Basil Thomson’s request for Met collaboration on a film project adapting his memoirs: “The Commissioner added that if and when we want an official film, we must go about it in our own way and have complete control”.46 The memo also mentions that Game, as a result of Thomson’s approach, discussed the possibility of the Met “advantageously” producing a film with the longserving Secretary, H. M. Howgrave-Graham, in 1935. Howgrave-Graham set out a series of potential subjects for films that would, he felt, “clearly be of public appeal and be of a kind which a film company could make money out of” and also propagandistically benefit the Met: The only subjects which occur to me as suitable for treatment in this way are (1) publicity for Information Room and wireless organisation, and (2) vulnerability of certain types of flat and jerry built houses and also of Yale locks; advantages of mortice locks.47

The unexciting nature of these subjects indicates the Met’s lack of understanding of the film industry and also demonstrates the Met’s lack of desire to break the inherent culture of suspicion, reticence and secrecy within Scotland Yard.

46

Anon., memo “Summary of applications for facilities to make films depicting Police work, etc.”, undated (possibly 1938, or early 1939). MEPO 2/7442, PRO TNA. 47 Ibid.

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Conclusion An analysis of the Met’s attitude towards the written and visual media during the twenty years of peace separating the two world wars helps, through contrast, to illuminate the difference of approach in PR taken in the mid-to-late 1940s. The Press Bureau was established in a climate where PR opportunities were being re-evaluated by state control agencies and other arms-length bodies, but, much to the chagrin of the film companies hoping for a new culture of openness and collaboration, the Bureau’s aspirations of providing transparency and demystifying the Met were too ambitious for a body whose traditions were drawn from the military and which sought to control the public image of the police through denying access to collaborative provisions. Successive administrations viewed the British film industry with an ever-increasing degree of suspicion, reinforced by the failure of the only collaborative production of the period, Scotland Yard 1921, and a series of controversies surrounding the production of unauthorised depictions of the Met by British film interests intent on placing the British police on screen. The post-World War II Press Bureau regime of PIO Percy Fearnley, augmented by the progressiveness of Commissioner Harold Scott, maximised the PR potential of depictions of the Met on British screens, but the interwar failure of the Met to regard the British film industry with anything less than deep suspicion led to a series of missed opportunities to increase the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public. The PR failure of the Met prior to the Second World War is neatly summed up by an incident in 1937. Howgrave-Graham compiled a series of notes in preparation for a parliamentary question asked of the Home Secretary, enquiring “if there is at present any public relations officer attached to the Metropolitan Police; and, if not, whether he will consider the appointment of such an officer”.48 Howgrave-Graham minuted the following for the attention of the Commissioner: The work of a Public Relations Officer is publicity – i.e. publicity by means of liaison with the Press, Films, Advertisement, and so on. We have, as you know, our press organisation here and the assistance of the Home Office Press Officer is also available to us. We don’t need advertisement in the same way as a big “business” like the Post Office.49 48

Captain Alec Cunningham-Reid, parliamentary question 11 February 1937, dossier prepared 4 February 1937. MEPO 2/8393, TNA PRO. 49 H. M. Howgrave-Graham, letter to Commissioner Philip Game, Minute 4, 9 February 1937. MEPO 2/8393, TNA PRO.

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The Commissioner and the Secretary eventually arrived at a suitable response: “There is no person bearing the title ‘Public Relations Officer’ attached to the Metropolitan Force, and the need for such an officer has not been felt”.50 The war, however, forcibly began to change this perceived lack of need within the Met.

Bibliography Chermak, Steven and Alexander Weiss. 2005. “Maintaining legitimacy using external communication strategies: An analysis of police-media relations”. Journal of Criminal Justice 33: 501-12. Chibnall, Steve. 1977. Law-and-Order News. London: Tavistock. Dickinson, Margaret and Sarah Street. 1985. Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927-84. London: BFI. Macready, General Sir Nevil. 1924. Annals of an Active Life Volume II. London: Hutchinson and Co. Mawby, Rob C. 2010. “Chibnall Revisited: Crime Reporters, the Police and ‘Law-and-Order News’”. British Journal of Criminology 50: 106076. McKernan, Luke. 1992. Topical Budget: The Great British News Film. London: BFI. Reiner, Robert. 1992. The Politics of the Police. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Sayers, R.S. 1976. The Bank of England, 1891-1944. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trewin, J. C. (ed.). 1967. The Journal of William Charles Macready 18321851. London: Longmans. Wood, John Carter. 2010. “‘The third degree’: press reporting, crime fiction and police powers in 1920s Britain”. Twentieth Century British History 21: 464–85. Anon. 1921. “Police Pictures: Tribute to the Work of the Force”. The Times, March 12.

50

HC Debate, 11 February 1937. Hansard vol. 320 cc. 571-2.

CHAPTER THREE FROM CATHY “QUEEN OF THE MODS” TO PAULA “POP PRINCESS”: WOMEN, MUSIC TELEVISION AND ADOLESCENT FEMALE IDENTITY HAZEL COLLIE

Scholarly work around female viewing preferences has tended to concentrate on genres traditionally characterised and denigrated as “feminine”, skewing the field to some extent through a concentration on soap opera and drama (Hobson 1982; Modleski 1979; Brown 1994; Brunsdon 2000). Such research may have been either audience or textual, but in all cases has proceeded from a basic starting assumption about what constitutes “television for women”. More recently, the scope of academic investigation of gendered viewing has widened to include news, reality television and documentary (Skeggs, Thumim and Wood 2008; Hill 2005 and 2007; Engel-Manga 2003), but what other genres might have fallen through the gaps? This is not just a question of what women have watched, either just because it was on or because it fitted in with what they were doing, but rather because it specifically “spoke” to them in some way; because it particularly resonated. As part of the AHRC funded project Television for Women 1947-1989,1 I carried out thirty oral history interviews with generationally and geographically dispersed British women to try to get a sense of which programmes a female British

1

The project’s purpose was to begin a sustained historical analysis of television for women in the period 1947-1989 from both production and reception perspectives. Dr Helen Wheatley, Dr Rachel Moseley and Dr Mary Irwin investigated the production and archival aspect of the project at the University of Warwick, whilst Dr Helen Wood and I carried out the audience research at De Montfort University (AHF01725/1).

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television audience had viewed as being “for them”. My interview data suggests that although soaps and dramas have indeed been important to women, other genres have been equally significant at certain stages of women’s lives. Particularly interesting has been the revelation that music programming has been integral to how teenage girls have negotiated their adolescent years, and to their creation of teenage identities across generations. Critical academic investigation of the relationships that young women might have with popular music has been limited to questions around various forms of fandom (Brown and Schulze 1990; Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs 1992; Rhodes 2005) or how women have “managed” in the frequently misogynistic environment of rock music culture (Whiteley 2000; Schippers 2002). Norma Coates has drawn attention to the gendering of musical genres, noting the “discursive and stylistic segregation” of rock and pop. She identifies that “rock” is metonymic with “authenticity” and “pop” with “artifice”, and that ultimately the two are set in binary opposition whereby “rock” is “masculine” and “pop” is “feminine” (Coates 1997, 52-53). Rock, of course, assumes the dominant position and much academic literature is concerned with locating women within that culture. Critical engagement with the television audience of popular music programming has been rare, and where it has occurred it has not recognised the differing gendered positions that might exist in the viewing of music programmes (Cubitt 1984), treating the entire youth audience as one homogenous group and preferencing music as a category for analysis over television (Frith 2002). Conversely, extant scholarship on women’s identification with female pop and rock stars, such as Madonna and The Spice Girls (Danuta Walters 1995; Lemish 1998), connects with the importance of female artists and especially female presenters for young women watching music television which emerged from my interviews. So too does Karen Lury’s account of her memory of Tracey Ullman, whose use of the hairbrush microphone in a Top of the Pops performance is for Lury a knowing celebration of her and other young women’s own relationship with pop music and female performance. Here, Lury hints at the significance of this gendered performance for a female audience and demonstrates how different viewing groups might have a different relationship with the programme, “I understood Tracey Ullman’s performance because I related to the myth of Top of the Pops in a particular way – because I am British, a woman, and had watched Top of the Pops for many years” (Lury 2001, 45-46). It would be disingenuous to state the importance of pop programmes without acknowledging the paucity of programming for teenagers during

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the period of study. Until the early 1980s, British television had not actively created content specifically for the teenage audience. The age group was either grouped under children’s television or was “catered for almost exclusively through pop music programming” (Moseley 2007, 186). Women who were teenagers in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, then, might have recalled these programmes as teenage viewing simply because that was the sole television output that appealed to them and that addressed their interests. However, this cannot negate the fact that it did appeal to them very much, and during my interviews the women’s conversation around the genre was animated and extensive, suggesting that the programmes had a resonance and importance beyond merely being available to view. Additionally, women who were teenagers in the 1980s, when drama began to be targeted at a teenage audience, were also heavily invested in music programming. In this chapter I will present women’s talk about pop programming to illuminate the various ways they identified the genre as being important to them as adolescents.

Habitus, field and cultural capital Bourdieu’s understanding of society is based on the movement of “capital” through social spaces as it is used by individuals. The vacillations of the Marxist concept of economic capital are well accounted for, but Bourdieu proposes other metaphorical forms of capital (Bourdieu 1986, 243). His model of “cultural capital” exists in three different states: in an embodied state in the form of durable dispositions in the mind and body; in an objectified state in the form of cultural goods such as books or paintings; and in an institutionalised state which might take the form of academic credentials. Like economic capital, cultural capital can be accumulated and lost, invested and distributed within a specific social field. The social field where cultural capital is traded is the place of competition between individuals or institutions who are competing for the same stake (Bourdieu 1986). Power is achieved by the ability to confer or withdraw legitimacy from the other participants. Each field generates a specific habitus, a system of dispositions and a “feel for the game” (Bourdieu 1990, 66). The notion of habitus is the means by which we acquire ways of being through practice and socialisation rather than through conscious, formalised learning, throughout our whole lives. There has been an increasing engagement of contemporary feminist theory with Bourdieu’s work as a means of understanding societal power relations and the creation of gender identities (Moi 1991; Skeggs and

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Adkins 2005; McNay 1999; Lovell 2000). Bourdieu is often criticised for not directly inscribing gender analysis into his theories, but Toril Moi makes a strong case for the appropriation of Bourdieu’s work. She highlights how Bourdieu’s theories on everyday life offer us the tools to understand how gender is lived out, enabling us to “link the humdrum details of everyday life to a more general social analysis of power” (Moi 1991, 1020). Beverley Skeggs has suggested that, for Bourdieu, cultural capital is always associated with high culture, making it difficult to see different variants of femininity as a form of cultural capital (Skeggs 2005), and the constant necessity to “trade up”, as with economic capital, means that women are often unable to compete. In fact, and counter to Skeggs’ argument, my research indicates that, at least during the teenage years, women can and do trade in feminine cultural capital in a very specific field.

Resourceful girls Nearly two thirds of the women I spoke to independently talked about the importance of pop music programmes in their lives and for nine of those, the programmes had a particular resonance. The oldest women in my sample, those in their eighties and nineties, had a slightly different relationship with music programming on television. For most of these women, television was not a part of their lives until they were older, and this type of teenage musical programme did not begin to be broadcast until the late 1950s with programmes such as Six-Five Special (BBC, 19571958) and Oh Boy! (ABC, 1958-1959). By this period, the women were in their late twenties and early thirties, and had moved out of adolescence and into a different life stage in which they were wives and mothers. Although they did talk about the role of radio and music in their lives, their discussion of television music shows was limited to reminiscences about enjoying the music programmes with their own children. Again, this is highly suggestive of the role of music programming in women’s lives as specific to their adolescence. The women I spoke to were selected from respondents to a series of magazine adverts and press releases, which I placed with the help of the De Montfort University press office. The publications which we approached had a diverse readership and included Woman’s Weekly, Yours, Saga, The Lady and TV Times. I interviewed thirty women in total, ranging in age between 42 and 95 and living in diverse regions of the United Kingdom. I designated these regions as Scotland, Wales, North East, North West, Central, South West and South East. No women responded from Northern

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Ireland. Generational attitudes were the main focus of my research, and accordingly, when creating the interview sample, I focussed on a broad range of ages with a more limited attention to social class. As such, the class spread was limited to working and middle class. Many of the women who identified themselves as working class when younger recognised that they had been socially mobile and, at this stage in their lives, were middle class.2 The sample was exclusively white.3 The importance of music programming to women was one of the first clear trends to begin to emerge from the research, and even before the interview process started, the responses I received to the adverts were heavily laden with references to popular music programmes such as Top of The Pops (BBC1, 1964-2006), Ready Steady Go (ITV, 1963-66), The Tube (Channel 4, 1982-1987) and Six Five Special (BBC1, 1957-1958). This was a trend that was common across generation and class. What became clear from my interview data was that this was a genre that women made time for as teenagers, at a time in their lives when other viewing fell away as social, familial and educational commitments began to encroach upon the time they would have spent watching television as younger children. Many described television at this time as something which “dropped away”, suggestive of a skin or clothing that had belonged to a different phase of their lives that could be divested. Yet pop programmes prevailed, leading me to question what it was about the programmes that made them different to others. The typical and enduring popular culture image of girls’ engagement with music is of the hysterical fan, screaming for her most recent object of lust, be this in the heady days of Beatlemania or, more recently, with Justin Bieber’s “Beliebers”. All of the women I interviewed identified themselves as heterosexual, and an element of attraction to male music stars does permeate some of the interviews. As Tracey (52) put it: 2

I used Bourdieu’s model of social class (1987) to identify the various fields that the women inhabited and the processes by which they had arrived there. In a demographic profile and more casually throughout the interview I asked about education, employment, parental employment, housing and domestic and cultural habits, as well as trying to gain a sense of how each woman understood their own class position. 3 I did not receive any responses to my call to interview from ethnic minority women. Furthermore, the De Montfort University press office approached magazines such as The Voice and Asian Eye with the press release that was run by other publications and neither chose to run it. This is highly suggestive of a different relationship with television within ethnic communities which would benefit from further investigation.

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Patricia (64) spoke about her crush on Cliff Richard which led her to avidly consume music programmes so that she could look at him, and recalled how a family member scathingly suggested that he would be here one minute and gone the next. In choosing to talk about men, however, Tracey and Patricia were in the minority, and desire for male performers did not emerge over all as the main reason the women chose to talk to me about music programming or why their connections with and memories of the programmes remained so strong after all this time. Free access to music, which was otherwise inaccessible or unaffordable, came through very strongly in the interviews. So here, for example, Sylvia (50) remembers how important music programmes were for her to maintain some “street cred”: We used to record Top of the Pops. ’Cos we didn’t have any money so we used to do it on tapes. We’d have been quite geeky without it I think. It was important.

Sylvia grew up in a working class family in the East End of London in the 1970s. Her father had died when she was young and her mother was the family’s sole breadwinner. Within the context of talking about Top of the Pops she remembered that her mother used to let her and her younger brother have parties, and the songs they played were all recorded from the television or radio because that was the only way they could afford to own their favourite music. Dawn also recalled using The Tube and The Old Grey Whistle Test (BBC2, 1971-1987) to curate and archive her own personal musical selections: Yeah, we would keep stuff like that for ages, and it would get re-watched quite a lot. And have little collections, certainly for certain bands, and kind of record certain songs...we were much more – rather than now, when you go out and leave it to set record entire programmes, back then you’d be sat there with the remote control specifically getting the songs that you wanted. Cos really it was the same as having it on record but you could get it free. (Dawn, 42)

Several women spoke about this type of engagement, which differs from Ann Gray’s depiction of women’s strategic refusal of recording technology as “chore” (Gray 1992). This is clearly related to their life stage. Gray’s study of women aged between 19 and 52 dealt with their ongoing negotiation of television around the dynamics of the household, whilst my

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interviewees were recalling a period of youth which may be tinged with nostalgia rather than dealing with the pressures of the everyday. The importance of this means of obtaining permanent copies of music for free, essentially pre-dating illegal digital downloading by a couple of decades, was a frequent topic of conversation during interviews in relation to music programming. However, the women also talked at length about the importance of the radio in their musical education, indicating that free access to music on the television cannot fully explain the significance or resonance of the programmes. Music could be just as easily recorded from the radio, where both the choice and possibly even the cultural prestige of youth music offered by that medium would surely have been greater. The importance of music performance on television must, therefore, stem in some way from the visual capacity of the medium. Distinction and quality

As conversation around the subject progressed it became clear that not all music programmes were created equally in teenage girl’s eyes. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984) Bourdieu indicates that aesthetic concepts such as taste are defined by those in power, and he demonstrates how social class tends to determine a person's likes and interests, as well as how those distinctions are reinforced in daily life. What emerges from these interviews is a slightly different picture of the construction of hierarchies of taste and distinction. Social class was not a factor in the women’s engagement with pop music programmes, but it is accurate to say that, in this particular instance, ideas around what constitutes “good” and “bad” taste are still being defined by those teenage girls who wield power. The controllers of this field are not members of a class elite. When asked about important teenage viewing, the women would frequently begin by talking about Top of the Pops and its importance in the weekly schedule. It genuinely appears to have been “can’t miss television”, because to miss it would risk exclusion from playground or office conversation the following day when everyone else would be discussing the programme, as in Dorothy Hobson’s work on soap opera and office culture (Hobson 1991). However, as the conversation and reminiscence continued, many of the women revealed a more discerning approach to the genre than is initially suggested and would come to the conclusion that they had actually often found Top of the Pops “crap”, “boring” or “rubbish”. Sue E (60) had kept diaries throughout the period and noted that she had many entries where she wrote about Top of the Pops in these terms. The audience were criticised by many women for

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their unfashionable clothes, and for not looking as though they were enjoying themselves: It used to make me laugh how sort of rigid the audience were. You were lucky if they shuffled from one foot to the other really…they sometimes didn’t even look like they were enjoying it. Serious. And very old fashioned. Tank tops, boring T-shirts and A-line skirts. Things like that. (Tracey, 52)

This indicates that in their recollections of the programme, the women are taking pleasure in discrimination by asserting their own taste and cultural knowledge (Bourdieu 1984). Despite their dislike of the programme, its success lay in offering them a rare space for superiority. The middle-aged male presenters drafted in from Radio One, including David Hamilton, Noel Edmonds and Mike Reid, were criticised for being old, out of touch and for ogling and pawing young girls.4 Conversely, the women seem to have had a completely different relationship with Ready Steady Go and The Tube, and the female presenters of those programmes, Cathy McGowan and Paula Yates, emerged as absolutely central to why, as girls, these women devoured the genre. They were held up as style icons and as role models. Interestingly, both of these series were produced by women,5 and it is striking just how prominent women with agency are on camera in these programmes, in both the audience and presenting, compared to Top of the Pops (Collie and Irwin, 2013).

The field of teenage girldom So how were girls watching these programmes? Although I have briefly discussed the access to music releases already, the programmes additionally offered performances by the musical acts on the shows. A common point among the women in their sixties and seventies was how exciting it was for them to actually see the performances of some of the big acts from outside the United Kingdom:

4

These interviews took place between June 2011 and March 2012. Some of the comments women made about the male presenters of Top of the Pops have taken on a different character in the wake of news stories regarding abuse of minors, Jimmy Savile and the working culture of the BBC during the period. 5 Ready Steady Go! was produced by record producer and talent manager Vicky Wickham. Twenty years later Andrea Wonfor, Tyne Tees’ head of youth and children's programmes, launched The Tube for Channel 4.

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The thing that was called Top of the Pops, if it was called that then. I can’t remember. That was awful, when you look back. Everybody miming. But it was just to see the actual people. Bill Haley came over. Yeah. (Lynda, 64)

For many of these women, this type of programme represented their only means to do this, even though, as Lynda indicates, they might not hold the programme in particularly high regard. The content of pop music programmes was a staple of playground or workplace conversation the following day, and it was important to have been a part of that shared viewing experience. Top of the Pops of course. I mean then it was wonderful to have Top of the Pops. I was watching it when PJ Proby, he split his trousers singing. And he was always known for that. I was watching – every Thursday night that used to come on at seven. (Marilyn, 63)

Even fifty years later, the fact that Marilyn saw this moment as it was broadcast is important enough to her that she felt it necessary to mention during the interview. Fashion and style were a huge attraction of music programming. The audience and the acts were intensely scrutinised for fashion ideas, and as mentioned previously, the relative unstylishness of the Top of the Pops audience was one of the reasons women used to deride the programme. Although some female acts on the shows were name-checked for their style influence, including Dusty Springfield and Lulu, it was the female presenters of Ready Steady Go and The Tube who were foremost in the fashion stakes for teenage girls. Their clothes, hair and make-up were learned to be practised at home and copied for Friday night out on the town: I personally did my thing, and I wasn’t interested in sharing [my fashion knowledge]. If [other girls] came and didn’t look fashionable, well sorry you obviously haven’t been watching the same programmes as I have. I’m not going to tell you what to watch or wear. I thought of myself as a leader of fashion. (Fiona, 64)

In these recollections we begin to see a clear identification of a field, as per Bourdieu’s model that has the potential to be played, conquered and controlled. In this instance, it is a field of teenage girldom. The women’s recollections also indicate how that field is to be played. Lynda and Marilyn’s insistence that it was vital to see the programme as it was broadcast, and Fiona’s assertion of the importance of the fashion depicted on the shows, are clear indications of the means by which that field might

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be controlled or, conversely, lost. Clearly, to miss particular aspects and key moments of this appointment viewing and, therefore, an important shared event and topic of conversation might exclude a teenage girl and affect her position in the game. Fiona’s position as “leader of fashion” is more explicit, and was important precisely because it demonstrated her control of the field that she operated in.

Identification McGowan and Yates were central to the women’s talk about these programmes, to the complete exclusion of their male counterparts Keith Fordyce and Jools Holland. This suggests something quite unlike the hysterical and hormonally-charged screaming girl fans of popular culture, and it is substantially different to much of the work that was discussed in the introduction of this chapter. Here it was other women who were the focus of girls’ attention, and not in a sexualised way. In her work on women’s relationships with female cinematic stars of the Hollywood Golden Age, Jackie Stacey constructed a complex and nuanced account of the pleasures of cinematic identification, and the processes of the formations of feminine identities. On one hand, the women she studied valued difference, which could transport them into a world where their desires might be fulfilled, while at the same time valuing similarity for enabling them to recognise qualities they already had (Stacey 1994, 128). In my own interviews, this identification with the female stars of the music programmes and attempted appropriation of their styles is apparent. Dawn talks about Paula Yates’ look deeply influencing her own, while Sue E (60) goes further in stating that “like most girls I probably wanted to be Cathy McGowan”. It was not enough to look like her, she also wants to be her. The way that the women’s attention was fixed on McGowan and Yates over and above the many, very stylish, female acts on the programmes suggests that these two women captured girls’ imagination and attention because they were, in some way, not only less starry than the featured musicians, but also more familiar through their weekly appearance on television. Their positions as television personalities, rather than film stars, made them just glamorous enough to want to emulate, but not so out of reach for the girls to possibly achieve as the Hollywood stars of Stacey’s work or the female A-list musical stars of the time. McGowan’s involvement with the show started when she

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answered an advert for “a typical teenager” for the show,6 before being propelled in front of the cameras, a route to fame which seems eminently real and possible. In the same way a highly feminised cultural icon such as Madonna might provide girls with a set of symbolic tools by which they can create their own definitions of femininity (Kaplan 1993), so might the very particular, and potentially more achievable to an adolescent, femininities represented by Yates and McGowan. Precisely because the women did not talk of their imitation of the two presenters in terms of attracting boys, it is tempting to view it as a practice that they carried out for themselves as part of their self-creation as women. Cathy and Paula were not only integral to how the girls created their physical teenage identities. Their very presence, these women who were like them, on television in the music programmes, was inspirational, for many girls opening up the possibility to be in charge of their own destinies and legitimating girls’ choices to do and be someone different to what they felt society expected of them: Paula Yates on The Tube really. Um, I think with Top of the Pops it was more difficult to align with because the presenters were mainly men. They were just so cheesy. And to get a woman as a presenter who was firstly not really posh, and could also pull off being sexy as well, and come over as being smart. I suppose really, yeah, she was like a role model. (Dawn, 42)

It’s also clear that in the viewing of music programmes, girls were creating their own, domestic, rebellion. It is abundantly clear from the interviews that, at best, parents were utterly bemused by the shows. They did not “get it”, a further indication that music programmes weren’t “for them”. At the other end of the spectrum, parents did not like or approve of the shows and viewing at all was an act of defiance, likened here by Belinda (72) to covertly listening to the radio broadcasts: When we only had the radio a lot of teenagers weren’t allowed to listen to the...what was it? The light p... where you had pop music, things like that? You weren’t allowed. You know, ’cos it was just thought – Radio Luxemburg and things like that, you had to listen to it under the bed covers because parents just didn’t like you doing it. They thought you could be corrupted by it. And I guess it was much the same as this with parental control over television for a lot of people.

6

Hogan (2011) describes the choice of McGowan as a presenter on the programme.

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Interestingly, Belinda did not watch music programmes as a teenager at home, because her father would not allow her to, but she reminisced about enjoying them when married and, particularly, once she had children. In fact, two other women (who both also married and became mothers in their teens) remembered enjoying Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go, recalling how dancing along to their favourite songs after the birth of their children in some small way made up for the fact that they could not go out any more. This depicts another scene of small-scale, domestic rebellion and rejection of the way that the women were expected to behave. Essentially, in the access offered to fashion, music, celebrities and, to some extent, advice, the women who spoke to me were using music programmes as an extension of teen magazines, to shape their lifestyles. This was a position that was made explicit by Fiona when she talked about how difficult it could be to get the magazines she wanted in 1960s’ Aberdeen, and how these programmes filled that void to some extent. The domestic nature of viewing these programmes, and the opportunity for some form of rebellion, is particularly feminine in character, if we consider that traditionally boys have had more freedom outside the home. Angela McRobbie’s extensive empirical work (McRobbie 1976, 1978, 1991, 2000) on working class teenage girls’ culture is pertinent to my work. She questions how girls are placed in youth cultures, noting that while boys appear to be participatory and at the forefront (for example, Teddy Boys and the Mod/Rocker confrontations), girls seem to be absent. Her suggestion is that instead of trying to place girls in boys’ culture, it would be more useful to recognise that the girls’ participation is sustained by a complementary, but different pattern. Boys are participative and technically informed, while girls are fans and readers. Here we see that there are different ways of “wearing” knowledge (Straw 1997), and that there may be gendered differences at play. Again Bourdieu’s work on field and habitus illuminates precisely how and why this might be; that the field of teenage boydom has different rules for control than the field of teenage girldom. Angela McRobbie identifies feminine teenage fan activity as a bedroom culture, a private culture, and has demonstrated how fashion, hair and make-up ideas are picked up from magazines and practised at home in private. Her research was carried out in the late 1970s and early 1980s, making it comparatively contemporary with some of the women’s memories from my interviews. If anything, this period could be seen as a more liberated moment than some of the histories which the women I spoke to shared. McRobbie’s research echoes the way the women, as girls, consumed the musical culture of these programmes. In most cases, the women recalled watching the programme at home with their family, firmly

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locating themselves in the domestic sphere and frequently choosing to talk about their own relationship with the programme through their relationships with others. Patricia (64) remembered that her stepfather watched her dancing and miming along to Six Five Special, instead of watching the programme himself, as if he could not believe his eyes. She drew attention to the gendered differences in the way teenagers watched the programme when she exclaimed “he only had boys, for goodness’ sake”. Although Patricia watched Six Five Special with her mother, stepfather and three step-brothers, only she was so engrossed that she performed along with it. Similarly, Jenny (52) recalled dancing to The Jackson Five during one edition of Top of the Pops when her grandmother was babysitting and wondered, with hindsight, what on earth her grandmother had made of the whole event. The women’s memories indicate that their immersion in the programme, with associated dancing and singing along, made the viewing an event, but additionally sets them out as “different”, and distinct to family members of other genders and generations. A fortuitous opportunity to talk to men about their experiences of music television arose when the team behind this research project set up The Pop Up TV Pop Shop, an innovative impact event in a disused shop in Coventry city centre. It materialised that male adolescents’ responses to the programmes had not been that different to the women’s, and that music programming had been important to them as adolescents. Men also talked about the thrill of seeing their favourite bands on television, and copying the style of male musicians and on the shows. Where the men’s recollections differed significantly from the women’s, however, was in the way they used their initial memories of watching the programmes to situate themselves within youth culture of the time. Whereas the women I interviewed and spoke to in the shop talked of their engagement with the programmes and presenters, and then moved on to discuss family viewing and associated publications, and beautifying activities that went on domestically, the men’s memories instead quickly turned to the clubs and gigs they attended outside of the home. They additionally used it as an opportunity to educate me about various musical and technical aspects of youth sub-cultures, reiterating McRobbie’s pattern of boys as technically informed and participative and girls as fans and readers. Two of the women I interviewed, Hilary and Jane, spoke about their consumption of music programmes during later adolescence when they were at nursing and teaching college respectively. Although not watching in a domestic context, both drew attention to the group viewing of Top of the Pops in the common room every Thursday evening, again giving their discussion of

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the programme a relational quality, and highlighting the importance of group appointment viewing and regular scheduling during this period. When I went into nursing the only thing we had time to watch was Top of the Pops. We used to make a beeline for that. Every Thursday, that was it. All the nurses round the telly for Top of the Pops. (Hilary, 64)

This gives some insight into the importance to women of the shared aspect of the programmes. Although they were often watched at home with family, part of the enjoyment of the genre was as a shared experience with friends, either during the act of viewing or through later conversation when notes on performances and fashion could be compared. While Simon Frith has assumed that there is no relationship between youth and music on television (Frith 2002), my data shows that female members of the youth audience were in fact deeply engaged with the genre. In suggesting that one of the limitations for television as a music medium is its relatively poor sound quality, he assumes that the musical experience itself is key in understanding why adolescents might watch music programmes, but as I have demonstrated at length in this chapter, the music itself was not the only reason to watch. Frith also suggests that “the musical moments that we remember are the ones that disrupt the flow, that become newsworthy” (Frith 2002, 280), citing Elvis Presley’s comeback gig in 1968 or LiveAid in 1985. Aside from PJ Proby’s split trousers and one mention of the late night repeat of LiveAid as viewing material chosen by Patricia on a particularly arduous night of breastfeeding a young baby, the majority of the interviewees did not talk about anything that could be considered newsworthy in these programmes at all. In fact, what they remember is as mundane and decidedly unnewsworthy as the act of viewing itself, and how the programmes then filtered into their daily lives. Frith argues that music and television are mutually exclusive. That, because “youth self-consciously differentiates itself from the rhythms of daily family life” (Frith 2002, 280), television music programmes were created to be family friendly and to appeal to parents as much as to youthful viewers. He also categorically states that adolescents do not watch television because they are otherwise engaged with youthful acts of experiencing popular and musical cultures in their true dominion of clubs and pubs, “out of the house in public spaces” (ibid.). I would suggest that these assumptions are in fact both gendered and generational. In talking about the programmes, far from differentiating themselves, the women actively situated themselves within the domestic rhythms of daily family life and rarely talked about their musical consumption in public terms.

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Only Fiona and Hilary went on to extrapolate their memories of the programmes into what they did when they went out, and in both cases this related to their appearance rather than the musical culture of where they went or, even, what they did when they got there. Fiona recalled wearing a long parka and pulling her skirt down to make it look longer so her father would not disapprove, before running round the corner to where her boyfriend waited with his scooter, hitching her skirt back up above the knee and jumping on the back of the bike. Hilary’s recollection of an R&B club in Derby which she used to attend revolved entirely around the other girls’ hairstyles and clothes, and she actually related the fashions back to television when she exclaimed “Oh, it was so Top of the Pops!” As previously mentioned, the men I spoke to in the Pop Up TV Pop Shop did talk extensively about their public engagement with wider youth culture and not about their lives at home. Additionally, while the earlier music programmes may have been conceived to be family friendly (Hill 1991), the women interviewed recalled the consternation of their parents when viewing, and have a clear sense that these programmes were for them as teenage girls, and not for their parents. The relatively greater financial and social freedom that boys have traditionally enjoyed (McRobbie 1991) means that they possibly did spend more time out of the home enjoying popular culture as teenagers, and as a result perhaps watched less television than girls. But for many younger teenage girls, and particularly for some women from older generations who were likely to be subjected to greater parental supervision, music on television offered their best means of exposure and access to youth cultures, to music, and to fashion.

Conclusion From my interviews, we can begin to get a clear sense that, within this particular teenage and feminine culture, there are certain ways of being that can give girls an enhanced cultural position amongst their peers, or within the field of teenage girldom. This is apparent in Fiona’s pride at being a “leader of fashion” among her friends, and also in the way that others recall the importance of the shows in enabling them to know the Top Twenty, to see the “big moments”, and to be able to discuss the programmes with their friends. Beverley Skeggs has rejected the idea of habitus, suggesting that recourse to femininity is actually more performative in its nature. In her research on working class teenage girls, she saw their feminine practice as something they “did”, as the only form of cultural capital available to them, rather something that was internalised as an identity, because the consequences of appearing to reject that

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femininity were potentially devastating, leading to a loss of “respectability” (Skeggs 1997). The women’s participation in programmes such as The Tube or Ready, Steady, Go! is not entirely about feminine practice, although such practice explains the appropriation of role models such as McGowan and Yates, who exuded a kind of femininity that girls wanted to recreate for themselves to deploy within their own field. However, in neither case was it a type of femininity that teenage girl’s parents or other authority figures might recognise either as femininity or as a desirable trait. Fiona’s memory of hiding the length of her skirt from her father suggests that recourse to this femininity had the potential to cause loss of respectability in his eyes, that Fiona recognised this and was keen to avoid that outcome. Yet, in the wider public domain, and certainly within the field of teenage girldom, the potential for loss of respectability was a risk that girls were prepared to take. The women came from varied social backgrounds and were watching these programmes in different decades of the twentieth century. As such, there are a variety of different habituses at play in the interview data. One aspect that is particularly striking is that social class does not appear to be a factor in how the women I interviewed used music programming. In this case, I would suggest that maintaining “respectability”, as defined by an older generation, was not as important as operating within and belonging to this feminine, teenage culture. In the women’s extensive discussion about the access to music and associated cultures that these programmes offered, they indicate another means of cultural capital that is not wholly predicated upon a traditional feminine performativity, and one which receives its legitimacy from within the field itself, from other teenage girls, rather than from more traditional and authoritarian sources. Valerie Walkerdine has interrogated the easy application of theories of resistance to working class girls’ behaviour, suggesting that what is often naively and lazily perceived as “resistance’ is, in fact, a mechanism for coping (Walkerdine 1997). In light of these women’s recollections of pop music programming, I begin to wonder whether this is actually a commonality of the teenage girl experience, and possibly adolescence generally, across social class and over time. Adolescents “manage”, and they do so by appearing to fit in and striving to belong.

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Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1986. “The Forms of Capital”. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed John G Richardson, 241-58. New York: Greenwood. —. 1987. “What Makes a Social Class? On The Theoretical and Political Existence of Groups”. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32: 1-17. —. 1990. The Logics of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, Jane D and Laurie Schulze. 1990. “The Effects of Race, Gender, and Fandom on Audience Interpretations of Madonna’s Music Videos”. Journal of Communication 40 (2): 88-102. Brown, Mary Ellen. 1994. Soap Opera and Women’s Talk: The Pleasure of Resistance. California: Sage. Brunsdon, Charlotte, Julie D’Acci and Lynn Spigel. 1997. Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brunsdon, Charlotte. 2000. The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coates, Norma. 1997. “(R)evolution Now?: Rock and the Political Potential of Gender”. In Sexing the Groove: Popular music and gender, ed Sheila Whiteley, 50-64. London and New York: Routledge. Collie, Hazel and Mary Irwin. 2013. “‘The Weekend Starts Here’: Young Women, Pop Music Television and Identity”. Screen 54 (2): 262-269. Corner, John, ed. 1991. Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History. London: BFI. Cubitt, Sean. 1984. “‘Top of the Pops’: the Politics of the Living Room”. In Television Mythologies: Stars, Shows and Signs, ed Len Masterson, 43-45 London: Routledge. Danuta Walters, Suzanna. 1995. Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory. Berkley: University of California Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs. 1992. “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun”. In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed Lisa A Lewis, 84-106. London: Routledge. Engel-Manga, Julie. 2003. Talking Trash: The Cultural Politics of Daytime TV Talk Shows. New York: New York University Press Fowler, Bridget. 1997. Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations. London: Sage. Frith, Simon and Angela McRobbie. 1978. “Rock and Sexuality”. Screen Education 29: 3-19.

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Frith, Simon. 2002. “Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television”. Popular Music 21 (3): 277 – 290. Gray, Ann. 1992. Video Playtime: The Gendering of a Leisure Technology. London: Routledge. Hill, Annette. 2005. Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. London: Routledge. —. 2007. Restyling Factual TV: the Reception of News, Documentary, and Reality Genres. London: Routledge. Hill, John. 1991. “Television and Pop: The Case of the 1950s”. In Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History, ed. John Corner, 90107. London: BFI. Hobson, Dorothy. 1982. Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. London: Methuen. —. 1991. “Soap Operas at Work”. In Remote Control: Television, Audience and Cultural Power, eds Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner and Eva-Maria Warth, 150-67, London: Routledge. Hogan, Phil. 2011. “How Ready Steady Go! Soundtracked a Revolution”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/29/ready-steady-gomeltdown-ray-davies. Jenkins, Richard. 2002. Pierre Bourdieu (Key Sociologists). London: Routledge. Lemish, Dafna. 1998. “Spice Girls’ Talk: A Case Study in the Development of Gendered Identity”. In Millennium Girls: Todays Girls Around the World, ed Sherrie A Inness, 145-67. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Kaplan, Ellen A. 1993. “Madonna Politics: Perversion, Repression or Subversion?” In The Madonna Connection: Representation Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory, ed Cathy Schwichtenburg, 149-65. Colorado: Westview. Lovell, Terry. 2000. “Thinking Feminism With and Against Bourdieu”. Feminist Theory 2000 1 (1): 11- 32. Lury, Karen. 2001. British Youth Television: Cynicism and Enchantment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McNay, Lois. 1999. “Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity”. Theory, Culture and Society 16 (1): 95-117. McRobbie, Angela and Jenny Garber. 1976. “Girls and Subcultures: An Exploration”. In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, eds Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 209-22. London: Routledge.

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McRobbie, Angela. 1978. “Working Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity”. In Women Take Issue, Women’s Study Group, 96-108. London: Hutchinson. McRobbie, Angela. 1991. Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’. Hants: MacMillan McRobbie, Angela. 2000. Feminism and Youth Culture. London: Routledge. Modleski, Tania. 1979. “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas: Notes on a Feminine Narrative Frame”. Film Quarterly 33 (1): 12 – 21. Moi, Toril. 1991. “Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture”. New Literary History 22 (4): 10171049. Moseley, Rachel. 2007. “Teenagers and Television Drama in Britain, 1968-1982”. In Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography, ed Helen Wheatley, 184-197 London: I. B. Tauris. O’Sullivan, Tim. 1991. “Television Memories and Cultures of Viewing”. In Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History, ed John Corner, 159 – 181. London: BFI. —. 2007. “Researching the Viewing Culture”. In Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography, ed Helen Wheatley, 159 – 169 London: I. B. Tauris. Rhodes, Lisa. 2005. Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schippers, Mimi. 2002. Rocking Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock. Brunswick, NJ: Rutger’s University Press. Skeggs, Beverley. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. —. 2005. “Exchange, Value and Affect: Bourdieu and ‘the Self’”. In Feminism After Bourdieu, eds Beverley Skeggs and Lisa Adkins, 7596. Oxford: Blackwell. Skeggs, Beverley and Lisa Adkins eds. 2005. Feminism After Bourdieu. Oxford: Blackwell Skeggs, Beverley, Nancy Thumim, and Helen Wood. 2008. ‘“Oh Goodness! I Am Watching Reality TV”: How Methods Make Class in Audience Research”. European Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (1): 524. Stacey, Jackie. 1987. “Desperately Seeking Difference”. Screen 28 (1): 48-61.

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—. 1994. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Routledge. Straw, Will. 1997. “Sizing Up Record Collections: Gender and Connoisseurship in Rock Music Culture”. In ed Sheila Whiteley, Sexing the Groove: Popular music and gender, 3-16. London: New York: Routledge. Van Zoonen, Liesbet. 1999. Feminist Media Studies. London: Sage Wald, Grace. 1998. “Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth”. Feminisms and Youth Cultures 23 (3): 587-610. Walkerdine, Valerie. 1990. Schoolgirl Fictions. London: New York: Verso. —. 1997. Daddy’s Girl. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Whiteley, Sheila ed. 1997. Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. London: New York: Routledge. Whiteley, Sheila. 2000. Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity. London: Routledge. Wood, Helen. 2009. Talking with Television: Women, Talk Shows and Modern Self-Reflexivity. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

CHAPTER FOUR THE POLISH TV FICTIONSCAPE: FROM PROGRAMME IMPORTATION TO DOMESTIC REVIVAL SYLWIA SZOSTAK

After a decade-long reliance on imported—mainly American—programmes, television fiction programming in Poland is now increasingly produced by the country’s own television industry. This confirms what we already know about developing television markets: they develop from heavy importation in their early years to domestic production as they mature. The self-reliance of Polish broadcasters in producing domestic TV fiction, as elsewhere in Europe, suggests that TV fiction on local television screens gradually becomes exclusively national in its character. But the Polish television screenwriter Karol Klementewicz complicates this notion, when he states: “I don’t even know what a truly Polish show would look like. So I think the only category for assessing that would have to be a show made in Poland” (Klementewicz 2011, original emphasis). Klementewicz’s observation provides a good starting point for my discussion of fiction television in Poland, and the shift in Polish broadcasters’ programming practises from importation to domestic production. This chapter considers the history and development of the Polish television industry, from its beginnings, through its gradual growth to eventual maturity and increasing self-sufficiency in the post-Soviet era. Through this focus, it will be argued that the shift toward domestic production, as observed in mature television markets including Poland, can in fact be supported, and to a large extent, determined, by transnational influences. Exploring some of the views and perceptions of television practitioners at a moment of great change in Polish broadcasting, this chapter reveals that, as maturing markets shift towards domestic production, the increasing disappearance of imported television shows should not imply the declining impact of foreign television. Rather,

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foreign television has actually supported Polish broadcasters in their move away from programme importation and towards producing domestic television series. This process has been supported by transnational media flows; in particular the industrial practice of scripted format adaptation as well as borrowing and assimilating elements from American television. This chapter focuses solely on serialised “fiction” programming (as opposed to documentary or reality TV).1 According to Els de Bens and Hedwig de Smaele, this is “by far the most important programme category on European television” (de Bens and de Smaele 2001, 54). However, as Milly Buonanno argues, it is also the most costly type of television production, and “the most difficult to plan, manage and programme” (Buonanno 1999, xvi). This chapter will therefore investigate how local producers and broadcasters generate this programming type, the production of which requires a complex industrial organisation and an array of experts from various professions across the creative process (Bechelloni 1999, xvi).

Part I: Poland and International Audiovisual Flows The fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 marked the beginning of a transition from authoritarian regimes towards democratic political systems. Following these systemic changes, the television landscapes of Central and Eastern European countries have been rapidly internationalised. It is hardly surprising that, given the pre-existing demand for non-Eastern programming, as a result of the opening of the media markets to international television imports after 1989, the Polish broadcasting market—previously under Soviet coercion and thus fairly hostile to foreign (particularly Western) imports—began to rely heavily on imported audiovisual product. In a sample week in 1998, only a few months after the end of the licensing period when the television market emerged in the form in which it remains today with its division into the public and commercial sector, Poland’s three terrestrial free-to-air broadcasters—the public service TVP1 and its two commercial counterparts, TVN and Polsat—were all reliant on American product in the domain of fiction in prime time (see Fig. 4-1, Fig. 4-2 and Fig. 4-3). This reliance on American programming in the 1990s in Poland is unsurprising, as similar patterns were evident in most of the post1

Generally speaking, serialised fiction programmes can be identified as belonging to certain production types and genres, such as soap operas, situation comedies, telenovelas and cop shows.

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communist countries and were the result of several clearly distinguishable factors (ŠtČtka 2012, 111). As the result of the dramatic changes of the TV landscape after 1989, the broadcast hours of the existing state broadcaster became extended. In 1980, the first TVP channel (Program 1) broadcast up to 17 hours of programming per day, with the second (Program 2) only up to 11 hours (RTV 1980). Yet, by 1991, both channels were broadcasting from 7:00 or 8:00 till after 23:00 (Radio i Telewizja 1991), before both soon began broadcasting for an unprecedented 22 hours per day. Additionally, new commercial networks became available to viewers in two

Fig. 4-1: TVP1 schedule 4pm—11pm, 18 to 24 September, 1999, number of fiction series episodes by country of origin (Tele TydzieĔ, 1998)

Fig. 4-2: Polsat schedule 4pm—11pm, 18 to 24 September, 1999, number of fiction series episodes by country of origin (Tele TydzieĔ, 1998)

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Fig. 4-3: TVN schedule 4pm—11pm, 18 to 24 September, 1999, number of fiction series episodes by country of origin (Tele TydzieĔ, 1998)

licensing processes in 1994 and 1997 respectively. The most immediate consequence of this transformation was an urgent need to fill the schedules with a large volume of programming. However, the absence of industrial infrastructure and appropriate models for production, alongside the lack of trained personnel, and the high launch costs of the new channels and their initial unprofitability, kept Poland’s broadcasters from producing enough local and national productions to cope with the programming demand that arose in the 1990s. As this demand heightened, the need for programming could not be met domestically through indigenous production in the early phase of the market transformation, and Poland encountered a predicament symptomatic of emerging and infant TV markets: namely, the requirement to turn to importation in order to fill vacant slots. Historically, channels within these markets have mainly turned to the US as a source of affordable fiction that has traditionally ensured high ratings. As was the case with Western European countries in the 1980s, the situation at the end of the 1990s in Poland certainly gave credence to the expression “Dallasification”—a term coined by the scholar Els de Bens and colleagues in reference to the hit US show Dallas (1978—1991), Lorimar Productions)—as fiction programming on Polish terrestrial broadcasters was predominantly of American origin (De Bens, Kelly and Bakke 1992, 73-100). Yet this reliance on US programming was, ultimately, a short-lived phenomenon. American shows started losing prominence in the Polish prime-time schedules in the mid-2000s, giving way to domestic TV fiction in the most prominent timeslots. This evidenced a shift in approach among

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Polish television executives, and implied that the days of Polish broadcasters fighting over American shows were over. Today, such shows are bought in packages, albeit with some reluctance. If the contract is too unfavorable, it is often the case that Polish broadcasters will simply walk away from the deal. This is due to the fact that there are now more programming options, and, as a result, broadcasters no longer feel pressured into buying American product. Whereas in the 1990s Poland’s free-to-air broadcasters were acquiring large packages of American programmes, new trends in the 2000s led to a decline in volume output deals with US suppliers, and more “cherry-picking” as a result. This approach is reflected in the importation strategies of Polish television’s major players. Comparing data from the broadcast schedules of sample weeks between 1998 and 2011 reveals how, in a relatively short space of time, the production of domestic television fiction has significantly increased. For TVP1, TVN and Polsat, the 2011 sample week from the September schedule—which is representative of high season in Poland—demonstrates an overwhelming dominance of locally produced fiction over American product.2 In the sample broadcast week of 2011 as many as 26 of the 29 serialised scripted episodes broadcast by Polsat were of domestic origin (see Fig. 4-4), and only two were episodes of American shows, Bones (Far Field Productions, 2005—) and CSI: New York (Alliance Atlantis Communications, 2004—). A similar trend is evident in the data for Poland’s second commercial broadcaster, TVN (see Fig. 4-5), whose entire scripted fiction output in the 2011 sample week consisted of domestic shows such as Detektywi (TVN, 2005—), W11 – Wydziaá ĝledczy (TVN, 2004—) or Prosto w Serce (TVN, 2011). Similar shifts occurred in Poland’s public service broadcaster. TVP1 significantly increased its domestic fiction output during this period: from four episodes of domestic soap operas Klan (TVP1, 1997—) and Matki, ĩony i Kochanki (TVP1, 1995–1998) in the sample week of 1998 to nineteen episodes of shows such as Plebania (TVP1, 2000–2012), Ojciec Mateusz (2008—) and Rezydencja (TVP1, 2011) in 2011 (see Fig. 4-6). The trade in fiction programming can therefore be considered in relation to two distinct periods in recent history. The first period comprises

2

Autumn and spring are considered high season – the strongest advertising periods, when competition for viewers is intense and all three terrestrial broadcasters programme their strongest content, which usually constitutes new locally-produced programming. Broadcasters schedule re-runs and other inexpensive programming content in the summer and winter, when their advertising sales tend to be lower.

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the 1990s to the mid-2000s when Polish viewers became exposed to a high volume of American serialised fiction programming. The second period covers the mid-2000s up to 2011 and is characterised by the domestication of fiction in prime time and a dramatic decline in the presence of imported fiction series. Close analysis of the statistics on TV fiction flow in Poland reveals a lot about the Polish TV market. First, Poland’s terrestrial broadcasters display the same transnational trends, and have followed programming development stages similar to those of their Western European counterparts. Second, Poland’s broadcasters are not unique in their move from importation towards domestic production: it is a successive stage of development and business strategy for the growth of any television channel. Indeed, in a channel’s early years, it will often turn to importation, as there is insufficient domestic production. In time, the channel generates new audiences and profits, enabling it to produce in-house. It remains true for Poland, as elsewhere in Europe, that, “as [broadcast] markets mature and produce more domestic content, American programming is not always necessary to continue the commercial model” (Steemers 2004, 14). Poland, in this respect, reflects the same trends that have occurred in Western European countries in the late 1990s, which displayed steady increases in the volume of local fiction broadcast between 1996 and 2000 (see MipCom 2001 and De Bens and Smeale, 2001).

Fig. 4-4. Number of fiction series episodes by origin on Polsat, sample weeks 1998-2011, 4pm-1pm (Tele TydzieĔ, 1998-2011)

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Fig. 4-5. Number of fiction series episodes by origin on TVN, sample weeks 19982011, 4pm-11pm (Tele TydzieĔ, 1998)

Fig. 4-6. Number of fiction series episodes by origin on TVP1, sample weeks 1998-2011, 4pm-11pm (Tele TydzieĔ, 1998-2011)

The above analysis of audiovisual flows in Poland relies on the binary opposition between domestic and foreign, which has served as a basic conceptual tool for analysing the character of media flows in academic scholarship to date. Kaarle Nordenstreng and Tapio Varis’s classic study of international television programming, Television Traffic - A One-Way Street? A Survey and Analysis of the International Flow of Television Programme Material (1974), revealed one-way output from a few exporting countries to the rest of the world and thus painted a portrait of American dominance on local television cultures. Later studies, such as

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Varis’s International Flow of Television Programmes (1985) discovered increased domestic production in many nations after 1974 and the increasing use of imports in non-primetime hours, but still continued to demonstrate a clear imbalance between America and the rest of the world. Similarly, the comparative reports of the European Audiovisual Observatory’s Eurofiction project3 gather and distribute information on the main trends in TV fiction production and importation in the key European markets, documenting in detail a significant increase in the production and transmission of domestic TV fiction (Buonanno 1999, 2000). Such quantitative analyses certainly contribute to our understanding of international television exchanges, as they demonstrate trends of the past and present international flows of television programmes. But the approach to investigate the character of media flows based solely on the the quantity and origin of audiovisual imports/exports fails to grasp the complexities of the processes, such as shifts from importation to domestic production, and can tell us nothing about precisely how the move to a local broadcast culture takes place. Therefore, further explorations in the contemporary character of media flows should attempt to look beyond the statistical paradigm that relies on the dichotomy of domestic and foreign, in order to reveal how audiovisual flows change. Taking Poland as its case study, the remainder of this chapter investigates what industrial strategies assist local broadcasters and producers in their move from importation to domestic production. This level of analysis is crucial for understanding the dynamics governing local markets, and can tell us a lot about how television markets reach maturity and self-sufficiency.

Part 2: Programming When Polish terrestrial broadcasters began producing domestic fiction programming in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, some narrative formulas typical of serialised storytelling and associated production modes were completely alien to them. This was in most part due to the fact that

3

Eurofiction is a research project sponsored by the European Audiovisual Observatory in Strasbourg and the Italian public broadcaster RAI. It is carried out by Osservatorio sulla Fiction Italiana—OFI (Italy), Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel - CSA (France), British Film Institute—BFI (United Kingdom), Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona—UAB (Spain), University of Siegen (Germany), under the coordination of Fondazione Hypercampo (Italy). The Eurofiction reports focus on production and programming trends of TV fiction on European television.

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some broadcasters had been set up very recently (Polsat in 1994 and TVN in 1997), or had been state-controlled (such as TVP) and thus producing entertainment programming was not a priority. Since the production of Polish TV fiction was in its infancy and in need of inspiration, broadcasters looked to adapt formats that were enjoying success abroad, as a means of generating income with formulae that had already been tried and tested elsewhere.

Introducing docudrama TVN was the first Polish broadcaster to experiment with “docudrama”,4 a mode which blends “the codes and conventions of the documentary and drama genres” (Baltruschat 2010, 76-77), and usually focuses on reenactments of real-life events, the re-telling of international or national histories, the representation of public figures or the portrayal of ordinary people who are featured in the news media due to unusual circumstances (Baltruschat 2010, 53-54). W11 – Wydziaá ĝledczy (W11 – Crime Unit,) was the first Polish docu-crime series, optioned and produced in-house by TVN. Based on the successful German show K11 – Kommissare im Einsatz (Sat1, 2002—), it follows the work of real-life trained police inspectors, drawing the viewers into the world of crime and punishment and inviting them to experience the crime-solving procedures. Initially, episodes were produced based on the original German scripts. However, this soon changed when it transpired that the German versions were simply too culturally specific to be easily translated into a Polish context. As such, the network began commissioning local screenwriters to provide fresh dialogue and storylines that catered more to a local audience, whilst still paying a license fee to the original German rights owners (Czaja 2011). The creative input from local talent grew in the form of another docucrime show called Detektywi. In contrast to W11, this show was not adapted from a foreign property, but was entirely original. The show suggested that format adaptation was a good way for Polish broadcasters to familarise themselves with foreign genres, using them to hone their craft, before embarking on their own culturally specific examples. TVN

4 This type of programming is a hybrid form of reality programming and fiction scripted programming and is often referred to as scripted reality. Polish broadcasters, however, see this type of programming as scripted television series, and as such this programming type fits my understanding of television fiction for the purpose of this research.

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experimented with this way of producing a programming type entirely new to the Polish landscape with great success. Detekywi had an impressive run between 2005 and 2012. W11 became one of TVN’s most watched showed (Kurdupski, 2013) and continues to be broadcast today. As such, TVN was encouraged to expand this practice, applying it to different genres.

TVN’s experiment with telenovela TVN’s first encounter with the genre of telenovela—the Latin American version of a daily soap opera—was in late 1990s and first part of the 2000s when the broadcaster was importing South American shows such as Esmeralda (Televisa, 1997), Rosalinda (Canal de las Estrellas, 1999), Ricos y famosos (Canal 9, 1997–1998), Yo Soy Betty La Fea (RCN TV, 1999–2001), Por Un Beso (Televisa, 2000–2001), Niña... amada mía (Televisa, 2003), Amor Real (Televisa, 2003), Amar Otra Vez (Televisa, 2003–2004) and many others. The network abandoned telenovela importation in the mid-2000s, with the intention of producing its own domestic version instead. However, since no telenovelas had ever been made in Poland, the production mode of such a programme, as was initially the case with docudramas, was an alien concept to broadcasters and domestic screenwriters. Therefore, in order to minimise the risk involved in producing a new genre, TVN looked to adapt once more. This time, the pre-text was Columbia’s Yo Soy Betty, La Fea, which had already been successfully adapted for a number of countries, including in the US as the hit show Ugly Betty (Silent H Productions 2006-2010). TVN’s answer was BrzydUla (TVN, 2008). According to Izabela àopuch, a former TVN executive, Betty La Fea was chosen for one simple reason: it was arguably the most famous telenova in the world (àopuch 2012). BrzydUla was, expectedly, a huge commercial success, reaching 21% of the total viewership and becoming the most successful programme among the broadcaster's 16-49 target audience in the 17.55pm slot (Rutkowska 2009). Each episode attracted, on average, 3 million viewers, and was recognised as one of TVN’s biggest programming achievements (ZadroĪna 2009). The success of this adaptation encouraged TVN to seek other telenovela formats and, after BrzydUla, TVN produced a further two adaptations—Majka (TVN, 2010) based on the Venezuelan Juana La Virgen (RCTV, 2002) and Prosto w Serce (TVN, 2011) based on Argentina’s Sos mi Vida (Canal 13, 2006–2007)—before embarking on their own production, Julia, in 2012. In many ways, Julia can be regarded as a crowning achievement for TVN after a long period of training, during which the broadcaster managed to familiarise itself with the generic mode.

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As Poland’s broadcasters and producers adopted production strategies required for the adaptation of certain formats, such as the telenovela and the docudrama, they learnt how to produce new genres and original programming content. Formats, therefore, have been seen to invigorate and encourage the local production community to be more innovative rather than imitative, extending the stock of televisual ideas. In this instance, formatting supported TVN in its shift from importation to domestic production by activating local production. At the same time, format adaptation and the original creations that eventually followed helped satisfy a growing demand for local programming. Both telenovela and docudrama adaptations and, later, the original programming of the same type, were all stripped daily: that is, scheduled Monday through Friday at the same time each day (Eastman, Head and Klein 1985, 11). W11 was initially stripped in the late afternoon slot, but then moved to prime time, where it remains at the time of writing. Detektywi was broadcast consistently at 6.25 pm daily, preceded by the telenovela slot at 5.55pm, until 2012, when it was removed from the schedule. The fact that each programme appeared five times across the week contributed immensely to the proportion of domestic programming in TVN’s total output. More significantly, in the case of the telenovela adaptation, the approach additionally helped substitute imported programming with domestic fare that would continue the aesthetic strategies of the imports. The above examples show how an increasing use of format adaptation can support, develop and mature local production environments both in a quantitative and qualitative manner, thus contributing toward the domestication of Polish broadcasters’ programming output.

American generic models and Polish domestic TV drama As discussed in the previous section, licensed formatting, where the owners of ideas are acknowledged and the copyright respected, is not the only way in which a network or producer can borrow and recycle programming ideas. In addition to a number of internationally successful formats which are bought and adapted legally, television executives can appropriate programme ideas without acknowledging their origin or paying royalties. There is no single term in academic scholarship to describe the phenomenon, where national markets observe one another in order to find inspiration and to develop new ideas on the basis of what is produced elsewhere, though Michael Keane’s and Albert Moran’s discussion of cultural borrowing, imitation or emulation—what they term

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“the copycat phenomenon” (Keane and Moran, 2004)—is useful here. After all, such copying, which includes cultural borrowing and modifying other cultural texts, is very common in the media industries, and according to Moran “has been ongoing, widespread and persistent over the past 80 years” (Moran 2009, 15). Copying and borrowing are certainly practices that are endemic and even essential to doing business in Poland, where American television has become a major source of inspiration for the local television professionals. Television producer and director Bogumiá Lipski has the following view of the American TV industry: Americans have been making shows for sixty years now. So they are way more experienced than any other market in the world. What is more, this is where all the best writers went to, following the American dream. They make shows, they make them well, and they do not particularly want to share their knowledge. So the least you can do is to watch what they produce and draw some sort of conclusions from what you can see on the small screen. (Lipski, 2012)

The most straightforward way in which American influence impacts the Polish original TV fiction is through genre imitation. A good example of this is Poland’s first legal procedural drama, Prawo Agaty (English title: True Law, TVN, 2012—) which was developed in the tradition of FOX’s Ally McBeal (1997–2002), and premiered on TVN in March 2012.5 The series focuses on Agata Przybysz (Agnieszka Dygant), a successful lawyer, who loses her prestigious job and stylish flat as a result of falling prey to her seemingly charming boyfriend’s money scam. The titular character is forced to build her life and career from scratch. Bogumiá Lipski (2012), the show’s producer, admits one of the main incentives for producing the show was that Poland had not yet contributed to the genre, despite there having been an influx of successful American imports, including Boston Legal (20th Century Fox Television, 2004–2008), Drop Dead Diva (Storyline Entertainment, 2009– ) and The Good Wife (Scott Free Productions, 2009– ). Incidentally, all of these shows proved essential reference points to Lipski during Prawo Agaty’s conception.

5

TVN broadcast Magda M. (2005–2007)—a prime time drama set in a legal environment. Magda M. however did not have a narrative structure of a legal procedural, as its narrative was more centred around the drama aspect rather than the legal proceedings. Therefore, I treat Prawo Agaty as the first Polish original production to use the generic structure of a legal procedural, where each episode revolves around a different legal case.

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Prawo Agaty was not an isolated case of the impact of American genres and, in September 2012, TVN premiered Lekarze (English title: Medics), a medical drama show based on highly popular American shows such as Grey’s Anatomy (ShondaLand 2005—). However, as with W11, these Polish shows sacrificed most foreign elements for locally orientated stories with locally orientated themes. Where the American influence could be felt most strongly, however, was in the way each show structured its episodes. Prawo Agaty and Lekarze, share the formal attributes of what Robin Nelson terms a “flexi-narrative” (Nelson 1997, 30-49). This mode of storytelling, which is prevalent in American television, is said to reward dedicated viewers by introducing larger arcs of narrative progression while also allowing sporadic or new viewers to enjoy standalone episodes. Lipski explains how the flexi-narrative functions in Prawo Agaty: I wanted Prawo Agaty to have a procedural structure, with new story in each episode. So my basic preoccupation was how to combine the episodic, case-based structure with the narrative drama arc. And this is what will make people tune in, the drama arc. I do not think the case structure would be enough for viewers to tune in. (Lipski, 2012).

Throughout season two of Prawo Agaty, the main character deals with various legal cases, which are resolved within each episode: for example, in the second episode, she tackles a case of a student suing her lecturer for sexual harassment, in episode three a malpractice suit, and, in episode six, a football rioting case. Prawo Agaty thus patterns its weekly episodes into structures of problems and solutions in a way that the central conflict introduced in the beginning of an episode is overcome at the end in a similar way to its American counterparts. Without this unity, casual viewers would be less likely to watch. By the same token, as a flexi-narrative dictates, the show also explores units of storytelling that transcend single episodes. The season-long arcs feature plotlines centred around Agata, the show’s main character, and her personal life, giving viewers an opportunity to consider her emotions, which, hopefully, intensifies their interest in character psychology. For example, across seasons one and two, the extended narrative arc centres on the growing romantic tension building between Agata and her business partner, Marek. This romantic involvement creates a “will-they-won’tthey” scenario, where the viewer is left wondering how this romantic dilemma will be resolved. The season two finale rewards regular viewers by providing an important progression to this narrative arc: the romantic tension between Agata and Marek results in the two sharing a kiss. Lekarze is similar, in that it too shares these traits of a flexi-narratives, in

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which short, medically-oriented arcs which are resolved weekly run alongside more complex plotlines involving family, romantic and interpersonal relationships (in a similar fashion to both Grey’s Anatomy and The Good Wife). Given the success of these shows, both have been renewed for successive seasons (Pallus, 2012). Prawo Agaty and Lekarze are not, however, the only shows to do this. Bogdan Czaja, TVN’s Deputy Programming Director, recognises the increasing importance of the blending of the episodic and the serial in Poland’s television market more generally: For a mainstream broadcaster the type of fiction that seems to work best is the type that involves episodic form with a narrative arc, but not too serialized. The type of show that doesn’t seem to work too well are the ones that require continual watching. If the show is too demanding and requires watching episode by episode, it doesn’t work. So it’s best to have a show that, even if it has continuity across episodes, is not too demanding. This is the best recipe for a show. (Czaja, 2011)

Czaja’s account looks towards a new paradigm of television storytelling in Poland, with a reconceptualisation of the boundary between episodic and serial forms, as Polish practitioners borrow the proven storytelling resources of American television’s craft tradition. The examples discussed above suggest that Polish original television drama is influenced by international genre conventions, many of which originate in America. Polish TV professionals learn the new cultural language through watching American television and gradually are able to develop their own versions of textual models from the American television culture. In this respect, watching American programming can support local producers in the creation of fresh domestic programming and strengthening the existing repertoire with new genres, which are modelled on American successes, but maintain local content.

Conclusion As Poland’s production sector develops and becomes more mature, it is gradually generating more original fiction programming, slowly removing the need for heavy reliance on imported serialised programming. Czaja believes that: This is how markets work, not only in Poland but elsewhere as well – local content always works better. Viewers prefer shows featuring characters that speak Polish and deal with problems and issues they can relate to. The

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general truth is that people want to watch Polish series more than the imported content. (Czaja, 2011)

Poland, in this instance, reflects the same trends that occurred in Western European countries in the late 1990s, which witnessed steady increases in the volume of national local fiction broadcasts in Western Europe.6 The specific circumstances in which these processes of change and growth have occurred can tell us a lot about the stages of development of local infant television markets and reveal how production communities mature. This chapter has argued that borrowing successful programme formulas from foreign television can help local television practitioners develop original programming and thus remove the need for importation. In this respect, scripted format adaptation and the industrial practice of imitation have facilitated and assisted change in the Polish mediasphere. Both processes, of formatting and imitation, have helped Polish broadcasters replace the imported product by activating local production. Programmes developed on the basis of genres produced in the US or international scripted formats certainly represent a significant proportion of the fiction programming on offer from Poland’s terrestrial broadcasters. As such, both programming strategies contributed to the development of the Polish television landscape, and supported Polish broadcasters in their shift from importation to domestic production, marginalising especially American content in the primetime slots. It is, therefore, difficult to overestimate the significance of format adaptation and cultural borrowing in the Polish fictionscape. This capacity to actively incorporate global influences into the domestic context testifies convincingly to the dynamic vitality of the Polish TV industry that has developed not only in spite of the early heavy importation of American product, but rather supported by foreign televisual influences. Polish domestic production represents what Milly Buonanno sees as “the plausibility of a different interpretative hypothesis about the relationship between the domestic and the foreign, the local and the global, where this latter does not necessarily or exclusively stand as a threat to be neutralised, or an obstacle to be overcome, but—switching the perspective—as a resource to be fruitfully exploited” (Buonanno 2009, 267). The positive impact of transnational televisual flows on the Polish industry, as discussed in this chapter, paints a much less threatening picture of the impact of format business and American programming on

6

On the topic of programming output of Western European markets see: Buonanno 2000; Steemers 2004, 150; De Bens and de Smaele 2001.

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nascent local television industries. Foreign televisual cultures can represent a vital resource for national players and local television cultures. The processes and trends reviewed in this chapter highlight the increasing calls for moving beyond the statistical and the exclusively nation-centred approach within which a large part of the studies of media flows have traditionally been embedded. In order to uncover the complexities of contemporary television flows, it is necessary to supplement the statistical data, which on its own fails to grasp all the aspects that are part of international programme exchanges. Apart from looking at media exchanges in the statistical dimension, it is also worth considering how those audiovisual flows change. The specific circumstances in which the changes of programming flows occur can tell us a lot about stages of development of local television markets and can uncover how television practitioners within those markets deal with particular difficulties of their national contexts.

Bibliography Ang, Ien. 1996. Living Room Wars. London: Routledge. Baltruschat, Doris. 2010. Global Media Ecologies: Networked Production in Film and Television. New York and Oxon: Routledge. Bechelloni, Giovanni. 1999. “Introduction”. In Shifting Landscapes. Television Fiction in Europe, ed. Milly Buonanno, 1-5. Luton: University of Luton Press. Bondebjerg, Ib et al. 2008. “American Television. Point of Reference or European Nightmare?” In A European Television History, eds. Jonathan Bignell and Andreas Fickers, 154-183, Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Buonanno, Milly, ed. 1999. Shifting Landscapes. Television Fiction in Europe. University of Luton Press. Buonanno, Milly, ed. 2000. Continuity and Change: Television Fiction in Europe. University of Luton Press. Buonanno, Milly. 2009. “A Place in the Sun: Global Seriality and the Revival of Domestic Drama in Italy”. In TV Formats Worldwide: Localising Global Programs, ed. Albert Moran, 255-269, Bristol: Intellect. Chamczyk, Dorota. (Executive Producer in TV Drama and Feature Film Production Department at TVN) in discussion with the author, January 2012. Czaja, Bogdan. (Deputy Programming Director at TVN) in discussion with the author, December 2011.

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De Bens, Els, Mary Kelly and Marit Bakke. 1992. “Television Content: Dallasification of Culture?” In Dynamics of Media Politics, eds. K. Siune and W. Truetzschler, 73-100. London: Sage. De Bens, Els and Hedwig de Smaele. 2001. “The Inflow of American Television Fiction on European Broadcasting Channels Revisited”. European Journal of Communication 16 (1), 51-76. Eastman, Susan Tyler, Sydney W. Head and Lewis Klein, eds. 1985. Broadcast/Cable programming. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Górska, Joanna. (Public Relations Manager at TVN), e-mail message to author, May 15, 2012. Keane, Michael and Albert Moran. eds. 2004. Television Across Asia. Television Industries, Programme Formats and Globalization. Oxon: Routledge Curzon. Kempinsky, Grzegorz. (Television Scriptwriter) e-mail message to author, January 7, 2012. Klementewicz, Karol. (Television Scriptwriter) in discussion with the author, December 2011. Kozanecka, Anna. (Head of Film Acquisitions and Programming at Polsat) email message to author April 24, 2013. Kurdupski, Michaá. 2013. “W-11 - Wydziaá ĝledczy” straciá 370 tys. Widzów,” Wirtualne Media. http://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/w11-wydzial-sledczy-stracil-370-tys-widzow. —. 2012a. “Lekarze hitem telewizji TVN, 29 mln zá z reklam,” Wirtualne Media. http://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/lekarze-hitem-telewizjitvn-29-mln-zl-z-reklam. —. 2012b. “3 mln widzów „Prawa Agaty”, jesienią druga seria,” Wirtualne Media. http://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/3-mln-wid zow-prawa-agaty-jesienia-druga-seria. —. 2012c “Prawo Agaty” straciáo widzów. 26 mln zá z reklam,” Wirtualne Media, http://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/prawo-agaty-stracilo-wid zow-26-mln-zl-z-reklam. Lipski, Bogumiá. (Television Producer and Director) in discussion with the author, March 2012. àopuch, Izabela. (at the time Producer in TV Drama and Feature Film Production Department at TVN, now Head of Original Production, HBO Poland) in discussion with the author, January 2012. MipCom. 2001. “European TV Fiction Production in Decline”. Press Release. 9 October 2001. http://www.obs.coe.int/about/oea/pr/pr_eurofiction.html.

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Moran, Albert. ed. 2009. TV Formats Worldwide: Localising Global Programs. Bristol: Intellect. Nelson, Robin. 1997. TV Drama in Transition. Forms, Values and Cultural Change. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Pallus, Patryk. 2012. “Telewizja TVN krĊci Prawo Agaty 3”, Wirtualne Media. http://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/telewizja-tvn-kreci-prawoagaty-3. Radio i Telewizja, 1991, Warszawa, 1-29. RTV. Radio i Telewizja. Tygodnik. 1-14. Warszawa. 1980. Rutkowska, ElĪbieta. 2009. “Serial "Brzydula" przyciągaá do TVN-u 2,5 mln widzów,” Press. http://www.press.pl/newsy/telewizja/pokaz/18947,Serial-Brzydulaprzyciagal-do-TVN-u-2_5-mln-widzow. Steemers, Jeanette. 2004. Selling Television. British Television in The Global Marketplace. London: BFI. ŠtČtka, Václav. 2012. “From Global to (G)local: Changing Patterns of Television Program Flows and Audience Preferences in Central and Eastern Europe”. Journal of Popular Film and Television 40 (3) 109118. Tunstall, Jeremy and David Machin. 1999. The Anglo-American Media Connection. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varis, Tapio. 1974. Television Traffic - A One-Way Street? A Survey and Analysis of the International Flow of Television Programme Material. Paris: UNESCO. Varis, Tapio. 1985. International Flow of Television Programmes. Paris: UNESCO. ZadroĪna, Ewelina. “Za co Polacy pokochali BrzydUlĊ.” Popcorner.pl. http://www.popcorner.pl/popcorner/1,81588,7375721,Za_co_Polacy_p okochali_BrzydUle_.html.

CHAPTER FIVE MAINTAINING A CRITICAL EYE: THE POLITICAL AVANT-GARDE ON CHANNEL 4 IN THE 1990S STEVE PRESENCE

Channel 4’s Independent Film and Video Department (IFVD) was broadcasting politically radical documentary throughout the first half of the 1990s as part of its Critical Eye series (1990-4). In this chapter, I want to draw attention to that series and explore some of the reasons for its absence from the historical record, as Critical Eye is part of a much wider tradition of oppositional documentary in Britain, of which the last twentyfive years have received almost no historical or cultural recognition. The last book-length study of oppositional British film culture was Margaret Dickinson’s Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90 (1999). As a result, a survey of current research on the topic could be forgiven for thinking that a politicised documentary film culture in Britain was all but non-existent. However, on the contrary, Britain has a lively and diverse culture of radical documentary filmmaking, albeit one that has undergone significant changes as it has adapted to the major technological, socio-economic and political developments that have taken place since 1990. Indeed, Critical Eye is a useful point of comparison for measuring the impact of those developments on British broadcasting. The lowbudget, activist-oriented documentary it broadcast for the first half of the 1990s is unthinkable from the standpoint of contemporary television, in which documentary is governed almost entirely by the strictures of socalled “objectivity”, a concept which today more often than not describes a commitment to the status quo. Recovering the kinds of alternative broadcast histories of which Critical Eye is a part is thus all the more important, if only to remind ourselves that television is capable of a much more challenging and meaningful contribution to society than is suggested by the majority of programming today.

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In fact, as we will see, part of the reason Critical Eye has not received the attention it deserves has to do with the changing context of British broadcasting in the early 1990s. When it launched in November 1982, Channel 4—in particular the IFVD—broke new ground in public-service television, broadcasting community programmes and low-budget drama alongside “world cinema” and politically and aesthetically experimental work. Unfortunately, state support for this kind of cultural diversity— finally achieved after decades of campaigning (Harvey 1994)—was anathema to the neoliberal ideologies of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and by the end of the 1980s the commercialisation of Channel 4 was well underway. This process took time to complete, however, and was in fact not concluded until the middle of the next decade. Nevertheless, discussions of radicalism on the channel understandably focus their attention on the 1980s, with the unfortunate result that the astonishing array of oppositional documentary shown in the first half of the 1990s is obscured. However, discussions of radicalism on Channel 4 in the 1980s are also revealing of another, more troubling explanation for the lack of attention paid to oppositional documentary on the channel in the 1990s, the explanation of which depends upon a problematic yet necessary distinction between the “aesthetic avant-garde” and the “political avant-garde.” In this chapter at least, oppositional documentary is synonymous with the political avant-garde: an explicitly partisan and committed kind of filmmaking in which the need for aesthetic innovation is subordinate to the communication of political ideas. Distinct from the political avant-garde but related to it, the aesthetic avant-garde denotes a body of work more commonly referred to today as “film and video art”1 or “artists’ film and video”.2 As the name suggests, this kind of filmmaking is more preoccupied with issues of aesthetics, and produces films which address aesthetic questions as well as political ones. As well as focusing on the 1980s, discussions of radicalism on Channel 4 also focus (almost without exception) on the aesthetic avant-garde. As we will see, the presence of the political avant-garde on the channel in the 1980s is all but effaced as a result. This disproportionate attention to the aesthetic avant-garde is the legacy of a trend dominant in political film theory since the 1970s. As a result of this trend, the values and priorities of the aesthetic avant-garde have become the benchmark of political film practice, such that the 1 2

See Knight (1996), Elewes (2004) or Comer (2009). See Curtis (2007), Danino and Mazière (2003) or Rees (1999).

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existence of the political avant-garde has been eclipsed altogether. That the last quarter of a century of radical British documentary is virtually undocumented is testament to this effect, of which the absence of Critical Eye from Channel 4’s history is but a small part. However, distinguishing between the aesthetic and political avant-garde is a provocative (though by no means original) move, especially since there is not space here to discuss the history of debates regarding politics and aesthetics that has led me to it.3 Nevertheless, my argument cannot be understood outside of this context, and will itself go some way towards confirming my claim that the privileging of the aesthetic over the political avant-garde has all but eradicated awareness of the latter. Such a claim is likely to elicit criticism on a number of fronts, however, so I want to begin with a few caveats. First, differentiating the political from the aesthetic avant-garde is likely to be accused of reproducing a false dichotomy between aesthetics and politics, or misunderstanding the dialectical relationship between a film’s content and the form in which it is represented. In some respects, this is a justifiable criticism. Aesthetic questions are, of course, also political ones—the means with which one represents always shapes what is represented—and political filmmakers should, at the very least, be sensitive to the political implications of film language. That said, at present, films that foreground aesthetics over and above politics are frequently described as “radical”, while others which explicitly address, promote and critique radical politics have that status denied them. Asserting the existence of the political avant-garde is thus a necessary corrective to the privileging of the aesthetic avant-garde that already exists. Second, I do not wish to patronise those of the aesthetic avant-garde who are genuinely engaged with radical politics, and I have no interest in reproducing what Esther Leslie has called (albeit in a slightly different context) a “phoney war” between artists working in popular forms and those more interested in aesthetic innovation (2002, v). Nevertheless, documentary works of the political avant-garde have been ignored and dismissed by guardians of the aesthetic avant-garde for too long.

3

In the 1970s these debates took place predominantly in the journal Screen, but also featured in others such as After Image, Framework and Cinema Rising. Some of the key writings are collected in Dickinson (1999), others are reprinted in Neale and Eaton (1981). “Screen theory”, as it has become known (Kuhn, 2009, 4), reworked in particular the Brecht-Lukács debate over realism in the 1930s, the key texts of which are collected in Taylor (2007). In the1980s these debates were reinvigorated by Third cinema and the emergence of a number of politically and aesthetically motivated Black film collectives in Britain (see Mercer 1988).

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Identifying this imbalance and arguing against it is the first step towards rectifying it and developing a more effective, holistic radical film culture. With that in mind, the rest of this chapter is divided into three sections. The first explores the excessive emphasis on the aesthetic avant-garde on Channel 4 in the 1980s. As we will see, not only has this effaced the presence of both aesthetic and political radicalism in the 1990s, it has also eclipsed the fact that the political avant-garde was as much a part of a series hitherto celebrated almost exclusively for its aesthetic radicalism. The second section explores the political avant-garde on Channel 4 in the 1990s. Though my focus is on Critical Eye, I will show how this was in fact far from the only source of political radicalism on the channel in this period. Finally, the third section constitutes a close analysis of the documentary with which Critical Eye was launched: Despite TV’s The Battle of Trafalgar (1990). Not only is this indicative of the extraordinary work broadcast on the series, it also demonstrates that, while the political avant-garde might not be as formally inventive as its aesthetic equivalent, neither is it aesthetically conservative. Indeed, these films are formally unconventional precisely because they explicitly calibrate their aesthetic strategies for use as tools of political communication, aware that political art must “speak not to some self-regarding artistic elite, but to people” (Brecht 2003, 209).

The two avant-gardes on Channel 4 in the 1980s Discussions of radicalism on Channel 4 invariably focus on the 1980s, with the IFVD and its series, The Eleventh Hour (1982-9), frequently singled out as representative of the period.4 That this decade, department and series are among the most common topics of this research is understandable. First, Channel 4’s first decade (mostly contained in the 4

For discussions of The Eleventh Hour as representative of radicalism on Channel 4 in the 1980s see Andrews (2011), Rees (1999, 92), Hobson (2008, 75) and Wyver (2007, 55). For radicalism on the channel framed in terms of the aesthetic avant-garde, see various essays in Knight (1996), O’Pray (1996a, 21), Walker (1993, 123-34) and Lambert (1982, 149-51). Rees (2007), Curtis (2007) and Stoneman (2005 and 1996) focus on the aesthetic avant-garde in the 1980s and the 1990s, with Rees and Stoneman acknowledging the presence of more politically oriented work. Along with Dickinson (1999), Sylvia Harvey’s work (1994 and 1986, for example) is probably the most consistent exception to the rule, recognising the existence of and discussing with equal merit both the political and the aesthetic avant-garde, sometimes even focusing exclusively on the former (1984).

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1980s) is widely recognised as its most “radical” (Kerr 2008, 323). According to Rod Stoneman, for instance, “the first decade of Channel 4 constitutes a considerable experiment with experiment—the largest body of avant-garde work shown on network television, encountering its widest audiences, anywhere, ever” (1996, 295). The IFVD, meanwhile, was set-up largely as a result of the Independent Filmmakers’ Association’s (IFA)5 campaign to ensure that the radical work the sector had been producing for the preceding two decades was properly represented on the channel. As such, it was the IFVD which most frequently screened (politically and aesthetically) avantgarde work. Prior to the launch of Channel 4, the IFA’s negotiations with Jeremy Isaacs, the channel’s founding chief executive, led to the formation of the IFVD and the appointment of Alan Fountain as its Commissioning Editor (Dickinson 1999, 58). A member of the IFA himself, Fountain hired two other IFA members as his Deputy Commissioning Editors, Rod Stoneman and Caroline Spry, and together they produced The Eleventh Hour as the department’s flagship series. The classification of the 1980s as Channel 4’s radical decade can also be explained by virtue of the fact that many of the changes that signalled the end of this period can be located around the turn of the decade and the channel’s tenth birthday in November 1992. Isaacs was replaced with the more commercially-oriented Michael Grade in 1987, and the following year the government’s White Paper, Broadcasting in the 1990s: Competition, Choice and Quality (Hansard 1988), recommended the deregulation of the industry and the transformation of Channel 4’s funding structure. The Eleventh Hour was shelved in 1989 and, by 1990, other series from the 1980s that had featured similar work had also come to an end.6 That year also saw the government’s White Paper enshrined in law in the Broadcasting Act 1990 (Corner et al 1994, 6), which eventually led 5

Set-up in 1974 to promote the principles of ‘independent’ filmmaking and campaign for funding and support from relevant bodies (Dickinson 2003), the importance of the IFA in this period is hard to overestimate. As well as lobbying for a space on Channel 4 they also spearheaded the campaign for the Workshop Agreement (1984), a deal between the film workers’ union (ACCT), the BFI and Channel 4 which secured unionised wages for those recognised as conforming to “workshop” practises (ACCT 1984). This was a crucial source of support for the sector and, though far from perfect, was an unprecedented achievement which has not been replicated since. See Lovell (1990) and Stoneman (1992 and 2005). 6 Other Channel 4 series which also broadcast the aesthetic avant-garde include Visions (1982-85), Alter-Image (1983), Ghosts in the Machine (1986), Ghosts 2 (1988) and TV Dante (1987-90).

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to the crucial moment in 1993 when the channel became responsible for selling its own advertising. Previously, Channel 4 had been funded by a levy on the commercially run ITV channels, in exchange for which they received the right to sell advertisements in their regions on the fourth channel. Making the channel responsible for its own advertising forced it to compete with the other commercial channels for revenue. Thus Channel 4 was itself “obliged to commercialise” (Andrews 2011, 218). In practice, as Andrews says, this meant “abandoning the types of programme, such as The Eleventh Hour, which that could be expected to appeal only to tiny audiences” (218). From this perspective then, the characterisation of the 1980s as Channel 4’s radical phase and the 1990s as marking its shift to “a tabloid agenda” (Malik 2002, 51) is reasonable. However, although the events marking that shift were taking place from the late 1980s onwards, their impact was not manifest in the schedules immediately. For instance, while none of the series broadcasting avant-garde work in the 1980s continued into the 1990s, others took their place. As Al Rees (2007) argues, artists’ film and video continued to appear on Channel 4 “through into the next decade” (146) with series like TV Interventions (1990), The Dazzling Image (1990 and 1992) and Midnight Underground (1993-7).7 Indeed, according to Rees “cash-crop culture finally caught up with the visual arts sector” only in 1995, when Stuart Cosgrove took over as Channel 4’s Head of Independent Commissioning (160). Just as 1995 marks the end point for platforms dedicated to the aesthetic avant-garde on Channel 4, the broadcast of oppositional documentary on the channel also continued until the middle of the 1990s. However, despite the fact that radicalism on Channel 4 in the 1980s is discussed almost exclusively in terms of the aesthetic avant-garde, the political avant-garde was as much a part of that radicalism as its aesthetic equivalent. Indeed, this combination of formal and political radicalism is unsurprising given that the independent film sector the IFVD was intended to serve itself consisted of both the aesthetic and the political avant-garde. According to Sylvia Harvey (1982a), for instance, the IFA represented both experimental filmmakers interested in “aesthetic and formal radicalism” as well as others “whose goals were more socially, politically .

7

Other channels also featured platforms for the aesthetic avant-garde in the 1990s, such as White Noise (BBC2, 1990), Eleven O’Clock High (1995, Carlton) or The Late Show (BBC2, 1990-94). See Flaxton (1996), Walker (1993) and Curtis (2007). That these other platforms were following Channel 4’s lead is noted in, for example, Stoneman (1996, 294).

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or community oriented”, and who “made films for the labour movement, the women’s movement, the anti-racist movement and other campaigns” (160). Rees (2007) notes the same distinction, describing the IFA’s membership as composed of both “artist filmmakers” as well as “socialpolitical filmmakers” (148). This combination of emphases is even less surprising when one considers that the IFVD’s Commissioning Editors were part of this milieu. Fountain describes his view of cinema as politics as one in which, for example, “television [was] a site of ideological struggle” (quoted in Dowmunt 2007, 248). According to Stoneman (2011), meanwhile, the IFVD had a sort of unstated agenda ... to push the boundaries of politics, to experiment, to have a basic 68er agenda which would be some mixture of class, gender, race, anti-imperialism, generally libertarian stuff really although we didn’t use that word. (4)

Clearly, the IFVD was motivated by political concerns at least as much as it was concerned with aesthetic experimentation. So although it is frequently cited as the aesthetic avant-garde’s televisual high-point, The Eleventh Hour showed a combination of aesthetically and politically radical work. This combination occasionally existed in single films, of course, such as So That You Can Live (for Shirley) (Cinema Action 1982), Amy! (Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey 1980) or The Filleting Machine (Amber 1981), but it was more common for the aesthetic avant-garde to be broadcast alongside the political avantgarde. The Eleventh Hour’s series of “Profiles” (1983) on filmmakers like Margaret Tait, Jeff Keen and Malcolm LeGrice, or collections of experimental work on video and super-eight for instance,8 were broadcast alongside oppositional documentaries like The Women of the Rhondda (The London Women’s Film Group 1973), The Miners’ Film (Cinema Action 1974), The Cause of Ireland (Platform Films 1983), Rocking the Boat (Cinema Action 1983), Welcome to the Spiv Economy (Newsreel Collective 1986), The Peoples’ Flag (Platform Films 1987), and Biko: Breaking the Silence (Edwina Spicer 1987). While these focused on issues in the UK, The Eleventh Hour also broadcast other oppositional documentaries addressing radical politics overseas, such as the mini-series, The New Cinema of Latin America (Michael Chanan, 1983), The Bronx: A Cry for Help (Brent Owens 1987) or My Son Che: A Family Portrait by Don Ernesto Guevara (Fernando Birri 1987).

8

In series such as Video 1, 2, and 3 (1985), or Super Eight 1 and 2 (1986).

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Furthermore, The Eleventh Hour was not the only platform for the political avant-garde in the 1980s. The other series the IFVD produced was People to People (1983-9), which broadcast an extraordinary range of oppositional documentary, including Byker (Amber, 1983), Coal Not Dole: Miners United (Banner Film and TV, 1984), Struggles for the Black Community (Colin Prescod 1984), We Owned and Ran (Banner Film and TV 1985), Hell to Pay (Anne Cottringer 1988) and Dockers (John Goddard 1988), to name but a few. Nevertheless, aside from work written by members of the department themselves this series is scarcely acknowledged in the channel’s history precisely because it lacked the presence of formally aesthetic work. In acknowledging that the IFVD “showed the stuff with the best claim to meet Parliament’s command that we encourage innovation and experiment”, for instance, Jeremy Isaacs argued that without it Channel 4 would be all the poorer, and would have a far less convincing claim to innovation. The two series, in particular The Eleventh Hour, deserve—what I sought for them—a protected place in the channel’s schedule, and an established and guaranteed claim on the channel’s budget. (1989, 174)

The other series Isaacs is referring to is People to People but, as we can see, its presence is effaced in favour of foregrounding the series which showcased formal innovation and experiment.

The political avant-garde in the 1990s The output of the political avant-garde on Channel 4 in the 1990s has received similarly scant attention. Critical Eye was arguably the primary platform for oppositional documentary in this period, but the IFVD also produced a number of other neglected series. Out (1989-91), for instance, was dedicated to gay and lesbian programming and showed films like Lust and Liberation (Clare Bevan 1989), After Stonewall (John Scagliotti 1989), Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien 1990), Comrades in Arms (Mayavision 1990) and Over Our Dead Bodies (Stuart Marshall 1991). Although Global Image (1992-1994) consisted mostly of radical work from overseas, it also broadcast Marc Karlin’s Utopias (1988), about seven different version of socialism, and Life Can be Wonderful (Martin Smith and Shelagh Brady 1994), about British communist filmmaker and distributor, Stanley Foreman. Channel 4’s Guide for Producers, meanwhile, describes the IFVD’s First Sex (1994-5) as “a feminist and

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women’s issue series” and War Cries (1995-6) as “a strand for social and polemical films” (Channel 4 1994, n.p.). This extraordinary array of politically radical documentary is practically absent from the historical record. Aside from brief references in Harvey (1994, 122) and Stoneman (1996, 289 and 1992, 140), Critical Eye, for instance, is missing from the history of oppositional film in Britain. More general histories of Channel 4, such as Hobson (2008) or Brown (2007), hardly recognise the presence of oppositional film on the channel at all, in either the 1980s or the 1990s.9 Indeed, the conference marking Channel 4’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2007 included only one paper explicitly addressing the channel’s relationship with radical film, and this was Stoneman reflecting on the radicalism of the channel’s “early years” (Stoneman 2007). Writing in Screen’s dossier on the conference, Paul Kerr (2008) notes that there was “little or nothing ... about politics or policy”, and that, although there were panels on race and sexuality, class was conspicuously absent (318). This absence of attention is partly a result of the political avant-garde being increasingly unwelcome on Channel 4 from the late 1980s onwards. However, it also derives from the legacy of anti-illusionist film theory that dominated debates about aesthetic and politics in the cinema in the 1970s and 1980s. These arguments deserve more attention than I have time for here, but suffice to say that, as Robert Stam has argued, the overriding consequence was that radical film theorists “came to regard reflexivity as a political obligation” (226). Deemed lacking of the modernist qualities subsequently required for political art to qualify for scholarly investigation, the political avant-garde on Channel 4 in the 1990s has been all but ignored. This is also in spite of the fact that Critical Eye was reaching larger audiences than experimental work had ever had access, by virtue of the fact that it was broadcast in a 9pm slot. Despite their best efforts (Fountain quoted in Dowmunt 2007, 251), the IFVD had never succeeded in breaking the aesthetic avant-garde out from the “tundra of the schedules” (Stoneman 1996, 290), with The Eleventh Hour stuck at 11pm, Midnight Underground at 12am, and so on. Of course, Critical Eye was permitted the earlier slot largely because it was deemed to adopt a 9

Hobson (2008) briefly mentions Fountain twice, once in the context of The Eleventh Hour (75) and once in a list of executives involved in the Channel 4 Campaign Group (an initiative intended to protect the channel from the privatisation involved in the 1990 Broadcast Act) (167). Brown (2007) affords one mention each to Fountain and Spry, the former in a list of Commissioning Editors (47), and the latter in the context of a Daily Mail article criticising a programme she commissioned, Dyke TV (175).

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more conservative aesthetic approach, yet the aesthetics of films shown on Critical Eye were hardly conservative. According to Caroline Spry, for instance, the late ’80s early ’90s was when we started to do more supposedly mainstream, populist stuff than had been in The Eleventh Hour. So Critical Eye came in there in the 9 o’clock slot [but] we tried to do things that would bring some of the politics and aesthetics of The Eleventh Hour into the more mainstream slots. (2011, 2)

Compared to the experimental work shown on The Eleventh Hour the formal qualities of the films broadcast on Critical Eye were indeed closer to the conventional standards of mainstream documentary. However, as Spry says, it was the IFVD’s explicit intention to incorporate some political and aesthetic radicalism into the mainstream schedule, and the formal qualities of the films they produced are far more complex than conventional documentary aesthetics. Indeed, the series showed work by filmmakers known for innovative formal approaches, such as Reece Auguiste’s Mysteries of July (1991) or Marc Karlin’s Between Times (1993). However, these filmmakers are already well known precisely because they are deemed to combine their politics with a sufficient level of formal innovation in their work. So, in the final part of the chapter I want to argue that the aesthetic strategies of much lesser known filmmakers of the political avant-garde are also worthy of attention, despite the absence of reflexive tropes as conventionally conceived.

Despite TV’s The Battle of Trafalgar Despite TV was a London-based anarchist film collective founded by Mark Saunders in 1981. Like other access groups at that time, such as Oval House or Albany Video, Despite TV was set-up to facilitate community video production, serving the boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham. Unlike those other access workshops, however, Despite TV operated according to a constitution explicitly based on anarchist philosophy. Consensus-based decision-making underpinned all organisation and editorial decisions, and the group practised role-rotation and other strategies designed to encourage democratic and nonhierarchical working processes (Saunders 2011). Unfortunately this principled internal structure also excluded Despite TV from the funding opportunities provided by the Workshop Agreement, the terms and conditions of which did not allow for the large numbers of people involved in the group (on average around ten but up to as many as

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twenty). According to Saunders, the Agreement was insufficiently flexible to ensure equal wages for every member and was thus rejected by the group as a whole, wage hierarchies being incompatible with their nonhierarchical ethos (2011, 10). Thus, while other access groups (such as Albany) became franchised Channel 4 workshops, Despite TV did not, and the resulting financial instability contributed to their eventual demise. Nevertheless, their non-hierarchical mode of production proved an efficient one even without workshop funding, and Despite TV released fifteen videos from 1984 to 1993. Most of these were video-activist newsreels: compilations of short films on local political issues, often alongside videos of local bands or other cultural activities and topics. However, Despite TV also produced a handful of feature documentaries, including The Battle of Trafalgar. This was the film which launched the first of Critical Eye’s five seasons of oppositional documentary. The “battle” of the film’s title is the Poll Tax riot that took place in central London on Saturday 31 March 1990. Broadcast six months later on 18 September, the film sets out to contest the dominant version of the day’s events as told by the police, media and government. This objective is clearly established in the opening sequence, a montage composed of numerous accounts of the riot in the mainstream media. From the incessant repetition of the word “trouble” to clichéd statements blaming “the minority of anarchists who regularly hijack protests”, the sequence foregrounds the language with which the media frames the protestors as the cause of the riot and the police as innocent victims caught in the line of duty. Their refusal to deviate from this interpretation is articulated most dramatically when the image track shows a group of mounted police officers galloping into, and then over, a fleeing woman, while the voice-over declares that “the violence was caused by about 3000 among them”.10 Following this montage the film states its intention to challenge this interpretation of events. Cutting to a close-up of a woman’s silhouetted face in profile, she explains that “Despite TV was present at the event. Our experience was dramatically different from that portrayed by television news”. As she speaks, the lighting of the shot increases and the silhouette effect is eradicated, fully illuminating the speaker as she turns to face the camera. This lighting effect expresses the film’s sentiment, literally shedding light on the narrator as she promises to reveal an alternative interpretation of the riot. Addressing the audience directly, she reminds us 10

Later, this footage is repeated with another reporter explaining that, “with the guilty mingling deliberately with the innocent, such injuries are inevitable”.

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that, like all television programmes, their film has been edited, but she insists that the events shown are in chronological order. Unlike modernist reflexivity, this reference to the film’s construction is intended to re-affirm rather than de-stabilise The Battle of Trafalgar’s truth-claim. This kind of self-referentiality is typical of the political avant-garde. Despite TV are too concerned with the political consequences of the riot’s representation in the media to focus on ontological distinctions between reality and its representation. Thus the text references itself to underscore the filmmakers’ sincerity, not to arouse the audience’s suspicions of the filmic apparatus. The opening sequence also functions to introduce the over-riding structure and form of the film. Divided into three sections, the first establishes the chronology of the day and substantiates claims that it was in fact the police who antagonised the protestors. The second and third sections of the film explore the consequences of the day, focusing respectively on the response of the media and police and arguing that the violence on the behalf of the protestors constituted “common defence” against an armoured, baton-wielding police force. Continuing with the form in which the female narrator first appeared, the film frequently features its talking-heads in profile on the left-hand side of the frame, discussing their experiences as the footage of the events in question plays on the remainder of the screen. As with the reference to the editing process in the film’s introduction, this composition complements Despite TV’s intention to contest the dominant version of events. As the talking-heads of the protestors recall their experiences, the footage of the events being discussed forms an audio-visual testimony, authenticating much of what they say and powerfully contesting the claims of the media and the police. Aesthetic strategies emphasising synchronicity in the protesters’ perspective are all the more powerful when used alongside strategies that suggest contradiction in the official version of events. As with the example of mounted police trampling the woman while the accompanying voiceover blames the protestors, this is frequently done by contrasting sound with image. At other times contradictions are articulated in a single visual composition. For instance, the police allegation that “the crowd were getting fairly determined in their efforts to remove the double row of barriers in Whitehall” is unfurled across the screen in large white font, while the image beneath it clearly shows police officers removing the barriers themselves. The distinction between the two versions of events is further reinforced by emphasising the opposition between the police and the protestors. One sequence, for instance, uses CGI to visualise the route of the march and demonstrate the way in which police split the crowd, creating panic and forcing a bottle-neck to form at Trafalgar Square. If

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conventional documentary draws factual capital from the objective connotations of maps and diagrams, here these tropes articulate the openly subjective argument of the film. The protestors are represented as white circles, suggesting unity and cohesiveness, while the police are symbolised as truncheons and horses, indicating a repressive function. While these aesthetic strategies emphasise the intervention on the part of the filmmakers, others profess to articulate the protestors’ version of events more directly. The film frequently supports its argument with footage of protestors speaking directly into the camera during the riot itself, for instance. One man, evidently shaken having fled a police cavalry charge in which he was separated from his family, speaks directly into the camera as he articulates his anger and frustration with the police. Moments later another incredulous protestor points for the camera as it whip-pans down the street to capture a squad car speeding through the crowd. “You got that, yeah?” he says to the cameraperson, “I fucking hope so”. However, while these sequences do not suggest artifice on the part of the filmmaker in the same way as the CGI sequences, they do implicitly draw attention to the role of the filmmakers. Again, unlike the reflexivity of the anti-illusionist mode, this kind of self-referentiality creates a powerful sense of insider knowledge which, as well as justifying the film’s argument, also stresses the vital importance of oppositional filmmaking itself. Indeed, this is one of the film’s overriding themes, present throughout in footage which, shot from the protestors’ point of view, is evidently not taken by the mainstream news media. Another cavalry charge is depicted from in the midst of the crowd being charged, for instance. The sense of danger and panic created by mounted policemen towering above the camera is striking, intensified when one of the policemen lashes out with his baton, carving an arc across the frame as he strikes just to the right of the cameraperson. Footage like this is repeated throughout the film, aligning the audience with the protestors and offering a taste of the reality of police violence for those on the receiving end of it. It also, however, emphasises the distinction between a mainstream media that reports on events from a distance and an oppositional media willing to speak from a position of direct experience—and be attacked for doing so. Indeed, oppositional filmmakers were not only liable to attack from the police. While the increased availability of camcorder technology in the 1990s benefitted video-activist culture enormously (Harding 1998), it also led to heightened suspicions of audio-visual media and sections of the activist community adopted a zero-tolerance approach to recording technology in general (Do or Die 1998). The implicit theme of the importance of

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oppositional media—and its difference from mainstream media—thus becomes an explicit one at the end of the film. As Michael Mansfield QC (one of the few professional talking-heads in the film), discusses the importance of distinguishing “independent” cameras from their mainstream counterpart, his speech is illustrated with a cut-away of a protestor smashing a billiard ball into Despite TV’s camera lens. This experience was not uncommon among video-activists in the 1990s (Harding 1998, 92-3), who were often attacked by protestors unable or unwilling to differentiate between them and the mainstream media. This distinction is therefore something the film is at pains to make clear, the narrator prefacing the film’s conclusion by reminding the audience that “if people had not taken their own cameras this story would not have been told”.

Conclusion As this analysis has shown, The Battle of Trafalgar is far from the average television documentary. Committed to the argument it is trying to stage, the filmmakers readily acknowledge that their position is not an impartial one. This is not the same as misrepresenting the truth, of course, despite the fact that “neutrality” and “disinterest” have become the markers of contemporary “quality” journalism. Indeed, filmmakers of the aesthetic and the political avant-garde would be more likely to argue that the very notion of objectivity denies the fact that subjectivity is inherent in any act of representation. From this perspective, claiming independence or neutrality is either naive or intellectually dishonest, a denial of the ideological values and beliefs that are always already present. Leaving aside philosophical reservations about the possibility of objectivity, oppositional filmmakers would argue that it is not a quality to which one should aspire in a world rife with inequality. It is this political commitment from which The Battle of Trafalgar’s interest as an aesthetic object in part derives. Unconcerned with affecting neutrality, the film attempts to utilise all the tools at its disposal to make its argument as forcefully as possible. In this way it not only stages a biting critique of the mainstream media and its complicity with the police, but also radically undermines the very notion of neutrality as a precondition for legitimate investigative journalism. The Battle of Trafalgar belongs to an entire culture of politically radical documentary filmmaking in Britain which for the last twenty-five years has been almost completely overlooked by scholars of film and media. While there are a variety of reasons for this lack of attention, the

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lion’s share of the responsibility lies with the anti-illusionist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s. It is as a result of this body of work that, in the academy and art gallery alike, radical politics are all too often acceptable only if they come dressed in the formal attire of the aesthetic avant-garde. Anything else tends to be ignored or held at arms’ length, dismissed as “community work” or “activist film”. While I have not had the space to develop this argument here, I hope that my discussion of the political avant-garde on Channel 4 has been a sufficient indication of its validity. As we have seen, discussions of radicalism on the channel in the 1990s are virtually non-existent, while radicalism on the channel in the 1980s— widely acknowledged as one of the most radical periods in television history—is discussed almost exclusively in terms of the aesthetic avantgarde. Without denying the importance of the latter, the exaltation of formally experimental work has all but erased the very existence of the political avant-garde. Recovering this history is essential if we are to keep pace with the ways in which cinema, still one of the most powerful forms of communication in existence, continues to be used as a political tool today.

Bibliography ACCT. 1984. “Grant-aided Workshop Production Declaration.” In Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90, ed. Margaret Dickinson, 163-7. London: BFI. Andrews, Hannah. 2011. “On the Grey Box: Broadcasting Experimental Film and Video on Channel 4’s The Eleventh Hour.” Visual Culture in Britain 12 (2): 203-18. Caughie, John. 2000. Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Channel Four. 1994. An Introduction and Guide for Producers. London: Channel Four. Comer, Stuart. 2009. Film and Video Art. London: Tate Publishing. Corner, John, Sylvia Harvey, and Karen Lury. 1994. “Culture, Quality and Choice: The Re-regulation of TV, 1989-91.” In Behind the Screens: The Structure of British Television in the Nineties, ed. Stuart Hood, 119. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Curtis, David. 2007. A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain. London: BFI. Danino, Nina, and Michael Mazière, eds. 2003. The Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists’ Films and Video. London: Wallflower.

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Dickinson, Margaret. 2003. “Political Film: Film as an Ideological Weapon.” BFI Screenonline. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/976967/index.html. Dickinson, Margaret, ed. 1999. Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90. London: BFI. Do Or Die. 1998. “Lights, Camera... Activism!: Video Media and Direct Action.” Do Or Die 7. http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no7/5-8.html. Dowmunt, Tony. 2007. “On the occasion of Channel 4’s 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Alan Fountain, Former Channel 4 Chief Commissioning Editor.” Journal of Media Practice 8 (3). doi: 10.1386/jmpr.8.3.247/1. Elewes, Catherine. 2004. Video Art: A Guided Tour. London: I. B. Tauris. Hansard. 1988. House of Lords Debates, vol. 502, col. 838-926. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1988/dec/13/broadcastingin-the-1990s. Harding, Thomas. 1998. “Viva Camcordistas! Video-activism and the Protest Movement.” In DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain, ed. George McKay, 79-99. London: Verso. Harvey, Sylvia. 1994. “Channel 4 Television: From Annan to Grade.” In Behind the Screens: the Structure of British Television in the Nineties, ed. Stuart Hood, 102-32. London: Lawrence and Wishart. —. 1986. “The ‘Other Cinema’ in Britain: Unfinished Business in Oppositional and Independent Film, 1929-1984.” In All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, 2nd Ed, ed. Charles Barr, 22551. London: BFI. Harvey, Sylvia. 1984. “‘Those Other Voices’: An Interview with Platform Films.” Screen 25 (6): 31-48. Hobson, Dorothy. 2008. Channel Four: The Early Years and the Jeremy Isaacs Legacy. London: I. B. Tauris. Knight, Julia, ed. 1996. Diverse Practises: A Critical Reader on British Video Art. Luton: University of Luton Press. Kuhn, Annette. 2009. “Screen and Screen theorizing today.” Screen 50 (1): 1-12. Kuhn, Tom and Steve Giles. 2003. “Introduction to Part Four.” In Brecht on Art and Politics, eds. Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles, 205-12. London: Methuen. Leslie, Esther. 2002. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso. Mercer, Kobena, ed. 1988. Black Film, British Cinema. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts.

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Neale, Steve and Mick Eaton, eds. 1981. Screen Reader 2: Cinema and Semiotics. London: SEFT. O’Pray, Michael. 1996. “Introduction.” In The British Avant-garde Film 1926-1995: An Anthology of Writings, ed. Michael O’Pray, 1-28. Luton: John Libbey Media. Rees, A. L. 1999. A History of Experimental Film and Video: From the Canonical Avant-Garde to Contemporary British Practise. London: BFI. —. 2007. “Experimenting on air: UK Artists’ film on television.” In Experimental British Television, ed. Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton, 146-65. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Saunders, Mark. 2011. Interview by Steve Presence. Digital recording. London, UK, January 11. Spry, Caroline. 2011. Interview by Steve Presence. Telephone. October 26. Stoneman, Rod. 2011. Interview by Steve Presence. Telephone. September 29. —. 2007. “Radical pluralism in early Channel 4.” Channel 4: The First 25 Years. BFI, London, 17-18 November. —. 2005. “Sins of Commission II.” Screen 46 (2): 247-64. —. 1996. “Incursions and Excursions: The Avant-garde on C4 1983-93.” In British Avant-garde Film 1926 to 1996, ed. Michael O’Pray, 28596. Luton: University of Luton Press. Taylor, Ronald, ed. 2007. Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso. Walker, John. 1993. Arts TV: A History of Arts Television in Britain. London: John Libbey. Wayne, Mike. 2001. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. London: Pluto. Wyver, John. 2007. Vision On: Film Television and the Arts in Britain. London: Wallflower.

PART III: RETHINKING HISTORIES OF CINEMA AND TELEVISION

CHAPTER SIX “THESE PEOPLE ARE THE ENEMY!”: THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF FILM AND TELEVISION HISTORY WITHIN THE HUMANITIES DIETER DECLERCQ

The issue of morality in relation to film and television history as part of the humanities has been on my mind ever since I attended the inaugural meeting of a UK student newspaper in 2011. During the meeting, a thirdyear media student addressing the audience asked the other media students present to raise their hands and have a good look around at their colleagues. He then said: “These people are the enemy!” His bold statement was followed by laughter: the laughter of recognition that this was indeed how things were. Truth in jest, for his remark could very well have acted as the concealed motto of our neoliberal culture. Neoliberalism, in particular the American variant developed by the Chicago School of Economics in the fifties, is the free-market ideology of competition which has established itself since the eighties as a cultural hegemony in the globalised West (Steger and Roy 2010; Harvey 2008). That is, at least until the global financial crisis of 2008. The economic model of the free market has been strongly criticised since the crisis and neoliberalism itself has become somewhat shorthand for everything that went wrong and led up to the current malaise. As an economic model, the days of neoliberalism have therefore been declared numbered. However, much more than just an economic model rooted in the free market, the essence of neoliberalism is a whole way of thinking and being characterised by the universalisation of market competition (Foucault 2008, 243ff). In this respect, neoliberalism’s true cultural hegemony is still on-going and resides in the conviction that the best way to advance human wellbeing is to organise all forms of human activity along the economic principle of the market, as a site of intense competition for profit between free and

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autonomous individuals. It is exactly this universalisation of market competition which can strip fellow students and colleagues of their subjectivity as they are reduced to objects that stand in the way of our success. As such, in neoliberalism, the others become the enemy. This chapter will discuss the French documentary Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible (Jean-Robert Viallet, 2010), internationally released as How TV Messes With Your Head, which links the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism to the rise and success of reality television in France. Similarly, reality TV in the UK and the US has been considered the product of a neoliberal production context (Kavka 2012, 46ff), while the genre’s underlying messages and viewpoints have also been identified as neoliberal (Shaw 2011, 61). Scholarly research has particularly drawn on Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality” to argue that reality TV functions as an ideological instrument aimed at the governance of neoliberal citizens (Kavka 2012, 137-138; Sender 2011, 4; Ouellette and Hay 2008, 8ff). Although not an academic work per se, Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible is underpinned by the contributions of academics and adds to the on-going scholarly debate about the relationship between neoliberalism and reality television. Moreover, the documentary urges us to reconsider the possibilities of (film and) television history by combining historical investigation and psychoanalytical theory in order to morally criticise reality TV’s glorification of regressive social behaviour. Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible, as a moral history which explicitly combines historiography with theoretical analysis, may be understood as contributing to Helen Wheatley’s appeal for “a multi-methodological approach to television historiography in order to produce a more rounded, holistic version of television history” (2007, 8). Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible does not offer the definitive historical account of reality TV in France, but its specific perspective rooted in psychoanalytical theory allows it to engage with certain moral issues that film and television history must address as part of the humanities. To attribute a moral responsibility to the study of film and television is not so much a reconsideration as it is a reminder. In the editorial to Why Does Film Matter?, a promotional leaflet for the academic publisher Intellect Ltd, chairman Masoud Yazdani states that “Arts and Humanities research begins with a desire to understand the human condition” and he continues that “film offers a rich medium for [such] reflection on human nature” (2012, 3). Further down the leaflet, Mette Hjort stresses film’s capacity “to deepen our moral sensibility,” (2012, 25) while Pietari Kääpä argues that film can stimulate audiences “to rethink their place in the world, and crucially, it can also motivate them to do something about the

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injustices and exploitation to which they are witness” (2012, 12). In Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Martha Nussbaum argued that the humanities in general have a moral responsibility to react against the cultural hegemony of market competition and the objectification of others that follows from it. Today, more than ever, it is up to the humanities to stimulate “the faculties of thought and imagination that make us human and make our relationships rich human relationships, rather than relationships of mere use and manipulation” (Nussbaum 2010, 6). Through an analysis of Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible, this chapter hopes to show that film and television history can play a part in the moral reinvestigation and re-evaluation of human relationships in our culture, which is and remains neoliberal.

Quest for ratings The political and economic dominance of neoliberal ideologies from the 1980s onwards has created a production context which allowed reality TV to flourish (Grazian 2010, 69). According to neoliberalism, the market is inherently perfect and works best without government interference (Devos 2010, 74-76). The state should therefore limit itself to providing institutional frameworks in which markets can freely function, mainly through deregulation of the economy, liberalisation of trade and industry, and privatisation of state-owned enterprises (Harvey 2008, 2; Steger and Roy 2010, 14). Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible shows how the seeds of reality TV were sown in France when the socialist government led by President François Mitterrand came to power in 1981 and decided to liberalise the airwaves on the condition that free radio should be local, notfor-profit and non-commercial. However, the youth of France soon demanded the complete deregulation of radio. In 1984, President Mitterrand gave them what they wanted – and more. In an attempt to regain the support of the public, the President not only completely deregulated the airwaves, but also decided to break the state’s television monopoly by allowing private-owned commercial networks to form – first Canal+ and later La Cinque and TV6. Mitterrand remained President until 1995, but his socialist party lost the lower legislative house in the elections of 1986 to the right-wing party of new Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. Chirac considered the newly-founded private networks as friends of the socialist left. As he came to power, he immediately cancelled the broadcasting license of TV6 and later of La Cinque, in order to sell the available broadcasting space to investors with more right-wing sympathies. The new Prime Minister did not stop there, however, and, in a burst of

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what the documentary describes as “ultraliberalism”, Chirac also privatised the state-owned TF1 and sold the network to a private buyer and friend of the right, Francis Bouygues. (The other state-owned networks, Antenne 2 and FR3, were not privatised.) In this respect, the acceptance of policies of liberalisation, privatisation and commercialisation at both the left and right end of the political spectrum in France changed the logic of the French television landscape. Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible reveals how the decision of Prime Minister Chirac to privatise TF1 was justified on the basis of neoliberalism’s core principle: “may competition decide.” The competition principle is underpinned by the rational choice theory, which advocates the ideal of free and autonomous individuals who make rational choices, and rational choices only – i.e. calculated choices to pursue their self-interests (and their self-interests only). According to neoliberalism, if self-interested individuals pursue their profit-driven calculated choices in a competitive market, the “invisible hand” of the competition principle will create a just economic and social order (de Swaan 2010). Neoliberalism does not assume that individuals are by nature inclined to act in such a “rational” way, but that it is both possible and desirable for them to do so; the rational individual functions as a “normative ideal” (Laermans 2009, 12). Following the logic of the rational choice theory, rational individuals who make well-calculated choices in their own self-interest will only watch the networks that offer high-quality television. Networks that do not offer quality will consequently fail to survive in a competitive market environment. Apart from the rational choice theory, the privatisation of state-owned television in France was furthermore in line with an ethos of “liberal-equality” which arose in the cultural climate of postmodernity (Pattyn 2009). Absolute claims to truth had become impossible, entailing that nobody could claim the authority to tell others what to think, feel, appreciate, cultivate, etc. – including the government. For better or for worse, state-owned television could therefore not continue its role as cultural educator of the people. The government realised that it must no longer interfere in debates about quality but instead free the market so it can offer what the consumer desires. According to Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible, the liberalisation and commercialisation of the French television landscape completely changed the logic of television in France. TV no longer addressed the French public as citizens, but instead as customers; French television came to understand citizenship solely in terms of customer service. The sole purpose of commercial television is to make profit for the shareholders by increasing market share, i.e. by attracting more viewers or customers. The more of

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these customers, the bigger the revenues (as licenses for pay channels increase and commercial networks are able to charge more for advertising space). In this respect, debates about the quality of television in France were reduced solely to quantity and to quantifiable profit in particular; qualitative television is quite simply television which makes the most profit (cf. Verhaeghe 2011, 7; 15). In 2004, Patrick Le Lay, then CEO of TF1 infamously (and perhaps unwittingly) revealed the essence of the quantitative approach to debates about quality. Le Lay argued that “[t]here are many ways to talk about television. However, from a business perspective, let’s be realistic, in essence, the function of TF1 is to help Coca Cola, for example, to sell its products” (Le Lay quoted in Anon. 2004). According to Le Lay, television programmes are entertaining instruments to capture the attention of the spectators in a way that makes their brains receptive to the upcoming commercial blocks. In the words of its CEO, TF1 was quite simply in the business of selling “moments of available human brain” – du temps de cerveau humain disponible. Taking Le Lay’s controversial statement as its title, Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible reveals the social danger of understanding television solely in terms of market rationality.

Reality TV’s neoliberal care of self The commercialisation of television in France created a climate in which transgressive reality TV was able to flourish. Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible identifies the talk-show Psy Show (1983-1985), aired on the state-owned network Antenne 2, as the first programme to transgress the boundaries between the private and public sphere in a way that would characterise later reality television. In essence, Psy Show was a session of psychotherapy broadcast on national television, where people revealed their most intimate problems, often of a sexual nature. Psy Show was followed by Sexy Folies (Antenne 2, 1986-1987), a programme in which members of the public performed stripteases on TV. Shows such as Perdu de vue (TF1, 1990-1997), which aimed to reunite people who had lost all contact with biological parents or other relatives, continued the exhibition of the intimate sphere, as well as the potential humiliation of participants on national television. Later came Témoin numéro 1 (TF1, 1993-1997), which aimed to solve criminal cases by appealing to the public. Témoin numéro 1, in particular, showed affinity to what Misha Kavka (2012, 9) has called the first generation of modern reality concepts in the US, i.e. the crime and emergency shows like Cops (Fox, 1989-present) and America’s Most Wanted (Fox, 1990-2012).

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Transgressive reality TV only really boomed in France, the US and the rest of the globalised world, with the advent of Big Brother (original series: Veronica, 1999). As is well-known, Big Brother is a game show where people compete for a cash prize in a house full of cameras. It was originally developed in 1999 for Dutch television by Endemol. Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible describes Big Brother as a “spectacle of sex, tears and violence” which took the Netherlands by storm, followed by Italy, Spain, Germany, the UK, the US, Sweden, Belgium and Switzerland. The documentary explains that French television networks, nonetheless, categorically refused to buy the rights of the format, deeming it too transgressive. That is, until the dot-com bubble burst. The foundation of internet companies in the mid-1990s had increased the value of stock markets worldwide. Between 1996 and 2000, the value of the CAC 40 – the most important French stock market index – doubled. Over this period, the value of TF1’s stock had multiplied by no less than nine times; competitor M6’s value increased six fold. In the early 2000s, however, stock markets crashed worldwide and both TF1 and M6 lost one fourth of their market value. Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible explains that the smaller M6 had to take action in order to avoid bankruptcy and bought the rights of Big Brother. Immediately, its market value stabilised. At the time, Patrick Le Lay called it an “immoral” decision of M6 to broadcast such a “pornographic” programme as Big Brother during primetime, when many children watch TV. Le Lay’s criticism had no effect on the stock market and TF1’s stock continued to plummet over the summer of 2001. By September, TF1’s shareholders had lost 80% of their capital and Patrick Le Lay could no longer remain idle. His decision: to sign an exclusivity contract with Endemol for all its future programmes. TF1’s market value stabilised. The advent of Big Brother and subsequent boom of reality television in France was a direct consequence of the worldwide stock market crises caused by the dot-com bubble and, as such, an indirect result of neoliberal policies which understood television purely in economic terms of the market. As explained, M6’s and TF1’s decisions to buy Endemol’s formats were rooted purely in market logic. Neoliberal ideology, moreover, not only affected the production context of reality TV, but also the content of the formats (Grazian 2010, 69). Although not all reality television on a global scale endorses neoliberal ideologies (Kraidy 2011, 214), or automatically succeeds in political normativity if it does (Kavka 2012, 142), reality TV in the globalised West has commonly been understood as a resource for good neoliberal citizenship (Ouellette and Hay 2008, 2-3). The discourse of good neoliberal citizenship is centred

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around the concept of human capital, which is the total of physical and psychological factors that enable somebody to gain a wage through labour (Foucault 2008, 227). Human capital can be compared to an abilitiesmachine which is innate, but must be developed continuously through lifelong education, cultural input, self-transformation, etc. (Devos 2010, 86). The neoliberal individual is an enterprise-unit which invests its innate and acquired human capital to make the biggest possible financial profit on a competitive market. The market principle allows the individual as entrepreneur to gain a financial capital which can be reinvested in the production of satisfaction through the acquisition of consumer goods (Foucault 2008, 226). The neoliberal ideology of human capital and entrepreneurship thus makes government-funded social welfare unnecessary and even undesirable. Among the consumer goods that can be bought to produce satisfaction are namely also those which protect the individual against social risks; in other words, competition enables individuals to buy private insurance implying that government interference would only disturb the inherently perfect balance of the welfare market (Devos 2010, 78). The concept of human capital and good neoliberal citizenship underpins the bulk of reality television in the globalised West, including France. Competitive game show concepts like Big Brother (adapted in France as Loft Story: M6, 2001-2002) and talent show concepts like Idol (adapted in France as Nouvelle Star: M6, 2003-2010; D8, 2013-present) portray a market where people compete fiercely for profit; occasional coalitions are necessary, but as there can only be one winner, the ultimate goal is to eliminate the others (Grazian 2010, 69). Participants are furthermore expected to conform to the ideal of the good neoliberal worker, who is competitive and assertive, keen to learn, adaptive to shifting market demands, individualistic yet able to work in a group, etc. (Windle 2010, 252-3; Couldry 2008). Interventionist reality programmes like Judge Judy (CBS, 1996-present) and makeover programs like Extreme Makeover (ABC, 2002-2007; in France aka Relooking Extrême) present participants with an opportunity for self-transformation which will turn them into successful, autonomous and beautiful neoliberal citizens who consume intelligently and do not depend on state welfare (Kavka 2012, 9; 135ff; Ouellette 2009). “Good Samaritan” reality TV like Extreme Makeover Home Edition (ABC, 2003-2012; in France aka Les Maçons du Cœur) promotes individual volunteerism and one-off corporate charity to help out a few poor but “deserving” families, instead of structural public solutions (McMurria 2008, 326). Third generation reality TV like I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here (ITV, 2002-present; adapted in France as

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Je Suis une Célébrité, Sortez-Moi de là: TF1, 2006), in its turn, is centred around the production of celebrity as a highly desirable cultural and financial commodity, the result of a wise investment of human capital (Kavka 2012, 9-11). Reality television in the globalised West generally subscribes to the ideology of human capital and the individual as an enterprise-unit who competes with other enterprise-units for the biggest possible financial profit. The ideology of human capital is characterised by the universalisation of the competition principle to all socio-cultural and interpersonal relationships. The metaphysical framework which justifies a society founded on unrestricted competition is a particular (and arguably flawed) interpretation of the evolution theory, which stipulates that life is, in essence, a continuous competition between species where only the fittest survive (de Swaan 2010). More specifically, neoliberalism has taken up the tenets of Social Darwinism which transposed the biological concept of the evolution theory to the socio-cultural sphere; the same Social Darwinism, it should be pointed out, also informed Nazi and communist ideologies (Verhaeghe 2011, 8; Vanheeswijck 2011, 196ff). Neoliberalism’s uncurbed competition, rooted in Social Darwinism, has stimulated the spread of a rampant cynicism which favours individual gain at the expense of the group and reduces social relationships to temporary coalitions of use and manipulation (Verhaeghe 2011, 4; 13). Neoliberal ideology, which underpins the majority of reality television in the globalised West, quite simply promotes a care of self which reduces the others to an enemy status. The free market ideology of neoliberalism has taken quite a blow in the aftermath of the post-2008 financial crises. Nowadays, policy makers again advocate more economic control and regulation. Once a staunch supporter of free markets, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) now explains on its website that: governments need to restore confidence in markets and the institutions and companies that make them function. That will require improved regulation and more effective governance at all levels of political and business life. (“About the OECD”)

Does the increased regulation and governance of the market consequently mean the end of neoliberalism’s cultural hegemony? Not necessarily. The freedom of the market is not the essence of neoliberalism. From a political perspective, in fact, the market has actually never been free. Although neoliberals argue that the market works perfectly by itself, they do not assume that such a perfect situation arises naturally; an active government

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policy must create a legal framework in which competitive markets flourish (Devos 2010, 75ff). In this respect, it can hardly be said that the French government refrained from interfering with the television market, if it was responsible for creating that market in the first place. It is therefore not the freedom of the market, which is the essence of neoliberalism’s cultural hegemony, but instead the universalisation of market rationality to all domains of human activity (Foucault 2008, 225226). In neoliberalism, the competitive rationality of the market functions as the principle of intelligibility and governance of all individual and social activity, whether it be sport, art, culture, education or politics (Devos 2010, 87). In this regard, increased regulation of the market does not at all entail the abandonment of universal market rationality, but by contrast only aims to further support the universalisation of market rationality.

Redefining care of self Market rationality promotes a care of self-rooted in the rational choice theory, which promotes the ideal of free, autonomous and rational individuals who pursue their calculated self-interests. From a psychoanalytical perspective, Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible criticises the rational choice theory by arguing that individuals are far from completely free or autonomous, while their choice to watch reality television can hardly be called fully rational or calculated. The rational choice theory namely overlooks the interference of irrational drives in the process of decisionmaking (Pattyn 2009, 258). Psychoanalysis rejects the idea of an autonomous self-controlling rational subject because it argues that certain irrational drives inherent to the self can never be fully rationalised. In the documentary, philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues that reality television operates exactly by exploiting these irrational drives, in particular the desires to see and to be seen – which are manifested in voyeurism and exhibitionism respectively. Even if society frowns upon voyeuristic and exhibitionistic drives, they are present in everybody and reality TV thrives exactly on the desire of participants to expose themselves and the desire of the audience to gaze. Reality television furthermore typically appeals to (what psychoanalysis calls) either the erotic life drives or the destructive death drives; in other words, to what attracts, often sexually, or to what abhors and disgusts. Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible refers to reality TV as impulsedriven television. The decision to watch reality television is not a fully rational and calculated choice in pursuit of self-interest; it is quite clear

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that emotional and even irrational factors are in play. The concept of reality TV is marketed as a place where: every transgression becomes possible. We eliminate, we humiliate and in the meantime we expose ourselves. Reality television is constructed as such that every transgression is perceived as real. Every candidate is exhorted to disregard all taboos. (Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible)

Transgressive reality television is so appealing exactly because it appeals to the irrational drives of the psyche, which, according to Stiegler, are “mechanical” and therefore beyond rational control. Similar to gossip, confronted with certain transgressive images – of sex, intimacy, seduction, jealousy, anger, elimination, humiliation, violence, disgust, etc. – the audience cannot help but feel intrigued. So however disgusting, in poor taste or just plain rubbish someone might consider reality TV, it nonetheless has a way of capturing a society’s attention. The documentary argues that the marketing behind reality TV is well aware that the audience does not just consist of those who watch it because they like it, but also of those who want to make fun of those who like it, or make fun of the participants, or those who watch it because they are curious, or want to know what the fuss is all about, and so on. The importance of irrational factors in deciding to watch reality television counters the rational choice theory which underpins the commercialisation and marketisation of television in France. However, television which appeals to the emotions and irrational aspects of the psyche is not a problem as such. It is reality TV’s unquestioned exploitation of the irrational drives for profit which forms the real danger. According to Freud, the irrational drives of the psyche are of an exclusive sexual nature. Freud therefore referred to them as sexual drives or Sexualtriebe. It is not really important here whether these irrational drives are indeed of a strictly sexual nature (I doubt this). Of greater importance is the main idea behind Freud’s description of the development of these Sexualtriebe. According to Freud, the sexual drives do not automatically or naturally seek lust in heterosexual intercourse. Instead, the lust to see or to be seen might just as well be more satisfying to the individual and develop into voyeurism or exhibitionism respectively. From this perspective, there is nothing inherently wrong with voyeurism and exhibitionism, but they are antisocial in the sense that they cannot guarantee the continuation of society – only heterosexual intercourse does. In order to safeguard the further existence of society, a form of external stimulation in the form of social persuasion is therefore necessary to “socialise” the Sexualtriebe into heterosexual intercourse. Taking up the

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idea that the external manipulation of irrational drives can have social consequences, Bernard Stiegler argues that the profit-driven exploitation of the irrational drives on transgressive reality TV has desocialising effects. According to Stiegler, such blind and profit-driven exploitation cannot but lead to a hyper-violent society, because it produces a dangerous cocktail of socially regressive behaviour. Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible argues that market-driven reality television destroys the bonds of trust between individuals and manipulates the irrational drives of the psyche in a way that stimulates egoism, narcissism, greed, anger, domination, humiliation, manipulation, envy, jealousy, etc. With selected footage of reality television, the documentary defends the claim that transgressive reality TV incites regressive social behaviour which reduces others to objects that are to be manipulated. A contestant of Star Academy (TF1, 2001-2008; NRJ 12 2012-present) is shown explaining to the game show host that: when somebody told me: ‘What you’re doing is rubbish.’ I really wanted to say to him: ‘I know what I want. I’m not just anybody. So shut your face, because you’re a piece of shit!’—while he was standing next to me. From the moment somebody makes a small remark like that, I want to put them under the ground, hurt them, make them cry and crawl. And I like to see people like that.

Violence, anger and housemates declaring war on each other are commonplace on Loft Story (M6, 2001-2002). Manipulation is glorified on L’Île de la Tentation (TF1, 2002-2008; Virgin 17, 2010; aka Temptation Island), as female participants explain that “the four women who have left their men in my hands, are completely lost” and “I’m a genuine strategist and, in my opinion, more than one [guy] is going to break.” The motor of Le Maillon Faible (TF1, 2001-2007; aka The Weakest Link) is the game show host who stoically offends the participants, telling them that “350 euros in the bank, it’s not a lot. Though for a team that performs badly, it’s well paid. [A team] which is as brilliant as a winter’s sun at five pm.” The objectification of others is the order of the day on reality TV and, moreover, is shown to pay off. Reality TV stars like Gordon Ramsey and Simon Cowell are “winners” in the neoliberal society who have gathered fame and fortune basically by shouting at people. Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible considers domination and manipulation, greed and egotism, as forms of regressive social behaviour. However, neoliberal ideology (taken to its consequences) considers such behaviour as normal, if not desirable. The neoliberal worldview argues that:

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every human being is by nature an egoist, driven purely by self-interest, and this inevitable law justifies the ruthless competition, the unrestrained pursuit of profit and the imperialistic character of the [neoliberal] capitalist economy. (Hannah Arendt cited in Vanheeswijck 2011, 201, my translation)

From a psychoanalytical perspective, Paul Verhaeghe (2011) has refuted the idea of the individual as a free and autonomous egoist driven purely by self-interest. In his criticism of the neoliberal war of all against all, Verhaeghe (2011, 4) has argued that we do not fully control our selfimage, as it coincides with a set of external ideas, expectations, norms and values of which we adopt some and refute others. This process of adopting and refuting which shapes our identity is not determined solely by our autonomous rational decisions, as the recognition (or lack thereof) of others plays a major role. Everybody knows that the positive attention of people whom we love and respect makes us feel strong; the opposite, of course, is true as well, and staunch criticism of someone we respect actually makes us believe we are good-for-nothing (Pattyn 2009, 248). In this respect, Freud thinks of the loving attention that goes out to the other as a flow of energy that can be returned or rejected and as such determines how we feel about ourselves and how we experience our own identity (Pattyn 2009, 263 n2). The idea that we do not fully control our self-image or identity is not exclusive to psychoanalysis or even continental philosophy. Also from an Anglo-American or analytic perspective, it has been argued that self-appreciation and consequently identity depend strongly on the opinions of others (Maes 2002). The idea that identity is strongly determined by the opinion of others was taken up by Jacques Lacan, who argued that it is therefore impossible to have a single, fixed identity (Pattyn 2011, 63ff). The argument of Lacan is that people continuously talk about me in various ways so that there is no single fixed, determined “me” which corresponds to all these different opinions. We all desperately aspire to cancel out this ambiguity by striving to possess “it”, i.e. that which nobody can fail to appreciate (whether it is fame, fortune, honour, beauty, intelligence, sophistication, etc.). However, each time we reach “it”, we find it does not fulfill our expectations and we are confronted again with new desires, because we have not been able to cancel out the ambiguity in our identity. In this respect, the infinity of human desire can be linked to the impossibility to achieve a single, fixed identity which nobody can fail to appreciate. Emile Durkheim (Pattyn 2011, 99ff) has argued that individuals can nonetheless be genuinely pleased with who they are if, through the recognition of others, they can consider their social position as honourable and praiseworthy. In a

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neoliberal society, however, Durkheim’s solution has become impossible. Not only does everybody have to continuously prove themselves in competition, which means that the recognition of the other is not stable in any way. Moreover, the objectification of the others which results from universal competition means they have no value anymore as subjects whose opinion really matters. The neoliberal ideology of “the sky is the limit” therefore leads to major problems of identity and self-appreciation (Verhaeghe 2011, 4). It produces a situation of uncontrollability to which Durkheim would have referred to as anomie, i.e. normlessness as a result of insatiability. In this respect, “the uncontrollable” is exactly what Bernard Stiegler considers the inevitable result of neoliberal reality TV, as it glorifies the destruction of the social boundaries which act as the only possible limit to the insatiability of human desire. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger (1967) argues that, on an existential level, a human being is, in essence, “being there” or (in German) Dasein. According to Heidegger, “[s]o far as ‘Dasein’ is at all, it has being-with-one-another as its kind of being” (1967, 153, original emphasis). In other words, the essence of what it means to be a human being includes being together with other human beings. Even when we are alone, we still relate to the others on an existential level; being-alone should simply be understood as a deficient mode of being-with-oneanother. According to Heidegger, the most deficient mode of being-withone-another is ruthless or inconsiderate being-with which “‘reckons’ [Rechnet] with others without seriously ‘counting on them’ [auf sie zählt], or even ‘wanting to have anything to do’ with them” (Heidegger 1967, 163). This inconsiderate being-with is exactly the type of social behaviour that is currently stimulated by the cultural hegemony of the market and its competition principle. We are counting people, not counting on them. We reduce them to quantifiable objects which are to be manipulated in competition. For this reason, the neoliberal ideology of competition is immoral. It aspires a moral aim, namely to increase human wellbeing, but it ends up simply ignoring humanity altogether. Neoliberalism has failed to acknowledge that the wellbeing of the individual cannot be understood independently of his or her social relations (Verhaeghe 2011, 19). Instead, the universalisation of competition exactly destroys these social relations by stripping the others of their subjectivity and reducing them to either useful instruments or dangerous obstacles in the quest for profit.

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Conclusion Through an analysis of Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible, this chapter has argued against the cultural hegemony of the neoliberal competition principle. The documentary shows how neoliberal policies of commercialisation and privatisation in France created a production context in which debates on the quality of television were reduced to issues of quantifiable profit. The advent of Big Brother arriving on French television, in particular, was shown to be directly linked to the global stock market crisis following the dot-com bubble. Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible further reveals that French reality TV, similar to reality TV in the globalised West, functions as a resource for good neoliberal citizenship, which is centred around the concepts of human capital, entrepreneurship and competition. The documentary strongly criticises this type of neoliberal citizenship promoted by reality television, because it glorifies the domination, humiliation and manipulation of others as a result of widespread competition. To counter the cultural hegemony of the market and neoliberal citizenship, Guy Vanheeswijck (2012, 10) has argued that other discourses than economics should be taken into account as organisational principles of society, in particular the cultural, religious, political and historical discourses of the humanities. The humanities are the disciplines which study the human condition and therefore they have the responsibility to address the flagrant misunderstanding of human existence that justifies the marketisation of society. Studies of film and television history, as a whole, could and should play a part in reinvestigating and re-evaluating human relationships in our culture which remains dominated by the market. That is not to argue that all historiographical accounts of film and television should serve such a moral aim, but only that some histories of film and television can make valuable moral contributions. Ethical reflection on film and television can be quite straightforward and natural; especially when film and television engages in ethical reflection itself. I want to conclude by referring to the South Park episode “Quest for Ratings” (Trey Parker, 2004), a satire of the influence of market ideology on television and society. In a similar way as the thirdyear media student revealed the truth about neoliberal social relationships by jesting, South Park’s satire should be understood as a form of truthtelling through humour. The episode “Quest for Ratings” reflects on the marketisation of contemporary television culture by having six boys from South Park Elementary make a school news bulletin for an Extracurricular AV Class. The boys are quickly confronted with the realities of a competitive market environment, as their Super School News faces cancellation due to

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very poor ratings. In a desperate attempt to save their news show, the boys decide to revamp the format so that it would appeal to the entire school. The questionable effects of understanding TV quality solely in terms of audience quantity quickly become clear. Similar to reality TV, the renewed Sexy Action School News is impulse-driven television featuring news items about “hot girls” for the sixth graders and a “Panda Bear Madness Minute” to appeal to pre-schoolers. In their attempt to improve the ratings, the boys do not shrink from regressive social behaviour and simply make up sensational stories (“Is South Park about to explode from a methane gas leak?”) or include false gossip about celebrities and classmates (“Clyde Donovan has only one testicle”). The undesirable social consequences of market rationality in combination with impulsedriven television are plain to see, as there is no time left “in between cheerleader pie-eating and ‘Who’s got Skidmarks? Monday’” for an interview with (at the time) American Vice President Dick Cheney. Jimmy, who interviewed the Vice President, is outraged and wonders whether the whole concept of the renewed Sexy Action School News is even ethical. The response of the others says it all: “We’re in fourth grade, Jimmy. We don’t even know what ethical means.”

Acknowledgements The translations of citations from Le Temps de Cerveau Disponible are my own. I developed the initial ideas for this paper in the context of Bart Pattyn’s lectures on media-ethics at KU Leuven in 2011. For my analysis of the sexual drives (Sexualtriebe), I am indebted to Paul Moyaert’s lectures on philosophical anthropology, also at KU Leuven in 2011.

Bibliography “About the OECD”. n.d. OECD http://www.oecd.org/about/ Anon. 2004. “Patrick Le Lay, Président Directeur Général de TF1”. L’Expansion.com, July 9. http://lexpansion.lexpress.fr/entreprise/patrick-le-lay-presidentdirecteur-general-de-tf1_105361.html Couldry, Nick. 2008. “Reality TV, or the Secret Theater of Neoliberalism”. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30 (1): 3-13. de Swaan, Abram. 2010. “Het Financieel Regime: over de Gevolgen van een Moderne Dwaalleer”. Me Judice, November 20.

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http://www.mejudice.nl/artikelen/detail/het-financieel-regime-over-degevolgen-van-een-moderne-dwaalleer. Devos, Rob. 2010. Biopolitiek en Postfordisme. Antwerpen and Apeldoorn: Garant. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Translated from French by Graham Burchell. Edited with annotations by Michael Sennelart. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Grazian, David. 2010. “Neoliberalism and the Realities of Reality Television”. Contexts 9 (2): 68-71. Harvey, David. 2008. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1967. Being and Time. Translated from German by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Kavka, Misha. 2012. Reality TV. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kraidy, Marwan M. 2011. “Reality Television in New Worlds”. In: The Politics of Reality Television. Global Perspectives, eds. Marwan M. Kraidy and Katherine Sender, 207-218. London and New York: Routledge. Laermans, Rudi. 2009. “The Condition of Neoliberalism”. A-Prior 19: 617. Maes, Hans. 2002. “Zelfwaardering en het Standpunt van Anderen”. In Terugkeer van het Subject. Recente Ontwikkelingen binnen de Filosofie, eds. Antoon Braeckman, Rob Devos and Barbara Verdonck, 223-235. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven. Nussbaum, Martha. 2010. Not For Profit. Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ouellette, Laurie. 2009. “Take Responsibility for Yourself: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen”. In Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, eds. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, 223-242. New York: New York University Press. Pattyn, Bart. 2009. “De Liberaal-Egalitaire Neutralisering van elke Publieke Rechtvaardiging”. Ethische Perspectieven 19 (3): 246-265. —. 2011. Medium en Mentaliteit. Ideologiekritiek en Deontologie van de Media. Unpublished manuscript. Leuven. http://www.scribd.com/doc/84564051/Cursus-Media-Ethiek-2010-2011. Sender, Katherine. 2011. “Real Worlds: Migrating Genres, Travelling Participants, Shifting Theories”. In: The Politics of Reality Television. Global Perspectives, eds. Marwan M. Kraidy and Katherine Sender, 19. London and New York: Routledge.

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CHAPTER SEVEN THE TRANS/NATIONAL DIVIDE: TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF “TRANSATLANTIC BRITISH CINEMA” DURING THE 1930S AND 1940S NATHAN TOWNSEND

Despite the persistence of transnational activity between national film industries and cultures since the earliest days of the medium, academic discourse has been slow to accommodate transnational cinema at a conceptual level. Dudley Andrew, for instance, stresses that the “institution of film historiography” has long privileged “the national” as “textbooks, university courses, and museum screenings continue to praise cinematic output mainly by nation”. Foregrounding “the national” has enshrined the belief that “every country—the mature ones at least—was thought to have its distinct industry, style, and thematic concerns” (2010, 65). Indeed, the concept of national cinema and more specifically British cinema as a form of national cinema enjoyed a significant wave of scholarly interest in the late 1980s and 1990s (Higson, 1989, 1995; Crofts, 1993; Hill, 1997, Street, 1997). Throughout this wealth of discourse, Hollywood has consistently been cited as an important determinant in the conceptual construction of British cinema. However, Hollywood’s influence has typically been understood as an external force which shapes British cinema from without, not within. In this way, the broader implications of Hollywood’s global reach have been acknowledged while primacy continues to be afforded to “the national” by asserting a British film industry and culture that remains largely discrete from, and oppositional to, Hollywood. The term “national cinema” is, however, problematic precisely because of its widespread and general application. As Andrew Higson explains, it is a fluid and negotiable concept that concedes substantive definition, and

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is rather “mobilised in different ways, by different commentators, for different reasons” (1995, 4). Equally, the term “transnational cinema” is ambiguous when used in the broadest sense insofar as it identifies only the “decline of national sovereignty as a regulatory force” and the “impossibility of assigning a fixed national identity to much cinema” (Ezra and Rowden 2006, 1). According to Mette Hjort, the “transnational” is in danger of “playing a strangely homogenising role … in which conceptual distinctions are effaced rather than properly developed” (2010, 13). The desire to impose essentialist structures which regulate the boundaries of “national cinema” or “transnational cinema” has thus been met with the realisation that such monolithic labels conflate diverse and unwieldy bodies of work. This problem has typically been dealt with by processes of deconstruction, whereby particular mobilisations or sub-categories can be asserted by applying the label of “the national” or “the transnational” alongside additional criteria. The preferred methodology in this respect has been to develop typologies that narrow the conceptual framework and so offer more useful tools of explanation or inquiry. For example, Stephen Crofts argues that most national cinemas, especially in the West, are “defined against Hollywood” and consequently draw on strategies designed to combat the “transnational reach” of the major studios (Crofts 1993: 50). Drawing on Crofts, John Hill constructs a typology of industrial strategies that producers of British cinema may adopt in opposition to the global presence of Hollywood. He suggests that there are three marketrelated strategic options: to compete directly with Hollywood films in the international market, to compete with Hollywood films in the domestic market or to avoid direct competition with Hollywood films through product differentiation (Hill 1997). Indeed, Hill’s assessment is broadly supported in significant monographs on the subject (Higson 1995; Street 1997 and 2009) which, in their privileging of oppositional market strategies (competition and product differentiation), constitute the orthodox account of British cinema’s industrial approaches. I offer a reassessment of British filmmaking during the 1930s and 1940s elsewhere (Townsend, forthcoming) which proposes a transnational cinematic space defined by interaction between the film industries and cultures of Britain and Hollywood. In this way, what I call “Transatlantic British Cinema” straddles the conceptual divide between national and transnational cinema by suggesting a way of understanding the transnational cinema most closely related to a particular nation—Britain—and, more specifically, a way to interpret a particular orientation of that transnationalism: the transatlantic. Drawing on more recent research about the historical relationship between the British and Hollywood film

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industries (Miskell, 2006, 2009; Sedgwick and Pokorny, 2005), I propose that the industrial activities of three British-based studios of the period— London Films Productions, MGM-British and the Rank Organisation— respectively exemplify what can be defined as the subcontractor, subsidiary and stakeholder modes of Transatlantic British Cinema. In this interpretation, the oppositional typology of competition or differentiation is inverted by positioning the industrial relationship between British and Hollywood cinema on a scale which extends from collaboration at one end to integration at the other. These (variously) vested industrial relationships thus diminish or eradicate the competitive market dynamic at the level of nation states. Rather, it is largely the Hollywood studios that compete with one another in the trade of Transatlantic British Cinema. This chapter develops the conceptual category of Transatlantic British Cinema beyond the confines of industrial modes by situating it in relation to contemporary debates about transnational cinema. In doing so, a strand of cinema emerges which is defined by industrial and textual hybridity and can be seen as a constituent part of both British cinema and global Hollywood while not owing exclusive allegiance to either. Discourse about the relationship between British and Hollywood cinema is not new in itself. For example, Sarah Street (2002) explores patterns of economic negotiation between the British and Hollywood film industries alongside issues of cultural exchange and cross-cultural reception. Similarly, Tom Ryall (2001) examines US involvement in the British industry, British success in the US market and the appropriation of British culture in Hollywood films. However, while both studies examine transnational exchange, they do so from the perspective of national cinema. The subtitle to Street’s volume reads “British Feature Films in the USA”, while Ryall marks an equally opaque distinction with the subtitle “Britain and the American Cinema”. This insistence on using national markers of interpretation and enquiry, albeit in the context of transatlantic exchange, fails to adequately grasp the intrinsically transnational properties of what I am calling Transatlantic British Cinema. The examples of London Films, the Rank Organisation and MGMBritish during the 1930s and 1940s once again provide a sound starting point for such a discussion. While accounts of these three companies appear in several histories of British cinema, what follows throws new light on familiar developments, and in particular on the genesis of transatlantic activity at the point of production. The antecedent forces which shaped both the subcontractor and subsidiary modes of Transatlantic British Cinema can be traced back to a period of extended decline in British film production during the 1920s. The British

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government became concerned by Hollywood’s dominance of domestic cinema screens (see Glancy, 2006) and responded by passing successive Film Acts in 1927, 1938 and 1948. The Acts required the major Hollywood studios to source and distribute a quota of British films in direct proportion (ranging from 5% to 30% during the period) to the quantity of American films they distributed in Britain (see Dickinson and Street 1985). For Hollywood’s burgeoning film empires, one response to meeting UK quota requirements was to subcontract an independently owned British-based producer to make films on the studio’s behalf; the other was to establish a centrally owned production subsidiary in Britain to perform the same function. Initially, the most common result from both modes of production was the “quota quickie”, a film designed to meet the quota criteria as quickly and cheaply as possible, often with little regard for quality (see Chibnall 2007). Despite the transatlantic industrial structures which supported this type of production, quota quickies remained in the domestic market as their export potential was virtually non-existent for an American (and global) audience typically used to Hollywood’s high production values, star actors and American characters, settings and storylines. Within this historical context, however, companies such as London Films and MGM-British also used the subcontractor and subsidiary modes to produce Transatlantic British Cinema. In contrast to the quota quickie, Transatlantic British Cinema is defined by a combination of transnational or, more precisely, transatlantic, filmmaking strategies. London Films was established by the producer and director Alexander Korda in 1932 and became a subcontractor for United Artists the following year. MGMBritish was founded in 1936 as a subsidiary of MGM with the producer Michael Balcon initially in charge of the Hollywood outpost. In contrast, the Rank Organisation was a British studio composed from a series of investments, acquisitions and mergers co-ordinated by its owner, J. Arthur Rank, between the mid-1930s and early 1940s. One such investment was a 25% stake in Universal purchased 1936. Universal would subsequently distribute many Rank films in the US, thereby exemplifying the stakeholder mode of Transatlantic British Cinema. As this chapter will demonstrate, the industrial modes of Transatlantic British Cinema as experienced by London Films, MGM-British and Rank, each assumed a different combination of creative and/or industrial constraints at the points of production, distribution and exhibition. However, the goal of commercial success in the US and global markets remained the same. Despite some notable success stories, most examples of Transatlantic British Cinema during the 1930s and 1940s failed in this

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ambition. To more fully understand the interrelated industrial and textual strategies that supported this faltering vision of transnational success, the following section considers Transatlantic British Cinema within contemporary discourse about cinematic transnationalism.

Transatlantic British Cinema as transnational cinema Studies of national and transnational cinemas are united by a resistance to proposing concrete definitions which invite over-simplified conclusions. The preferred approach has been to develop broad typologies, which act as matrices through which the terms might be understood. Mette Hjort, for instance, argues that transnational cinema can and should be conceived as a number of different (and potentially overlapping) strategies which operate at both industrial and textual levels. Three of the strategies she identifies can be seen as relevant to my discussion of Transatlantic British Cinema, namely opportunistic, globalising and affinitive transnationalism (Hjort 2010). “Opportunistic transnationalism” entails simply “responding to available economic opportunities at a given moment in time” (Hjort, 2010, 19). For the purposes of this chapter, however, Hjort’s term will be substituted for the more general category “economic transnationalism”, to acknowledge the prioritisation of economic matters without necessarily implying the expediency or short term gain suggested by the word “opportunistic”. Secondly, “globalising transnationalism”, involves making films which have “spectacular production values secured through transnational capital flows” and operate in tandem with “many of the genre– and star–based vehicles of transnational appeal” (Hjort 2010, 21). Finally, “affinitive transnationalism” is epitomised by efforts to communicate across borders with similar nations and peoples. In this case similarity or “affinity” is understood in terms of “ethnicity, partially overlapping or mutually intelligible languages, a history of interaction giving rise to shared core values, common practices and comparable institutions” (Hjort, 2010, 17). Taken together, the strategies of economic, globalising and affinitive transnationalism seek to reduce the industrial, aesthetic and cultural distance between Transatlantic British Cinema and Hollywood cinema. Explained in socio-economic terms, successfully combining such strategies may limit the cross-border reduction in monetary value of a cultural commodity, a process referred to by Colin Hoskins and Rolf Mirus as “cultural discount”. Originally applied to the international trade of television programmes, the logic of cultural discount suggests that a given programme is culturally anchored in the producing nation and will

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therefore have “diminished appeal elsewhere as viewers find it difficult to identify with the style, values, beliefs, institutions and behavioural patterns of the material in question”. The result is that fewer viewers will watch a foreign programme than a domestically produced programme of the same type and quality and thus its monetary value in the foreign market will be subject to discount (1988, 500). Cultural discount in the transatlantic context has, however, always been asymmetrical insofar as Hollywood films are consistently popular in the British market, while British films are only occasionally popular in the American market (Sedgwick & Pokorny 2005 and Miskell 2006). With this longstanding imbalance of market share in mind, it is worth reasserting that combining the strategies of economic, globalising and affinitive transnationalism does not, of course, provide a fool-proof recipe for transnational success, whether commercial or critical. Equally, any given example of Transatlantic British Cinema may display a greater or lesser degree of orientation towards each or any of the three inclinations. Accordingly, the strongest examples will explicitly embrace economic, affinitive and globalising strategies, whereas weaker cases will do so at a more implicit level, or foreground one strategy while another recedes. The following sections re-examine the filmmaking activities of London Films, MGM-British and the Rank Organisation during the 1930s and 1940s through the prism of these transnational strategies

Economic transnationalism It is certainly the case that numerous examples of Transatlantic British Cinema exemplify economic transnationalism whereby economic issues are prioritised when a producer selects partners based in other nations. The rationale for a producer of Transatlantic British Cinema is to benefit economically from Hollywood production finance and/or the potential revenue from US and global distribution and exhibition which only the major studios can provide. For high-budget prestige productions, reaching audiences outside the domestic market was not merely desirable but necessary. During the 1930s the American theatrical market was the largest in the world and the British was the second largest. Despite similar per capita attendance in both countries, the disparity in population ensured that the American theatrical market was still approximately three times the size of the British. As John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny explain: This disparity in size marks a fundamental asymmetry that is crucial to understanding film relations between the two countries. To compete effectively with Hollywood – to present films of a comparable quality and

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expense so as to match the production and storytelling values common to the products of the ‘major’ studios—British films needed to be as popular in the US market as Hollywood’s own product: they needed to generate comparable revenue streams. (2005, 82)

The major Hollywood studios were, of course, able to consistently produce films with high production values, and thus high unit costs, precisely because of their domination of the vast North American market. By the mid-1930s the eight major Hollywood studios had formed a mature oligopoly. By operating vertically integrated production, distribution and exhibition businesses, the so-called “big five” studios—MGM, Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros and RKO—were able to control their product at every stage of its life cycle. However, none of the majors were self-sufficient in terms of production, distribution and exhibition capacity and therefore depended on the collusive practices of a horizontal monopoly to jointly launch nation-wide releases. The “little three” studios, which lacked theatre chains of their own—Universal, Columbia and United Artists— were thus invaluable in keeping the first-run screens of the “big five” fully occupied (Cook 2006, 163). While the typical Hollywood film could expect to recoup its negative cost in the North American market, most of the majors derived 30-40% of their total revenue, and therefore the majority of their profit, from overseas markets during the 1930s and 1940s (Miskell 2009, 430). Gaining access to the first-run cinema screens of the major Hollywood studios was therefore essential to commercial success in the American market as well as many of the global markets in which the majors operated distribution arms. The means by which London Films, MGM-British and the Rank Organisation gained such access did not, however, constitute a level playing field of economic opportunity. The commercial success, or lack thereof, experienced by many examples of Transatlantic British Cinema was at least partly attributable to the relative strength or weakness of the industrial modes—subcontractor, subsidiary and stakeholder— under which they were produced, distributed and exhibited. The unique conditions at play within each institutional relationship and, in many cases with the handling of individual films, make it difficult to generalise about the merits of each approach per se. However, it is worth sketching some of the broad differences between the various industrial modes as they were experienced by London Films, MGM-British and the Rank Organisation during the 1930s and 1940s. Assessing London Films’ role as a subcontractor for United Artists first requires an understanding of how UA operated as a business. UA was an atypical “studio” because, unlike its Hollywood contemporaries, it did

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not own a studio building. What UA did have, however, was a powerful international distribution business that was established to distribute the films of its founders and owners: Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith. During the years that followed, UA increasingly filled its supply pipeline with films produced by independently owned and managed subcontractors. As such a subcontractor, London Films was granted creative autonomy, with Korda acting as the creative and commercial director of the company. In keeping with other independents on UA’s books, London Films agreed potentially lucrative terms under which UA claimed only a 25 per cent distribution fee on a given film’s income in the US market (Balio 1976, 134). This ostensibly ideal situation was, however, hindered by some sobering realities. Unlike the other Hollywood majors, UA rarely provided production finance and thus the risk of investment typically lay with the independent producer. Equally, without a theatre chain of their own, UA could not guarantee a US release on the major circuits. Instead, UA relied on their reputation for producing highly marketable “prestige” films with popular stars and rented individual titles to exhibitors rather than block-booking (selling a package of films of variable quality to exhibitors) (Balio 1976, 35). Under such conditions, each of Korda’s films had to find a mass audience in America on its own merits without the help of either blockbooking or vertical integration. Following the initial critical and commercial success of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) as a subcontractor, UA made Korda a stake-holding partner or “owner-producer” in 1935 (Drazin 2002, 106, 138-9), thus placing him in the anomalous position of being both a subcontractor for, and stakeholder in, a major Hollywood studio. Unfortunately for Korda, his subsequent films—Catherine the Great (1934), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), The Ghost Goes West (1935), Drums (1938) and The Four Feathers (1939)—provided only modest returns (Street 2002, 55) and his relationship with UA deteriorated based largely on the perceived mishandling of his films and the poor returns they generated (Balio 1976, 144). By the end of the 1930s, Korda had lost Denham Studios to his creditors and subsequently sold his stake in UA to the company’s remaining shareholders (Balio 1976, 172, 201). The 1938 Film Act introduced a number of changes which promoted higher quality production and transnational distribution (Dickinson & Street 1985, 98-100). In response to the legislation and Britain’s increasing importance as Hollywood’s largest overseas market, MGM-British produced a trio of prestige films before the outbreak of World War II—A Yank at Oxford (Jack Conway, 1938), The Citadel (King Vidor, 1938) and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (Sam Wood, 1939). MGM operated their subsidiary

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in the same manner as their US operations by exercising financial and creative control from their headquarters in Los Angeles, a situation which ultimately led to creative and managerial tensions and Balcon’s exit (Balcon 1969, 112). Nonetheless, dealing directly with the most powerful enterprise of Hollywood’s golden age meant that Balcon could rely on substantial financial backing for production, use of MGM’s star actors and ready access to first-run theatres through MGM’s world-wide distribution and exhibition network. Despite turbulence behind the scenes, all of the pre-war MGM-British films were major commercial successes, with Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Citadel also receiving critical plaudits in the form of multiple Academy Award nominations. As Mark Glancy points out, MGM considered MGM-British an “unqualified success” prior to the outbreak of World War II, an event which temporarily halted the subsidiary’s operations (Glancy 1999, 87-88). Unlike Korda and Balcon, Rank was first and foremost a businessman. Accepting his own limitations, he delegated the day-to-day activity of filmmaking to a number of production companies and their affiliated personnel, each based at one or more of his studios. At the prestige end of the production spectrum were Two Cities Films and a loose affiliation of production companies collectively known as Independent Producers Ltd. (IPL). Geoffrey Macnab suggests that the companies operating under the IPL banner “came as close to complete artistic and economic freedom as British filmmakers have been” (1993, 93) and, in the process, produced some of the most celebrated films in the history of British cinema. With vertical integration achieved in the British market by 1941, Rank agreed a two-year pact with United Artists in July 1944 for the American distribution of their prestige releases, a period which included the US box office successes Henry V (1944) and Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). Ultimately dissatisfied with UA’s handling of his films in the US, Rank switched allegiance to Universal a year later, putting his stake in the company to better use (Murphy 1983, 165-168). Rank and Universal jointly financed a world-wide distribution venture called United World Pictures in 1945 which was intended to give both partners’ films parity on a global scale by using the block-booking sales method. Unfortunately for the new partnership, block-booking was made illegal in the US the following year and the enterprise was dismantled as a result (Macnab 1993, 176). Despite their foiled plan, Rank and Universal continued to distribute in partnership; however, Universal’s capacity was continually compromised by the distribution and marketing of their own films. Consequently, Universal selected only the most prestigious films of the Rank line (Balio 1987, 19-21), including such titles as Brief Encounter (1945), Great

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Expectations (1946) and Hamlet (1948). As a minority partner in the studio, Rank lacked executive privileges and was left with only the power of negotiation on behalf of his output. In turn, Universal had to negotiate the release of its films with the vertically integrated “big five”. In an attempt to solve the problem, Rank founded Eagle-Lion Distributors in early 1944, shortly thereafter selling the company’s US-based interests to the American entrepreneur, Robert Young (Balio 1987, 17). In practice Eagle-Lion typically only had access to the screens of independent cinemas and small theatre chains in an American distribution and exhibition landscape dominated by the major studios. The outfit was left to distribute the Rank films which Universal rejected, including a number of Ealing and Gainsborough pictures, as well as some IPL productions. A third tier of distribution was arranged through Prestige Pictures, a division of Universal which operated in a similar manner to Eagle-Lion (Swann 2000, 33). The Rank films which were distributed by United Artists or Universal did not, however, necessarily find a mass-audience as a consequence of their association with a Hollywood major. Instead road-show and selective releasing strategies were used for films like Henry V, Brief Encounter, Great Expectations and Hamlet, which were initially targeted at the “art” markets of metropolitan areas and college towns (Street 2002, 96-115). As Paul Swann points out, while the American audience became increasingly receptive to films as a legitimate form of art after World War II, “a British film could become a really significant dollar earner only as a major American release and after being sold as a mass-market product” (2009, 31). Unfortunately, the migration from niche to wider release only occurred in a few cases with Rank films such as Henry V, Hamlet and, ironically via Eagle-Lion, The Red Shoes (Michael Powell, 1948) (Street 2002, 96-110). The subcontractor and stakeholder modes of Transatlantic British Cinema thus represent different forms of (variously vested) collaboration in contrast to the integration of the subsidiary mode. While London Films and the Rank Organisation were independent from Hollywood in terms of ownership and management at the point of production (and so retained high levels of creative autonomy), their comparative disadvantage in terms of access to US and worldwide distribution and exhibition was marked. This disadvantage was compounded by the prevailing “portfolio” model, which the Hollywood majors used during the period. Individual films typically had a short lifespan as commodities and thus the majors each released over 50 films annually. Amongst these releases, “hit” films took a

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disproportionate stake of the revenue. As Sedgwick and Pokorny point out: Film producers attempted to resolve this dilemma by constructing annual portfolios of films that were diversified in terms of the variation in production budgets, genre composition, and the distribution of star and directorial inputs. Thus, low and medium budget production provided a reliable source of profits (given the relatively low box office revenues that were required to cover costs), and in many cases resulted fortuitously in hit films, but essentially it played the role of cross-subsidising the risky activity of high budget production. (2005, 80)

For London Films and Rank, the portfolio approach of the Hollywood majors presented two problems. Firstly, both companies produced a high proportion of expensive prestige films and were, for different reasons, afforded inadequate or irregular access to the most valuable exhibition venues. Consequently, the chances of converting a prestige release into a “hit” were significantly reduced. Secondly, the overall quantity of medium and low budget films released in the American market (Rank’s releases through Eagle-Lion and Prestige, for example) was insufficient to crosssubsidise the risks of the high-budget prestige titles. In contrast, the films of MGM-British were given regular access to the screens of the major US circuits and, importantly, represented only a small percentage of MGM’s overall portfolio. As an integrated subsidiary, MGM-British was not, therefore, exposed to the same risk as the subcontractor and stakeholder operations of London Films and Rank. Considered from the opposite angle, Hollywood involvement in Transatlantic British Cinema was motivated by a number of factors including legislative necessity or inducement and the availability of appropriate production capital, whether in the form of finance, facilities and/or personnel. For both United Artists and MGM, transatlantic production was initially based on the limitations or opportunities presented by the 1927 and 1938 Films Acts. Indeed, subsequent legislation such as the Anglo-American Agreement in 1948, the Films Act of the same year and the introduction of the British Film Production Fund (more commonly known as the “Eady Levy”) in 1950, successively altered the investment environment (Stubbs 2009). In contrast, the vertical integration of the Rank Organisation presented a more comprehensive range of advantages for Universal, which ensured a direct route onto British screens for their films. In each case, however, the Hollywood studio was not only provided with a greater product range for the markets in which they were invested, but also turned any prospect of foreign competition to their advantage by selling British films alongside their own. Indeed, such a strategy is

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historically consistent with what David A. Cook (2006) has called the American film industry’s “history of market power concentration and risk aversion”. Finally, the size of the British theatrical market itself inspired different forms of economic transnationalism from the Hollywood majors. The British market accounted for more than one third of Hollywood’s foreign revenues in the mid-1920s and became increasingly important in the two decades that followed (Miskell 2006, 751-2). To exploit their largest overseas market, all but one of the Hollywood majors established whollyowned distribution subsidiaries in Britain (Miskell 2009, 436). Some studios went further, however, by tailoring some of their films to suit a British audience. For example, MGM targeted the British market by producing Transatlantic British Cinema at MGM-British or British themed Hollywood cinema at MGM’s Culver City studios in Los Angeles. Fortunately for MGM, their films proved popular in both the British and American markets. Equally, the sub-contractual relationship between United Artists and London Films produced quantities of Transatlantic British Cinema which regularly exceeded quota requirements, with many of Korda’s films proving more popular with British audiences than UA’s American films (Miskell 2006).

Globalising transnationalism Moving away from purely economic concerns, Hjort suggests that certain forms of transnationalism combine both industrial and textual practices. In this way, Transatlantic British Cinema also encompasses what she calls “globalising transnationalism”, which prioritises high production values, star actors and genre conventions (Hjort 2010, 21). During the 1930s and 1940s the creative agendas of London Films, MGM-British and the Rank Organisation incorporated all of these impulses, broadly united under the banner of “prestige” cinema. In Britain there was often an overlap between the notion of “prestige” cinema which, for the industry, “meant ‘an expensive film with which we can finally break into the mainstream American market’” and the “quality” cinema which, for the critics, meant films worthy of artistic appreciation (Ellis 1996, 67). In America, the prestige film had been an important production trend since the earliest days of the feature film and had since been continued with zeal by the major Hollywood studios. Using trade press coverage from the 1930s, Tino Balio explains that the “prestige picture is not a genre; rather, the term designates production values and promotion treatment. A prestige picture is typically a big-budget special based on a

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presold property, often as not a “classic” and tailored for top stars” (1993, 179). The key imperatives of globalising transnationalism—high production values, certain genre conventions and stars—are thus also at the core of the prestige picture. Following such a strategy clearly prioritises global rather than national or niche audiences and thus aligns Transatlantic British Cinema with the commercial imperatives of Hollywood. Indeed, producing prestige films represented an investment reliant upon the existence of established “transnational capital flows”: the subcontractor, subsidiary and stakeholder modes of Transatlantic British Cinema. High production values had long been streamlined and unified by Hollywood majors to give each studio’s output a consistent appearance and technical quality which audiences would recognise and expect. For London Film Productions, MGM-British and later the Rank Organisation, aesthetic alignment with Hollywood achieved with the extensive production infrastructure at Denham Studios (Warren, 1995, 30). By late 1937, MGM-British were producing at Denham, importing key creative personnel from Hollywood, such as the experienced directors Jack Conway, King Vidor and Sam Wood, to ensure a polished Hollywoodstyle product. From 1939 onwards, the consolidated Denham and Pinewood facility continued the same trend under the control of the Rank Organisation. The number of technical honours achieved by the two flagship studios at the Academy Awards is testament to the parity with which the quality of production was viewed. The Oscar for art direction was awarded to The Thief of Bagdad (Michael Powell, 1940), Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946), Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, 1947), Hamlet (Laurence Olivier, 1948) and The Red Shoes, for instance, with the first three also winning best cinematography and the final two taking best costume design and best music respectively. The transnational reach of Korda’s early films was instrumental in raising the profile of a generation of British actors including Charles Laughton, Leslie Howard, Robert Donat, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Merle Oberon. The partnership between London Films and United Artists promoted the exchange of actors, with other UA affiliated producers like Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick casting British stars in several Hollywood films. The performances of Leigh in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), Olivier in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), Oberon in The Dark Angel (Sidney Franklin, 1935) and the latter two in Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939) propelled them to international stardom. This established global appeal was at least temporarily harnessed by London Films releases such as The Divorce of Lady X (Tim Whelan, 1938), That Hamilton Woman (Alexander Korda,

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1941) and Lydia (Julien Duvivier, 1941), before the company’s decline. MGM shipped talent in the opposite direction by pairing the American star Robert Taylor with a then little known Vivien Leigh in A Yank at Oxford. Repeating the same tactic, Robert Donat appeared opposite MGM’s Rosalind Russell in The Citadel. While Donat was a recognisable face after roles in Gaumont-British thrillers and Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII and The Ghost Goes West (René Clair 1935), it was the back to back successes of The Citadel and Goodbye, Mr. Chips which established him as a global star. Absorbing local talent through their British operation, Greer Garson was signed to an MGM contract before Goodbye, Mr. Chips went into production and later became one of the studio’s brightest stars in the 1940s. Rank too bought into the strategy of globalising transnationalism by employing or developing star personalities within their roster of contract actors. A loose two tier system was established to complement the various national and transnational agendas of the company’s studios. Gainsborough’s contract stars like James Mason, Patricia Roc, Stewart Granger and Margaret Lockwood became widely known to audiences in Britain due to the success of their melodramas, as did Stanley Holloway and Alec Guinness for their performances in Ealing comedies. A greater degree of transnational exposure was, however, typically afforded to the stars of IPL films like Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Laurence Olivier, John Mills and Jean Simmons.

Affinitive transnationalism Transatlantic British Cinema can also be understood in terms of another of Hjort’s categories, “affinitive transnationalism”, which is defined by efforts to communicate across borders with nations and peoples with cultural affinities (Hjort 2010, 17). As Sarah Street notes, affinitive inclinations in British films are often centred upon the assumed “special relationship” between Britain and America, which implies that a “shared transnational identity might exist, to be understood and absorbed by audiences in both countries” (Street, 2002, 2). The most significant affinitive link between Britain and America is of course the shared use of the English language. This factor alone ensures that films and other works of performance and literature are more readily accessible to the residents of each country than those in other languages. More specifically, Transatlantic British Cinema has regularly relied upon two means of exploiting transnational affinity: adapting famous works of British literature or theatre and reproducing famous periods of British history, or institutions and mores which are

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emblematic of that history. In these ways, affinitive transnationalism, like globalising transnationalism, was intimately tied to the notion of prestige cinema during the 1930s and 1940s. Several prominent Rank productions adapted some of the most famous and revered texts in the English language. For example, Laurence Olivier produced, directed and starred in Shakespeare’s Henry V and Hamlet, while David Lean’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist brought Dickens’ most famous novels to the screen. Korda adapted more populist works of globally successful British literature. For example, he produced film adaptations of Rudyard Kipling’s adventure tales set in British India (The Elephant Boy [Robert J. Flaherty & Zoltan Korda, 1937]; The Jungle Book [Zoltan Korda, 1942]), brought Baroness Orczy’s most famous hero to the screen (The Scarlet Pimpernel [Harold Young, 1934]; Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel [Hanns Schwartz, 1937]) and adapted H.G. Wells’ fantasy novels (Things to Come [William Cameron Menzies, 1936]; The Man Who Could Work Miracles [Mothar Mendes, 1936]). As Korda demonstrated from his earliest days with London Films, the pre-existing fame or notoriety of British historical figures, events and eras can be drawn upon with or without the help of a prominent literary association. This process in itself can be considered a means of enhancing affinitive appeal. In this way, the British historical film coincides with the “dominant myths about the British historical experience” and more especially re-runs “narratives of national greatness” (Chapman 2005, 6-7) such as the Tudor period, the Victorian era and World War II. For Korda, this amounted to combining the cultural specificity of British heritage with the transferability of high production values and popular generic elements. For example, both The Private Life of Henry VIII and That Hamilton Woman concentrated on the romantic, the salacious and the comedic in the private lives of the titular monarch and Emma Hamilton, the mistress of Admiral Horatio Nelson. Similarly, Fire Over England (William K. Howard, 1937) combines action, mystery and romance by weaving a plot around England’s battle with the Spanish Armada, an assassination plot to murder Elizabeth I and the courtship of its two leading characters. Again foregrounding action and adventure, Sanders of the River (1935) The Drum (Zoltan Korda, 1938) and The Four Feathers (Zoltan Korda, 1939) use the exoticism of 19th century colonial Britain as a backdrop for their tales of chivalry and heroism. The contemporary narrative was, however, also a consistent theme in the pre-war films of MGM-British. However, modern Britain is portrayed as having a close and continuing relationship with its past, a theme which can be described as “neo-heritage” and which is expressed by the

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centrality of antiquated institutions, traditions and mores. A Yank at Oxford stamps its affinitive identity on screen by placing Lee Sheridan (Robert Taylor), the titular Yank, in Britain’s most famous and ancient university. A fish-out-of-water romantic comedy soon develops which derives much of its humour from the quirky but manageable differences between the Old World and the New. Ultimately the film expresses a happy, affinitive, meeting of cultures through Lee’s victory with the rowing team and romance with a young Englishwoman, Molly (Maureen O’Sullivan). The next two MGM-British films, The Citadel and Goodbye, Mr Chips are based on bestselling British novels. Goodbye, Mr. Chips narrates the personal journey of Mr. Chipping (Donat) from gauche and fastidious public school master to benevolent hero. The narrative arc of the bittersweet melodrama hinges on Chipping’s mid-life romance with and marriage to Kathy (Greer Garson), a woman who changes his outlook on life beyond recognition before her untimely death. Like A Yank at Oxford, the story reruns romanticised imagery of ancient and strongly class-based British institutions, while also encompassing the ramifications of World War I, a historical event with a shared transatlantic meaning. The Citadel treads a more realist line by addressing the plight of Welsh miners afflicted by tuberculosis, typhoid and poor working conditions. However, this gritty milieu is tempered by the idealistic struggle of the newly qualified Dr. Mason (Robert Donat) and his wife (Rosalind Russell) to improve the lives of the working poor. Mason becomes a crusader for medical reform, while his eventual triumph over adversity coupled with the modernising themes of science and progress place the story in comfortable affinitive territory. The lack of rentable studio space available to MGM-British as a result of wartime requisitioning resulted in just two modest wartime releases, Busman’s Honeymoon (Arthur B. Woods, 1940) and The Adventures of Tartu (Harold S. Bucquet, 1943). During the 1940s, World War II was, of course, not an historical subject but rather the most significant contemporary narrative. Acting as both official and unofficial propaganda, Rank produced a series of films about the British war experience, including The 49th Parallel (Michael Powell, 1941), The First of the Few (Leslie Howard, 1942), The Way Ahead (Carol Reed, 1944) and This Happy Breed (David Lean, 1944). MGM-British followed suit at their newly acquired Elstree Studios in the latter half of the decade with Perfect Strangers (Alexander Korda, 1945) and Edward, My Son (George Cukor, 1949), casting A-list British and Hollywood stars. Deborah Kerr appears opposite Robert Donat in the former and with Spencer Tracy in the latter,

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both films encompassing the World Wars within their dramatic arcs. As subject matter, the war was not only strongly affinitive due to the contemporaneous involvement of Britain and the US military but also encompassed many of the popular dramatic conventions of the war film as a genre. Producers of Transatlantic British Cinema were far from alone in perpetuating such national myths. During the 1930s and 1940s, the range of historical representations of Britain in Hollywood films reveals many similarities in theme or subject matter to those produced by British-based studios. For example, the Tudor period was evoked in prestige pictures like Mary of Scotland (John Ford, 1936) The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Michael Curtiz, 1939) and The Sea Hawk (Michael Curtiz, 1940), while the Victorian era was recreated in films like Cavalcade (Frank Lloyd, 1933), How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941) and Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944). Indeed, multiple film adaptations of classic literature such as the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie cemented the myths of Victorian Britain in the minds of filmgoers worldwide. Equally, Hollywood produced a number of films about the British war experience, including MGM’s Waterloo Bridge (Mervyn LeRoy, 1940), Mrs Miniver (William Wyler, 1942) and Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942). As Mark Glancy notes, over 150 such “Hollywood ‘British’ films” were made between 1930 and 1945, a period in which “no other foreign country was portrayed by Hollywood so often and with so much apparent admiration” (Glancy 1999, 1). Adding inverted commas in the same manner as Sarah Street, Glancy uses the phrase ‘Hollywood “British” film’ to indicate Hollywood films which appropriate British settings, source material and/or creative personnel yet are solely the products of the Hollywood industry. This broad similarity of British representations and mythologies produced in popular Hollywood films underlines the importance of affinitive transnationalism as a potentially lucrative strategy for Transatlantic British Cinema. Despite combining the strategies of economic, globalising and affinitive transnationalism, the Transatlantic British Cinema of the London Film Productions and the Rank Organisation experienced only occasional success in the US and global market. Beyond the industrial limitations of the subcontractor and stakeholder modes, a partial answer for this failure can also be found in the subtleties of the ways these strategies were used. A revealing indicator of the textual differences between a typical example of Transatlantic British Cinema and a Hollywood film was noted during J. Arthur Rank’s 1945 tour of the US. Having asked American producers

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what British films lacked in popular appeal compared to their Hollywood counterparts, five perceived deficiencies were highlighted. These included: slow action, too much dialogue, difficulty with accent and dialogue comprehension, physically unsuitable or unappealing actors and comparatively diminished production values. As Macnab makes clear, Rank subsequently made a committed effort to iron out many of these problem areas (1993, 73). Sarah Street (2002) also cites numerous instances where Transatlantic British Cinema was treated with contempt by American distributors and exhibitors because of similar textual issues. In contrast, MGM-British largely avoided the pitfalls of cultural discount by exporting key creative personnel raised in the Hollywood studio system who were able to accurately replicate its storytelling and production values. Finally, it is worth noting that, in pursuing the prestige model, Transatlantic British Cinema often played to the strengths of British heritage and culture but failed to engage with many of the genres most popular with American audiences. John Sedgwick’s extensive survey of Hollywood product differentiation between 1946 and 1965 proves enlightening in this respect. While this sample largely examines a later period than that covered in this chapter, many of the observations about genre and star popularity can be seen as broadly indicative of the situation in the 1930s and 1940s, not least because of the persistence of key genres within a period still considered by many as “classical Hollywood” and the length of many acting careers. He notes that the most popular genres in the domestic market were drama, comedy, the musical, the western and action-adventure. While the hybridity of many genres presents the problem of succinct classification, it is apparent that Transatlantic British Cinema offered few or no examples of comedy, the musical or the western. While many examples of Transatlantic British Cinema may be categorised in the popular categories of drama and action-adventure, many more could equally fall under considerably less popular categories such as war, historical, biographical or period films (Sedgwick 2002, 693). A similar story emerges when the most popular stars of the same period are considered. The most popular British stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Richard Burton, Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews (Sedgwick 2002, 700) found fame in Hollywood films and had little or no connection with Transatlantic British Cinema. While the majority of actors used by London Films and the Rank Organisation during the 1930s and 1940s were home-grown, the most successful stars such as Robert Donat, David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Laurence Olivier and Jean Simmons all left Britain to work for the Hollywood majors.

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Conclusion Applying three transnational strategies—economic, globalising and affinitive transnationalism—to examples of Transatlantic British Cinema previously defined through industrial modes alone—subcontractor, subsidiary and stakeholder—has elucidated the interrelated industrial and textual determinants of the conceptual category. Positioning given examples using these markers reveals a necessarily broad typology which transcends traditional criteria such as genre, period and authorship. Transatlantic British Cinema also embraces a diversity of creative conditions which range from high levels of autonomy to similar degrees of constraint. Equally, marketing, distribution and exhibition practices may vary from a general release on a global scale to more selective practices such as niche marketing and road-show distribution. Forgoing a strict essentialism in favour of a malleable conceptual matrix, Transatlantic British Cinema nonetheless adheres, in varying degrees, to a number of interrelated principals. Firstly, at an industrial level, the subcontractor, subsidiary and stakeholder modes privilege economic transnationalism and ultimately collaboration or integration with Hollywood. Secondly, at a textual level, Transatlantic British Cinema is defined by an implicit or explicit mix of globalising and affinitive transnationalism which seeks to reduce the level of transatlantic “cultural discount” by adopting many of the aesthetic and cultural values of Hollywood cinema. What emerges from this conceptual re-interpretation is a version of British cinema defined by an industrial and textual hybridity which is fundamentally transnational in nature. In this way, the concept of Transatlantic British Cinema helps to illuminate one of the most longstanding and prominent transnational relationships in cinema history. Indeed, this particular conceptual hybridisation continues to define the dominant version of British cinema in the twenty-first century insofar as it is the most heavily capitalised and the most widely distributed, exhibited and marketed both at home and abroad.

Bibliography Andrew, Dudley. 2010 “Time Zones and Jet Lag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema”. In World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman, 59-89. London: Routledge. Balcon, Michael. 1969. Michael Balcon presents...A Lifetime in Films. London: Hutchinson.

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Balio, Tino. 1976. United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. —. 1987. United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. —. 1993. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chapman, James. 2005. National Identity and the British Historical Film. London: I. B. Tauris. Cook, David. A. 2006. “We’re In the Money!’ A Brief History of Market Power Concentration and Risk Aversion in the American Film Industry from the Edison Trust to the Rise of Transnational Media Conglomerates”. In Theorising National Cinema, ed. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen, 158-171. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chibnall, Steve. 2007. Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film. London: BFI Publishing. Crofts, Stephen. 1993. “Reconceptualising National Cinema/s”. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14 (3): 50-7. Dickinson, Margaret and Sarah Street. 1985. Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927-84. London: BFI Publishing. Drazin, Charles. 2002. Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Ellis, John. 1996. “The Quality Film Adventure: British Critics and the Cinema, 1942-1948”. In Dissolving Views Key Writings on British Cinema, ed. Andrew Higson, 66-93. London: Cassell. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden. 2006. “General Introduction: What is Transnational Cinema?”. In Transnational Cinema the Film Reader, ed. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, 1-12. Abingdon: Routledge. Glancy, Mark. 1999. When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood ‘British’ Film 1939-45. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —. 2006. “Temporary American citizens? British audiences, Hollywood films and the threat of Americanization in the 1920s”. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 26 (4): 461-484. Higson, Andrew. 1995. Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press Higson, Andrew. 1989. “The Concept of National Cinema”. Screen 30 (4): 36-46. Hill, John. 1997. “British cinema as national cinema: Production, audience and representation”. In The British Cinema Book, ed. Robert Murphy, 244-254. London: BFI Publishing.

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Hjort, Mette. 2010. “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism”. In World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman, 12-33. London: Routledge. Hoskins, Colin and Rolf Mirus. 1988. “Reasons for the US Dominance of the International Trade in Television Programmes”. Media, Culture and Society, (10): 499-515. Macnab, Geoffrey. 1993. J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry. London: Routledge. Miskell, Peter. 2006. “‘Selling America to the world’? The Rise and Fall of an International Film Distributor in its Largest Foreign Market: United Artists in Britain, 1927-1947”. Enterprise & Society 7 (4): 740776. —. 2009. “Resolving the Global Efficiency Versus Local Adaptability Dilemma: US Film Multinationals in their Largest Foreign Market in the 1930s and 1940s”. Business History 51 (3): 426-444. Murphy, Robert. (1983) “Rank’s Attempt on the American Market, 19449”. In British Cinema History, ed. James Curran and Vincent Porter, 164-178. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Porter, Vincent. 1983. “The Context of Creativity: Ealing Studios and Hammer Films”. In British Cinema History, ed. James Curran and Vincent Porter, 179-207. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Ryall, Tom. 2001. Britain and the American Cinema. London: Thousand Oaks. Sedgwick, John. 2002. “Product Differentiation at the Movies: Hollywood, 1946 to 1965”. The Journal of Economic History 62 (3): 676-705. Sedgwick, John & Michael Porkorny. 2005. “The Film Business in the United States and Britain during the 1930s”. Economic History Review, 58 (1): 79-112. Street, Sarah. 1997. British National Cinema. London: Routledge. —. 2002. Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA. London: Continuum. Stubbs, John. 2009. “The Eady Levy: A Runaway Bribe? Hollywood Production and British Subsidy in the Early 1960s”. Journal of British Cinema and Television 6 (1): 1-20. Swann, Paul. 2000. “The British Culture Industries and the Mythology of the American Market: Cultural Policy and Cultural Exports in the 1940s and 1990s”. Cinema Journal 39 (4): 27-42. Townsend, Nathan. Forthcoming 2014. Working Title Films and Transatlantic British Cinema (PhD Thesis). York: University of York.

CHAPTER EIGHT “MARVELLOUS, AWESOME, TRUE-TO-LIFE, EPOCH-MAKING, A NEW DIMENSION”1: RECONSIDERING THE EARLY HISTORY OF COLOUR TELEVISION IN BRITAIN HELEN WHEATLEY

Chromophobia and the problem of colour In 2000, the artist David Batchelor published a persuasive book on what he understood as the problem of colour, or “Chromophobia”, in which he argued that: In the West, since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded… Colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body… [and is] relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. (2000, 22-3)

This work has become significant in the recent flurry of work on colour in film, not least to explain the relative lack of attention that has been paid to colour within film scholarship. Whilst there are a number of other attendant arguments which explain the dearth of work on film colour (about the subjective nature of colour perception, the potential unevenness of reproduced filmic colour in different settings and media, and so on), Batchelor’s work points us towards what might be seen as an underlying snobbery against a consideration of the aesthetic qualities of colour in cinema. Certainly this is how it has been interpreted within film studies.

1

David Attenborough discussing the critical reception of colour in the Radio Times (Attenborough 1967).

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Chromophobia, or a deep suspicion about the meaning and propriety, even, of producing works of art and culture in colour, can also be found at the heart of the history of television’s move into colour. It is found, for example, in the policy documents which surround the setting up of the first colour television service in Britain, on BBC2, in 1967; it is also found in the attitude of British broadcasters to colour broadcasts elsewhere in the world, as is shown in their public and private documents. However, one cannot underestimate the impact of colour on television screens, its vividness and luminosity, and the contrast that must have been so startling when television shifted from black and white to colour, first tentatively, on BBC2, in the summer of 1967, and then, by the end of the year, across the majority of the channel’s programmes, and two years later, across BBC1 and ITV. The rhetoric surrounding the coming of colour, in the promotional material of the BBC and in reviews, editorials and letters from the public, speaks loudly of this contrast, and this will be explored in this examination of the coming of colour to British television. This chapter will concentrate primarily on how colour television was conceived of prior to and during its initial appearance on British television, meaning that the focus will be on the BBC2 period alone. In telling the story of colour’s arrival, particular attention will be paid to both the internal discussions about colour technology and its capabilities within the BBC, but also on the ways in which this discourse was interpreted and expanded upon within the marketing of colour television. Whilst others have given a more detailed technical history of the coming of colour, placing the “race for colour” in its properly international context,2 this chapter will sketch the key points of this technical history only briefly, and offer an international history only in the sense that this will lead to the question of the tone and style of the colour television that the BBC was seeking to produce for Britain (particularly as opposed to that which had been produced in North America). Thus this chapter proposes that a “restrained” and genteel colour palette, as opposed to the “brashness” and “gaudiness” of American colour, was written into television policy in the mid-1960s; it also looks at how this was interpreted as a search for authentic, realist, or “natural” colour by BBC management and programme makers, as opposed to a more “spectacular” version of television colour. By analysing programmes, production files and listings guides which document the creation and broadcast of early colour programmes on British television, we are able to assess the success, 2

Briggs (1995) offers more of this, as does Andreas Fickers’ account of the struggle for a European-wide colour standard (2010).

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or otherwise, of producing what might be seen as a chromophobic form of colour television in this early period. In order to test these ideas, this chapter will particularly focus on the impact that the coming of colour had on the production of television drama. It is clear that colour was assessed as having specific implications for drama producers, directors and designers: whereas, on the one hand, colour had the potential to add new layers of meaning to a production of television fiction and could therefore be used in expressive, and eloquent, ways, on the other hand it might also be seen as producing a more superficial “prettifying” of the television drama, offering an increased attention to the surface of the image rather than producing depth of meaning. The recent proliferation of writing on the role of colour in film has all begun by acknowledging that colour has been, until recently at least, an under-researched and misunderstood area of film scholarship. For example, Sarah Street has argued that “For much of its history, commentators played down colour’s contribution to film, emphasizing instead its function in underscoring dramatic narrative trajectories, neither drawing attention to itself nor acting as a distraction” (2010, 379). Three years earlier, Wendy Everett had been even more strident in claiming that film studies had a colour “blind spot” and that within this field of scholarship “there is no suggestion that colour might play any role in the construction of meaning” (2007, 13). Whilst this must surely be seen as an overstatement, it is true that colour is, on the one hand, difficult to talk about in relation to film, and, on the other, is often understood as being of lesser importance than other aspects of mise-en-scène within a good deal of film analysis. This sense of difficulty, which also arises as an issue in art criticism, rests on the fact that, as is well documented, the perception of colour is subjective and culturally specific. For example, the naming of colour has been highlighted as a major issue for the film and fine art scholar alike, and reference to the Maori’s “3,000 colour terms” (Everett 2007 13) as opposed to the Filipino Hanunóo people’s four has become a critical commonplace in representing this particular “difficulty”. As Everett argues: “Whereas it may be tempting to think of certain colours as possessing universal meanings that are reflected in their use as symbols and codes, it is important to bear in mind that any relationship between colour and meaning is essentially arbitrary” (ibid). It is also true that even within cultures, we cannot be sure that colour perception is uniform. Therefore, scholars might be seen to shy away from using colour terms with authority and struggle with reading and understanding the meaning of colour, given the contingent and ambiguous nature of colour as a signifier.

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The other major issue for film scholars has been the stability of film’s colour. In short, if colour varies in reproduction from print to print, copy to copy, cinema to cinema, how can one write with certainty and conviction about it? Of course, if this variability is a problem for the study of film, it is infinitely more difficult and problematic when it comes to television. From the very first colour television sets, the “look” of the image could be adjusted individually, to suit individual tastes, and sometimes in rather outlandish ways. Many sets allowed viewers to adjust brightness, contrast or tint, and colour settings, and all sets had to be set up by a trained engineer who would adjust the colour reception internally before leaving the viewer to their own adjustments.3 Furthermore, variation in the broadcast signal (often caused by viewers’ distance from their nearest transmitter) had an impact on the stability of television colour, as did the transfer of programmes between different colour systems (i.e. NTSC to PAL). This issue of colour’s variability was remarked upon in the reviews for the very beginning of BBC2’s colour broadcasts, and the coverage of Wimbledon which kicked off colour in the UK, when Maurice Wiggin in the Sunday Times remarked that whilst “we can rely on the BBC to put out good, lifelike colour… what we see at home will depend on things beyond their control” (Wiggin 1967). Indeed, commenting on the Wimbledon coverage, the Sunday Mirror’s reviewer said: What a time I had fighting those two knobs marked Tint and Colour. At first the Centre Court looked like a sick greengage jelly in a sea of blue haze – which was the stands. Poor old David Attenborough, who introduced the programme, seemed to have chocolate blancmange all over his face. I fiddled and fiddled desperately with those knobs. And at last I got the trick of it. (Anon. 1967b)

A few days later, in the Guardian, Stanley Reynolds wrote that: You may adjust the colour if you fancy surrealistic blues or greens or purples or if you wish to make some favourite television personality appear ridiculous. On BBC1 and ITV you can get a sort of sepia colour by twiddling the colour knob. The colour on our 25 inch set is very natural, more like real life than Technicolor, and with none of the green blur some have complained of. (Reynolds 1967)

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The British Radio Equipment Manufacturer’s Association (BREMA) 1967 film, ‘The Colour Television Receiver’, which details the process of setting up colour television in the home, can be viewed via YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkrLf_9n_7w

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Clearly, then, reviewers of television were attune to the variability of colour reception, and the fun that could be had in playing with television’s colour. The BBC was also worrying about this issue in their assessment of their own programmes; the Weekly Review of Programme Presentation minutes from the 28th November 1967 documents a discussion with Barry Learoyd, the Co-ordinator of Colour Familiarisation, who wondered whether an area of greenness during the programme Three of a Kind (BBC 1967) occurred “because he lived on the fringe of the receiving area for colour television [and] if this was the case then he felt that it should be borne in mind when producing for colour since a major part of the general public would be viewing from a fringe area.”4 What all this suggests is that like scholars of film who are concerned about the trueness of the colour they analyse in the particular print, video, DVD or download they are working with, television historians must, in dealing with colour, acknowledge that they are working with a version of a reproduction of television colour, rather than a guaranteed facsimile of what the viewer would have seen or what the director intended them to see. Nevertheless, with these caveats, it is possible to describe, analyse, and evaluate the different uses of colour seen at the start of the colour television service in Britain; indeed, in all likelihood, the historian will be dealing with a version of television colour which is closer to the intended colours of the programme as broadcast than the colour that was received in homes across the UK in 1967 and 68.

Setting up colour television and selling it In brief, the facts of UK television’s introduction of colour are that the BBC launched a limited colour service in July of 1967 on BBC2 only, which was already being delivered in the higher definition 625 lines system. After many years of experimentation and discussion (the Colour Policy files at the BBC Written Archives Centre go as far back as the start of the service in 1936), the UK adopted the German PAL system invented by Dr Walter Burch of the Telefunken Company. Colour television had, however, begun in the US in the previous decade; CBS had introduced colour broadcasts as early as 1951, and whilst their colour broadcasting system was quite successful in technical terms, it was not adopted by other networks and was abandoned later that same year. NBC was then the first 4

“Weekly review of programme presentation minutes” November 28, 1967, BBC Written Archive Centre [WAC hereafter] file, T5/682/1, Vanity Fair, General and Filming.

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network to adopt the alternative NTSC colour standard, named for the National Television Standards Committee, in 1954. However, the take-up of NTSC colour by other networks happened slowly across the next decade, with CBS, ironically, being the last to adopt the system in 1966, just a year before the BBC launched their colour service. Colour broadcasting in the US had had a shaky start: the NTSC system, referred to alternately as “Never Twice the Same Colour”, was seen as unreliable, and as producing gaudy, unnatural looking colour. David Attenborough, who was Controller of BBC2 in the colour launching period, refers to the “staggeringly garish quality of the first colour programmes shown in the United States” in his memoirs, and argues that “I was sure, from watching the test transmissions, that ours would be in a different class, full of tonal subtleties and wholly comparable from the point of view of colour reproduction, with any printed colour pictures” (Attenborough 2002, 212). Attenborough’s memories of the significance of this comparison are wholly accurate: a great deal is made in the colour policy documentation from the launch in 1967 about “not doing it like the Americans”. The initial launching of the colour service in the UK was comparatively lowkey, but with a larger number of colour programmes spread across the week, many of which were quite “unspectacular” in their design; for example, Late Night Line Up (BBC2, 1964-72), a panel discussion/arts programme made in Studio H, the first fully equipped colour studio, was the first daily series to be broadcast in colour, and became something of a colour testing ground and “flagship”, despite its apparent lack of spectacle. The BBC General Advisory Council reported on this quandary of whether to start with a “few glittering colourful hours a week, set in a basic monochrome schedule” or produce the “maximum amount of colour from the available equipment” (BBC General Advisory Council 1967) in their document entitled “The Colour Service” in the month before colour was launched in the UK. This document noted that the Americans had opted for the former strategy and thus: Producers and engineers… were faced with having to learn their skills on productions which would have been complex in monochrome but which in colour caused gigantic problems. Colour television thus became synonymous with complexity and difficulty [in the States, with engineers becoming] so obsessed with colour that it frequently came to dominate their production plans. As a result the crucial programme values – the wit of a comedian, the dramatic quality of a play, the balance of news coverage – became of secondary importance. (ibid.)

In comparison, the General Advisory Council argued:

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The notion of this “more subtle” tone and style that the BBC thought it ought to be producing (in comparison with the American model) will be returned to below: first, however, a detour must be made in order to examine the BBC’s campaign to get viewers to invest in colour television. A crucial difference between film and television colour is that as soon as a film is made in colour, everyone sees it in colour, whereas the shift into television colour required financial investment on the part of the viewer, in the form of purchasing a new colour set and investing in TV License which was £5 more expensive than a regular license per year. For those still watching in black and white, colour television could be viewed as black and white, so the reception of television in colour was far more gradual than that of film. According to Andrew Crisell (2002, 122), a colour set would have cost £350 in 1967 (around £5000 in 2012 when adjusted for inflation); this was, therefore, no small investment, and accounts for the fact that only 17% of households were equipped with colour TV by 1972 (Lury 2005, 36), though this number rose rapidly throughout the 1970s, thanks largely to the hiring and hire-purchasing of colour sets through companies like Radio Rentals and Rediffusion. Whist Radio Rentals had ensured that the TV critics were viewing in colour by sending them free colour sets,5 Maurice Wiggin reported in the Sunday Times in the first week of colour that there was only an estimated one to two thousand sets in operation across the country.6 Thus the BBC found itself at the forefront of promoting the purchase of colour television, and 5

Memo from George Campney (Head of Publicity) to David Attenborough, “Colour promotion”, June 27, 1967, BBC WAC file R44/773/1, Publicity: Television Colour System: “I gather that most of the critics now have colour receivers – courtesy of Radio Rentals – so we should not be short of a notice or two”. 6 Incidentally, there is a letter from Buckingham Palace from the middle of December, 1967, in the Colour Television: General file at the BBC WAC (R78/554/1) thanking the Corporation for the offer of a colour set but stating that “The Queen has only just (in the last few days) ordered and had installed a set at Windsor Castle” (December 13, 1967), so clearly even royalty were initially slow to adopt colour television.

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worked closely with BREMA, the British Radio Equipment Manufacturers Association, in order to ensure that there were enough viewers purchasing new sets, and therefore the new, more expensive, license, to cover the increased costs of moving to 625 line colour programme production and broadcasting. The jewel in the crown of the BBC and BREMA’s joint efforts was the travelling exhibition, Colour Comes to Town, which is described by the BBC’s Publicity Service as being “comprised of 14 manufacturer’s stands and four BBC stands…a total of 308,000 people visited the Exhibition at its eight venues”.7 The exhibition opened at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon on the 25th of September, 1967, and the BBC employed three “Colour Girls”, actresses or singers from London, Skipton, and Glasgow, to host the exhibition in the relevant regional centres, answering visitors’ questions, introducing celebrity guests from the world of television, and keeping an eye on the mobile Colour TV Demonstration unit which was displaying colour showreels, and a back projection unit showing a continuous selection of slides illustrating colour programmes. For many people without the capital, and without rich enough friends and neighbours, Colour Comes to Town was their first experience of colour television. Following the buzz (and high attendance figures) of this mobile exhibition, the BBC and BREMA sent a scaled down version of Colour Comes to Town to tour holiday camps the following summer. The Board of Management minutes for the 22nd of July, 1968, report that this venture had been “a considerable success [and that] It appeared that 90% of those visiting the exhibition had never seen a colour television picture”.8 The same Board reported in the following month that “at the end of that week [the holiday camp tour] would probably have reached 25,000 people... [and] at one camp about 150 people had sat through a performance of Cosi Fan Tutte [being broadcast on a colour set in the exhibition]”9. Alongside BREMA, the BBC had also mounted an exhibition in the 5th floor exhibition lounge of Austin Reed’s in Regent Street during Wimbledon Fortnight in 1968, and, teaming up with Kodak, had simultaneously mounted an exhibition entitled “Colour Comes to Television” in Harrods’

7

Introduction of the BBC Publicity Service dossier, “Sample of press coverage: Colour Television Comes to Town”, BBC WAC file R78/555/1, Colour Television Promotion. 8 Board of Management minutes, point 629g, June 22, 1968, BBC WAC file R78/555/1, Colour Television Promotion. 9 Board of Management minutes, point 699i, August 19, 1968, BBC WAC file R78/555/1, Colour Television Promotion.

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“Fashion Theatre”.10 Thus the BBC aimed to cover all of their demographic bases in collaborating with set and film stock manufacturers, as well as TV rental companies, to promote colour television within a variety of public spaces during the launch period. The “show business” tone of promotion is interesting because it sits slightly at odds with the BBC and David Attenborough’s insistence that the colour launch would not be spectacular, but rather should be seen as the natural progression of television form and style, and as an increase in fidelity rather than a recourse to showier aspects of the nascent colour service. It is this quandary to which we now turn.

On the question of “spectacular colour vs. “realist colour” Francis McLean, the BBC’s Director of Engineering, opened his lunchtime lecture in March 1967 by asking why the BBC was switching to colour? In answering his own question, McLean said: Well, the Government has told us to do it, and of course we wanted to do it for various reasons, like keeping up with the Joneses, helping the export trade, and so on. These are all important, but I think the real reason is that it is the natural thing to do. By a sort of curious inversion of logic, we have come to regard black and white television as a normal thing, and colour as abnormal, whereas in life the natural thing is to see everything in colour. (McLean 1967, 3)

McLean went on to say that: It is sometimes said that colour is an extravagance and that we could do without it. This is of course true – we can do without a great many things … but experience shows that human nature does not work this way. Colour is such an essential part of human living that it would be an unnatural deprivation to do without it. (ibid, 15-16)

The rhetoric used here is indicative of the BBC’s drive to produce “natural” colour, to see it as an essential, and not unnecessary, progression of the television image, as something that would augment the BBC’s “core values” of providing truth and extending cultural experience, rather than something which would detract from this. In short, the coming of colour was, according to management-speak at least, to be precisely un-televisual, 10

Howard, Geoffrey (Exhibition and Campaign Organiser). 1968. “Wimbledon 1968: Colour TV Store Promotions”, June 18, BBC WAC file T23/135/1 TV Publicity: Colour Television 1966-1968.

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using John Caldwell’s (1995) understanding of that term to mean “excessively styled” or exhibitionist in its aesthetic. A month after McLean’s lecture, the trade publication Electrical and Radio Trading reported that “the very word colour, Mr Attenborough said, was a misnomer. It puts a false emphasis. We should say natural television. Monochrome has been an impoverished and debased picture. We shall now provide a more accurate picture” (Anon. 1967a). BBC management went to great lengths to deny colour television’s more spectacular functions or properties during the launch period, as reflected in Director General Charles Curran’s statement that colour should not “simply [be] a decorative addition to the screen” (1969, 7). Whereas the term “high fidelity” colour often replaced “realist” colour within BBC policy documentation, the meaning of this was certain. The term faithfulness was also used to denote a realist approach to colour: the Controller of Programming for Television, Ian Atkins, argued that “faithfulness to the original is obviously the ultimate criterion of colour pictures” and adamantly stated that “This new dimension that has just been added to the television picture will not be exploited for its own sake”.11 This rhetoric runs contra to the histories of British television which argue, as Crisell does, that the “obvious effect of colour was to make the medium of television immensely more vivid and picturesque” (2002, 122). Furthermore, when one looks at the reception of what Karen Lury describes as a “homegrown spectacular” (2005, 36), i.e. the BBC’s colour coverage of Wimbledon in 1967, what becomes clear is that reviews suggest it was both eye-poppingly spectacular and at the same time stressed the realism of the colour coverage (the grass is actually green, the tennis whites, white and so on). In Attenborough’s summing up of these reviews in an editorial for the Radio Times, the superlatives used (“Marvellous, awesome, true-to-life, epoch-making, a new dimension” (Attenborough 1967, 5)) speak simultaneously to colour’s potential to be both spectacular (marvellous, awesome, epoch making), but also closer to the real (true to life, a new dimension). However, it was variety programming, even more so than sport, that was seen as one of the key beneficiaries of the shift into colour, relying, as the genre did, on spectacular sets, costumes, lighting and choreographed set pieces. Furthermore, it was the variety programme which took the BBC

11

Atkins, Ian. 1967. “Working in colour: A lecture by Ian Atkins, controller, Programme Services, Television, at the third of the sixth series of lunch-time lecture in the Concert Hall of Broadcasting House”, 13 December, BBC WAC file T66/161/1, Colour TV – Start of Services 8/10/53-15/10/71.

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closer to the garish American colour palette which Attenborough et al had been so keen to avoid, seen so vividly in the acid-bright, primary colours of sets, lighting and costumes of the Black and White Minstrel Show (BBC1/2, 1958-78). In his report, “Colour Television: a Report on Progress”, Secretary to the BBC, Kenneth Lamb, states that “The only concession to colour” in terms of a shift in programme policy, was the transfer of the highly popular variety show, the Black and White Minstrel Show, from BBC1 to BBC2. He argues that “This was necessary because BBC2 had no light entertainment “spectacular” through which to demonstrate the potential of colour when used in productions of this kind”.12 However, this is not strictly the case, given that BBC2 launched its full service with an hour and 15 minutes of Billy Smart’s Circus (BBC2, tx. 2/12/67), a spectacular variety event programme, and, in the first weeks of the full colour service, broadcast either the Black and White Minstrel Show or variety/comedy vehicle, The Charlie Drake Show (BBC2, 1967-8), on Saturday evening, and Once More with Felix (BBC2, 1967-70) on a Sunday evening. Whilst the latter was based around the folky Julie Felix, it still had the format and design of a variety show, and its innovative use of coloured lighting was praised highly by the Head of Television Lighting, Phil Ward.13 Of the Charlie Drake Show, the producer Ernest Maxim said in the Radio Times that: The word “spectacular” sounds as though we’re letting off fireworks. In a way, it’s true… It will certainly be colourful. The costumes are marvellous and we have lit the sets like a Hollywood film. A black and white show, when completed, can give certain satisfaction, but a colour show 500 per cent more. (Anon 1967c, 11)

The colour design and prominence of these BBC2 variety shows in the schedule, also referred to as “spectaculars” within policy documents produced in the 1960s, sits at odds then with Attenborough et al’s suggestion that BBC2 would launch a more subtle colour service than the Americans that would not seek to “showcase” this new technology with “excessive” production values but rather to utilise colour as a “natural progression” towards a greater sense of verisimilitude. In the conclusion of this chapter, an assessment of the extent to which this was achieved in television drama production is offered.

12

Lamb, Kenneth. 1968. “Colour Television: A report on progress”, March 7, BBC WAC file R78/1967/1, Colour Television – Policy. 13 Ward, Phil. 1968. “Commendation”, April 1, BBC WAC file T12/1188/1, Once More With Felix 16/12/67-30/3/68.

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Making meaning or “looking pretty” In considering whether some dramas should continue to be produced in black and white after the launch of the colour service, David Attenborough drafted a letter to Kenneth Adam, Director of Television, in 1966, with the following thoughts: “There may be strong aesthetic reasons why some productions should be shown in monochrome. This will doubtless apply to many plays, for colour, unless used with great skill, can turn the dramatic into the merely pretty”.14 Whilst Attenborough changed his “many plays” to “some plays” in the final draft of this letter, the fear of producing the “merely pretty” television drama remained plain. In her writing on the “pretty” in cinema, Rosalind Galt argues that “prettiness” is frequently at the centre of “the resilience of “empty spectacle” as a figure of critique in film writing from journalism to high theory” (2011, 2) and goes on to say that: Pretty things do not have the status of beautiful ones… because pretty so immediately brings to mind a negative, even repugnant, version of aesthetic value… Many critics hear in the term a silent ‘merely’ in which the merely pretty is understood as a pleasing surface for an unsophisticated audience, lacking in depth, seriousness, or complexity of meaning. (6)

Galt’s etymology of “pretty”, and the “merely pretty” more specifically, is useful in understanding precisely the formal elements Attenborough feared colour might bring to television drama: the production of decorative or attractive drama which lacked depth, seriousness and complexity. In the last section of this chapter then, the extent to which the BBC produced “merely pretty” dramas in the first months of the full colour service will be discussed. The first long-running colour dramas on BBC2 during the colour launching period were American imports: these included the anthology drama Impact,15 featured high end actors like Simone Signoret, John Cassavetes, Dana Andrews and Shelley Winters, and aimed to bring the values of Hollywood colour cinema to the small screen, and the westerns The Virginian, and later High Chaparral. In an article entitled “My verdict on colour TV”, Shaun Usher in the Daily Sketch described The Virginian as “the dullest, wordiest, most pompous Western series ever screened on

14

Attenborough, David. 1966. “Colour policy”, December 5, BBC WAC file T16/47/10, TV Policy: Colour Television File 7B, Aug-Dec 66. 15 Made up of selected episodes of the award-winning anthology series Theater of Stars (NBC, 1963-67).

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television” (Usher 1967), but then argued that, in relation to its broadcast in colour, “all of a sudden I wouldn’t be without it for the world… For whenever the action palls, my eyes wander to the scenery—green pine trees, vivid blue or sunset skies” (ibid.). We see here an account of a show doing exactly what Attenborough had feared of colour drama: lacking in dramatic value but providing a rather more “shallow” sense of visual pleasure in colour not tied to the creation of meaning. This review, then, sees colour landscapes being viewed as salve for poor drama, rather than, as Technicolor pioneer Natalie Kalmus proposed, colour being utilised to “convey dramatic moods and impressions to the audience, making them more receptive to whatever emotional effect the scenes, action, and dialog may convey” (2006, 26). In preparing for the start of the colour service, the BBC’s own producers, directors and designers of television drama, along with all other technical staff, needed to be trained in the specific issues and problems of producing TV fiction in colour. It was decided that this training had to be done in such a way that the makers of television drama (along with all other genres of programming) would produce full programmes, as if for broadcast, to test out the new equipment. This training, dubbed the “Colour Familiarisation Course”, was described by its co-ordinator, Barry Learoyd, in a memo to director Rudolph Cartier’s assistant: There are precisely three weeks from [the start date] during which the production team must prepare, plan, design, rehearse and, in the studio, bring to a successful final run your team’s 20-30 minute programme… The object of the course is for you to obtain as much practical experience of colour and its compatible black and white picture as possible, in the time… Simple programmes with a simple use of colour are likely to be more successful until the Service as whole has gained experience… Colour is accentuated on the screen. Pictures can easily become ‘gaudy’. Most successful pictures are composed largely of subdued colours.16

Ian Atkins later said of this course that the working teams “were encouraged to experiment and if they got it right first time we asked them to try it another way. We believed that they would learn as much from their failures as from their successes”.17 16

Learoyd, Barry. 1967. “Colour Familiarisation Course Number 12”, January 6, BBC WAC file T5/1015/1, Drama: Colour Courses 10/2/67. 17 Atkins, Ian. 1967. “Working in Colour: A lecture by Ian Atkins, Controller, Programme Services, Television, at the third of the sixth series of lunch-time lecture in the Concert Hall of Broadcasting House”, December 13, BBC WAC file T66/161/1, Colour TV – Start of Services 8/10/53-15/10/71.

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The training took place in Studio H and Cartier’s team produced Three Essays in Colour featuring three literary adaptations (Chekov’s The Bear, the fantasy mystery novel The Master of Judgement Day by Leo Perutz, and Akutagawa’s Rashomon) and experimented with, amongst other things, the use of back projection in colour production and also highlighted the major problem of shifting between studio and footage filmed on location: this had always been seen as problem for the production of dramas, but even more so in colour. From the documents pertaining to the Colour Familiarisation Course to the files of ongoing series and serials once colour production began in earnest, there are repeated issues about the disjuncture between these elements of productions: actors’ hair appearing to be two different colours in the same scene, weather and lighting changing starkly from shot to shot, etc. Coming out of this process, there was a repeated insistence within the BBC on an increased need for teamwork and collaboration between the directors, producers, designers, and costume and makeup designers of TV drama; as Kenneth Lamb argued, “colour demands that all the separate creative processes of production should be considered in relation to each other”.18 This is also evidenced in a document written by Head of Classic Serials, David Conroy,19 which sets out a five step process of collaboration in a series of “Colour Co-ordination Meetings” between the director and all other members of the design and realisation team on each programme. Given that colour programming was around 20% more expensive to produce than black and white,20 and that the differential costs for the classic serial were slightly higher at 23%, Conroy was wise in carefully laying out the processes of colour production for all who worked on these programmes, for it was the classic serial which was to launch the BBC Drama Department’s efforts in colour and it is to these productions that I now turn. The BBC launched their full colour service on BBC2, with a five-part adaptation of Vanity Fair (BBC2, 1967-8), adapted by Rex Tucker and directed by David Giles. The adaptation was strongly promoted: stories about its production appeared in a weekly colour supplement of the Radio 18

Lamb, Kenneth. 1968. “Colour Television: A Report on Progress”. March 7, BBC WAC file R78/1967/1, Colour Television – Policy. 19 Conroy, David. 1967. “BBC Classic Serials: Colour Programmes, General Notes”. October 27, BBC WAC file T5/1809/1, Portrait of a Lady, General. 20 See “Programme Colour Costs” document, which shows the differential costs of producing in colour and balck and white across all genres of programming: November 11, 1966, BBC WAC file T39/9/1, Controller of Television Admin Papers: Colour Television – Colour BBC1 1966-69.

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Times in the five weeks running up to the broadcast of the first episode, and its star, Susan Hampshire, appeared on the front of the Radio Times in the first week of the full colour service, advertising both Vanity Fair but also the start of colour. Following this, and broadcast in the same Saturday and Thursday evening slots, Jack Pullman’s adaptation of Portrait of a Lady (BBC2, 1968), directed by James Cellan Jones, was produced. In their history of the classic serial on television, Giddings and Selby argue that “Colour television… brought a revival of interest in classic novels which could be set in luscious locations, classy architecture or rhapsodic landscapes” (2001, 30). The costume drama, and the classic adaptation in particular, is, of course, one of the few areas of television production to have previously been considered in relation to questions of visual pleasure. Whilst analyses of the genre have mainly concentrated on the sumptuousness of costume dramas filmed on film and on location from the 1980s onwards, I have previously argued that the studio-based costume drama might also be understood in relation to similar notions of visual pleasure, and particularly the pleasures of heritage detail found in costuming and set dressing (Wheatley 2005). This is certainly the case for both Vanity Fair and Portrait of a Lady which were both shot mainly in the studio, with some location filmed inserts for exterior shooting: their costuming and set design fits Kristen Thompson’s description of colour in film as described by Brian Price: “excess[ive], a source of abstract visual pleasure and perceptual play that resides somewhere above” questions of meaning (Price 2006, 6). Vanity Fair was commissioned by Shaun Sutton, Head of Serials in the BBC Drama Department, because: “(1) It is a Classic, but not too heavy or demanding a Classic… (2) It has a splendid girl as its leading character. A girl who is wicked, but not too wicked and (3) It is good colour. A cool, elegant period in architecture, very pretty women’s dresses, attractive men’s clothes and uniforms.”21 Whilst Sutton tempered these comments, found in a memo to the Controller of Television, by following them with “Of course I agree it is the content, and only the content, that matters in the end. Scenery in television is the thing that stops you seeing the studio walls”,22 his initial emphasis on Vanity Fair being an “unchallenging” play that offered the opportunity for “good colour” is telling.23

21

Sutton, Shaun. 1967. “Memo to C. P. Tel”, July 12, BBC WAC file T5/682/2, Vanity Fair, General and Filming. 22 Ibid. 23 Indeed, perhaps this is why the novel was also the source for the first feature film to be shot in Technicolor, Robert Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp (US, 1935)

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Vanity Fair is a sprawling tale of the Machiavellian manoeuvrings of Becky Sharp (Susan Hampshire), a young woman intent on social climbing who befriends and betrays the family of her kind and innocent school friend, Amelia Sedley (Marilyn Taylerson), among others, in her pursuit of fortune and social esteem. Sharp is an interesting figurehead for colour television: a vain and deceitful figure, she is repeatedly shown to be obsessed with the appearance of things. Beautiful in comparison to her much plainer friend Amelia, Hampshire plays Becky as a coquettish but firey red-head (despite Thackeray’s description of Becky as “sandy haired”), perhaps literally embodying what colour technology was capable of showing. This reading of Becky as an embodiment of colour is also evidenced by the fact that Becky’s costumes are an array of colour, pinks and purples and greens, as opposed to the whites and pale blues of Amelia’s. When approaching a colour-centric reading of Vanity Fair (or any other piece of television, for that matter), we seek out some evidence of colour being used in meaningful or expressive ways, looking for what colour brings to the creation of meaning in this production or lent to the symbolic aspects of storytelling. In the contrast between Becky as a kind of peacock, an embodiment of Batchelor’s “chromophobia” in which the colourful is also the deceitful, dangerous and shallow, as opposed to the purity, innocence and truthfulness of Amelia, we do see this symbolic use of colour, to a certain extent. However, what is far more striking about the use of colour in Vanity Fair is that it is frequently figured as an enhancement of the decorative elements of the mise-en-scene of the classic serial: this novel, chosen for adaptation for its series of balls and gatherings of men in colourful military uniform, offers the programme makers ample opportunity to showcase colour, with a parade of contrasting costumes running through the entire colour spectrum. Short montage sequences, such as the moment in the first episode when a number of characters prepare to attend a party in Vauxhall, present a spectrum of colour: the characters, dressed in a range of colours from the deep purple velvet of George’s (Roy Marsden) jacket to the bright red of Captain Dobbin’s (Bryan Marshall) military dress, and, of course, Becky’s sugary pink gown, are shot in medium close-up, facing the camera, which briefly lingers on the richness of these fabrics. There then follows a filmed insert of a night sky bursting with fireworks, and then a tracking shot around the Vauxhall party, with coloured streamers hanging down all around the group as they arrive. Here, as in many of the dance and party sequences of Vanity Fair, we see colour being strikingly used for its decorative properties. An array of colour is offered but without any obvious sense of symbolic meaning: it is colour to be looked at, to be

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enjoyed, rather than to be understood. The colour design reflects the gaiety of the sequence and the characters’ lives at this moment, but more than that, it expresses a joyousness in colour itself. As Becky dances in circles, filled with excitement and enacting this sense of deep joy, we see a moment, like many in Vanity Fair, where the pleasure of colour is foregrounded – perhaps not entirely “merely pretty” drama, but in terms of the definitions set out in the colour policy discussed in this chapter, perilously close to it. This sense of the pleasure to be taken in colour which is emphasised by Vanity Fair is reflected in a viewer’s letter to the Radio Times, from a Mr Cecil Williams of Wendover, Buckinghamshire: I cannot praise the BBC too highly for the quality of their colour programmes. Vanity Fair took on a new beauty. The elegant richness of the costumes and the detail of the settings were revealed as in a new dimension… Having first had TV in 1950 when it was fairly rare, we have seen many and varied programmes and have become selective. This colour is something which exceeds our expectations in every way. (Williams 1968)

It is notable that this “early adopter” uses the term “beauty” rather than “prettiness” in describing Vanity Fair, remembering that Galt (2011) argues that the beautiful is more culturally acceptable than the merely pretty. If we compare Vanity Fair’s use of colour with, for example, that of The Owl Service, the first Granada drama to be shot entirely on colour film and on location in the following year, even though it would be first broadcast in black and white (ITV did not begin colour broadcasting until the end of 1969), we see a strikingly different approach. Jealousy, class struggle, burgeoning sexual desire, and suggestions of incest are writ large through each episode of The Owl Service: the action centres around the developing triangular relationship between Alison (Gillian Hills) and Roger (Francis Wallis), step siblings, and Gwyn (Michael Holden), the son of the housekeeper of the house in the Welsh valleys where Alison and Roger have been brought for the summer. What is particularly striking about this adaptation though is that the “love triangle” between the three central characters is defined via a symbolic use of colour in the drama: the colour scheme, based around the 1960s wiring system, sees Alison, a sexually-charged young adult whose body is the central object of desire, dressed entirely in “live” red throughout, Gwyn clad in black to suggest his relationship to the “earth”, and his groundedness in Wales and the Welsh landscape, and the jealous Roger dressed only in “neutral” green as an expression of his frustration and jealousy. Here colour is deeply meaningful (almost hysterically so), rather than “merely pretty”.

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In conclusion, it must be pointed out that the classic serial wasn’t the only genre of drama to be made in these early days of colour at the BBC; as discussed in Wheatley (2006), an anthology series called Late Night Horror (BBC2, 1968) was the first to be produced in colour by Harry Moore and the directors who had done the Colour Familiarisation Course in 1967, including Rudolph Cartier and Naomi Capon, though wasn’t broadcast until 1968. The production files for Late Night Horror show that Moore was keen that his directors exploit the new possibilities of colour to the full, with lots of blood and guts on show. Furthermore, the longrunning anthology series Theatre 625 (BBC2, 1964-68) and 30 Minute Theatre (BBC2, 1965-73) also began producing in colour towards the end of 1967; as anthology dramas on which a variety teams of worked, they offer a fascinating prospect for the historian researching the impact of colour on drama production. How the teams working on individual episodes responded to and utilised the new possibilities of the medium might offer us an illuminating and varied picture of colour’s dramatic possibilities. However, sadly, no copies of these dramas have been archived, and their paper files offer little indication of how the directors and designers working on Theatre 625 and 30 Minute Theatre responded to this new challenge, save for repeated calls for more money and more time to produce in colour. It would be fascinating, for example, to see the episode of 30 Minute Theatre ‘Lovely in Black’ from the 24th of January 1968, in which a young woman imagines her visitors after the death of her husband (who, it is revealed at the end of the drama, is not actually dead). A production note in the file for this episode states that: Olivia’s imaginary life, being more colourful than reality, takes place in an atmosphere almost gay, despite Alfred’s supposed demise. Only at the beginning and end of the play is there the greyness imposed by loneliness and Alfred’s personality. The quality of light can be used to suggest this, and the colour of Alfred’s clothes.24 It is important to remember, ultimately, that these were dramas that were still being made for the majority of the audience to view in black and white: as David Conroy, head of Classic Serials stated in a press release for Vanity Fair, “This first colour drama contribution to the full colour service will still be “colourful” in black and white. As much care is being 24 Ferman, James. 1968. “Memo”, BBC WAC file T5/1620/1, Drama: Lovely In Black (30 Minute Theatre), January 24.

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taken in monochrome tonal values as is being taken in colour aspects”.25 Perhaps this explains the lack of depth and complexity in the use of colour in the early costume dramas discussed? Certainly, this raises an interesting historiographical issue: whilst our instincts in researching the impact of colour technology on television drama might be to look at the very first productions made in colour, perhaps we might see a more developed use of colour in programmes made and broadcast at the end of the following decade, when the majority of viewers were watching in colour and when directors and designers might be fairly sure that most people would be able to read the colour of their productions? Even if, as argued at the start of this chapter, the meanings of colour can be understood as subjective, even arbitrary, it is clear that the makers of television were attempting to use colour in meaningful ways. In conclusion then, it can be firmly stated that colour brought a further life to television, and television drama in particular; there is further work to do in understanding its meanings and impact.

Bibliography Anonymous. 1967a. “40 Hours’ Colour in First Week of July”, Electrical and Radio Trading, June 29, held in press clippings pack, BBC WAC file R78/555/1, Colour Television Promotion. —. 1967b. “It’s Colourific.” Sunday Mirror, July 2, held in press clippings pack, BBC WAC file R78/555/1, Colour Television Promotion. —. 1967c. “Charlie’s Spectacular.” Radio Times, December 7, 11. Attenborough, David. 1967. “On Your Screen This Autumn”. Radio Times, September 30, 5. —. 2002. Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster. London: BBC Books. Batchelor, David. 2000. Chromophobia. London: Reaktion Books. BBC General Advisory Council. 1967. “The Colour Service”, June 16, BBC WAC file, R78/554/1, Colour Television: General. Briggs, Asa. 1995. The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom Volume V: Competition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caldwell, John Thornton. 1995. Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Crisell, Andrew. 2002. An Introductory History of British Broadcasting (2nd edn.). London & New York: Routledge.

25 Conroy, David. 1967. “Press Release for Initial Broadcast of Vanity Fair”, October 6, BBC WAC file T5/682/1, Vanity Fair: General and Filming.

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Curran, Charles. 1969. Supporting a Public Service: A Speech Given by Charles J. Curran, Director General of the BBC, Radio Industries Club, 27 May 1969. London: BBC Publishing. Everett, Wendy, ed. 2007. Questions of Colour in Cinema: From Paintbrush to Pixel. Bern: Peter Lang. Fickers, Andreas. 2010. “Techno-politics of Colour: Britain and the European Struggle for a Colour Television Standard”. Journal of British Cinema and Television 7 (1): 95-114. Giddings, Robert and Selby, Keith. 2001. The Classic Serial on Television and Radio. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kalmus, Natalie. 2006. “Colour Consciousness [1935]”. In Colour: The Film Reader, ed. Angela Dalle Vache and Brian Price, 24-29. London & New York: Routledge. Lury, Karen. 2005. Interpreting Television. London: Arnold. McLean, Francis. 1967. Colour Television (BBC Lunch-time Lectures Fifth Series – 6). London: BBC Publishing. Price, Brian. 2006. “Colour: The Film Reader—General Introduction”. In Colour: The Film Reader, ed. Angela Dalle Vache and Brian Price, 19. London & New York: Routledge. Reynolds, Stanley. 1967. “Television”. Guardian, June 6, held in press clippings pack, BBC WAC file R78/555/1, Colour Television Promotion. Street, Sarah. 2010. “The Colour Dossier Introduction: The Mutability of Colour Space”. Screen 51 (4): 379-82. Usher, Shaun. 1967. “My Verdict on Colour TV”, Daily Sketch, July 6, held in press clippings pack, BBC WAC file R78/555/1, Colour Television Promotion. Wheatley, Helen. 2005. “Rooms within Rooms: Upstairs Downstairs and the Studio Costume Drama of the 1970s”. in ITV Cultures: Independent Television Over Fifty Years, ed. Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock, 143-58. Maidenhead: Open University Press. —. 2006. Gothic Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wiggin, Maurice. 1967. “Whitest of all on Colour TV”. Sunday Times, July 2, held in press clippings pack, BBC WAC file R78/555/1, Colour Television Promotion. Williams, Cecil S. 1968. “BBC Colour Television”. Radio Times, January 11, 63.

PART IV: RETHINKING HISTORY THROUGH CINEMA AND TELEVISION

CHAPTER NINE KNOWN PLEASURES: NOSTALGIA AND JOY DIVISION MYTHOLOGY IN 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE AND CONTROL CAITLIN SHAW

In his book Retromania, post-punk historian Simon Reynolds laments what he regards as the death of originality in twenty-first century pop music. He writes that instead of “being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself” (Reynolds 2011, x-xi). Contemporary music trends are “retromanic”, he suggests, in their tendency to reference past styles rather than inventing their own, and he attributes the retro-steeped contemporary music scene to a decade of easy accessibility to popular music pasts via platforms like YouTube and iTunes. Reynolds’ ironically nostalgic perspective reflects a widespread nostalgia, visible across contemporary media, for the genuineness that is thought to have characterised preThatcher and Thatcher era music scenes, fashions and movements in Britain. It is a perspective that underlies certain post-2005 British films that revisit music and subcultural movements from those eras. These, which include This is England (Shane Meadows 2006), Control (Anton Corbijn 2007) and Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (Mat Whitecross 2010), are part of a wider cycle of British film and television productions set in the late seventies and eighties, beginning in 2005 with Nick Love’s The Business and including popular films like Starter for 10 (Tom Vaughan 2006), Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings 2007) and Killing Bono (Nick Hamm 2011), that have tended to emphasise the era’s authenticity and nostalgic value. The recent phenomenon of idolising the pre-Thatcher and Thatcher periods marks a shift from previously irreverent attitudes, and this chapter will examine that shift by discussing two films released five years apart: Michael Winterbottom’s biopic about Factory Records founder Tony

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Wilson 24 Hour Party People (2002) and Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control. Both depict the short career of the celebrated Manchester post-punk band Joy Division and the trials of its epileptic frontman Ian Curtis, who committed suicide on the eve of the band’s first American tour. Yet, the films’ historical perspectives differ significantly; whereas 24 Hour Party People resists nostalgia and interrogates the process by which rock mythologies develop, Control recovers many of the myths overturned in Party People. This change of approach coincided with a widespread increase in post-punk nostalgia, and it is clear that Control’s meticulously authentic reconstruction of Joy Division’s aesthetic was meant to appeal to a nostalgic market. Indeed, while advertisements for 24 Hour Party People had suggested to audiences that it would be a new kind of film, playful in its approach to history, those for Control branded its style as decidedly old. Examining the styles of and reactions to these two productions reveals how filmic representations of rock mythologies can renegotiate them, but also how cinema often services cultural nostalgia by reaffirming them.

From “New Britain” optimism to post-punk nostalgia The film and television cycle described above is not the first to revisit the pre-Thatcher and Thatcher eras onscreen. The first popular British film to be retrospectively set in the 1980s was actually Trainspotting (Danny Boyle 1996), made nearly ten years prior to The Business, and was followed by a few films set in the seventies and eighties such as Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes 1998) and Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry 2000). These films are generally (and rightly) read in the context of late 1990s “New Britain “ optimism, fuelled by the Blair government’s attempts to shed Britain’s international reputation as stuffy and conservative by rebranding it as a forward-thinking and free market society. This led to the development of labels like “Cool Britannia “ and “New Britain “ that redefined Britain, as Claire Monk writes, “in terms of youth, modernity, creativity, energy, optimism, and entrepreneurialism” (Monk 2001, 34). It also led to increased support in the development of cultural industries that could promote these labels, including the inception in 2000 of the UK Film Council to promote British film production. Period films like Trainspotting and Billy Elliot reflect this optimism; their period settings tend to be more or less unconcerned with authenticity and are generally quite fluid. Furthermore, importance is quite often placed on the transition to the present rather than on the past itself; for instance, Monk argues that although Trainspotting represents disenfranchised youth, the film’s narrative of self-improvement reconciles subcultural dissent with Britain’s

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newfound entrepreneurial spirit (Monk 2000, 285), while Mike Wayne argues that Billy Elliot’s retro setting champions consumer culture’s triumph over traditional class culture by drawing attention to cultural transformations (Wayne 2006, 287). Thus, although they are set in the past, films like Trainspotting are not nostalgic. The more recent cycle of British films set in the late 70s and 80s, by contrast, has demonstrated a shift wherein the era itself has been foregrounded and lovingly recreated with an apparent authenticity that is more or less absent from earlier films. This has been at least partially influenced by nostalgic appropriations of the late seventies and especially the eighties that began to appear in fashion and media in the early 2000s, visible in everything from the BBC’s pop culture mini-series I Love the 70s (2000) and I Love the 80s (2001) to recycled fashion trends and eighties band reunions. Post-punk in particular saw a substantial revival from 2002 onward not only in Britain but also internationally, evidenced by the emergence of American bands like The Killers, The Strokes and Interpol. This in turn sparked a renewed interest in original post-punk bands like Joy Division, encouraged by the emergence of YouTube in 2005 that resulted in a sudden influx of easily accessible performance footage and music videos. Simon Reynolds’ assessment of the decade’s “retromania “ is excessive, ignoring questions of postmodernism and the self-conscious and often complex ways in which contemporary musicians as well as other artists, like filmmakers, have invoked these past styles. Yet, it is undeniable that the 2000s – especially the latter half – have been characterised by a tendency to look back rather than forward, and postpunk has especially been recovered for nostalgic consumption.

Manchester and Joy Division’s “aura of modernist severity” Before discussing Winterbottom’s and Corbijn’s films, it is necessary to establish precisely what has been recovered; both films draw heavily on culturally familiar mythologies of post-punk and especially of Joy Division. Joy Division’s mythology is closely linked to that of their hometown, which Noel McLaughlin calls the UK’s “most mythologized popular musical city” outside London (McLaughlin 2012, 102). Like most of England’s northern cities, Manchester was hit hard by the effects of deindustrialisation throughout the 1970s and 80s, but the city was in part rejuvenated by an increasingly thriving music scene which produced several high-profile bands from the late 70s through the 90s including The Smiths, New Order, The Stone Roses and Oasis. Central to the music

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scene’s development was the focus of Winterbottom’s film, Tony Wilson, who is remembered for co-founding Factory Records, the label responsible for New Order and the Happy Mondays, and for founding the nightclub The Haçienda, which contributed to the global rise of rave culture. He is also known for signing Joy Division, whose 1979 album Unknown Pleasures was the first LP to be recorded with Factory. It is impossible to tell Tony Wilson’s story without exploring Joy Division, just as it is impossible to tell Joy Division’s tale without mention of their connection to Manchester’s music mythology. Joy Division is considered a pioneer of post-punk, the experimental and introverted response to punk bands like The Sex Pistols and The Clash. The group’s dark, minimalist sound and pensive lyrics stood in stark contrast to punk and reflected the depressed atmosphere of the deindustrialised north. In his essay “Joy Division: Two Movies”, Simon Reynolds writes that frontman Ian Curtis “was worshipped at the time as a seer plugged into the currents of dread pervading post-punk Britain” (Reynolds 2009, 359). The group’s iconography also marked a departure from previous music movements; in the wake of the bold and transgressive fashions sported by preceding punk and glam rock artists, Joy Division opted for bland button-up shirts and trousers. McLaughlin notes that the “‘seriousness’ of Joy Division’s dress […] subtly invoked the European, urban working-class of the inter-war years” (McLaughlin 2012, 110). The band’s entire iconography – including their name, taken from the term for prostitution divisions at Nazi concentration camps – evoked what Simon Reynolds calls an “aura of modernist severity” (Reynolds 2009, 363) that was accentuated by Curtis’ eventual suicide, transforming him into a heroic martyr. Partially responsible for Joy Division’s aura was photographer Anton Corbijn, who before directing Control was known for his portraits of bands like Depeche Mode and U2, and whose first British project was photographing Joy Division in a monochrome, high-contrast style that echoed the group’s modernist aura by recalling early 20th century European cinemas like German Expressionism. Because Corbijn’s images aesthetically reflected the band’s solemn sound and look, they soon became a defining feature of Joy Division’s popular identity. McLaughlin explains that the photos’ “‘noir’ image became a trademark one of the band, establishing literally and metaphorically their urban, ‘underground’ credentials” (McLaughlin 2012, 104). Eight years after Curtis’ death, Corbijn again cast his influence on the Joy Division aesthetic, directing the music video for the 1988 re-release of the band’s single ‘Atmosphere’. Again highly stylised and expressionist, the black and white video depicts

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cloaked monks that carry large photographs of Curtis across the frame, reinforcing already established elements of Joy Division’s persona – Corbijn’s visual style, the band’s foreboding aura and Curtis’ status as a martyr – for a new generation of listeners.

Deconstructing Joy Division: 24 Hour Party People Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People engages with these myths as it charts the band’s development. The film is not strictly about Joy Division; it follows Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan) from his work as a presenter on the Granada music show So It Goes (1976-7) to the closure of the Haçienda in 1997. However, the band features prominently in Winterbottom’s self-conscious, mix-and-match ode to Manchester’s early music scene. Party People combines actual stock footage, improvised scenes shot on DV and to-screen narration, and often comments on the inaccuracy of its own claims, making no attempt to hide anachronisms. This style has often been suggested to reflect both the ethos of Factory Records and of punk in general; Colin Kennedy writes in Empire, for instance, that DV’s “don’t-give-a-shit” quality makes it the perfect technology for punk (Kennedy 2002, 83). Like Trainspotting and Billy Elliot, many have read Party People’s upbeat and optimistic tone as cultural tourism that celebrates Britain’s new identity as forward-thinking and cool. John Orr makes reference to its “gross laddishness” (Orr 2008, 16) while Reynolds calls it a “post-Trainspotting” film that is “relentlessly lively, as if convinced that the youth market will not stand for stillness or sombreness” (Reynolds 2009, 260). However, the film’s self-criticality calls its seeming optimism for creative entrepreneurialism into question, a tension identified by Joe Barton, who argues that while the film embraces Factory’s “oppositional ingenuity”, its celebration of Manchester still contributes to the city’s “on-going culture-led regeneration […] which ultimately acquiesces to the neo-liberal forces that Wilson originally attempted to resist” (Barton 2012). The tension Barton notes is partly due to the fact that Party People was released in 2002, somewhat after the initial optimism for “New Britain” had died down but before a genuinely nostalgic perspective of the era had set in. While the film features several cameos of people involved in the Manchester music scene and a roll call of British comedy talent that might be read as shameless cultural tourism, and while the film’s punk aesthetic can be interpreted as a celebration of the ethos that inspired it, 24 Hour Party People is still too distinct to be interpreted as touristic or nostalgic. The film both refrains from providing an easy bridge for an outsider into

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the world of late 1970s Manchester and resists indulging its assumed insider audience in nostalgia. In a scene near the end, for instance, Wilson identifies to the audience each cameo appearance featured throughout the film. For an outsider, this highlights the viewer’s failure to recognise the cameos or their significance to Factory Records, while for an insider, it negates whatever nostalgic pride the viewer might have felt in being able to identify the cameos unaided. Like much of the film, the scene is challenging for both outsider and insider audiences. 24 Hour Party People, then, stands apart from slightly earlier films like Trainspotting that projected a “cool” image of Britain for the rest of the world, as it makes very few attempts to appeal to a global audience. Still, Winterbottom’s film reflects the ideologies of a forward-thinking culture, promoting newness and originality and challenging its audience to rethink nostalgic impulses. Self-reflexive in its renegotiation of rock mythologies, the film explores how myths and legends have formed and blurs the distinction between myth and truth. In depictions of Ian Curtis and Joy Division it retains a critical distance, asking audiences to reflect on the representational style. This is evident in Winterbottom’s decision to film certain sequences featuring Joy Division in black and white. Because the monochrome is sporadic – most of the film is in colour – it calls attention to its own status as a defining element of the band’s persona and reminds the audience that it is mere affectation. It is introduced when the band first performs live; here, black and white alternates with colour as Curtis (Sean Harris) repeats the lyrics “I feel it closing in” from the song ‘Digital’ (Joy Division 1978), giving the impression that the black and white is metaphorically “closing in” on Curtis. As the film progresses the monochrome recurs more frequently, suggesting an increasingly solidified mythological discourse. One montage explicitly comments on the culturally held definitions of Joy Division’s monochrome trademark, intercutting between black and white shots of the band and archival colour footage of events during 1979’s so-called “Winter of Discontent”: a National Front demonstration, the Transport and General Workers’ Union strike and the consequent petrol shortage, and waste collectors’ and nurses’ strikes. Narrated by Wilson as headline news, the montage invokes cultural myths that connect Joy Division’s music and monochrome style to the socially and economically depressed north of England. By stating this connection so blatantly, however, the sequence also hints at the inevitable simplification of meaning that this mythologising process involves. In his critique of 24 Hour Party People and Control, Simon Reynolds argues that Party People fails to provide audiences with a nuanced representation of Ian Curtis, writing that “you get no real sense of this

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complicated, troubled figure” (Reynolds 2009, 359). However, what Reynolds interprets as a failure to accurately represent Curtis is actually the film’s refusal to represent him as someone familiar with the mythology, like Reynolds, might expect. Winterbottom is more interested in exploring how Curtis has been “explained” than in explaining him. Thus the film’s representations of Curtis fluctuate between irreverence and overt reverence, highlighting inconsistencies between the actual Curtis and the mythical one. This is exemplified in an exchange between Wilson and Curtis in Wilson’s car: Curtis complains that he hates David Bowie for living into his thirties after claiming one should die at twenty-five, and reacts defensively when Wilson mentions Yeats, retorting that he has “never heard of him”. Curtis appears less like a tragic poet than an immature, disgruntled youth. At the end of this colour sequence, the film stock switches to black and white as Curtis turns to look out the car window in a close-up that resembles publicity images of him, suggesting inconsistency between how he behaves and how he is commonly represented. The film retains its critical distance in depicting Curtis’ death, simultaneously emphasising the immediacy with which he is interpreted as martyr and self-consciously confronting the myth. Wilson receives the news that Curtis has committed suicide while interviewing a town crier in Chester, and his response is to request that the town crier announce Curtis’ death. This formal announcement, which the audience subsequently sees broadcasting on Wilson’s television, establishes Curtis’ death as a culturally significant event, but the town crier, complete with handbell and period costume, keeps viewers at an ironic distance. The scene then cuts to Wilson in the present day, sitting in the editing room for the film, who asserts to the audience, “If you listen to Ian’s music and you know that he killed himself then you probably imagine some very dark, depressive figure, a prophet of urban decay and alienation”. He explains that he, however, has many good memories of Curtis, and a colour sequence follows of Joy Division playfully performing ‘Louie Louie’ (Berry 1955). The myth that a more learned fan might take for granted is here explicitly stated only to be overturned by a sequence that challenges it, the colour footage emphasising the band’s more playful side as a detail that is generally omitted from the mythology. By the time Party People reaches Curtis’ funeral, his persona has so entirely been called into question that when Wilson contributes to the legend by describing him as “the musical equivalent of Che Guevara”, it cannot be taken seriously. After the funeral scene, a title card featuring Curtis’ name and years of birth and death appears over a clip of Anton Corbijn’s music video for ‘Atmosphere’,

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breaking the dramatic flow of the diegesis. Because of Curtis’ conflicted portrayal, the inclusion of this clip seems less commemorative than reflective, provoking the audience to consider the video’s contribution to the Ian Curtis, and indeed the Joy Division, canon.

Reconstructing Joy Division: Control It might be said that Winterbottom’s thought-provoking representation of the rise and fall of Factory Records was appropriate in 2002 because the subject matter was not expected to be of widespread global interest. But when Anton Corbijn’s Control was released in 2007, the widespread appeal of a film about Joy Division had significantly increased. As such, Control, which follows Ian Curtis’ (Sam Riley) life from Joy Division’s formation in 1976 to his death in 1980, was made on the assumption that it could appeal to a global audience and a demographically broader one as well; the advent of post-punk revivalism meant that now not only would original Joy Division fans be interested in the subject matter but a younger demographic of retro fans could also be targeted. Unlike 24 Hour Party People, which was conceived by Winterbottom alongside producer Andrew Eaton and was “based around their passion for rock music” (Hunt 2001, 24), Control was developed by producer Orian Williams, who then approached Anton Corbijn to direct (Dawson 2010). The decision to ask Corbijn, who played such a crucial role in influencing cultural memories of the group, makes it clear that the film was imagined as a contribution to the Joy Division mythology rather than a new perspective on it. In September 2005, Corbijn told Screen International that the film would be shot in black and white because “most people’s memories of that era are in black and white. Joy Division specifically seems like a black-and-white band” (Mitchell 2005, 12). While Winterbottom addresses Joy Division’s cultural status as “a black-and-white band” at a critical remove, Corbijn reveals himself here to be intent on upholding rather than critiquing cultural memory. This is less in keeping with the anarchic Factory Records ethos, but it results in a film that is far more accessible than 24 Hour Party People to a universally nostalgic audience, canonising Joy Division while avoiding more challenging questions on myth formation and on the legitimacy of authenticity. Unlike 24 Hour Party People’s cut-and-paste visual style, Control’s aesthetic is consistent throughout, mainly comprising static and slow tracking shots and expressionistic visual imagery. Many critics have likened the style to European art movements of the 1950s and 1960s; John Orr, for instance, notes the influences of Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson

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and British New Wave filmmakers (Orr 2008). Of course, these influences are visible in the film primarily because they inspired Corbijn’s stark, modernist photographs of the band. One shot particularly reminiscent of a still photograph is seen when the band drive to a gig in London and Curtis is pictured looking out of the car window with the setting sun piercing the frame behind him. It closely resembles the car window shot in 24 Hour Party People, but here the shot is consistent with the material that comes before it. Thus, while the switch to black and white in 24 Hour Party People signals a tension between the mythic image of Curtis and his actual persona, the two remain synonymous throughout Control. The film’s poetic cinematography is often accompanied by the use of Curtis’ lyrics as non-diegetic narration. Sam Riley speaks the lyrics rather than singing them, emphasising their significance over the music and likening them to poetry. Alongside the cinematography, this device stresses Curtis’ status as a poet. This is further highlighted by a sequence in which Curtis quotes Wordsworth from memory while staring longingly out of a window. In light of Sean Harris’ Curtis in 24 Hour Party People, who has never heard of Yeats, the inclusion of this particular scene is significant, a seemingly deliberate recovery of Curtis’ identity as poetic genius that was called into question in Party People. The spoken lyrics are used throughout the film to comment on pivotal events in Curtis’ life, reducing their significance to his personal trials. Simon Reynolds considers this to be the film’s failing, arguing that Joy Division’s music is explained from a “reductive perspective: biography”, when in fact Curtis’ lyrics were “existential rather than autobiographical” (Reynolds 2009, 362-3). Reynolds interprets this decision, however, as a failing of the narrative film medium, writing that “a full-length movie can’t rely on the power of pure imagery the way a video can. Corbijn was always going to have to try to ‘explain’ Joy Division” (Reynolds 2009, 362). Yet, Corbijn’s video for ‘Atmosphere’ explained Joy Division in much the same way, sanctifying Curtis and redefining the song as his elegy, and Reynolds himself notes that Curtis’ identity as an enigmatic seer developed even before his death. The film’s explanation for Joy Division’s music is not a failing of the film medium at all, but a conscious decision to sustain the already extant legend of Curtis as tortured poetic genius. While Curtis is portrayed as a tragic hero, other factors that influenced Joy Division’s success are nearly absent. Other band members’ contributions and the efforts of those like Tony Wilson are mostly ignored, as are environmental influences. The other members of Joy Division, Bernard Sumner (James Anthony Pearson), Peter Hook (Joe Anderson) and Stephen Morris (Harry Treadaway), are depicted as comparatively

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naïve and simple when set against the more profound Curtis. In an interview sequence, Morris notes that the most beautiful thing he has ever seen is a drum kit, Sumner responds to the question of believing in love by saying he believes in “pure sex” and Hook responds to the same question by stating that “if somebody kicked my car, I’d be as upset as if they kicked my girlfriend. These vapid responses are juxtaposed with Curtis’ thoughtful response to the question of whether or not Joy Division’s music is beautiful: “Some of it, yeah, but some of it’s not meant to be beautiful”. A similar approach is taken in representing Tony Wilson (Craig Parkinson). If in 24 Hour Party People Tony Wilson is ironic, clever and intuitive, in Control, he is not afforded the same credit. In Party People’s depiction of the Factory legend of Wilson signing a contract for Joy Division in blood, Wilson suggests the idea, ironically remarking that “in the words of the great prophet, ‘I dares do owt’”. In Control’s interpretation of the same legend, Wilson is portrayed as desperate for Joy Division’s talent, taking the signing seriously while the others laugh, and as the subject of mockery, falling over at the end of the sequence. Attributing little intellectual credit to Wilson, or indeed to Joy Division’s other musicians, sharpens the focus on Curtis as sole creative genius and makes him more a tragic martyr than if he had merely played a contributing role. Although Curtis is represented as the heart and soul of Joy Division, Manchester is noticeably absent from the film. Outdoor scenes occur mostly near Curtis’ home in Macclesfield or in other cities and towns to which he travels, while those sequences based on gigs and events known to have occurred in Manchester offer little indication of their location. In one sequence, Tony Wilson attempts to convince Joy Division to sign with Factory by saying that “we both fly the flag for the republic of Manchester”, to which Curtis points out that he is a royalist, making clear that the film has little interest in connecting the Joy Division sound, or indeed the band’s success, to the fledgling music scene in deindustrialised Manchester. It is entirely attributed in the film, then, to Curtis’ genius. Furthermore, while the high-contrast monochrome helps to evoke the bleakness of industrial decay and the drabness of the terraced homes that line Curtis’ street, the aesthetic is one of picturesque bleakness rather than a true evocation of destitution. It is destitution captured through the lens of nostalgic gloss, both beautiful in its modernist starkness and “cool” in its recollection of Joy Division’s monochrome iconography. Despite the film’s mythic qualities, Corbijn aims primarily for realism. The actors who play Joy Division perform the songs themselves, with Sam Riley’s voice replacing Curtis’, and indeed, of the twelve Joy Division

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songs that appear throughout the film, only three are original tracks. Noel McLaughlin expresses his surprise that these live performances were so well-received, writing that “generally fans are resistant to imitations of originals” (McLaughlin 2012, 108). Yet, although they are imitations, what makes them appealing is the suspension of disbelief they enable viewers, who can accept the actors as the real musicians performing live. This is aided by the scenes’ remarkable likeness to actual footage available to view on YouTube. The live performances reflect the film’s general objective to avoid acknowledgement of its own status as representation. This in turn naturalises the myth the film represents; the black and white feels correct and accurate, as does Ian Curtis’ identity as martyr and tragic hero. When Debbie Curtis (Samantha Morton) discovers Ian’s body in the film’s final scene, the soundtrack seamlessly plays ‘Atmosphere’. Whereas the inclusion of the music video clip in Party People highlights how the song has been canonised as Curtis’ elegy, in Control this connotation is naturalised by cuing an emotional response that is consistent with the song’s already canonised meaning.

“Shadowplay”: Rebranding Joy Division Control, then, rebuilds the myth that was deconstructed five years prior, restoring its credibility for consumption in a cultural climate immersed in eighties nostalgia and post-punk revivalism. In this light, the two films’ marketing campaigns are interesting to compare. The British campaign for 24 Hour Party People was ironically obtuse and self-reflexive, so much so that it was redevised for the film’s American release. The UK poster for Party People features a series of three images in succession: one of Danny Cunningham as Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder, one of Sean Harris as Ian Curtis and one of Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson. The image of Shaun Ryder is tinted pink and titled “poet”; the image of Ian Curtis is monochrome and titled “genius”; the image of Tony Wilson is in colour and titled “twat”. Shaun Ryder and Ian Curtis are labelled according to their mythic identities, but labelling Tony Wilson as a “twat” playfully pokes fun at these myths. The poster makes little attempt to establish itself as film promotion; there are no credits and the title appears in a miniscule font in the bottom corner, discouraging wide audience appeal and relying on the viewer’s prior knowledge of Factory mythology to make sense of it. The UK trailer is also self-reflexive; Steve Coogan narrates it, explaining that it is the trailer for the film and listing conventions as they appear: “Name of the film company, director’s credit, the bloke who plays me, title graphic: 24 Hour Party People, release date, silly bit at the end,

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website and credit block that nobody ever reads”. By drawing attention to itself as a commodity, the trailer is able to advertise the film as a product that will appeal to Factory fans while simultaneously ridiculing film marketing. In this way, Party People’s promotional materials work somewhat similarly to Trainspotting’s as discussed by Karen Lury. Lury argues that Trainspotting’s excessive marketing campaign, which involved branding each of its characters and releasing an overabundance of posters and tshirts in conjunction with the film’s release, “was made to appeal to the youth of a global, hybrid culture, where the ambivalent play, negotiation and celebration of the commodity was unavoidable in the making and understanding of identity” (Lury 2000, 107). 24 Hour Party People’s campaign functions similarly, playfully exploiting its status as a potential nostalgic product. However, Trainspotting’s campaign was made to appeal to global youth and ironises global consumer culture, making it easily accessible to a wide audience. 24 Hour Party People’s campaign addresses a niche group and is therefore more challenging than Trainspotting’s campaign. It assumes familiarity with its references and addresses its target audience with the same challenging irony found in the film itself, refusing to appeal to nostalgia and instead poking fun at the mythologies with which they are assumed to be familiar. The US campaign features a more conventional poster and trailer in a clear attempt to widen appeal, but its failure to reflect the tone of the film evidences Party People’s innate lack of appeal to a global, mainstream audience. The Control marketing campaign, on the other hand, followed a similar format worldwide. While the layout varies, nearly every poster for Control uses the same black and white image of Sam Riley as Curtis, staring off pensively with the collar of his grey overcoat upturned and a cigarette hanging loosely from his mouth. The image replicates iconic photographs of the real Curtis, who was often pictured smoking in a grey overcoat. Unlike the UK poster for 24 Hour Party People, which pokes fun at nostalgic impulses, the British and international posters for Control appeal to those same impulses by remaining consistent with Joy Division discourse. The UK trailer is similarly consistent, stressing Joy Division’s canonical status by announcing in intertitles that “This is the sound of passion, of beauty that changed the face of music”. Both trailers and posters for the UK and US campaigns include critical quotes such as “Superb”, “Extraordinary” and “The coolest British movie of 2007”, giving the impression of a film that, like the band and iconography that inspired it, is both artistic and “cool”. Interestingly, the only element of the campaign which is not consistent with Joy Division discourse is the pink

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text used in the posters, which is not commonly associated with the band. However, pink is, in combination with monochrome, associated with punk bands like The Clash and with late seventies and eighties fashion more generally. The pink therefore widens the film’s retro appeal, targeting those who may not recognise Joy Division iconography. These promotional emphases on the film's value as a nostalgic product notably contrast Party People's deliberate disavowal of product marketing.

Manufactured nostalgias: Responding to 24 Hour Party People and Control It is clear, then, that Control was marketed to appeal to a less regionally or demographically specific and more nostalgically-inclined audience than was 24 Hour Party People. The question of reception remains, however: did responses to Control suggest a more nostalgic engagement with postpunk mythology than those to 24 Hour Party People? Analysis of critical reviews and user reviews on The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) suggest that this was, more or less, the case. Both were critical successes upon their release, but what is praised in 24 Hour Party People differs from what is praised in Control. Critical reviews of Party People tend to emphasise the film’s originality and vibrancy, simultaneously hailing it as a departure from typical nostalgic rock biopics. Roger Ebert, for instance, argues that the film “works so well because it evokes genuine, not manufactured, nostalgia” (Ebert 2002). Upon its release, then, Party People was often praised for its newness, for confounding the expectations of a typical rock biopic and avoiding “manufactured” nostalgia. IMDb user reviews posted in the first year after the film’s release suggest that its general audience similarly embraced its irreverence. Reviewers tend to celebrate the film’s inaccuracies as tributes to Factory’s anarchic attitude – one writes, “Does it tell the truth? Who cares?” (phiggins 2002) – and the distortion of myth and truth is generally regarded as one of the film’s strongest points. This is not to say that nostalgia is absent from user reviews; several echo one user’s claim that “if you loved these bands, these people, the scenes, Factory, the Hacienda and even Tony Wilson, then this is a must-see for you” (zirh 2002). But as the preceding quote exemplifies, expressions of nostalgia are usually phrased in the film’s playful style, suggesting that audiences did not take their own nostalgia very seriously. Control provoked a more reverently nostalgic reaction from both critics and general viewers on IMDb. Several critical reviews of Control feature hyperbolic descriptions of Curtis’ and Joy Division’s talent and

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legendary status, with Anthony Quinn writing that “I was 15, and I’d never seen anything quite like Joy Division. I still haven’t” (Quinn 2007). The film is often hailed for its nostalgic recreation of the past, and for accurately representing Joy Division as they exist in rock mythology. In The Guardian Peter Bradshaw writes, “It all looked so vividly real to my fortysomething eye that, frankly, I thought I’d died and gone to Qmagazine-reading 50-quid bloke heaven” (Bradshaw 2007). IMDb reviews posted in the first two years after its release suggest a similarly reverential reaction among general audiences. One reviewer writes, for instance, that Curtis’ suicide “not only ended his promising young life but also the dreams of a generation” (Schumann 2007). Interestingly, while in 2002 Party People was praised for blurring the distinction between myth and reality, in 2007 several IMDb users praise Control’s discursive consistency. For instance, one user writes: No, the film does not show the laughs and good times the band had, but this is in keeping with all of Joy Division's work. […] Almost everything they issued was in stark black and white; their imagery was overwhelmingly bleak and funereal; […] this film simply continues that project. (Gormley00 2007)

Implicit in this argument is the assumption that certain viewers will react critically to the film’s sombre tone after having seen Party People, but this is justified by Control's mythic accuracy, on its success in continuing Joy Division’s “project”. Yet, Control was also often judged to do the opposite, to resist romanticising Ian Curtis. Several critics and general viewers praise the film for emphasising what Steve Ramos calls Curtis’ “average-Joe moments” rather than depicting him as a typical rock star (Ramos 2007). This propensity to interpret Control as a realistic representation of Ian Curtis may be elucidated by Damon Wise’s verdict on the film in Empire: “A film […] that says more about the fragility of the soul than any montage of ticket sales and “sold out” signs could ever muster” (Wise 2007, 51). What audiences interpreted as a resistance to mythologise Curtis might actually have been the film’s lack of expected rock biopic conventions. However, these are conventions of rock biopics and not of Joy Division mythology, which was deliberately unglamorous and decidedly ordinary. What these responses actually suggest is the film’s success in encouraging viewers to regard the legend as truth, to accept it as the appropriate mode of representation rather than to question its semantic system, as does Party People.

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What is also interesting about IMDb user responses to 24 Hour Party People in relation to those to Control is the general consensus on the films’ appeal, which despite their equally positive ratings, differs substantially. While a select few users suggest that Party People’s eclectic style and humorous tone will appeal to audiences unfamiliar with its subject matter, an overwhelming majority of reviewers argue that the film will not appeal to an outsider audience. Control, by contrast, is almost unanimously agreed to have universal appeal, with one user recommending it “not only to all music-lovers over the world but also to those who like to be moved by true feelings and inner conflicts” (sebbe-9 2007). The film’s emphasis on universality and on mythology over regional and cultural specificity evidently succeeded in widening the appeal of what had been considered a distinctive subject matter in 2002. It is also clear, from the above user’s comment as well as in other reviews, that in 2007 a film about Joy Division was thought to appeal to a wider audience of “musiclovers over the world”, suggesting a broader interest in post-punk as a genre.

“Remember when we were young”? Post-punk for a post-post-punk generation Despite being released only five years apart, 24 Hour Party People and Control were produced, marketed and viewed in differing cultural climates. Party People was released in the wake of New Britain optimism, when the initial hype and enthusiasm of “Cool Britannia” had died down and there were signs of an increasingly nostalgic climate, but when enthusiasm for Britain’s present and future had not altogether been replaced by what Reynolds calls the “retromania” of the 2000s. The stylistic and marketing decisions for Party People suggest that it was targeted at a small audience assumed to delight in a film that would “[piss] all over the floor with the facts” (TCh) and ironically renegotiate Manchester history and mythology. However, by the time of Control’s release in 2007, nostalgic practices were visible everywhere: in heavily retro-influenced fashions, in an increasing number of stylistically nostalgic films set in Britain’s recent past, and in revivals of past music genres like post-punk that all triggered renewed interest in now “retro” bands like Joy Division. The style and marketing for Control suggest that the film had aspirations to appeal to this wider and more nostalgic demographic, some of whom might remember Joy Division and some of whom might not, but most of whom would expect an authentic and reverent representation.

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In an article on Control, This is England and the documentary Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (Julien Temple 2007), Mark Sinker suggests that the nostalgia in Control is rooted in a longing for the vitality of music movements before they were seemingly absorbed by globalised consumer culture. These films evoke, for Sinker, “nostalgia for a time when the collective energy of pop wasn’t quite yet commodified, before all was simply gathered up before it begins and fed back at us, any potential movement on our part circumscribed” (Sinker 2007, 28). However, the nostalgia Sinker describes was actually more frequently expressed in IMDb responses to 24 Hour Party People than it was in responses to Control. One reviewer, for instance, writes that the contemporary music industry “seems to be mainly consumed with the capital gain derived from manufactured acts. This film is here to remind us of a time and a place when music meant something more” (domenicarose 2003). This might be because nostalgia for non-commercialised music genres requires at least some knowledge, if not memory, of their subversive meaning, and might more typically have been felt by Party People’s niche audience of Factory fans. The nostalgia expressed in Control, I would argue, is less historically specific. Unlike Party People, it did not incite very much nostalgia among viewers for post-punk’s dissidence. It was instead enjoyed for being both unequivocally timely, preserving Joy Division iconography in a nostalgic bubble, and timeless, locating the music’s significance in Curtis’ “genius” rather than in its cultural specificity and subversive influence. So while the film might have provoked occasional reactions, amongst some Factory fans, of longing for what they considered to be less commodified music genres, Control was not ultimately produced for them. The film succeeded precisely because it is not for original post-punk fans, but rather for a postpost-punk generation whose interest in the subject relates more to its retro value than to involvement in any specific cultural history. In the service of nostalgia for an idealised era, the film lauds Joy Division not for being fresh and new, but for being old.

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Bibliography Barton, Joe. 2012. “‘Welcome to Manchester’: Heritage, Urban Regeneration, and Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People”. Frames Cinema Journal, November 22. http://framescinemajournal.com/article/welcome-to-manchester-heritageurban-regeneration-and-michael-winterbottoms-24-hour-party-people/. Bradshaw, Peter. 2007. “Control”. The Guardian October 5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/oct/05/popandrock.joydivision. Dawson, Nick. 2010. “Anton Corbijn Interview”. Focus Features July 16. http://focusfeatures.com/article/anton_corbijn_interview?film=the_am erican. domenicarose. 2003. “‘Madchester’ in the Heydey… Wish I Had Been There”. IMDb: Reviews & Ratings for 24 Hour Party People January 28. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/reviews-48. Ebert, Roger. 2002. “24 Hour Party People”. The Chicago Sun-Times August 16. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020816/R EVIEWS/208160301/1023. Gormley00. 2007. “Depressingly Beautiful”. IMDb: Reviews & Ratings for Control October 7. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421082/reviews. Hunt, Nick. 2001. “Case Study: 24 Hour Party People”. Screen International, June 22, 24. Kennedy, Colin. 2002. “Sex+drugs+(punkxacid)truth=comedy”. Empire, May, 76-83. Lury, Karen. 2000. “Here and Then: Space, Place and Nostalgia in British Youth Cinema of the 1990s”. In British Cinema of the 90s, ed. Robert Murphy, 100-8. London: British Film Institute. McLaughlin, Noel. 2012. “Rattling Out of Control: A Comparison of U2 and Joy Division on Film”. Film, Fashion and Consumption 1 (1): 101-20. Mitchell, Wendy. 2005. “Corbijn in Control of Rock Legend’s Story”. Screen International, September 30, 12. Monk, Claire. 2000. “Underbelly UK: The 1990s Underclass Film, Masculinity and the Ideologies of ‘New’ Britain”. In British Cinema, Past and Present, ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson, 274-287. London: Routledge. —. 2001. “Projecting a ‘New Britain’”. Cineaste 26 (4): 34-7, 42. Orr, John. 2008. “Control and British Cinema”. Film International 6 (1): 13-22.

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phiggins. 2002. “Sure, it’s a Mess, But WHAT a Mess!” IMDB: Reviews & Ratings for 24 Hour Party People 29 April. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/reviews-21. Quinn, Anthony. 2007. “Control: A Rock’n’roll Suicide”. The Independent 5 October. http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/films/reviews/control-15-395959.html. Ramos, Steve. 2007. “Troubled Singer’s Story Resonates in ‘Control’”. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 9 November. http://www.jsonline.com/entertainment/movies/29282069.html. Reynolds, Simon. 2009. “Joy Division: Two Movies”. In Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews, 238-66. London: Faber and Faber. —. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber. Schumann, Howard. 2007. “An Extremely Moving Experience”. IMDb: Reviews & Ratings for Control September 30. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421082/reviews-7. sebbe-9. 2007. “Magnificent Movie”. IMDb: Reviews & Ratings for Control September 5. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421082/reviews?filter=chrono;filter=chr ono;start=120. Sinker, Mark. 2007 “Control, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, This is England”. Film Quarterly 61 (2): 22-9. TCh. (Unknown). “24 Hour Party People”. Time Out London Film Guide, Time Out London. http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/79901/24hour-party-people.html. Wayne, Mike. 2006. “The Performing Northern Working Class in British Cinema: Cultural representation and its political economy”. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 23 (4): 287-97. Wise, Damon. 2007. “Control”. Empire, November, 51. zirh. 2002. “Yer twistin mi melon man!” IMDb: Reviews & Ratings for 24 Hour Party People April 5. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/reviews-4.

CHAPTER TEN “MEDIA VIRGINS VS. POLITICAL LIONS”: HISTORICISING THE GENDER POLITICS OF QUESTION TIME JILLY BOYCE KAY

The thing is we reflect public life, that's our job. On the panel we're reflecting public life. The cabinet, for instance, has five women out of 29. With MPs, only 22% are women, FTSE 100 directors – 6% are women, so you see we can't create women to put them on Question Time. —David Dimbleby, Question Time chair, 2012 If half the population is female I don't see why half the panel shouldn't be. —Sue Ayling, Question Time producer, 1995

Question Time is a weekly current affairs discussion programme on British television that has been broadcast since 1979 on BBC 1. In this chapter, I trace some of the debates that have historically emerged around the programme, particularly in relation to the (under-) representation of women on the panel, some of which are captured in the quotations above. The long-running nature of the programme, and its intimate relationship with parliamentary politics, make it a particularly interesting example of mediated political discourse in this regard; it has often been held up as a television public sphere par excellence and described as a “national institution”. Whilst the number of women who appear on the panel has been a recurring criticism of the programme in its lifetime, the gender politics of the programme - its format, its “public” address and its discursive modes - remain under-theorised. In this chapter I consider the various explanations that have been posited for the under-representation of women as panellists on the programme, and interrogate these with reference to feminist theories of political representation, gender and discourse, the public sphere, and television. Drawing on archival material, I argue that the programme’s

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history of representing women is neither a case of fixed and immutable discrimination, nor a straightforward story of progress or decline. Rather, the programme is best conceptualised as a site of competing pressures, constituted by unequal but shifting gendered power relations. The presence and significance of female editors and producers on Question Time have tended to be written out of popular histories of the programme; here, I point to some of the key women personnel in the programme’s history. Whilst campaigns to increase the number of women panelists have had some positive effects on male to female ratios on the programme, I suggest that rather than arguing simply for more women, there are more productive—albeit necessarily demanding—ways to interrogate the gender politics of the programme. As such, I consider the gendered dimensions of the particular debate format, its relationship to formal parliamentary politics, and the wider, gendered political and cultural context in which it is produced and consumed.

“A national institution” Question Time is an hour-long topical debate programme that is broadcast once a week whilst parliament is sitting. Currently there are five panel members, usually drawn from the three main political parties in Britain— the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative parties—and other “public” figures from the spheres of business, entertainment, charity, as well as representatives from smaller political parties. Audience members are selected to ask pre-approved, topical questions to the panel—based on current issues in that week’s news—which are then discussed (some spontaneous follow-up questions and comments are also included during the course of the programme). The programme is chaired by a regular presenter who fields the questions, and ensures that all panelists contribute to the debate. Its assured position within broadcasting history is regularly reaffirmed when it is described as a “national institution”, as it often is in popular discourse. A special, reflective edition of the programme was broadcast in 2004 to commemorate a quarter of a century of its existence, entitled 25 Years of Question Time (BBC, 2004). The programme also features prominently within the biographies of its first two chairpersons, Robin Day (who chaired between 1979-89) and Peter Sissons (1989-93). Since 1994 it has been chaired by David Dimbleby. Its highest-ever audience figures (around 8 million) came in 2009 when the leader of the extreme right-wing British National Party, Nick Griffin, appeared on the panel. Griffin’s appearance was a highly controversial choice and was vigorously

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protested by anti-fascist campaigners at the time. The programme is often subjected to accusations of left-wing bias by the conservative British press, as well as of elitism and class-based discrimination by the liberalleft media. These are important elements within the history of the programme and merit further study and analysis; however, for the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on the debates around the representation of women, which have been a regular feature in the extratextual life of the programme.

“We can’t create women to put them on Question Time” In 2012 Question Time became the subject of some debate when a BBCcommissioned report singled it out (along with other panel shows) for only allowing “token” women to appear (Plunkett 2012). Dimbleby dismissed the charge as “fantasy” (quoted in Evans 2012), arguing that the programme regularly featured two women on the panel, but that because of the paucity of women in “public life”, numerical equality was unachievable: We can’t create women to put them on Question Time. We choose people who are vigorous in debate, and articulate, and come from all sections of public life—but they’ve got to be there in public life. (ibid.)

Dimbleby nonetheless expressed his view that more women “ought to be in public life. I’m a great exponent of this” (ibid.). The defense of merely “reflecting” the gendered realities of public life against accusations of sexism is one that has been made recurrently at various points within the programme’s history. In 1990, Peter Sissons, in response to criticism that a new series of Question Time had failed to feature a woman in its first two episodes, was reported to have said that: “There is a big gap, a real shortage of front-line women” (Anon. 1990a). In response, Maggie Brown, then media correspondent at the Independent, ran a campaign in which readers were invited to send in suggestions of potential women panellists, and seventy-two of these women’s names were then published (Anon. 1990b). Responding in turn to this, Mark McDonald, the then producer of the show, wrote for the Independent in support of Peter Sissons, asserting that: decision-makers remain overwhelmingly male. The nation’s “front-line” women have not been selected for John Major’s new cabinet. Women comprise 7 per cent of MPs, 1 per cent of senior managers and out of 200 leading listed companies only 21 have female directors […] For more than a decade it has been predominantly men who have been held responsible

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for the decisions. The programme looks forward to women formulating policies and being cross-examined by Question Time audiences. (McDonald 1990, 15)

In 2005, the Independent reported that a senior figure at Question Time’s production company, Mentorn, had sent an email to the pressure group Project Parity in response to their complaints about the programme’s under-representation of women. It read: The House of Commons, whether you like it or not, is made up of 659 members, only 119 of whom are female. This is less than 20 per cent of the total number of MPs. Question Time, on the other hand, has had a 35 per cent female contingent. What exactly is your complaint? (Anon., in McSmith 2005)

Similarly, Robin Day, the original chairperson on Question Time, wrote in his memoir: I beg leave to doubt whether the regrettable fact that only 6 per cent or so of MPs are women, and other similar injustices, can be redressed by putting unsuitable women on a programme like Question Time. (Day, 1989, 281)

Apparent again in these arguments is the logic of reflection – that the job of a political discussion programme is to mirror politics as it actually exists, rather than to challenge any of its democratic shortcomings. This reasoning is powerfully sustained within the BBC’s remit to be impartial (which implicitly requires partiality to the existing political system or status quo). The seeming immutable rationality of these arguments has not, however, been an unchanging feature of the programme throughout its history. Robin Day, when invoking the lack-of-women-in-public-life argument, was writing in his memoir about the then-editor of Question Time Barbara Maxwell (who is also credited with coming up with the idea for the programme). She operated a policy of “positive discrimination” (1989, 281), ensuring that there was at least one woman on the panel each week. According to Day, Maxwell proactively headhunted women, holding “fortnightly lunches” (ibid) with prospective panelists. Such a policy comes much closer to acknowledging that the media is not merely a neutral conduit for reflecting politics. As Livingstone and Lunt argue, “the political role of the media is not…simply dependent on the nature of political process; because it mediates political communications, the workings of the mass media are also constitutive of that process” (1994, 12).

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In his memoir, Day identified “the main area of disagreement [between him and Maxwell]” as “the choice of women for the panel. Not whether women should be on the panel – there has never been argument about that. The difficulty has been which women” (1989, 281). Like Dimbleby and McDonald, Day professed support for women’s political equality at the same time as defending their under-representation on the programme: “The problem with [Maxwell’s] strategy is that it sometimes produces panellists who do not benefit the cause of women’s advancement (of which I am a sturdy champion)” (ibid.). Day also expressed concern for “the ‘discovered’ woman” in “cast[ing] her among hardened, practiced tele-gladiators in front of a mass audience” (ibid). Day insisted that he did “not care what sex” (278) the panellists were; a meritocratic, gender-blind system of selection has often been professed. It is significant, however, that it has often only been when people (usually women) in senior production and editorial roles make the representation of women an explicitly stated goal that something approaching parity has been achieved. As a female TV producer anonymously told Rosalind Coward following Maxwell’s departure from the programme, and in the wake of Sissons’ lament that “front-line women” were in short supply: When Question Time had a woman producer, there were always plenty of women. Look what happens when a man takes over. Suddenly no one can think of any decent women. If someone isn't there nurturing a woman’s perspective, it usually disappears. (anonymous, quoted in Coward 1990)

For significant periods before this, during both Day and Sissons’ tenures, the programme had an all-female production team. Sissons wrote in his memoir that: what I should have…seen coming, was that an all-woman production team would have strong ideas about the alleged male bias of Question Time panels […] I felt she [Alexandra Henderson, the editor from 1991-1994] didn’t quite appreciate how difficult it was to chair a discussion between people totally new to the show, whether they were men or women. (Sissons, 2011, 225)

In 1994, Sue Ayling became the producer of Question Time, now produced by the independent Capron Productions company. Their intention was that “the programme always has two women unless there are unforeseen developments” (in Brown 1995, 3). Maggie Brown wrote that, within a short space of time following Ayling’s appointment, “the long overdue feminisation of BBC Television’s Question Time has quietly taken place” (ibid). The show was now regularly featuring two women on

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each panel of four. Against the seemingly incontrovertible “commonsense” marginalisation of women based on their under-representation in parliament, Ayling provided her own commonsense assertion: “If half the population is female I don't see why half the panel shouldn't be” (ibid.). For Ayling, if women were not available in equal numbers to men from Westminster, then they could be drawn in from other spheres, such as entertainment and business. In 1995, in response to this newly emerging debate about Question Time and gender, Barbara Maxwell wrote a letter to the Independent that is worth reproducing here in full: I was interested to read your article last week about women on Question Time and wish Sue Ayling the best of luck in her search for equal numbers. I think it would have been nice if you had congratulated the original Question Time for having created the normality of women as guests on such shows. When I started Question Time in 1979, women rarely got invited on to serious political programmes. I made it an absolute rule that we never did a programme without a woman - and we regularly had two, sometimes three and occasionally four. It seems so normal now but was a significant statement of equality then. At that time, it was much harder to find women willing to appear, or experienced enough to risk such tough exposure, as women had not made the inroads they have now into all areas of our public life. I devoted a lot of time to finding good women, many of whom now turn up on our screens all the time as well-known, established figures. It’s a matter of great satisfaction that the place of women in society has seen such advances over the past 15 years, and quite right and proper that Question Time - since its beginnings always a perfect representation of public attitudes - should reflect this. Barbara Maxwell Editor, Question Time 1979-90 (Maxwell, 1995, 24)

Maxwell’s achievement in normalising the presence of women panellists was made in the face of resistance from Robin Day as well as the dominant media culture of the time. Ann Leslie, the famous war correspondent and latterly a Daily Mail columnist, who appeared as a panellist, as well as being a friend of Day’s, wrote in 2008 that: “His ideal programme panellists, every week, would have been Michael Foot, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Michael Heseltine” (Leslie 2008, 244). She went on:

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In the special edition of the show that was made to commemorate its 25th year of broadcasting in 2004, a small segment was given over to discussion of Day’s “problem with women”, as Ann Leslie put it (BBC 2004). Archival footage showed him interacting rather inappropriately with female audience members, saying, for example: “Is there a lady who’d like to ask a question, because otherwise if I don’t insist on having a lady I’ll get a lot of rude letters—and there’s a rather lovely one there” (ibid). In her memoirs, Leslie later expanded more fully upon Day’s behaviour and attitudes towards women: “like most men of his generation, he didn’t rate women as femmes sérieuses or intellectual equals. He was both patronising towards us, and, of course, rather scared of us” (2008, 244). For Leslie, this attitude towards women shaped Day’s professional practice on Question Time: He bullied male panellists, of course, but he couldn’t be bothered to do us women the honour even of being bullied—he just tended to dismiss us and move quickly on. Once he cut me off before I was able to finish what I was saying and I snapped back “I haven’t finished, Robin!” He was thoroughly startled. (ibid., original emphasis).

In a Daily Mail article from 2004, Leslie wrote that once, at dinner with Day, in discussion about the programme, he revealed his position quite clearly: “‘Women simply aren't up to it!’ he boomed magisterially at me over a glass of claret” (Leslie 2004).

Changing institutional context In 1991, the programme was “privatised” under new rules set out in the Broadcasting Act 1990, which stipulated that 25% of BBC content must be produced by independent companies. Question Time was the first BBC current affairs programme to be put out to tender following the Act (Garfield 1991, 10). As a condition of the contract sell-off of Question Time, the BBC had stipulated that the new programme be representative of the population in terms of gender, age, class and ethnicity. The winner of the contract, Brian Lapping, was of the view that at least two women should appear each week (at a time when the panel was four- rather than

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five-strong). He also suggested that those with little or no practical experience of Question Time should be briefed on news events so that they could match up more strongly with “heavyweights”. He was quoted as saying: Of course, you can get Margaret Thatcher or Margaret Beckett on and they’re very good. But once you go outside the ranks of self-confident politicians, what you find is ladies who are eminent, distinguished and very able, but when confronted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on whether interest rates are going up, frankly don't have anything very interesting to say. We think that panel members who are new and not obviously heavyweights ought to be put on Question Time if we can help them to be as good as the heavyweights. (interview with Leapman, 1991)

In both historical and contemporary media debates around Question Time, women are often described as “lightweights”. The very term “heavyweight”, as with Robin Day’s term “tele-gladiators”, comes pre-loaded with gendered values that privilege a particularly masculinised political discourse. The premise of the programme, as with parliamentary politics, is—ostensibly—gender neutral, but, as is evident, the onus has most often been on women to transform themselves to fit the political culture of Question Time, rather than on the programme to transform itself to be more inclusive. Even those (perhaps recognisably feminist) strategies to “train” women up to withstand the rigours of political debate (and so to better represent women within the political public sphere) nonetheless reproduce the idea that it is women who must “get better”, rather than the political culture itself be changed. In 1993, an article was published in the Guardian entitled ‘Media virgins Vs political lions: how women are being trained to improve their TV personas’. It told the story of Boxclever Productions, set up by exBBC producer Claire Walmsley in 1990 to run “specialist communications courses for women who may be asked to appear on the more aggressive current affairs programmes”: In the gladiatorial atmosphere of programmes such as Today, Newsnight and Question Time, many confident, knowledgeable women fail to hold their own. As a result, producers can become cautious about the wisdom of feeding media virgins to political lions. (Birch 1993)

In the article, Walmsley referred to Peter Sissons’s remarks from 1990, when he had bemoaned the “real shortage of front-line women”: “He had a point”, Walmsley suggested. The premise of the training course, according

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to the piece, was that: “Oxbridge debating societies produce confident broadcasters and…for the unschooled majority, acquiring some of their techniques can prove invaluable” (ibid.). A sense that “Oxbridge debating societies” provide the basis of an idealised public sphere is implied here; this particular “school” of political speech is installed as the ideal; and it is against this that the definition of the majority as “unschooled” depends. For feminist political theorists and activists, the question of whether to ask women to adapt or transform their modes of political practice to “fit” the dominant political culture (or become “like men”) has been a longstanding and difficult one. Traditionally, entry into the formal (masculine) political sphere has seemed dependent on relinquishing or disavowing certain “feminine” characteristics. In relation to the assumed “masculine” character of politics, Lister (2003) argues that widely-held assumptions about women being less politically engaged than men depend upon a narrow conceptualisation of what constitutes “politics”; she suggests that “Minority group” women, who are virtually completely absent as one ascends the formal power hierarchy, which favours the privileged on every score, are often, like working-class women, politically active...[It is when] formal management or paid employment positions emerge, or a protest shifts to the national level, [that] there is an observed tendency for men to take over. (Lister 2003: 146)

She cites the example of Northern Ireland as a “particularly telling example of the contrast between women’s traditional invisibility and lack of power in formal politics and the force of their presence in working-class communities” (ibid). In 2005, when an episode of Question Time was broadcast from Northern Ireland, it was heavily criticised for featuring an all-male panel, “just as the province was entering a period when its political landscape was to be transformed by a group of very determined women” (McSmith 2005). Ric Bailey, the then-editor of the programme defended the broadcast as such: It is a fact of Northern Ireland’s politics that there are very few senior women in the main four parties. It would be unfair to have one or more parties represented, on their only appearance, by less senior people (quoted in McSmith 2005)

Understood within the framework of feminist political theory, it is precisely the reliance on formal political structures that perpetuates a gendered hierarchy within the programme. However, it is this relationship with formal politics from which the programme derives its legitimacy.

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Constrained by the imperative to “reflect” official political institutions, and also by the BBC’s public service remit to be politically impartial, the programme has little room for manouevre in this regard. Crucially, it does have some room, as evidenced by the examples given in this chapter; however, the extent to which this can provide substantive democratic change is unclear. As such, efforts to increase the number of women who appear on political (and other) television programmes will not produce adequate political change in and of themselves. Rather, these efforts should retain an insistent link with wider efforts to democratise the formal political sphere.

“Question Time has real problems getting women to appear” Writer and broadcaster Bel Mooney wrote in 1990 about the reasons why she had turned down two invitations to appear on Question Time, having previously accepted and appeared twice: The programme’s style impels panellists to declare as axiomatic that which is mere postulation, and not many women (including those in politics) are quite so skillful - or arrogant. I suggest that men have a more highly developed line in bullshit than do women; they are also more enamoured of the sound of their own voices. As a result, they are less likely to be fazed by a question on a subject about which they know nothing. After all, Question Time deals not with knowledge but with opinion - a crucial distinction. Its premise is that there are instant answers to the weightiest questions, and the public requires absolute certainty as consolation for its own confusion. (Mooney, 1990)

The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore (2011) wrote more recently about her own, similar perspective on women and Question Time, describing the problem as one of “political discourse”: You can’t go on Question Time and say, “I am not really sure about the euro”, even though no one is really sure about the euro. Or “Actually, NHS funding is not my area” when you are up against politicians who have had teams briefing them. Your job, as I was told aeons ago when booked to appear on Question Time, is to “represent the average mum”, which I screwed up badly by asking that Myra Hindley be released and all drugs be legalised, while sitting next to David Trimble. (Moore 2011)

Moore asserted that it is unlikely that she will participate in such programmes again.

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In 2012, Janet Daley, the conservative Telegraph columnist, wrote that “I know for a fact that Question Time has real problems getting women to appear on the programme—because I am one who refuses on a tiresomely regular basis” (Daley 2012). One of her explanations of why she turned down these invitations was: Do I want to compete for a few seconds airtime with a handful of maniacally ambitious politicians who are determined to hog the show? (On one memorable programme, a very senior LibDem figure cut across me every single time that I was called on to speak.) (ibid.)

These accounts of Question Time as a space in which doubt, uncertainty, empathy and consensus are implicitly discouraged, also figure the programme as one in which masculine modes of speech are privileged. The accounts can be usefully understood within theoretical debates that consider whether women bring a “unique” or “different” approach to political discourse. For example, Bicquelet et al (2012) found that in debates in the House of Commons on the issue of abortion, there were gendered differences in the rhetorical strategies of politicians, with men more likely to use procedural arguments and women substantive arguments. Similarly, Sarah Childs’ interviews with women Labour MPs in the electoral intake of 1997 (which saw a large increase in the proportion of women MPs, although this still only stood at 18.2%) found that many of these politicians claimed that “women are less combative and aggressive, more collaborative and speak in a different language compared to men” (Childs 2004, 14). Whilst these studies are careful not to posit essential differences between men and women—that is to say, they do not ascribe gendered behaviours to innate or biologically determined differences—they do nonetheless depend upon a claim that a critical mass of women within political spaces will, to some extent, challenge prevailing masculinist norms. Such arguments also suggest that women’s under-representation on the programme cannot be merely attributed to straightforwardly discriminatory selection practices, but rather that the gendered constitution of the format itself should be called into question, particularly for the ways in which it might be hostile to women’s voices. This poses an altogether more difficult set of questions. In 2010, in the week of International Women’s Day, a panel of men and women participated in front an all-female audience. The decision was welcomed by feminist campaign group the Fawcett Society, who said that the “show will give ordinary women, whose all-important vote the parties have been falling over themselves to court, the chance to question if there's

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any policy substance behind their "female-friendly" spin” (Goddard 2010). However, for Libby Brooks, writing in the Guardian, it was both “patronising” and not substantively different from any other episode: “There was precisely the same proportion of people reading out their queries from notes in a shaky voice, shouty Daily Mail platitudes and comments that sank like a stone” (Brooks 2010). Whilst the “positive discrimination” was here applied to the audience, rather than the guests, it nonetheless provoked similar debates about the relationship between women and media representation; namely, does the mere presence of women substantively challenge or transform political media discourse? Similar debates have focused on the sex of the chairperson, and the possibility of transforming Question Time’s gendered character by having a female presenter. During Robin Days’ time, Sue Lawley often covered for him when he was unable to appear. However, she tends to be absent from popular histories of the programme. For example, in the 2004 special retrospective, the journalist Toby Young describes the various hosts as being like the “James Bonds” of Question Time: “Robin Day is Sean Connery, David Dimbleby is Pierce Brosnan, Ludovic Kennedy is George Lazenby, and Peter Sissons is Roger Moore”. Within this logic, of course, Sue Lawley is simply written out of the programme’s history (although she does appear very briefly in archive footage of the famous episode in 1984 when the Conservative MP Alan Clarke was critical of Margaret Thatcher’s defense policy). Clarke (2010 [1993]) wrote about this appearance in his published diaries. Of Lawley, he wrote: … we did not “hit it off”. The worst possible basis for a relationship—she, an “attractive woman”, spotted at once that I have lecherous tendencies, but did not actually fancy her. (ibid., 256)

He then went on to describe her as “bitchlike” (ibid.). This gives some indication of the misogyny that existed within the wider political culture; even if one accepted the “gender-neutral” premise of the programme, women would still have to contend with the views of panellists such as Clarke. When the revolutionary feminist politician Linda Bellos appeared on the panel in 1987, the conservative journalist Charles Moore wrote of his co-panellist in the “Diary” section of the Spectator, following their appearance: “I predict twinset and pearls in seven to ten years” (Moore 1987). More recently, after appearing as a panellist in 2013, the Cambridge historian and television presenter Mary Beard was subjected to what she described as “brutal sexism” in online forums, the likes of which

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“would be quite enough to put many women off appearing in public, contributing to political debate” (Beard 2013). As such, whilst the formally “gender-neutral” space of Question Time and other political television programmes is regulated by certain norms of behavior which (ostensibly at least) do not tolerate explicit or crude sexism, the wider context within which programmes are broadcast must significantly inform our understandings of why a “problem with women” exists.

Theorising gender inequalities in television history Question Time’s history of representing women has been more contradictory and shifting than might be expected in terms of efforts to achieve a better balance between men and women panellists. Whilst the logic of “reflecting” parliamentary politics has had a powerful influence on the selection of guests, the moments when this has been challenged from within illuminate its mutability. But, again, to what extent can the mere presence of more women make a substantive difference? Whilst the role, function, symbolic and decision-making power of Question Time are all clearly different to those of the Houses of Commons and Lords, there is nonetheless a case for applying the insights of (feminist) political theory to the programme. Simon Cottle has argued more broadly that Question Time: provides a program agora that is closely modelled on the ideas and institutional practices of representative parliamentary democracy. The program chair (parliamentary “speaker”) officiates from the studio audience (“represented public”) who is permitted to pose (mainly preselected) questions to a panel of “representatives” (MPs from the main political parties and opinionated public figures) who are assembled either side of the program chair. These assembled “senior figures” then hold forth on the various topics put to them. (Cottle 2011, 236)

Paddy Scannell has similarly argued that programmes such as Question Time and the Radio 4 equivalent Any Questions? (since 1948) operate “within the framework of parliamentary democracy” (Scannell 1992, 345). For Scannell, women in this context are “doubly determined: they are there ‘as women’” as well as in their professional capacity. He suggests that it is “as rare as snow for there to be a majority of female panelists in public debate programmes.” (ibid) For some feminists, women’s inclusion within the political sphere in equal numbers to men remains the primary goal, as a result of which it is assumed other gender oppressions will be ameliorated. For others, the

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masculinist imperatives that still regulate and police the terms of “acceptable” debate remain the biggest obstacle to the participation of women and other marginalised groups. As Cornwall and Goetz (2005) have argued: Much of the focus in the debate on “engendering” democracy has been on how to insert women into existing democratic structures, with an emphasis primarily on formal political institutions. Yet, taken literally, the idea of “engendering democracy” might be read in a rather different way: as concerned with bringing about changes in political systems that make them genuinely inclusive, democratising democracy. (783)

In this analysis, the project of “inserting” women into existing structures is insufficiently powerful to challenge entrenched inequalities. The danger, too, of pushing for greater numbers of “women”, is that other axes of privilege and oppression—class, ethnic, sexual etc.—are obscured. As such, feminist campaigns for more democratic television public spheres ought not only to press for more women, but also to incessantly question the gendered, class and racialised terms upon which women are included, and, as such, to challenge the very notion of what constitutes political debate. In her feminist analysis of the concept of “the public sphere”, Nancy Fraser (1999, 529) emphasises the importance of “a plurality of public arenas in which groups with diverse values and rhetoric participate”. Taking account of Fraser’s analysis—which theorises the limitations of a singular, universal public sphere—a more productive approach might be to situate Question Time within the wider context of political programming and talk shows, and to question to what extent space is made for feminist “counter-publics”. That is to say that no one programme or mode of mediated political discourse can carry the burden of providing a television public sphere. Lisa McLaughlin (1993), considering the usefulness of Fraser’s critical theory to feminist media studies, argues that: if we look upon the problem as one of systemic social inequality, made possible through class society and capitalist relations of production, tallying numbers of marginalised individuals employed in media production is destined to be a celebration of incremental gains and continues to leave open the problem of unequal relations based on economic hierarchies (615)

For feminist television historians, then, a tension remains: how to emphasise the historical agency—and feminist successes—of women

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personnel without de-emphasising or even implicitly legitimising the structural disadvantages they faced? As McLaughlin warns against, any project that seeks to recover and celebrate the successes of individual women must also take care not to obscure the structural and systemic inequalities that women have faced—and continue to face—in media industries, but also in politics, society and culture more broadly. As such, the successes of these women should be situated in the wider context of women’s under-representation in high-ranking political and media positions, as well as the materially and discursively unequal society more broadly. Crucially, in my view this must be seen as a question of gender; that is to say, that the differences between men and women in this regard are neither biologically determined nor fixed. Indeed, there are women who have become regular and celebrated panelists over the years, such as the Liberal Democrat Shirley Williams, the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Philips, and the Labour MP Caroline Flint. However, the (arguably increasingly) adversarial mode of debate privileges certain kinds of voices in a way that, in my view, works to exclude non-masculinist discourse. Similarly, attempts to “tally” the number of women on Question Time panels are problematic in a number of ways. Firstly, it obscures the differences that exist between women – political, class, ethnic, sexual, and so on. As such, the celebration of “women’s” successes might be more appropriately interpreted as “white, middle-class, heterosexual women’s” successes. Secondly, the fixation on counting the number of women and men on the programme assumes that there are only two biologically discrete sexes, and obscures the existence of gender identities beyond this binary distinction. Thirdly, as I have already discussed, the strategy of counting the numbers of women does not take account of the masculinist constitution of formal politics and mediated public spheres, which poses a more complex obstacle to gender equality. Question Time’s particular legitimacy as a political public sphere is achieved by drawing on the parliamentary model of political discourse; however, this imperative to “reflect” the formal structures of political life in Britain also reproduces many of the problems of representative democracy in terms of class, race and gender. The danger in pressing for more women to be represented within political programming, without acknowledging the problematic masculinism of formal political discourse or the continuing inability of liberal democracies to include women on an equal basis, is that it risks legitimising those very systems that work to marginalise women in complex and pernicious ways.

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Bibliography Anon. 1990a. “Talk of the Trade: Question Time on the Move”. Independent, September 19th, 15. Anon. 1990b. “Question of Women on Television”. Independent, December 5th, 1. BBC (2004) 25 Years of Question Time. 16 September. Beard, Mary. 2013. “Internet Fury: Or Having Your Anatomy Dissected Online”. Blogpost on A Don’s Life, January 27th. Available at: http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2013/01/internet-fury.html Bicquelet, Aude, Albert Weale and Judith Bara. 2012. “In a Different Parliamentary Voice?”. Politics and Gender 8 (1), 83-121. Birch, Helen. 1993. “Media Virgins vs. Political Lions: How Women are Being Trained to Improve Their TV Personas”. Guardian, August 5th, 15. Brooks, Libby. 2010. “A Patronising Question Time”. Guardian, March 12th. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/ mar/12/patronising-yup-significant-hardly. Brown, Maggie. 1995 “Women Provide their Share of Answers”. Independent, January 23rd, 3. Childs, Sarah. 2004. “A Feminised Style of Politics? Women MPs in the House of Commons”. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 6 (1), 3-19. Clarke, Alan. 2010. A Life in his Own Words: The Edited Diaries 19721999. London: Phoenix. Original work 1993. Cornwall, Andrea and Anne Marie Goetz. 2005. “Democratizing Democracy: Feminist Perspectives”. Democratization 12 (5), 783-800. Cottle, Simon. 2011. “Television Agora and Agoraphobia Post-September 11”. In Journalism After September 11th, eds. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan, 232-251. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Coward, Rosalind. 1990. “Women: Name calling - Hostility to the Idea of a Women's Anything is Now Widespread Across the Media”. Guardian, December 20. Daley, Janet. 2012. “Why Women (Including Me) Say ‘No’ to Question Time”. Telegraph, February 2. Available at: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/janetdaley/100134609/why-womenincluding-me-say-no-to-question-time/ Day, Robin. 1989. Grand Inquisitor: Memoirs. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson. Evans, Martin. 2012. “David Dimbleby: ‘We can't create women to put them on Question Time’”. Telegraph, February 2. Available at:

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9057055/DavidDimbleby-We-cant-create-women-to-put-them-on-Question-Time.html Fraser, Nancy. 1999. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”. In The Cultural Studies Reader. 2nd edition, ed. Simon During, 518-536. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Original work 1990. Garfield, Simon. 1991. “The Next Question Is: Whose Face Fits?”. Independent, June 2nd, 10. Goddard, Ceri. 2010. “Is Question Time’s All-women Audience a Good Idea?”. Guardian, March 11. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/mar/11/questiontime-women-audience. Leapman, Michael. 1991. “How to Stop Panellists Blathering On; ‘Question Time’ Hasn't Hit the Spot Since Peter Sissons Took Over From Sir Robin Day. The Programme's New Producer Explains to Michael Leapman Why He is Confident That the Problems Can Be Overcome”. Independent, June 26th, 15. Leslie, Ann. 2004. “Confessions of a (Female) Panelist on Question Time”. Daily Mail. September 16th, 52. Leslie, Ann. 2008. Killing My Own Snakes. London: Macmillan. Lister, Ruth. 2003. Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives. 2nd edition. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Livingstone, Sonia and Lunt, Peter. 1994. Talk on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate. London and New York: Routledge. Maxwell, Barbara. 1995. “Question Time Always Welcomed Women: Letter”. Independent, March 5th, letters section, 24. McDonald, Mark. 1990. “A Question of the Real Decision-makers; The BBC Says it Has a Problem Finding Female Panellists for Question Time. Last week The Independent Nominated 72 ‘Front-line’ Women. What Did Mark McDonald, the Producer, Make of Our Gesture?” Independent, December 12th, 15. McLaughlin, Lisa. 1993. “Feminism, the Public Sphere, Media and Democracy”. Media Culture and Society 15: 599-620. McSmith, Andy. 2005. “Television: A Question for the Panel—Why Aren't There More Women on the Show?” Independent, 20 March. Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/television-aquestion-for-the-panel--why-arent-there-more-women-on-the-show6150238.html. Mooney, Bel. 1990. “Question Time: Bel Mooney, Twice Bitten, Twice Shy”. Independent, December 5th, 16. Moore, Charles. 1987. “Diary”. Spectator, October 3rd, 7.

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Moore, Suzanne. 2011. “Why Women Don’t Like Appearing on TV”. Guardian, December 7th. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/dec/07/women-dontlike-appearing-tv Plunkett, John. 2012. “Question Time, QI and Mock the Week Criticised by BBC Diversity Report”. Guardian, January 31. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/jan/31/bbc-diversity-report Scannell, Paddy. “Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Life”. In Culture and Power: a Media, Culture and Society Reader, eds. Paddy Scannell, Philip Schlesinger and Colin Sparks, 317-348. London, thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Sissons, Peter. 2011. When One Door Closes. London: Biteback Publishing.

CHAPTER ELEVEN RETHINKING HISTORY THROUGH DOCUMENTARY: PARADISE LOST AND THE DOCUMENTED CASE OF “THE WEST MEMPHIS THREE” THOMAS JOSEPH WATSON

I really do believe these people would have gotten away with murdering me if it would not have been for what you guys did, for being there in the very beginning and getting this whole thing on tape so that the rest of the world sees what’s happening. If not for that, these people would have murdered me, swept this under the rug and I wouldn’t be anything but a memory right now. —Damien Echols on Death Row, 2009 (Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory [Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 2011]).

The concept of “history”, in its most basic sense, relates to the documentation of reality after the fact: working to shape the way reality is represented. The construction of history could therefore be understood as a process of editing that produces multiple versions of the same event and relatively constant instances of reassessment and reinterpretation. For the purposes of this chapter, documented history, as a process of editing, will be equated with the formal processes of documentary cinema, whereby certain pieces of information are judged as relevant or important enough to be included in an overarching diegesis. These ideas may be taken as a given; that the formal elements of documentary cinema are employed so that certain events can be codified and interpreted through the formation of an end product (the documentary text). But what if history could construct itself as it went along as opposed to this retroactive process of documentation? What if history could edit reality to the extent that it does not just shape the representation of what has happened, but takes a more proactive role in shaping reality itself as

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opposed to just its representation? Placed within the further contexts of the crime documentary, these questions resonate further, as they often deal with violent acts and their harrowing consequences as well as the construction of truth and evidence. In this respect: All discourses, including documentary film, seek to externalize evidence—to place it referentially outside the domain of the discourse itself … Evidence refers back to a fact, object, or situation … but facts and events only acquire the distinctive status of evidence within a discursive or interpretive frame. Evidence, then, is that part of discourse … it is both part of the discursive chain and gives the vivid impression of also being external to it … facts become evidence when they are taken up in a discourse; and that discourse gains the force to compel belief. (Nichols 2008, 29)

These issues will be addressed in a critical analysis of the Paradise Lost documentary trilogy,1 a film series that has documented the case history of three teenagers accused of murder. Later dubbed “The West Memphis Three”, the documentary series documented significant developments in the case over a period of eighteen years. As a starting point, a brief contextual overview of the case will establish why these films present a critical means of rethinking history through documentary.

The case of “The West Memphis Three” Following the disappearance of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993 three teenage boys were investigated and subsequently arrested as murder suspects. In 1994, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. were convicted for the brutal homicide of the three young victims, Baldwin and Misskelley receiving extended life sentences while Echols was to await execution on death row. Amidst the media furore surrounding the nature of these murders and the age of the suspected perpetrators, the television network HBO commissioned a documentary to be filmed in concurrence with the defendant’s initial arrests and upcoming trial. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (Berlinger and Sinofsky, 1996) emerged as an investigative piece that interrogated the circumstances of the crime and questioned the representation of the defendants in the wider news media. What the film

1

The films in the trilogy are comprised of Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011). All are directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky.

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went on to initiate was a documentary project that has spanned approximately eighteen years to date, garnering widespread support for the three men who many believed to be innocent and constructing wider criticism of the American judicial system. These films are now synonymous with the case itself and have been instrumental in shaping its legal developments and eventual outcome (the release of the defendants in August 2011 marking the culmination—at least to date—of the documentary series). The idea that documentary cinema can work to affect social reality has been demonstrated elsewhere, perhaps most famously in the documented case of Randall Dale Adams (The Thin Blue Line [Errol Morris, 1988]) and is perhaps not something completely unfamiliar to a wider understanding of documentary cinema. The Paradise Lost series, however, is different, as the films (along with the involvement of the filmmakers themselves) have intervened in the progression of an on-going criminal case, shifting and revising assertions of guilt and culpability. The filmmakers, placing their selves in a privileged position of authorial control from the outset, were able to direct and dramatically shape the “reality” that became the subject of their documentaries. In an attempt to document the story and the events that emerged following this violent triple homicide, the violent reality of the case has been continually recontextualised throughout the trilogy. As each new film was released, it encompassed the events of the preceding diegesis, the intervention of the filmmakers and other invested parties in the interim period, and documented the influence of these films on a wider public scale. In what follows, I suggest firstly, that, The Paradise Lost films have interceded in the history of “The West Memphis Three” by documenting the impact of successive interventions (made by both the filmmakers and the films themselves) and significantly shaping the actuality of the case. Secondly, the series allows for a wider examination of the documentary form itself, questioning processes of representation and what is expected/accepted as documentary. It is in this way that the Paradise Lost series is a viable way of rethinking history as well as its representation. As the Paradise Lost films encompass a period just short of two decades, it is critical to observe how these films have responded to new trends and developments in documentary cinema and related theory. In highlighting the position of these films and how they problematise ideas of what documentary cinema is, the chapter will then move onto a specific analysis of the films. Certain instances within the trilogy rupture the lines drawn between observation and intervention and it is the direct influence/participation of the filmmakers within the case that leads to

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questions of authorial responsibility. In this sense, I contend that the filmmakers employ modes of manipulative agency that not only shape the representation of history, but also exert a form of control over what particular version of that history is communicated through representation. Furthermore, these issues are also problematic in regard to the “creative treatment” of certain subjects and testimony and how this is constructed into a documentary diegesis. I will then conclude with an examination of the recent documented history of the case, pointing to its wider proliferation through other documented examples and modalities of media production. Ultimately, the aim of this chapter is to evaluate the ways in which the Paradise Lost documentary series allows us to rethink a specific history while at the same time allowing us to reconsider some wider assumptions concerning documentary cinema. How these two aspects come to merge signifies the unique angle presented by these films, focusing on how the shaping of history is facilitated through its documentation and how such documentation can shape its own history.

Vérité redux: The aesthetics and expectations of documentary Emerging from what directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky note as a film aimed at “reviving the art of vérité filmmaking”, the progression of the Paradise Lost series presents a marked shift from claims of “detached objectivity” to pure advocacy and a significant call to activism. It is this call to activism (stemming from the initial film and solidified in its sequels) that led to immense levels of garnered support for the three men who many believed to have been wrongfully convicted (see Leveritt, 2002). Although the words of Damien Echols that initiate this chapter were spoken two years prior to his release from prison, the negotiation of an Alford Plea bargain in August 20112 allowed the defendants to plead guilty while maintaining their innocence. Although Berlinger and Sinofsky have no qualms about the support generated for the three convicted men as a result of their documentaries (essentially leading to their intended eventuality), the concepts and expectations of “vérité filmmaking” are 2

An Alford Plea allows defendants to assert their innocence, while conceding that the prosecuting state has enough evidence to convict them. The stipulation within such a plea bargain is that the defendants are unable to sue the state for wrongful imprisonment or any perceived form of unlawful misconduct (a point that may be understood as a legal “get-out-clause” for the state of Arkansas).

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significantly contradicted by their direct involvement in the case and their subsequent documentary practices. In the production of the two sequels (Paradise Lost 2: Revelations [2000] and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory [2011]), a cyclical process emerges whereby the reality of the case becomes influenced (and effectively subsumed) by its represented/-mediated reality. In both creating and becoming part of the wider discourse/ narrative surrounding the history of the case (the filmmakers themselves submitting evidence and testifying in appeal hearings as the case advanced), the film series complicates the role of the filmmaker(s) in relation to the events they set out to document. In an interview with Cineaste amid the release and promotion of the first film, Joe Berlinger elaborated on some aspects of documentary practice that constituted the filmmaking style of both directors: What we like to do in our films, esthetically is to follow stories in the present tense—to capture real life as it unfolds, and then to give it some natural dramatic shape. This case seemed like an excellent opportunity to do this because, after all, the classic definition of drama is conflict … We felt a lot of drama was about to unfold that we could capture on film. So the subject fulfilled our esthetic requirements, that of capturing real drama (Berlinger quoted in West and West 1996).

The formal structuring that shapes the final documentary film removes certain events from their chronological progression in reality. The use of the word “natural” in the terms used by Berlinger suggests the appearance of vérité immediacy, masking the very constructedness of the events as they are represented in the film (better defined as “dramatic shaping”). Although documentary as a set of conventions and expectations brings with it the impossibility of non-biased representation, the imposition of narrative or a “dramatic shaping” of reality becomes a distinctive point of directorial intervention. What occurs, as Stella Bruzzi has it, is a movement away from “the traditional adherence to observation” which is effectively replaced “with a multi-layered, performative exchange between subjects, filmmakers/ apparatus and spectators” (Bruzzi 2006, 10). Berlinger himself has commented on the use of dramatic structuring within the initial documentary, emphasising the completed film as the creation of the filmmakers and a representation of the story that they wanted to tell: Dramatic structure is an artifice, and therefore interferes with the objective reality of a situation. We feel that all filmmaking is very subjective, that there is no one objective reality to be captured on film—there are many realities and many small ‘t’ truths. In this regard, we’re not afraid to deal

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with artifice … We are consciously creating a film that has a natural dramatic structure, and if certain things are truthful but stop the film cold, we’ll take them out. (Berlinger quoted in West and West 1996)

These statements are revealing in that they work to elucidate the imposition of control exercised by the filmmakers. The notions of “many realities” and “many small ‘t’ truths” suggest that there are many competing/conflicting narratives surrounding the case (the Paradise Lost documentaries being one such narrative among many). The people interviewed within the documentaries are only a small number of those whom have a narrative about the case and only a few of these positions are allowed to become representations within the films. The filmmakers select the “realities” that are deemed relevant to the narrative they are telling (other perspectives appearing in other representations). Following the release of the first documentary, Bruce Sinofsky was called to testify during one of Damien Echols’s defendant hearings (see Rule 37 Petition [June 10th, 1998]).3 Sinofsky noted that the footage collected during initial filming equated to 150 hours of material: “virtually the whole trial.” Writing in 2002, Mara Leveritt (who was also present in the initial stages of the case’s documentation) identifies other witnesses that were called to the stand to testify against the defendants, most notably Vicki Hutcheson and her young son Aaron (who was a friend of the murder victims). Although remaining key figures within the initial trial, Hutcheson and her son are entirely absent from the Paradise Lost documentaries. In line with Sinofsky’s previous assertions that the filmmakers had recorded “virtually the whole trial”, it is reasonable to assume that the testimony of the Hutcheson’s was also part of these 150 hours. This is further problematised as the footage shot by Berlinger and Sinofsky has been remediated within an adjacent documentary, West of Memphis (Amy Berg

3

After a defendant’s conviction has been affirmed, he or she may choose to file a petition for post-conviction relief in the trial court. These are commonly called "Rule 37" petitions because they are authorized by Rule 37 of the Arkansas Rules of Criminal Procedure. In a Rule 37 petition, the defendant raises claims that, if valid, could entitle him or her to a new trial for reasons other than the claims of trial error raised on appeal. Most often, a Rule 37 petition asserts that the defendant’s trial attorney made errors that deprived the defendant of effective legal counsel at trial (see http://www.ag.state.ar.us/index.html).

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2012).4 The testimony from Hutcheson does appear in this documentary, alongside a present day interview recanting the testimony she offered. Berg allows the voice of Hutcheson to become part of the documented history of this case, a point that was previously denied by the Paradise Lost films. This underlines the selective processes of the Paradise Lost trilogy as well as the concurrent yet competing narratives imposed by other productions (West of Memphis being one such example).5 Coercive modes of documentary filmmaking are therefore called into question when the filmmakers decide to withhold certain points of information, releasing it to the viewer to create optimum dramatic impact at various points in the film (or to create some form of affective response within the viewer). As the filmmakers are privileged to all of this information before they begin to edit their footage, what is included within the film will not necessarily be all that the filmmakers know about the case (as evidenced through Mara Leveritt’s analysis of the case discussed above). Likening the role of the juror to the spectator, Jennifer L. Mnookin argues that: Jurors, like film viewers, make inferences and interpret the evidence laid before them without knowing what has been excluded from their view by either the rules of evidence or the strategic or artistic decisions of either lawyers or filmmakers … unpacking the specific ways in which the films are “produced” also sheds refracted light on the trial itself as a production. That trials, too, are “productions”—elaborate staged dramas whose relation to the real is very far from indexical—also almost goes without saying. (2005, 157)

4

In 2005, Amy Berg was approached by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh to direct a documentary that later became West of Memphis. Jackson and Walsh had become interested in the case following a viewing of the first Paradise Lost film and began funding further investigation into the case, most significantly pursuing new DNA testing. The film was released following the release of the three defendants in 2011 and it emerged that Berg remained in close affiliation with Damien Echols and his wife Lori Davis (who served as producers on West of Memphis). The 2013 DVD release of the film features an audio commentary by Berg, Echols and Davis. 5 Although the case seemed to manifest itself across different news networks and the press, a series of television “specials” emerged through the late 80s and into the 90s concerning the presence of ritualistic occult activity and an escalating climate of “Satanic Panic”. These include the Geraldo Rivera broadcast Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s underground (first broadcast 22 October 1988), an Investigative Special Report on Devil Worship (first broadcast 16 April 1994), and the CBS documentary A Cry for Innocence (first broadcast 27 February 2010).

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Both the filmmakers and attorneys are privy to certain information and it is how they choose to share it, or perhaps more importantly, withhold it, that remains critical. This will be different in a court of law. Prosecutors and defence counsel present evidence and cross-examine witnesses and experts in accordance with the aims and goals of the case they are trying to make. The objective is ultimately to secure a conviction or a release. Although this process contains a great deal of strategic planning (instances of which are captured by Berlinger and Sinofsky), they effectively come into play at the time of the trial. The film Paradise Lost operates at a different level, as the filmmakers possess vast amounts of information and recorded footage, which they edited to form a coherent narrative. The subjective affect created by these coercive documentary techniques reveals a tension between the case external to its mediated reality and how this reality is informed through such mediation. Bruzzi, in her book New Documentary, contends that “sometimes it becomes necessary to remind ourselves that reality does exist and that it can be represented without such representation either invalidating or having to be synonymous with the reality that preceded it” (2006, 5). However, Paradise Lost as a documentary series confuses these ideas. It is increasingly difficult to disassociate the films from their “preceding” reality as they are integral in the formation of that reality. The reality of the case can never be removed from its documented history and the Paradise Lost trilogy is inseparable from the actuality it systematically influenced and documented. Thomas Austin has highlighted how “writing on documentary has long grappled with the relationship—often proposed as dichotomous—between evidentiality and aestheticization” (2008, 62). These assertions lead to the questions of how coercive a text can be if the “truth” it represents becomes clouded by the mediated sense of reality it has created. As such, “reality” that is continually caught in the processes of creation, revision and mediation ultimately gives way to its representation(s) in the trilogy. Indeed, how can different versions of reality be negotiated and renegotiated within and between these film texts when no definitive version of “truth” can ever exist? It is this construction of “truth” that is created through the interventions of Berlinger and Sinofsky that will be the focus of the next section: in particular, how the issues of guilt and culpability have been problematically revised and re-represented within both Revelations and Purgatory.

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The “trashing” of “white trash”: Ethics of advocacy from Revelations to Purgatory As the series progressed, Berlinger and Sinofsky began to move further away from their claims of “constructed” objectivity and “pure cinema vérité.” Due to the unprecedented access granted to the filmmakers in the production of the first film, the attraction of vast media attention to the case meant that certain key figures were unwilling to participate or be interviewed in the production of its sequel. The only figure that has any prominence in the film is, John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the murder victims, Christopher Byers. Depicted in the first film as a fundamental Christian, constantly remarking to the camera of his love for God and the punishment he will inflict upon the “devil worshipping” defendants, Byers is effectively given free reign with what he does and says in front of the cameras. Two key scenes within both Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and Revelations stand out in this respect. Following the arrests of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr., Byers and Todd Moore (the father of murder victim Michael Moore) are depicted at a firing range shooting pumpkins. While cocking his gun and firing, Byers graphically describes how he would murder the three people he believes to be responsible for the murder of his stepson: This right here is all needs to be done to ‘em, just shot slowly with a real nice firearm. And it ain’t got no consideration or no feeling who it’s aiming at, just like they didn’t care about killing my baby.

In the second film (in which Byers is largely constructed as a suspect and demonised accordingly), a rather harrowing sequence takes place in which Byers revisits the site where the three young victims were murdered. Upon reaching this location, he constructs effigies of the defendant’s graves and begins to ritualistically burn them. While certain aspects of performativity are no doubt of relevance, Berlinger and Sinofsky try to construct a get out clause to what can be considered as a problematic treatment of a father’s genuine, albeit eccentric, grief and mental anguish: Sometimes the camera is a catalyst for emotions. Many documentarians believe that the camera is there purely as a neutral observer of reality, and while that certainly can be the case, we feel that sometimes by immersing ourselves in the community and having a camera, we provide people with an opportunity to unload, and sometimes the camera is the catalyst for

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allowing deep seated emotions to purge. (Berlinger and Sinofsky, audio commentary: 2005 Warp Films dual release of Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and Paradise Lost: Revelations)

By placing themselves within the West Memphis community, the filmmakers stand in for a means of cathartic emotional purging. I contest that they have more of a hand in creating these situations in which a dramatic narrative is derived. Questioned about the performativity of John Mark Byers within the first film, Joe Berlinger stated the following: I think the presence of the camera does effect behaviour … what we try to do in the editing room is to analyse the footage, and determine whether it’s gratuitous mugging for the camera, or whether you’re really learning something that’s important to the film. Specifically in the shoot-out scene with the pumpkins, Mark Byers is clearly performing for the camera. We didn’t tell him to go out and shoot pumpkins in effigy. That was his idea. But he wouldn’t be so hyperbolic if there wasn’t a camera there … it’s still a valid scene … he’s unwittingly revealing something to the viewer … in the film it’s still truthful; there’s an emotional truth. (Quoted in Yabroff 1996)

The construction of such emotional truths goes too far the other way in Paradise Lost 2: Revelations. Becoming a pure advocacy film and aiming to garner support for “The West Memphis Three,” the film juxtaposes the innocent defendants with the now demonised Byers as he tries to clear his name for his suspected involvement in the murders. There is a hypocrisy that comes to light here, as the filmmakers essentially represent Byers much in the same way as the wider media had represented the defendants upon their arrests and incarceration. Speculation surrounding the possible involvement of Byers is therefore sensationalised (both by Byers’ own behaviour and his representation in the documentary). By manipulating these coercive techniques of letting the camera play out in the development of emotional truths, Berlinger and Sinofsky become complicit in what they had initially set out to criticise. A key scene from Revelations depicts an incarcerated Damien Echols partaking in a telephone call with the founders of the support group, “Free ‘The West Memphis Three’.” The telephone call (which is filmed by Berlinger and Sinofsky) follows the Rule 37 petition hearings that allowed Damien to see the first Paradise Lost film for the first time since its premier on HBO (noted in the film as three years previously). Damien is asked about his involvement in the film and if he felt “roped in” to doing Paradise Lost? He responds that “he wanted to do it” and that he felt the case needed some “positive publicity”, giving him his own voice that

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would present a contrast to his otherwise demonised portrayal. One of the most interesting questions posed to Damien is “what did you think of Byers?” Damien’s response is very telling in that he seems to compare his own personal experiences of Byers to the way Berlinger and Sinofsky have represented him within their film: I think Byers is probably the fakest creature to ever walk on two legs. I don’t think there is a true thing about him. He puts on all these false faces. He’ll act one way whenever they have cameras on him, another way when he’s by himself. (Damien Echols, Paradise Lost 2: Purgatory)

Although Damien is understandably critical of one of his most vocal persecutors (having his own suspicions regarding the involvement of Byers in the murders), what remains troubling in this scene is the remediation of Byers from the original film intercut with the footage of Damien’s audio testimony. The remediated footage of Byers shooting the pumpkin effigies from the first film is relayed alongside comments such as “the fakest creature to ever walk on two legs.” Instances that were previously accounted for as a representation of “emotional truth” have now been incorporated into a very specific narrative concerning the suspected guilt of John Mark Byers (and the possibility that he is in fact the real murderer). The directors are no longer interested in letting their subjects unwittingly reveal something to the viewer. Instead, they are imposing their own views on this subject, subsequently aiming to influence the perception of others. Immediately following the footage of Damien’s telephone interview, the film cuts to a scene in which Berlinger and Sinofsky follow Byers down to the site where the dead bodies were discovered. As the filmmaker’s follow Byers to this location, the footage of his journey is intercut with the original police crime scene footage and forensic photography of the deceased children. This is done at various points that seemingly match the location of the harrowing discovery with its present day state. As these diegetic scenes work to imply the complicity of Byers in the murders, this method of cross cutting suggests that Byers was present at the time of the initial murders. We as viewers are therefore presented with the same “scene” (the location of the crime) at two alternate points in time. Jumping between these alternate points in time to impose a specific narrative trajectory effectively constructs Byers as culpable. The forensic images of the deceased victims usually interrupt the diegetic progress of the film, drawing us back to the harrowing reality of the crime. However, in this particular instance, these images are no longer

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a moment of death or stasis but are repositioned as part of a different narrative trajectory. They signify hope in that they are now used to identify the real killer, advocating the innocence of those believed to have been wrongfully prosecuted. The problem here is that this is also executed at the expense of someone else. In other words, the brutal murder of the children is again supplanted by the narrative intent of the filmmakers. The treatment of Byers in these scenes demonstrates the power yielded by the filmmakers in shaping the events within their films, yet this lack of concern with “conforming to the style of objectivity” yields certain ethical considerations as to the questionable treatment of their subjects. As Drew Taylor writes, the relationship between the films may be examined when questioning “the blurred line between objective investigative journalism and outright activism, especially when the latter begins to, if not accuse, significantly considers you to point the finger elsewhere” (2011). It could be argued that it is the manipulation of these scenes (in part, if not entirely, facilitated by the presence of the filmmakers and their cameras) that interferes with the testimony offered by participants and significantly shapes the object/subject filmed.

External interference as monetary incentive and the shifting assertions of guilt Of course, it is one thing to influence reality through the very presence of the documentary camera (marked as a palpable form of intervention itself); it is another to extend this intervention in a more literal and direct manner. These revelations point towards potential financial gain as a driving impetus for “reliable” emotional truth. At the final credit sequence of both Revelations and Purgatory, the statement is made that some individuals received an honorarium for their participation within the films. Although it is not made explicitly clear as to whom these individuals are, such an acknowledgement does point to the questionable nature of some of the material recorded and the reliability of certain testimonies. Outlined by Mara Leveritt (2002), these honorariums were paid equally to the three families of the victims and the three families of the accused. These honorariums have been identified as: Essential to the first trial because of the lack of resources available to the public defenders assigned to the cases. This money was used to pay a number of expert witnesses who testified for the defence, tangibly altering the trial process. (Opel, 2004)

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The implication at this stage was that this monetary influence directly impacted upon the case proceedings. For example it has been documented within the trial of Jessie Misskelley that Jessie’s family were advised to release the $5,000 that they were to receive from their contract with HBO to fund the expert witnesses called upon by the defence (see Leveritt 2002, 180-81). In doing so, the filmmakers (affiliated with the HBO network) funded a considerable part of the defence counsel, documenting the testimony of the legal experts they had effectively paid for. This process has been somewhat cynically referred to as “checkbook journalism” (see Hearing on Rule 37 Petition 1998). The question remains as to whether or not the case would have proceeded in the same way had this intervention not been instigated. Although the funding in question was connected to the performativity of those involved, it also meant that the filmmakers could influence the case in other ways, subsequently recording the outcomes of their respective interventions. In response to the first two films, Jennifer L. Mnookin has identified John Mark Byers as the figurehead to which such criticism may be directed. Shown to behave in an excessive, extremely eccentric manner throughout the first two films (burning effigies of the defendants graves, presenting the filmmakers with a bloodied hunting knife, having his teeth removed amidst the suspicion of bite marks found on the victims’ bodies and harbouring a dubious criminal past), Byers is configured as a pertinent scapegoat in the intent to exonerate the defendants. The nature of Byers and the performativity of his constructed character has meant that any testimony he provides is immediately constructed as suspicious within the diegesis of the documentaries (even suggesting an indirect collaboration with the filmmakers). As such, Mnookin asserts the following with regard to the construction of Byers within these terms: Learning that he is being paid has a destabilizing effect: we no longer know whether we’re seeing the “real thing” on screen … It invites the proliferation of speculation: At the extreme, what if Byers has come to believe that the WM3 are not guilty himself? What if his odd behaviour is his own peculiar contribution to helping convince the public that an injustice has occurred? ... [L]earning that he has been paid complicates any attempt to read what we see on screen as purely “authentic”. (2005, 185)

As Mnookin made such assertions some six years previous to the release of Purgatory, it is somewhat ironic to note that Byers has in fact came to believe in the innocence of “The West Memphis Three” (suspected guilt now directed towards the step-father of murder victim Stevie Branch). Now adamant that Terry Hobbs is the guilty party (as emphasised in the film), Byers acknowledges that he acted somewhat bizarrely during the

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course of the first two films, accusing the defendants on the basis of questionable logic without the presence of hard evidence. Reflecting on the first two films in a bonus scene extracted from the third documentary (found on the HBO website),6 Byers has made the following comments: In hindsight, the two films have made me in a way … who I am today because not near the amount of people in the world know about this case if it weren’t for the two documentaries. Possibly because of the bizarre way I acted, it caught people’s attention, the way the movie was put together and edited. It put that red herring out there for people to think about … maybe The West Memphis Three were innocent; maybe that man right there is guilty. (Byers 2010)

If Byers is talking about how the films “made” him through the experience and trauma he has went through, I would suggest they have also “made” him through the construction of his mediated image/persona. I do not think Byers is suggesting here that he purposely acted the way he did to promote the innocence of the defendants. He is suggesting that his eccentricity (which is notably restrained within the third instalment) in some way contributed to the public perceptions of the defendant’s guiltlessness. The problematic issue with these sentiments is that we are unaware as to how much wider reading around the case Byers has conducted. He has featured in countless televised interviews since the murder of his stepson and has developed an impressive media savvy throughout the progression of the case. This point may be given credence in light of his attendance at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012 (Byers and co-producer Damien Echols “reunited” and extensively photographed at the premier of adjacent documentary, West of Memphis). It may be the case that Byers even read the article by Jennifer Mnookin as his statements echo some of the more critical aspects of her commentary. If Byers is no longer considered a suspect/figure of suspicion, Purgatory no longer needs to construct him in the same fashion as the previous films (he appears far less frequently in this later instalment). However, there are notable contradictions within the third film that point towards similar techniques of demonization that is now mapped onto other invested parties. When questioned as to whether he thinks he is treating Terry Hobbs in the same manner as he was treated (by the same filmmakers no less), Byers responds with an adamant “No!” The problematic implication is that the directors go on to do exactly that.

6

See http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/paradise-lost-3-purgatory

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The remediated footage used in Purgatory displays the remediated footage of Hobbs’ 2009 deposition and points to questions of his involvement in the murders. Newly uncovered DNA evidence also points to the implication of Hobbs: namely, a hair found in the ligature used to tie one of the murdered boys matching his own. However, in the press conference discussing these new revelations (represented in the film), care is taken to stress that the same hair fibre is congruent with 1% of the population. Emphasis is placed on the notion that because the hair does not match any of the three accused, it is an important element attributed to their innocence (not the specific denigration of Hobbs as a suspect). Although those involved in the defence press conference are not saying that Hobbs committed the crimes (the tested DNA evidence remaining significantly inconclusive), the directors go on to pursue that line of enquiry anyway. The representation of truth and its reliability still remain in a state of flux, as the third film works to assert allegations of guilt onto Terry Hobbs (much in the same fashion Byers was victimised within Revelations). Because Purgatory intensifies the advocacy of the previous documentaries, it is again problematic that these methods are used in the pursuit of exoneration (even if the three are innocent beyond any reasonable doubt). It is here that ethical and moral implications are drawn into focus; the filmmakers are no doubt accountable for their representation of Hobbs as a viable culprit.

Purgatory: Re-evaluation, remediation and release This final section looks at the further mediation of the case beyond the confines of the Paradise Lost trilogy. As other documentaries have been produced, they emerge from the initial Paradise Lost film and feedback into the wider documentary series as a whole. The initial film surfaced at a period preceding the growing omnipresence of veracious documentation. Indeed, the trajectory that the films went onto follow encountered the advent, and ubiquity, of several new media technologies (specifically the Internet). This is specifically true for the way the films were shot, edited and effectively presented to audiences, moving from 16mm film stock/flatbed editing for the first instalment to high definition video and digital editing processes by the third film. The means through which the case has been documented and subsequently mediated straddles a variety of different formats, ranging from television programmes, websites and evidence archives to the remediation of the documentaries on sites such as YouTube. A significant

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level of re-mediation also occurs between the documentaries themselves. Not only do these films remediate other external sources and media, they also re-incorporate themselves into one another as the series progresses. The culmination of this process can be observed within Purgatory as the narrative of the first film is reiterated within a new diegetic framework. The critical point here is that this is achieved through the composition of alternative footage shot and archived between 1993 and the release of the first film in 1996 (presumably that which was relegated to the cutting room floor). The filmmakers decided that footage that was not relevant in the first instance was now suitable for inclusion in the later film. As we have seen with the remediated footage of Byers within Revelations, the same images/ events come to mean something entirely different depending on which film they appear in. Considering the extension of this re-mediation out into other televisual forms (talk shows, online case archives, journal/ newspaper articles, tube clips etc.), there is a cyclic process at work whereby the various images and representations of the case feedback and collapse into one another between these various channels. For Jean Baudrillard, “It is the excess of reality that makes us stop believing in it. The saturation of the world, the technical saturation of life...” alludes to the point at which “the real is suffocated by its own accumulation” (2005, 19). Because there is a palpable tension between the representation of the case and how such representation has impacted upon that case as it proceeded, it is almost as if the real becomes stifled by the constant presentation of itself to itself, a process perhaps not that far removed from the documented case of “The West Memphis Three.” Contra Bruzzi’s assertion that “documentary will never be reality nor will it erase and invalidate that reality by being representational” (Bruzzi 2006, 6), I suggest that the documented history of this particular case has now engulfed its indexical claim to reality. If not erasing or invalidating that sense of reality, the documentaries at least work to undercut certain veracity and draw their own representation into dispute. It is here, at this stage of uncertainty, where the documented case of “The West Memphis Three” has come to reside.

Paradise Lost: Redux, adaptation and return The implementation of contractual obligations between Paradise Lost: Purgatory and West of Memphis has meant that these films had restricted rights of access to interview certain participants. The implication here is that a certain “ownership” is attached to the testimony offered in these

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adjacent narratives. The notion of ostensible truth(s) where one cannot exist therefore continues to plague the documentation of the case. A further development is how aspects of the case history are now being adapted into a fictional drama. The feature entitled Devil’s Knot (Atom Egoyan, Forthcoming) presents a recreation of the case history from the perspectives of the defendants (Jason Baldwin [Seth Meriwether], Damien Echols [James Hamrick] and Jessie Misskelley Jr. [Kristopher Higgins]) and the murder victim’s parents Pam Hobbs (Reece Witherspoon) and John Mark Byers (Kevin Durand). Based on Mara Leveritt’s book Devil’s Knot: The True Story of The West Memphis Three (2002), the feature length drama acts as a fictional adaptation of this other documented version of the case. Leveritt’s book (acting as source material) takes into account the production of Paradise Lost and effectively incorporates it within its own narrative. The documentaries are therefore subsumed into a book that forms the basis of this fictional depiction. Although the film has yet to be released (it is in the process of filming at the time of writing), the writers of its screenplay (both Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson) may also be credited with the horror films Hellraiser: Inferno (2000), Urban Legends: Final Cut (2002) and The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005). It is perhaps not unfair to foresee that Devil’s Knot will follow the same tonality and become something of a docu-drama-horror hybrid. Standing as one of the most recent developments in the documentation of the case is the newly acquired television series Paradise Falls, bought by the Fox network in the United States from Margaret Nagle (writerproducer of the prohibition set crime drama, Boardwalk Empire). Although it has been reported that the television series is not directly concerned with the events surrounding the case of “The West Memphis Three” (i.e. it is not a dramatized interpretation), Paradise Falls is set to be produced by Joe Berlinger and based on his experiences filming the Paradise Lost documentary trilogy. In a press statement relating to the shows production, a synopsis reads as follows: The series centres on a down-on-his-luck documentary filmmaker who is sent by a crime reality show to cover the trial of a heinous crime that has engulfed the tourist town of Paradise Falls, PA. He uncovers corruption and deceit at every turn, realizing the case is a smokescreen for the townspeople’s twisted ambition for fame and profit.7

7

For further explication, see Deadline Hollywood. 2012. “Drama Series Based on West Memphis 3 Filmmaker’s Experience Sold to Fox.”

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Although the series will be a fictional drama (the synopsis perhaps not too dissimilar to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks [1990-1991]), the fact that it is entitled Paradise Falls establishes a significant connection to the documentary series that preceded it (even if it is presented as a loose point of reference). If the series suggests a “twisted ambition for fame and profit” attributed to this fictional community, certain allusions to the people of West Memphis Arkansas (as they are represented within the documentary trilogy) are rendered problematic. As we have seen, the treatment of John Mark Byers throughout the documentaries (especially in the first film and its sequel) pointed to the cultivation of his eccentric persona and his awareness of the media. This was equated with the questionability of Byers as a character and his suspected culpability in the murders of the three young victims. Because Byers was held up as dubious relating to the construction of his persona and how he exaggerated this in the presence of the cameras, the documentary series suggests that he cultivated attention from the media to suit his own ends (a point alluded to by Byers himself in Purgatory). If these ideas are to be extended in a fictional diegesis, any comparisons made with the original crimes and those involved surely raise issues of ethical responsibility and integrity. Does the imminent Paradise Falls series then mean that the same criticism can now be aimed at Berlinger? His credit as co-executive producer ultimately means that some form of monetary value is placed upon his involvement in the project. How do notions of profit fit alongside Berlinger’s involvement in the case history of “The West Memphis Three” and the fictional series that is anchored in the reality of the case? As the series is in the early stages of development (it remains, at the time of writing, still awaiting commission), it is of course speculative to assert exactly how the series will develop. Nevertheless, these issues are present from the outset and raise significant questions as to the involvement of Berlinger within such a project even in its preliminary stages. The development of Paradise Falls marks a further movement away from the reality of a tragic homicide, signifying how the documentation of the case is becoming the foundation upon which other narratives and dramatizations are built. What results is a growing mythology surrounding the history of “The West Memphis Three”: a history that is still being shaped by its mediated representation yet also occluded by these different

www.deadline.com/2012/10/paradise-falls-drama-series-joe-berliner-westmemphis-three-experience-fox-margaret-nagle/.

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modalities. These narratives frame the case, yet they also present divergent perspectives concerning its actuality. The documentation of the case as it stands today means there is no one documented history per se but a number of different perspectives that want to convey information (or disinformation) about the case. What has now effaced the history of “The West Memphis Three” is a wider field of mediated representation. This chapter is also culpable within this process, documenting the problematic documentation of the case, while, at the same time, doing exactly the same thing. As a point of conclusion, it is perhaps fitting to finish where I began with a discussion of history and how it may be codified as a documented editorial of reality. As Nichols argues: We expect to be able both to trust the indexical linkage between what we see and what occurred before the camera and to assess the poetic or rhetorical transformation of its linkage into a commentary or perspective on the world we occupy. We anticipate an oscillation between the recognition of historical reality and the recognition of a representation about it. (Nichols 2010, 36)

Nichols suggests that there is indeed an element of expected overlap between actuality and its representation. However, the term “oscillation” suggests a certain wavering between these component parts of documentary cinema: a means of separation and distinction. I propose that the Paradise Lost series continuously closes down these adjacent polarities. As the case has been unalterably shaped by its representation, the progression of the documentaries has now resulted in an enveloping, cyclic effect. In other words, the actuality of the case informs its representation, which in turn goes on to influence the actuality of the case. As this has led to further documentation, the actuality of history is already tinged with the interventions and shaping effects of its representation. In light of these ideas, “documentary claims to address the historical world and to possess the capacity to intervene by shaping how we regard it” (ibid 38). The Paradise Lost trilogy goes one step further, shaping not just perception, but the historical world itself. The reality of the case can no longer be isolated from these documentaries as a result of the direct intervention in the case by both the filmmakers and the films they produced. The “oscillation” ascribed by Nichols can therefore be more usefully identified as a means of collapse or conflation. We can recognise movement between the reality of history and its representation but this also needs to be rethought of in terms of how one is concomitant with the other to the eventual point of suture. In this

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sense, it is indeed possible that the nature of history itself can be rethought through the frame of documentary cinema.

Bibliography Austin, Thomas. 2008. Watching the World: Screen Documentary and Audiences. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 2005. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. Oxford: Berg. Bruzzi, Stella. 2006. New Documentary (2nd Edition). London: Routledge. Itzkoff, Dave. 2011. “Films Clash Over Access in Crime Case”. The New York Times, December 5, C.1. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/movies/filmmakers-clash-onaccess-to-interviews-on-west-memphis-3.html. Leveritt, Mara. 2002. Devil’s Knot: The True Story of The West Memphis Three. New York: Atria Books Mnookin, Jennifer L. 2005. “Reproducing a Trial: Evidence and Its Assessment in Paradise Lost”. In Law on the Screen, ed. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas and Martha Merrill Umphrey, 153-200. California: Stanford University Press. Nichols, Bill. 2008. “The Question of Evidence, the Power of Rhetoric and Documentary Film”. In Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, ed. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong, 29-38. Berkshire: McGraw-Hill Education: Open University Press. —. 2010. Introduction to Documentary (Second Edition). Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press. Opel, Andy. 2004. “Paradise Lost I & II: Documentary, Gothic, and the Monster of Justice”. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 47. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc47.2005/goth/text.html. State of Arkansas Plaintiff vs. No. CR-93-450A Damien Echols, Defendant Hearing on Rule 37 Petition Hearing, Jonesboro, Arkansas, June 10, 1998 (Court Transcript). http://callahan.8k.com/wm3/rule37/june10.html Taylor, Drew. 2011. “New York Film Festival 2011 Review: ‘Paradise Lost 3’ Is Utterly Compelling, But Still Ethically Messy At Times”. The Playlist, October 6.  http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/nyff_11_review_paradise_lost_3 _is_utterly_compelling_still_ethically_messy_ West, Dennis, and West, Joan M. 1996. “Cinema-vérité, Nineties Style: An Interview with Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky”. Cineaste, 22 (3). http://callahan.8k.com/wm3/cineaste.html.

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Yabroff, Jennie. 1996. “American Gothic: The Director’s Chair Interviews (Joe Berlinger)”. Salon Magazine. http://www.industrycentral.net/director_interviews/JOBE01.html.

PART V: THE IMPACT OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES

CHAPTER TWELVE DVDS, STREAMS, COMMENT THREADS AND DEVELOPING A TELEVISION CANON ABBY WAYSDORF

On Thursdays, I watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Paramount Television, 1993-1999). The show has been off the air since 1999, but that is only a technicality. Thanks to the internet and DVDs, it is easy to access the show when needed. On one of my regularly visited pop-culture websites, new reviews of DS9, and their ensuing conversations, appear on Thursdays, which makes it easy to plan when to watch the next episode. I view each episode before the review appears, in order to discuss it with others while it’s still fresh in my mind. Currently, the reviews have just begun the fourth season. Unlike in other periods of television’s past, as a viewer, I can access episodes of a long-cancelled show with relative ease. DVDs, Blu-rays, streaming services, and downloads mean that many television shows, both old and new, are available and accessible at any time. While many shows are still watched on the schedules set by the channels, this is no longer the exclusive way to watch a programme. Television’s relationship to time has become far more flexible in the past decade. This is particularly evident with shows that aired in the past, where new “on-demand” models have joined the syndication model (of a programme being sold to local or speciality channels for rebroadcast) that previously dominated television’s history. At the same time, online discussion is increasingly an integral part of the way that viewers engage with television. As Henry Jenkins observed, “few watch television in total silence and isolation. For most of us, television provides fodder for so-called water cooler conversations. And, for a growing number of people, the water cooler has gone digital” (Jenkins 2006, 26). This has only increased in the years since Jenkins’ writing. Online reviews, and their ensuing discussion, are now a major part of how people react to and interact with television. The Internet has

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become a way not only to discuss favourite shows with others, but to discuss the medium of television itself. This chapter demonstrates how these two developments have interconnected, and what that means for television as a form. It discusses the how the watching of older television shows (that is, shows without new episodes being made) has developed, from syndication through to the current practice. The focus here is on practices in the United States, but trends elsewhere – notably in Europe – will also be acknowledged. The chapter also considers the rise and development of online television discussion. It concludes with a study of their convergence, focusing on the “TV Club Classic” section of The AV Club (www.avclub.com), a website that posts news, editorials, and reviews across a wide range of popular culture and media. In the TV Club Classic section, reviews are posted of older shows much in the same manner that they are posted for newer television shows, and connected to the greater discussion of television available on the site. This chapter demonstrates how two technological developments—the ability to watch older television shows at will and immediate communication with other television viewers—is leading to a “television canon” being created by professional reviewers and increasingly critically-minded fans.

How to watch old television A key element in the creation of a television canon is accessibility, which has been greatly increased by advances in and deployment of technology. To this end, the development of digitally based television storage and access has been one of the major concerns of television studies over the past decade (Kompare 2006, Hills 2007, Bennett 2008, Gripsrud 2010, Bennett and Strange 2011). Very quickly—the DVD player is one of the fastest adopted pieces of home technology ever—television changed from a scheduled medium to one that was easily accessible outside of the regular timing: TV texts are converted from being primarily moments in a schedule, designed to hold audiences or reach audiences of a specific type, to symbolically bounded objects more akin to artworks or novels, which audiences can search for and keep as digital files, or purchase as DVDs/legal downloads. (Hills 2007, 45)

This was not a change that came out of nowhere. VCR technology provoked a similar change in the accessibility of cinema, and its appearance in homes did mark changes in television viewing. The VCR

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was used for “timeshifting” programs, making a show available for when the viewer could or would want to watch it, but this happened on an individual level, or within smaller groups of fans. Unlike cinema, where home video was used to create a lucrative secondary market for film after its first release, television was never fully adopted or embraced by the video industry. Few shows were released on home video, and what was released tended to be smaller “collections” rather than full runs. Hometaping exchanges sprung up among the more hardcore fans of certain series, allowing them to trade episodes of favourite or potential favourite shows, but this practice was “on the margins, with very little effect on the business of television” (Kompare 2006, 341). There were reasons for this. For one, as Derek Kompare points out, videocassettes take up a lot of space. The standard two-hour commercial videocassette was fine for films, most of which could be viewed on one tape, but not ideal for television. An American primetime drama could fit just two episodes on a cassette, and a single season often consists of twenty-two to twenty-six episodes. Kompare illustrates this point by observing that for The X-Files (Ten Thirteen Productions, 1993-2002), “a complete release of this series on VHS (with two episodes per tape) would take up over one hundred cassettes and ten feet of horizontal shelf space” (2006, 343). The DVD can hold far more episodes than the VHS cassette, and is physically much smaller. The box set format pioneered by The XFiles reduces the space required even more by reducing the amount of packaging, putting a single season of a television show into an attractive, collectable object often not much bigger than a single videocassette. The simple issue of space, either in store or on the home shelf, limited the potential for VHS as a storage medium for television. It was also not encouraged by the industry, which has long made syndicated reruns (or repeats) a core of its business. Kompare states that “rerun syndication has also been an effective argument against the marketing of programs on home video on principle. Why release a series on home video that is already widely available on television?” (2006, 343). Reruns have been integral to television since almost the beginning of the medium. While not as immediately and automatically accessible as DVDs, the television rerun has meant that many older shows were never truly “gone”. The ubiquity and lucrativeness of syndicated reruns meant that releasing the shows on videocassette perhaps did not make commercial sense—it was not worth jeopardising the syndication trade for the industry, and, outside of the niche audience of tape traders, fans did not seem interested.

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The success of the television DVD, particularly the box-set format, has changed the thinking of the industry. On television, syndication is still popular—for example, I can usually find Star Trek: The Next Generation showing at least once a day on my cable system—but it has been joined by the DVD as a mode of viewing older shows. Following the success of The X-Files in full season box sets in 2000, the DVD release of a full series has become both standard and expected. This “has reconfigured the perception and retail prospects of television on home video, effectively extending television from broadcast flow to publication” (Kompare 2006, 347). The DVD release of a television show is now as anticipated as that of a major motion picture, and has proven to be a reliable source of income and part of a wider media strategy for the large multimedia corporations that produce these shows (Hernandez 2003). DVD box sets, in the early days, also served to valourise television, both through selection and the act of preserving itself. As Matt Hills suggested, selecting what to release was “not just a judgement on likely sales, this decision-making also partly evidences and reinforces hierarchies of ‘quality’ TV” (Hills 2007, 49). Hills made the point that what was released on DVD “[tended] to be content which is closer to being ‘highend’ or self-consciously ‘extraordinary’ TV” or particularly “cult” programs (2007, 49). The selection reinforced what television was considered important, and served “to valourise this content as televisual (and textual) ‘art’ over ‘commerce’” (Hills 2007, 55). What was released was television that encouraged a certain amount of involvement and discussion, whether scholarly, critical, or fan-based. This included cult favourites such as Xena, Warrior Princess (MCA Television 1995-2001) or Red Dwarf (BBC 1988- ), critically acclaimed shows such as Six Feet Under (HBO 2001-2005) and Twin Peaks (Lynch/Frost Productions 1990-1991), along with “classics” such as M*A*S*H* (20th Century Fox Television 19721983).1 In the years since Hills and Kompare wrote, however, the DVD box set has become nearly entirely omnipresent, firmly incorporated into the television market. It is no longer a device strictly reserved for “quality” or “cult” shows. The greater majority of shows aired on television receive a subsequent DVD box set release as well, even if there is no consensus on their quality or cult properties. The model that Hills observed still holds true in older television, but as DVD releases become ever more abundant, this too is changing. The introduction of the DVD box set allowed an 1 For a full list of television programmes released on DVD box set from 20002003, see Kompare (2006).

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entire television show to be considered as a completed artwork, a collectible work worth owning, analysing, and appreciating long after it had already completed its run. The release of a box set itself can be considered the first step towards canonisation, and the increasing ubiquity of the form perhaps enforces the idea that when a show is left unreleased there is something “wrong with it”. Yet, just as the popularity of DVD has risen, it is being challenged. While Kompare points out that DVD sets are ideal for shelving and collection, they do still take up space and money, as he points out: “a complete collection of all nine The X-Files box sets would cost over $1,000 at list price” (Kompare 2006, 350), and the “complete collector’s edition” of the show, released in 2007 and containing all seasons in one box, costs approximately $450. While this is a price which devoted fans are willing to pay, this is not the case for everyone. The success of the DVD has also led to the rise in DVD rentals, which was the original business model of Netflix in the United States. For a flat monthly fee, the company would deliver DVDs to the customer’s home, enabling them to watch the show at their leisure and return them for no additional cost. Netflix then introduced a video streaming service on its website which allowed instant playback of licensed movies and television shows over the Internet on a customer’s computer. Since then, this service has expanded to transmission via videogame consoles, certain models of smart televisions, and smartphone and tablet applications. This means that for many consumers, particularly fans of television, there is the ability to instantaneously and at will watch a large amount of shows for a low subscription fee. While the selection does not total everything broadcast on television, it is substantial enough to have implications for the TV model. The DVD still requires a certain amount of external action and storage, while streaming for many requires nothing more involved than an Internet connection and being able to manipulate the remote control, much like television has long been conceptualised. The act of using a service such as Netflix is a more impromptu, casual experience than the comparatively formalised act of DVD consumption. For the streaming subscriber, much of the world of television is available without forward planning. While Netflix is perhaps the most prominent example of these streaming sites in the United States, there are many other options for accessing television outside of the television schedule. Video on demand has become a major feature of the contemporary media landscape. Apple’s iTunes has options for both permanently purchasing and renting downloaded files of television shows. hulu.com, jointly owned by three

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major US networks, offers current and past television shows (as well as movies on their pay service), while Internet retail giant Amazon has individual television episodes available for purchase or rental along with a broader streaming “library” as part of their “Amazon Prime” package. In the United Kingdom and parts of Europe, Netflix has a major competitor in the Amazon-owned LoveFilm, which offers a similar service. Most official websites of television channels offer recent, and occasionally even archival, episodes of their shows (often for free), either directly from the website itself or through other dedicated applications such as the BBC’s iPlayer or the HBO GO system. For the tech-savvy, a number of less official (or legal) sites have also sprung up offering free downloads and streaming of an even wider range of television shows. On streaming sites, legal or not, the “ordinary television” tends to receive greater release, allowing it to function more as a “binge” or a “guilty pleasure” that can be viewed on impulse, when the emotion or moment calls for a show, or to watch a show without leaving a trace of its existence in the form of a box on the shelf. What the DVD has as an advantage is its existence as a collectable commodity for dedicated fans. Having the box is an important part of the appeal. For the devoted, “the set already functions as an aesthetic object before a disc is even played, as attractive as any well-designed hardback book and just as striking on the shelf” (Kompare 2006, 348). It is a tangible, aesthetically pleasing representation of fandom. They might be expensive, but they function as a proof of devotion, with Kompare noting that “it has apparently been a cost worth bearing for those interested in acquiring the definitive edition of their favourite television series” (2006, 350). Today, the DVD or Blu-ray set is acquired not just to watch a given programme, but to be a physical, collectable representation of one’s fandom. It is purchased specifically for itself, instead of acquired as part of subscription to a database. Purchasing such a set is therefore an indication that one is already a fan of a programme, rather than that one could be. Streaming sites and downloads ask the viewer “to sacrifice […] the pleasures of acquisition, ownership, guardianship, and membership” (Bjarkman 2004, 240), but make a wider survey of television as a medium possible. More can be watched than if the viewer had to purchase each show, which means that it is easier (and requires less investment or commitment) to sample a show based on a recommendation or review, or for the sake of participating in a discussion. Matt Hills linked the rediscovery of aesthetics in television with the rise of the box set, stating that “[t]he availability of DVD so that students can watch and rewatch ‘old’ TV thus impacts on whether and how this can be written about”

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(2007, 48). That older television was available on demand meant that it could be studied and analysed in the manner of other art forms. Hills focused on the academic world, but a similar change could be seen in nonacademic television criticism after the introduction of the DVD, which has risen in prominence in the past decade. Streaming and download sites expand this availability, meaning that students, critics, and more general viewers can experience the shows without needing to have the formal relationship that the DVD entails. Just as the DVD removed the archive from its reliance on time, streaming removes the archive from its reliance on space and cost. Hills’ linking of DVD to students’ and critics’ writing is even more applicable to streaming television. It enables the archive to be better connected to the greater television community that I will describe in the following section.

The television community Since its inception, the Internet has been used by fans to discuss television shows. As early as 1993, Nancy Baym wrote about Usenet, an early Internet discussion system, and the rec.arts.tv.soaps group, which began in 1984 and at the time of her writing, was one of the most active Usenet groups. The community she describes in her article—with defined personalities, an emphasis both on humor and on insightfulness, and norms of behaviour—is almost identical to what can be found online today, despite the nearly twenty years since her questionnaires went out to participants. She observed that “there is little praise higher on r.a.t.s. than to be told you made someone laugh and being a funny poster is a particularly effective way to forge a known identity in the group” (1993, 159), a sentiment that a contemporary participant in a television message board or discussion group would definitely recognise. At the time of Baym’s writing, the audience of a newsgroup like r.a.t.s. was necessarily limited to those that had Usenet access, which was a comparatively small portion of the world’s population. As the population of the Internet has increased, so has the number of people involved in television discussion of some form or another. There has also been a related expansion of forums for television discussion. What Baym describes in her article is what Ivan Askwith would define as “horizontal” relationships, which “involve peer-to-peer interactions between members of a program’s audience” (2007, 88). r.a.t.s. is an early (but still active) example of an independent discussion group, one set up by fans themselves to discuss their favourite shows. It is a specifically fan-driven space, independent of the networks showing the

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soap operas and a strictly amateur undertaking. None of the participants in r.a.t.s. or similar groups are professionals in television, in theory. It is a space for and controlled by soap opera fans. As the Internet has grown, and related discussion forums have grown with them, there have been newer developments. Networks have moved to create their own websites related to their produced shows, and have also created message boards to accompany them. These message boards promote themselves as the “official” spaces to communicate with other fans of the show, showcasing the boards as the legitimate way to participate. They are easy to find and often promoted on television during the shows themselves. As Askwith writes, “while many viewers still prefer to participate in unbranded ‘independent’ communities, such as Ain’t It Cool News and Television Without Pity, the emergence of official, showsponsored communities often encourages less net-savvy viewers to participate” (2007, 89). The “unbranded, ‘independent’ communities” mentioned by Askwith function as a space somewhere between the early Usenet groups described by Baym and the official network sites. They are commercial sites, utilising paid reviewers and often covering a wide range of entertainment topics. Peter Larsen describes the Grey’s Anatomy (ShondaLand 2005- ) fan community as: one of many similar sites nested within TV Fanatic, which is owned and operated by iScribe Ltd., ‘an Internet marketing company that specialises in entertainment-themed websites’ with the aim of establishing and maintaining ‘high rankings in all major search engines’. (Larsen 2010, 157)

One of the first of these commercial, wide-ranging sites was Television Without Pity, also known as TWoP, a site that originally began by offering recaps of the television show Dawson’s Creek (Outerbank Entertainment 1998-2003) before expanding into other shows and changing its name. At the time of Mark Andrejevic’s 2008 study of the site, its setup was one where professional, paid reviewers were “hired by TWoP to craft lengthy, detailed, and humorous summaries of the shows— [which] often focus on production details including lighting and editing” (Andrejevic 2008, 26), as well as forums where more “ordinary” or amateur viewers can discuss the shows, in much the tone and attitude demonstrated by the professionals. With a tagline of “spare the snark, spoil the networks”, its advantage to viewers (and the advantage of similar sites), is that “official sites […] do not have the luxury of deliberately fostering the critical, sarcastic repartee

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that has become the staple of TWoP” (Andrejevic 2008, 31). As a result, those that participate on a site such as Television Without Pity see themselves as a far smarter or savvier group than the ones who would participate on an official, network-branded site. Andrejevic stated that “TWoPers pride themselves on belonging to a knowing and critical subset of viewers,” a “savvy viewer apart from the rest of the viewing audience” (2008, 48). This conception of fans considering themselves both different from and superior to the regular viewer has long been a noticeable feature of online television fandom. The result of a survey of online television fans conducted by Victor Costello and Barbara Moore in 1998 found that “these respondents were adamant about distinguishing themselves from the stereotypical couch potato viewer with remote control in hand, consuming large quantities of television pabulum in an unstructured and habitual fashion” (2007, 130). As the Internet expanded to include more of the “typical” viewers, the divide has widened between the “savvy” users of the independent communities and the “less savvy” of the official ones. After Television Without Pity’s purchase by the Bravo TV network, itself owned by NBC-Universal, its original founders and “recappers” left the site, and it has lost much of its cache with the savvy viewers that made up its original audience and provided its reputation. It does still exist, though, in an expanded and redesigned form that contains a spinoff movie site (Movies Without Pity) and more general articles about television and popular culture, rather than only focusing on one show at a time. The model popularised by Television Without Pity, of professional (or at least paid) writers creating reviews or recaps of television shows soon after broadcast, which then feed discussion areas, has been taken up by other sites, such as the TV Fanatic sites mentioned by Larsen, but also by broader pop-cultural sites such as New York magazine’s Vulture, Gawker, HitFix.com, The AV Club, and many, many more. The television recap has become the established mode of television review, one that encourages a discourse and critical engagement with television, both among professional reviewers and more savvy fans. While not for everyone, the viewer who considers himself or herself more engaged with the show, or even the form of television, will often be drawn to this style, where the show can be discussed with both professional writers and fellow fans (not that there is always a distinction).

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“I wasn’t a weirdo. I was in the audio-visual club”2 The AV Club is one of these independent, yet professional, pop-culture sites. Online and in print, its publication exists alongside The Onion, an American satirical newspaper and website. The Onion started as a free weekly “fake news” paper in Madison, Wisconsin in 1988, eventually expanding nationwide across the USA, particularly in college towns. In 1993 the editors decided to add an entertainment section, which was rebranded as The AV Club in 1995. Published in the back of The Onion, it was considered to be something of an afterthought, although it proved attractive to advertisers as it published movie and music listings for the area. Eventually, it raised its profile as its own entity and partner of The Onion, focusing on popular culture which the college-age readers of the smartly satirical newspaper would be interested in. While both The Onion and The AV Club went online in 1996, it was not until 2005 that blogs and reader comments were incorporated, and in 2006 it began adding content on a daily, rather than weekly, basis. In addition to television recaps, it publishes movie, book, music, and video-game reviews, pop-culture oriented lists, interviews with performers and producers, recurring themed columns, a podcast, and news posts, as well as more intellectual essays and articles about popular culture. While the general tone is humorous, it is far from exclusionarily so. Its mission statement and general attitude is best summarised in the sites “about” page: Back in olden times, a school’s audiovisual club would be composed of a bunch of geeks who actually knew how to run the filmstrip and film projectors, and were typically deeply involved in things like audio fidelity and newfangled speakers. We’re proud to carry on the tradition of people immersed in pop culture and entertainment media to a somewhat obsessive degree. (The AV Club, 2011a)

The combination of obsessive, yet celebratory, geekiness and satirical scepticism is the general tone of The AV Club. As opposed to Television Without Pity’s emphasis on “snark”, The AV Club posits itself as a site that, while often sarcastic, is more open to both the joys of fandom and critical discussion about the forms of popular culture. Of note is that unlike Television Without Pity, and some other sites, The AV Club offers no extra forums. While everything posted on the site is open for comments (barring syndicated features, like the advice column “Savage Love” and two comics), and there is an extremely vibrant 2

D’arcy, The Simpsons, Season 7, Episode 26. Fox. 1996.

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commenting culture, not every piece of American popular culture is covered. This is particularly true for the “TV Club” section of the site, where the television reviews are organised. Stylistically, reviews tend to be about 1000-2000 words long, and the episode is given a letter grade analogous to the American school system (A+, A, A- and so on). This grade is usually based on other episodes of the show, rather than judging the show against the entirety of television, although this is not always the case. Obviously, not every television show aired in the United States is covered, and that which is tends to fall under the nebulous banner of “quality television”. Much has been written about what exactly falls into such a category (Jacobs 2001, Geraghty 2003, Nelson 2006, McCabe and Akass 2007), and while there is not scope to enter that debate here, it can be said that the TV Club’s television coverage is mostly dedicated to “quality” television without space for more “ordinary” programmes. The editorial staff of the site is aware of this, and even aware of the debate around what constitutes quality—a feature of one-off reviews of popular shows that are not normally covered began with this introduction: The Internet has made TV criticism more prominent, but the kinds of shows TV critics write about—serialized dramas and single-camera comedies—are rarely the kinds of shows that become popular with a mass audience. Every week, TV Club is going to drop in on one of the top-rated programs in the nation, one that we don’t normally cover. What makes these shows popular? Should we be covering them more often? Are our preconceived notions about quality not necessarily following popularity justified, or are we jumping to conclusions? (The AV Club, 2011b)

This both questions and reinforces the site’s position as an arbiter of quality in television. It recalls the results of Costello and Moore’s survey, with the site, and therefore the sort of viewers the site attracts, giving themselves an identity as those who take television aesthetics seriously. The critics writing the reviews are expected to engage seriously and critically with television. The readers/commenters are expected to do the same. Of particular popularity on the site are shows that are also highly critically regarded, such as the cult favourite comedy Community (Krasnoff Foster Productions 2009—) or the award-winning drama Breaking Bad (High Bridge Productions 2008—), both of which regularly receive comments which number in the thousands. The site relies on the interplay between the professional writers and the engaged readers, which create a general community of the critically concerned (or, in the selfdeprecating terminology of the site, a place filled with “hipster douchebags”). This positioning fulfils one condition for developing a canon that Christine Geraghty (2003) argued was lacking within television

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culture—a publicly accessible forum for questions of television aesthetics to be debated, much as already existed for film. The curatorial nature and identity of the website come out particularly in the TV Club Classic section. This is a section of the TV Club where older shows are recapped and reviewed in the same manner as newer shows. While the volume is considerably less than the current shows being reviewed, it is steadily increasing as the feature catches on with readers. One function of the TV Club Classic section is that it circumvents a problem that Will Brooker observes with regard to watching television shows on download or DVD, that the “follower who downloads a season in bulk for “binge” viewing may find him or herself isolated, out of time, with no obvious place within an online community that, perhaps quaintly, remains structured around traditional broadcast schedules and global geography” (Brooker 2009, 58). TV Club Classic allows the pleasures of discussing a television show with others, experiencing the show (or rewatching the show) at approximately the same time as them. The “isolation” described by Brooker is minimised. However, this community is not available for any show which a given individual might want to revisit. Rather, the show in question is selected and announced ahead of time, with new reviews arriving at a set time each week. The separation of time from consideration of which show to cover means that the review becomes even more a reflection of the opinions of editors and writers of the site. This results in a situation whereby watching the shows selected, and participating in the reviews and discussions, a viewer can experience many of the programmes involved in prior discussions of “quality television,” with The Sopranos (HBO 1999-2007), Twin Peaks, Seinfeld (Castle Rock Entertainment 1989-1998), and The Prisoner (Everyman Films 1967-1968) among the shows that have been covered. The shows are discussed as objects in themselves, but also in the greater context of their genres, and as with the regular TV Club recaps, the comments are a source of greater discussion and debate. However, while the TV Club Classic programmes are chosen by the site’s editors and writers, programmes that are poorly received by the readership are unlikely to be continued to be reviewed. Andrejevic stressed that the “productivity” of fans on Television Without Pity often equated with unpaid labour for the producers of a television show, that studios take advantage of “the effort viewers put into making the show interesting to themselves and the effort they devote to taking on the role of production assistants and attempting to provide feedback to writers and producers” (2008, 26). The rise of online discussion groups and the engaged viewer, to Andrejevic, means that

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making a television show engaging, interesting, and appealing is a task performed by the consumer, rather than the producer. They add value to the show with their unpaid labour, which is capitalised by those that make shows. The idea that the viewer is being listened to in this practice is billed as an enhancement, especially if the writer/producer of a show contacts the message group directly. Andrejevic writes that of his respondents, many “find themselves captivated by those moments when producers, actors, or writers participate in the forums or agree to be interviewed online for the site” (2008, 31). The idea that the producers take the fans seriously, that they will respond to the fans and that the fans are making a difference in the direction of the programme is considered by Andrejevic to be at the core of the Television Without Pity experience. This is echoed by Costello and Moore, who give the highest level of activity to “those who use the Internet as an interactive tool to participate in some sense with what they see as ‘their’ program” (2007, 137), who want to be recognised as participating in the program in much the manner Andrejevic ascribes to the viewers of Television Without Pity. Fans in these studies enjoy the feeling that they are contributing to the process of creating television, and want to see their influence reflected as the show progresses. While they might be communicating with other fans, it is towards media producers that they direct any influence. Yet the participants in a TV Club Classic discussion have absolutely no ability to influence the television show being watched, as the show is, by its definition as “classic”, long finished. While some shows have been famously brought back from the dead by fans (and DVD sales), that is not the aim of the TV Club Classic review, with the shows being considered as final, collected works of art at the start of the review process. Rather, the productivity, of both the professional writers and the amateur commenters, is dedicated not outwards towards the producers, but inwards towards the community. The point is to analyse and debate what are considered to be great works of television alongside others who feel a similar attachment to television as an art form. The producers of television are appreciated as creators of what is being watched, but removed from the frame of the present discussion. Instead of the viewers trying to influence the programme, treating it as something in development that they are also a part of, they are considering it as a complete object. What they are doing is creating a canon of television programming. Derek Kompare, in his study of reruns and syndication in American television, marks a difference between “canon” and “heritage”. In his words, “the canon tends to be separated from everyday life and located in

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a refined, timeless sanctuary, a heritage, while also protected to a certain degree is part of the lived, historical experience of a culture” (Kompare 2004, 105). He explains how in the 1970s the idea of “television heritage” arose, that old shows of the early days of television were part of our history, our past, and needed to be treasured and appreciated for their connection to that past. This is a model of older television that has held sway for quite some time—Kompare makes a mention of Nick At Nite, a television channel devoted to this idea of television as shared past, using as its slogan in the mid-nineties “preserving our precious television heritage.” The syndicated rerun model of television is well suited to the heritage concept, as older television shows were ubiquitous and often aired, even with their own dedicated channels, but not accessible on demand. Technological developments have enabled a television canon by making “the heritage” accessible on demand, available to be played back and analysed. Matt Hills made an explicit connection between the function of a DVD as a text and the new style of television criticism, crediting the DVD with “the reproducibility of TV” that in turn “makes its texts more akin to those of written rather than oral culture, […] support[ing] a level of aesthetic interrogation which would have been less readily possible in the past” (Hills 2007, 48). Individual scenes can be critiqued, and the entire run of a show can be taken out of the everyday context of television viewing. This echoes Kompare’s differentiation between a canon and a heritage, as a canon has to be separated from time and the everyday—the “grounding in discourses of value which involve the isolation of, and construction of symbolic boundaries around, specific texts” (Hills 2007, 47) that Hills relates to both DVD culture and television criticism. With the ability to remove television from context, the DVD makes a canon possible, and with the removal of space and formal investment, streaming and downloading make it even more so. The canon is therefore possible, but still must be produced, which is where the discursive model of something like The AV Club works. The amount of older television available on DVD and streaming services means that simple availability is not enough to determine the importance or quality of a programme. There needs to be more conscious selection, from a credible source, in order for a canon to be formed, understood, and accepted by television viewers. By establishing itself as a place for more considered discussion of television (and popular culture in general), and attracting a user base that expects and participates in such discussion, the Internet has become a space in which it is possible to create a canon, or at least contribute to the discussion of the canon that is forming. Productivity

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stems from the audience, rather than the producers and creators of television. The AV Club, with the TV Club Classic section, provides a space to discuss, contemplate, and critique a canon of television in the manner that has become the standard format of television criticism in the 21st century. The site setup and related discussions encourage the idea that television can be looked at in the way that film, literature, and music already are, and the growth of technologies means it is possible to gain the breadth of knowledge required to attain credibility as a fan of other media. While it might not be possible or desirable to watch every show available on DVD or Netflix, it is possible to watch a selection of “the best”, and to therefore be knowledgeable about television. The AV Club reader/commenter already considers themself within the intellectual category that makes attaining this knowledgeable state possible and desirable. As a canon was previously thought of as incompatible with television, due to its ephemeral nature and “ordinariness”, it is also up to the community to create it. Through watching selected programmes and debating them, the viewer not only becomes knowledgeable about television aesthetics, but also participates in creating its canon.

Conclusion This chapter shows how technological developments in both online communities and within the video industry result in the possibility of a television canon. While older television shows before the boxset were mostly confined to reruns or small, personal circles of tape-trading, the advent and promotion of first DVDs and then streaming services made them immediately accessible. This accessibility let critics and viewers analyse individual scenes and episodes, as well as taking television outside of the “everyday” context in which it was normally viewed. A television programme became, on DVD, a full, contained work of art. It is because of this access and separation that a television canon could be created. However, the existence of accessible archives alone is not enough to create a canon. It must be formulated, enabled by discussion among fans and critics. As DVDs and streaming services became prevalent, so too did online discussion of television shows. These sites attracted a “savvy” viewer, one who thought him or herself generally intelligent, knowledgeable, and discerning about what was watched. These sites generally feature paid writers who review new shows week by week, with space for readers to comment and debate the shows further. The AV Club has taken older television shows, now readily available, and reviewed them as a precursor to further debate in much the same manner. As the

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shows have to be selected by the site’s editors (and approved by the commenters), the result is the gradual formation of a television canon: specifying which shows, of a large number available, are credible, important and worthy of sustained discussion. The new availability and accessibility of older programmes, and the space and willingness to discuss television on an aesthetic level among a forum of fans and critics, makes a television canon—once thought to be a farfetched idea—concrete.

Bibliography Associated Press. 2007. “Netflix delivers 1 billionth DVD”. NBC News, February 25. Accessed March 29, 2013. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17331123/#.UVWDEb8Zqi8 Askwith, Ivan. 2007. “Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing Television as an Engagement Medium”. Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Andrejevic, Mark. 2008. “Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans”. Television & New Media 9 (1): 24-46. The AV Club. 2011a. “About The AV Club”. http://www.avclub.com/about/. —. “The Mentalist (review)”. http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-mentalist,52263/. Baym, Nancy. 1993. “Interpreting Soap Operas and Creating Community: Inside a Computer-Mediated Fan Culture”. Journal of Folklore Research 30 (2/3): 143-176. Bennett, James. 2008. “Television Studies Goes Digital”. Cinema Journal 47 (3): 158-165. Bennett, James and Niki Strange eds. 2011. Television as Digital Media. Durham: Duke University Press. Bjarkman, Kim. 2004. “To Have and To Hold: The Video Collector’s Relationship with an Ethereal Medium”. Television & New Media 5 (3): 217-246. Brooker, Will. 2009. Television Out of Time: Watching Cult Shows on Download. In: Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show edited by Roberta E. Pearson. IB Tauris: London 51-72. Costello, Victor and Moore, Barbara. 2007. “Cultural Outlaws: An Examination of Audience Activity and Online Television Fandom”. Television & New Media 8 (2): 124-143. Geraghty, Christine. 2003. “Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (25): 25-45.

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Gripsrud, Jostein, ed. 2010. Relocating Television: Television in the Digital Context. New York: Routledge. Herndandez, Greg. 2003. “TV shows old and new send DVD sales soaring”. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 31. Accessed March 29, 2013. http://www.seattlepi.com/ae/tv/article/TV-shows-old-and-newsend-DVD-sales-soaring-1122977.php. Hills, Matt. 2007. “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf”. New Review of Film and Television Studies 5 (1): 41-60. Jacobs, Jason. 2001. “Issues of judgement and value in television studies”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 4 (4): 427-447. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press. Kompare, Derek. 2006. “Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television”. Television & New Media 7 (4): 335-360 —. 2004. Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television. New York: Routlege. Larsen, Peter. 2010. “The Grey Area. A Rough Guide: Television fans, Internet forums, and the cultural public sphere”. In Relocating Television: Television in the Digital Context edited by Jostein Gripsrud. New York: Routledge 156-168. McCabe, Janet and Akass, Kim, eds. 2007. Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Nelson, Robin. 2006. “‘Quality Television’: ‘The Sopranos is the best television drama ever…in my humble opinion’”. Critical Studies in Television 1 (1): 59-71.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO BUILD HIDDEN SCREEN HISTORIES: A CASE STUDY OF THE PEBBLE MILL PROJECT VANESSA JACKSON

Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005) is impacting the landscape of television history in new and often under researched ways. The rise of digital technologies has meant that the screen archive has frequently been taken outside the institutional domain by fans and enthusiasts, becoming an interactive repository: a place for memories, comment and discussion, as much as a site for preservation. Through a case study of the Pebble Mill Project, an online archive documenting production at the now defunct BBC studio, this chapter will explore the impact of digital technologies on television archives, examining how unofficial, community based archives have emerged online. I will argue that online and especially social media allow us to access television histories which otherwise might never be told, and that they do this by widening the selection of whose views and memories can be heard, and preserving ephemera perhaps deemed unworthy by institutional archives. Questions are raised with a wider relevance: issues concerning the rise of the citizen curator, the accuracy of recalled memory, the nature of collaborative reminiscence, the motivation behind contributing to such collections, as well as the challenges of intellectual property protection, and what the potential of online community archives might hold for television historians. I will begin by outlining the project itself, examining how it sits in relation to traditional television histories, before teasing out some of the possibilities of online, interactive archives. Later in the chapter, I will explore in more depth some of the successes, limitations and challenges of the Pebble Mill Project, which are reflective of issues surrounding online archives in general.

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Pebble Mill and the Pebble Mill Project Until the building’s demolition in 2005, BBC Pebble Mill was the production and broadcast centre for the Midland region. It opened in 1971 as the first purpose built radio and television broadcasting centre in Britain, and played an important part of the BBC’s vision of “Broadcasting in the Seventies” (BBC 1969). At its height in the 1970s and 1980s, Pebble Mill produced a significant amount of BBC television output, dramas like Nuts in May (Leigh 1976), and Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC 1982), daytime programmes like Pebble Mill at One (BBC 1972-86), and factual series like Top Gear (BBC 1977- ), Countryfile (BBC 1988 ongoing) and Gardeners’ World (BBC 1968 ongoing). Many of the programmes produced, particularly the factual series and studio shows, were seen as ephemeral by the BBC, and were not necessarily preserved. Pebble Mill had a significant impact on the Midlands’ cultural landscape, frequently giving a non-metropolitan perspective through dramas and factual programmes of life outside London. The closure of Pebble Mill in 2004, and the move in 2012 of all BBC Birmingham’s factual series to BBC Bristol, seriously eroded the television production base in the region, leading to a loss of jobs in the Birmingham creative sector, and frequently a sense of bitterness from many former employees, as has become apparent through the project. I began the Pebble Mill Project in 2010, with the purpose of celebrating and documenting the programme making heritage of Pebble Mill1. At the heart of the project are a website, http://pebblemill.org, and an associated Facebook group. The website receives around 400 hits a week, with most of the traffic directed via Facebook links. The site includes video interviews with programme makers, editors and designers, as well as photographs and written memories. Pebble Mill is often remembered nostalgically by former members of staff, myself included, and many keep photographs which they are happy to share on the website. I post blogs regularly on the site, and by linking, remediate them to the ancillary Facebook group. The group has almost 1,200 Facebook “friends”, who have proved an invaluable resource, adding comments about working on productions, identifying photographs, posting their own photographs, and invoking memories in others. Often, a conversation is sparked on the Facebook group about a programme or a production method, which I then copy and preserve on the website. A culture has grown up around the site itself, and 1

The Pebble Mill Project was the recipient of a Screen West Midlands Digital Archive Fund grant.

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codes of practice have evolved naturally, for example, members themselves “police” the Facebook group, and ask for any irrelevant posts to be taken down.

Traditional TV histories Helen Wheatley provides a taxonomy of the different approaches that television histories can examine, including the meta-narratives of television as an institution; the micro histories of making programmes; viewing in relation to social or political change; form, aesthetics and representations; and the technological history of television (2007, 7). The Pebble Mill Project addresses most of Wheatley’s categories, aside from exploring viewing in relation to change, because the site concentrates on the programme makers, rather than audience impact. The posts, and readers’ responses to them, can tell us much about BBC production in Birmingham as an institution, its culture and working practices; although we must be conscious that the official BBC perspective tends not to be presented, and we are therefore only seeing a partial picture. The project is adept at detailing the making of television, giving programme makers the opportunity to talk about how specific series were produced. We can access voices, which are unlikely to be included in an institutional archive, for instance crew who worked on a particular show. Representation can certainly be addressed on the site, and it has, for instance, been particularly gratifying to hear from some of the families of contributors from impactful documentaries like Philip Donnellan’s film, The Colony (BBC 1964), an early example of West Indian immigrants’ experiences of life in the West Midlands, told through their own voices. The technological history of television is frequently demonstrated on the site. Engineering and postproduction staff are well represented in the Pebble Mill Facebook group, and actively contribute, prolifically documenting their working lives through photographs. This is particularly fruitful when illustrating how production and broadcasting technologies have developed. That the Pebble Mill Project can address most approaches to historical television research goes some way to demonstrate that online and social media can be a valuable tool in creating a historiography of production, particularly if used alongside institutional archives. Catherine Johnson argues that the huge volumes of the most everyday television programmes are difficult subjects for historians; they come without critical acclaim and often with questions regarding quality, particularly in relation to aesthetics (2007, 65). However, it can be said that all television programming is transient and of the moment: broadcast,

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viewed and then discarded to be replaced by the next transmission; this was particularly true in the 1970s and 1980s, when Pebble Mill was at its height, although arguably less so in the digital age, with the changes in the way that people consume TV. Are only those programmes with the highest production values, the biggest budgets, the most critical acclaim, to be considered by television historians? What makes one programme worthy of attention over another? Is it the audience size, the fact that some erudite critic deems it to have value, or that the production company or broadcaster has thought fit to archive it? It can be argued that researching the most ubiquitous of television programmes has a value, particularly in terms of understanding the production culture, the economies of scale, the pressures of delivery and the relationship between production teams and craft roles in programme making, as well as exploring how these programmes were consumed and by whom (Bonner 2003). There is no less effort for the production team in making a low budget programme than a high end one. Frequently, producers and directors have to think more creatively to make a less well funded programme look as good as possible, and deliver within a tighter timeframe. The series that are uppermost in the memories of the programme makers are not necessarily those that academic television historians canonise, but those where a new piece of technology was implemented, where a particular incident happened, or perhaps those that ultimately failed, and such programmes seem worthy of academic attention. With the exception of some of the dramas made at BBC Pebble Mill, for example Nuts in May, Boys from the Blackstuff, and Penda’s Fen (BBC 1974), many of the centre’s productions did not enjoy critical esteem at the time of transmission, and have remained beneath the radar of most television historians. Output consisted largely of both live and recorded daytime studio programmes, like Pebble Mill at One, Good Morning with Anne and Nick (BBC 1992—6), Call My Bluff (BBC 1996—2005), Style Challenge (BBC 1996—8) and Going for a Song (BBC 1995—9), as well as long running factual series for both daytime and primetime, such as Gardeners’ World, Countryfile, Top Gear, Real Rooms (BBC 1997—2002), The Clothes Show (BBC 1986—2000), and the programming of the Multicultural Unit, later becoming the Asian Programmes Unit. If television historians neglect the programmes produced by centres like Pebble Mill, then much will be lost; both knowledge of those everyday series and perhaps, more importantly, of the culture of network production in some English regions in the latter part of the twentieth century. Since many of the programmes made at Pebble Mill no longer exist, due to tapes being recorded over or discarded, the

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programme makers are an invaluable resource, with their memories, photographs and documents, and one that digital Web technologies make easy to access.

Digital technologies provide new opportunities Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005) refers to the contemporary, communal Internet and websites which, unlike their static predecessors, utilise digital technologies to allow for interactivity and collaboration. Social media sites, like Facebook, are prime examples of the way in which Web 2.0 provides new opportunities for online community building and creation: end-users can interact, comment, or post an artefact, whether that is a photograph, an audio or video clip, or a piece of writing. Media production, and indeed archiving, is therefore no longer the preserve of production companies and broadcasters: A shift in power relations is occurring, such that the powerful archiving force of the institution (museum, government, church, law or mass media) and corporations that may seek to preserve knowledge and history on their own terms seems to be challenged by the personal archiving power of increasingly popular and easy-to-use digital media (Garde-Hansen 2009, 147-8).

The advances in digital technologies have allowed for interactive and community archives to emerge, outside of any institutional control, in a way that was not previously possible. It is this potential for interactivity, and the empowerment of the individual outside of the institution that makes for exciting opportunities. The importance of the individual should not be underestimated here, the technological possibilities require human participation to make use of them and to orchestrate the conversation with fellow enthusiasts. It is this combination of social and technological factors that is important; having the means of expression is pointless if you have nothing to say, and no one to share it with (Leadbeater 2008). It is the ability to consult with a diverse but well-informed community, each member with their own piece of the jigsaw, that is significant for the Pebble Mill Project. Most members of the Facebook group were staff at BBC Pebble Mill, but other contributors include relatives of people who worked there, academics and historians, those interested in the Birmingham cultural scene, and people who simply enjoyed the programmes. Facebook is adept at constructing imagined communities, and the group is predicated on a shared identity, through members’ association with the project. Many members knew each other in their working lives at Pebble Mill, and for

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them the group has become a valuable tool for social interaction. Several people have been in contact to thank me for creating the website and Facebook group, which have enabled them to get back in touch with former colleagues they have not seen or heard from in a number of years. This is an example of “maintained social capital”, where valuable connections are reinstated, even when one’s life has progressed, and previous social ties are severed (Ellison, Steinfeld and Lampe 2007, 3). Online social networking tools can re-ignite these connections in a way in which is socially beneficial to those involved, but that also can have a wider purpose, for example, in allowing the collaborative building of a memory or archive. Perhaps a more surprising, and potentially more “revolutionary” aspect of Internet technology, than the project’s potential for reconnecting old friends, is the trust and co-operation that has grown between people in the group who did not know each other previously, and the connections that are formed through their shared enthusiasm. This resonates with studies of interaction via social media, for example see Putnam and Feldstein (2003, 227). For instance, I am now in regular on and off-line contact with a number of prolific contributors to the website and Facebook group, whom I did not know before the inception of the project. It is difficult to imagine how these ties could have been nurtured efficiently before the advent of social media, as group participants are so widely geographically scattered, with people accessing the site from as far afield as India, Australia and the United States as well as those across Europe and specifically from the United Kingdom. Although the primary purpose of the project was to create an interactive and democratic archive of programme making at the BBC in Birmingham, this positive social aspect, the building of an online community, has been an unintentional but interesting development.

What does a television archive mean in an online world? The traditional television archive is deeply entwined in issues of institutional power (Spigel 2010, 55); artefacts are selected as worthy of inclusion by some quality threshold not normally visible to outsiders. Materials are catalogued, preserved and made accessible (or not), by the institution and its stewards. From an institutional perspective this control makes perfect sense: there are commercial, ethical and legal considerations, as well as issues surrounding copyright. It is a “top-down” approach, ordered and rule driven, and the traditional archive is a physical space, a repository for items such as film, tapes, production files and documents. Digital interactivity democratises the archive in a way that is difficult for

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institutions to control. The amateurisation, and subsequent lack of archival process causes issues for television historians. As Lynn Spigel has suggested, sites like YouTube which fail to provide vital programming information such as original broadcast channels or dates, complicate or otherwise ignore the wider contexts of the programmes they hold clips from (Spigel 2010, 65). Conversely, the digital archive opens up previously untapped possibilities that can both change and enrich the television historian’s view. What is worth preserving and discussing is no longer at the institutional archivist’s discretion, but is now under the control of a collaborative online community. The relationship of personal memory and television history comes into effect here. As Spigel suggests: “As the archive goes viral, the nature of television history changes not only because of what is available, but also because of well-entrenched tastes and presuppositions about what counts as official history and what counts as popular memory or nostalgia” (Spigel 2010, 70). This observation is very relevant to the Pebble Mill Project. The majority of the artefacts displayed on the site would never have been archived in the traditional sense. Whilst some of the photographs, such as publicity stills, or records of studio sets were taken in a professional context, many more are simply informal shots of friends at work. Alongside the stills, blogs written by former staff at BBC Pebble Mill make up most of the content of the site. It is this access to personal memory and first hand testimony that makes the site so rich in terms of anecdotes and opinion, and it is particularly the interplay between posts on the site and the associated discussions on the Facebook group, that provides a potentially important record of ephemeral television series not otherwise deemed worthy of inclusion in the canon of historically significant programmes preserved by the BBC. Production and broadcast technologies and how they evolved, adapted and changed, along with the culture of working in television production during the second half of the twentieth century are also captured in the project, and are frequent topics of conversation within the online community. This community created archive does what Susan Douglas (2010) suggests: it is complementary to the traditional institutional collection, rather than duplicatory; it documents and records different materials, and tends to be more centred on the people involved in production and their memories, rather than the official documentation around the output and the programmes themselves. I would argue that there are different motivations behind the institutional and online community archive. Whilst both aim to preserve artefacts, what they determine worthy of preservation differs. The institution has to be

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careful to preserve its image and brand, selection has to be made due to space restrictions, and issues of “quality” programming and reputation have to be addressed and prioritised. The number of visitors to the archive and its ease of use are perhaps secondary concerns. For the online community archive, like the Pebble Mill Project, viability is determined by its usage and accessibility. It needs visibility and support to build its archive and serve its community, and as it is not run by a professional archivist, it is perhaps less focussed on the categorisation and preservation of the physical artefact, which indeed, it may not actually hold. Equally, the online community archive has, because of its interactivity, the ability to develop organically in response to community interest; it is shaped by its users, and is not a static entity. The opportunities which digital technologies provide cause us to question who the archivists are, and what online archives might consist of. We have seen the rise of the “citizen journalist”, and we are now perhaps seeing the rise of the “citizen curator”. In receiving artefacts, particularly photographs, from the Pebble Mill community to place on the website, it is possible to see a pattern in who contributes, and what type of material they choose to share. We can divide the photographs contributed into three categories: those taken as a requirement of someone’s job, those taken informally to document programmes or working environments, and snaps of friends at work. Included in the first category are publicity stills taken by professional photographers, particularly of dramas, used to promote forthcoming programmes in the press. Also in this category are photographic records of sets and lighting rigs taken by designers, as well as Polaroids taken by costume and make-up for continuity reasons. There is a wealth of this kind of material on the Pebble Mill website. The second category of photographs were often taken by staff, not as part of their job, but recording for themselves the programmes they were working on, or machinery they were using. The majority of the photos submitted are from former post-production staff, documenting the equipment they used and the editing suites they worked in. It is unclear why post-production workers chose to take more photographs than other craft staff, whether it is related in some way to the nature of their work, or the culture of the department, or indeed simply because of the particular individuals that are in the group. I rarely receive photographs from producers, it was much more common for former production assistants or other, more junior, members of teams to take photographs. This task was not expected or required of production teams, and producers would probably be preoccupied by the shoot itself and have little time for taking photos.

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The third category of more casual photographs again tends to be dominated by post-production staff, as well as design crews and some production teams. These photographs of parties, of informal gatherings in the bar or canteen, or of fun on location are perhaps less interesting from the point of view of documenting the programme making itself, but tell us much about the culture of a relatively stable workforce who knew each other well, and developed lasting friendships. In terms of written blogs on the website, the contributors are often former engineering or post-production staff; sometimes writing about working on a particular programme, or documenting the technology used in a particular era, or reminiscing about their career at Pebble Mill. Blogs, and even short written comments, can prove a worthwhile resource, frequently providing a wider context and arguably more value than photographs alone can give. Assigning significance to particular artefacts is something that an institutional archive does habitually, in contrast to online community archives, which allow for a conglomeration of material, easily accessible and searchable, but where users must employ their own judgment and interest in valuing the contributions. However, adding value to an original post is something that online communities can accomplish with ease. The following exchange posted on the Facebook group in response to a photograph (see Fig. 13-1) of the crew of the 1980’s drama, Morte D’Arthur (BBC 1984), pictured with a studio camera, an EMI 2001, illustrates how the process can work: Lighting director: Looks like a 2001 - nasty things! Engineer: Nasty things? From what I heard, once they were lined up they stayed lined up, not like the Links that needed realigning twice a day! Lighting director: Just stirring it! I never liked the tinted-monochrome feel of the EMIs but I was a voice crying in the wilderness when I arrived at Pebble Mill in 1984. Criticising the EMI 2001 was not a move guaranteed to endear me as the new boy. Cameraman: Ask any cameraman who worked during the 70’s or 80’s what was the best camera to operate, and the EMI 2001 would come out tops.

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Fig. 13-1: The crew of Morte D’Arthur. © Willoughby Gullachsen

We hear three different perspectives, from skilled craftsmen, each with a valid reason for their view. It would be impossible to anticipate such a conversation happening offline, and therefore difficult to capture it using another method—for example via interview—and yet this is the type of encounter which happens organically in a social media context. The comments tell us much about the production culture, they hint at the rivalry between different specialisms within the crew, as well as displaying their professionalism, and the importance of fitting in and being accepted. Such spontaneous conversations cannot be predicted, but capturing them does add to our understanding of screen histories in ways that would be difficult without social media. Occasionally, I post a photograph on the website for which I have very little information, and the Facebook group are invited to identify what a particular piece of equipment was and discuss the working practices surrounding it: in effect crowd sourcing information. Usually, within a remarkably short space of time, interesting and informative comments are posted. A case in point is the following response to a photograph of an editing block used on two-inch videotape in the 1960s and 1970s (see Fig. 13-2): Videotape editor: It is indeed a 2” Quad editing block. The magnetic recording was revealed by applying iron filings onto the tape and then viewed through a microscope to find the correct place to cut and splice the tape to make a synchronous join.

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Sound recordist: If I remember correctly the sound edit was at a different point from the video, making the edit not a straight cut. Also in Scotland the editors cut football matches on a single quad machine using this technique. On play out the tape ran continuously even when we cut back to the studio for links, which made studio presenting a hazardous activity. The link simply had to fit the gap in the tape. Lighting director: It’s thanks to the policy of avoiding editing a 2” tape that so many early programmes have been lost—they were recorded over! Radio producer/presenter: Exactly! I think if they cut the tape it had to be costed in the programme budgets.

Fig. 13-2. Editing block © Ian Collins

We learn from this online conversation not only about the time consuming and intricate disciplines of working with this piece of equipment, but about its implications in terms of both the production process and viewing experience. The explanation about expensive tape costs being passed on to programmes only if they were edited gives us an insight into why so many programmes were wiped rather than being archived. The participants draw on their experiences in other production centres beyond BBC Pebble Mill, widening the frames of reference, and giving the website relevance outside

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of the geographical locality. The production process of recording and editing today appears so simple and straightforward in comparison to this era, and as someone who is used to operating semi-professional camcorders today, an understanding of the technological history of programme making has provided me with a new found respect for these craftsmen. Many of the programmes produced at Pebble Mill were high volume, low budget productions, often for BBC1 Daytime: programmes with perceived low cultural value, which tend to be omitted from the major online television databases, such as the British Film Institute (BFI) database, and International Movie Database (IMDb). Such series can be difficult to research, and therefore having an online community to refer to can prove very effective. The BBC1 food quiz Eat Your Words (BBC 1996), is a case in point. I had a photograph of the set, from the production designer, but knew no other details about the show. Through posting the photograph on the website and linking it to the Facebook group, additional information was offered. The researcher who had developed the idea and devised the title added a comment, as did the show’s celebrity booker, advising that Loyd Grossman was the presenter, as well as identifying the two team captains, and providing the names of many of the celebrity guests. This information certainly enriches the archive of series which could otherwise be forgotten entirely, and demonstrates the potential of online interactive archives in supplementing traditional institutional archives. When I began the Pebble Mill Project I had assumed that I would be generating all the content. Former post-production staff had provided a lot of photographic material for the site, but I assumed that the pages would be fairly static once built. The associated Facebook group was initially seen as an aside. Facebook, however, has become integral to the project, and from the analysis of users it is clear that most traffic is directed via the Facebook links to the website. What was even more surprising was that the Facebook group grew and grew, and people began posting their own material. With their permission I was then able to copy photographs and comments and publish them again on the actual website, so that they are preserved, and searchable. Instead, therefore, of having to rely on information that I could source myself from interviews, or photographs in my possession, the site became community generated. The informality of Facebook, and the fact members can join and leave the conversation at will, makes people comfortable in commenting on a post in a way in which they seem more reticent to do on the website. This leads to interesting stories coming to light, which would otherwise risk

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being lost. The following anecdote was posted as a Facebook comment in response to a photograph about a different Pebble Mill at One programme: Assistant Floor Manager: And then, of course, there was the ‘World War III’ PM (Pebble Mill at One) from about 1981. My job was to cue in about 15 tanks and armoured personnel vehicles at the beginning of the show. Unfortunately, the engines were so loud that X’s (the director’s) ‘stand by to cue’ sounded like ‘and cue’; with the wonderful outcome that the war was over even before a bewildered and slightly smoky Bob Langley opened the show. I remember X’s rage becoming audible over the departing army ... To be fair, the centurion tanks didn’t help, but of course, absolutely, all X’s fault. I was so annoyed, I even swapped my earpiece for a headset...

The story illustrates the unpredictability of live television, and the repercussions of things going wrong on air, as well as the scale and ambition of a daily daytime magazine show. This kind of incident is unlikely to be recorded in the official BBC archive; there was probably no incriminating paper trail. Even if the programme as broadcast still exists, without the background knowledge the casual viewer would probably not realise that what was seen on screen was not intended to happen that way. The comment also demonstrates how one post can inspire another different, yet related, one. Through the interactivity of digital web technologies, the online community has the ability to build a story collectively, with each contributor adding a small piece to the jigsaw. An example of this took place when I posted a comment about comedian Frank Carson’s funeral in March 2012, mentioning that he had been a guest on Pebble Mill (BBC 1990—6), and had, I believed, attended the staff Christmas party. A member of staff confirmed: He came in through the double doors, saw an audience in party hats and went for it. He was fabulous. It was a real treat. Took our mind off sprouts that had been cooking since September.

An engineer then commented that he had a photograph of Carson at the party, which I was able to add to the post (see Fig. 13-3). After this the researcher who was looking after the comedian on the day added the following: When he arrived, he told me his flight back home to Blackpool wasn’t until 6pm, so we had to find something for him to do, the Christmas lunch was a Godsend. […] I love the earlier comments because since that day I’ve felt slightly guilty at disrupting everyone’s lunch. He was a lovely

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The post beccame richer thhrough the add dition of eachh comment. It is hard to imagine hoow this kind of incident could be efffectively doccumented without thee collaborative nature of social mediaa. That the comments c assuaged thee guilt the ressearcher had felt f from lettinng Carson loo ose at the Christmas llunch was an a added and d totally unfforeseen benefit. The exchange allso tells us a lot about thee culture of th the organisatio on – that there was a Christmas luunch for all th he staff, and tthat programm me guests might be inncluded, dem monstrates a closely c knit, yet informal working community.

Limitations of viirtual archiives mmunity arch hives such There are a number of chhallenges that unofficial com w The site has no officiial status, as the Pebble Mill Projecct are faced with. and I did noot consult thee BBC beforee I started it, although I diid talk to some formeer colleagues about a the issu ues I might faace. Some meembers of BBC managgement are aw ware of the pro oject and are ssupportive, forr instance the former H Head of Vision Productionss Birmingham m, Nick Patten n, has told me personallly that he enjooys the site. The T project is cclearly not commercial and remainss below the raddar of much of o the Corporaation.

Figure 13-3. F Frank Carson at a a staff party. © Stuart Gandyy

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Intellectual Property The question of intellectual property rights is an important and at times complex one. The BBC, like other broadcasters, is protective of the copyright of its programmes, despite its public service remit and its attempts to make some of its archived programmes more widely accessible online. This defensiveness is understandable given the BBC’s commercial activities, through BBC Worldwide, such as DVD sales, and sales of programmes abroad, as well as the complex rights considerations of its archived programmes. From my experience of working as a producer at the BBC, I know that during the Pebble Mill era many shows were licensed for two UK and Eire terrestrial transmissions only, and anything above that (including online) would require a renegotiation with rights holders such as artists, directors, composers etc.; this would be unfeasible, both logistically and (potentially) financially. There is no BBC video on the http://pebblemill.org site; to breach the BBC’s rights in this manner could invite unwelcome official attention, and possibly sanction. All video material has been specially shot for the website and does not pose rights issues. I am careful to add a copyright disclaimer on all posts, stating that, “copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission”.

Accuracy and authenticity Other major considerations with an archive sourced from an online community are questions of accuracy and authenticity. Frequently, little verification is possible, and an individual’s memories may prove factually unreliable. This was illustrated with a Facebook discussion over the location of former BBC Birmingham studios in Broad Street. The writer of a blog post said that he thought the building was still there, near the canal, another person said that it had been demolished, and had been where a hotel now stands, and a third person described it as being further up Broad Street altogether. It was possible to check this information using other sources, but for memories of specific programmes or working practices, this is not necessarily the case, and therefore information in blogs or online comments cannot be assumed to be entirely accurate. Whilst much of this inaccuracy is unintentional there are also questions of deliberate embellishment with incidents gaining greater impact in the re-telling than they originally enjoyed. The fact that the online community is made up of programme makers, people whose careers were often founded on their ability to tell a good story, seeks to cast a question of doubt over the

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veracity of some aspects of incidents re-told through website blogs or comments. The following is an edited excerpt from a cameraman’s blog about the occasion when a harrier jump jet appeared on the Pebble Mill at One programme: Ah, the Harrier. As you can see, it’s a bloody expensive way of getting a bloke from Rutland to Pebble Mill. Now, when these guys say they’ll land at 13:12 they land at 13:12. The director was screaming that they were early but really he should have asked them what time they’ll get close enough to be seen, which is obviously 4 or 5 minutes earlier. So, the ensuing interview had to be cut short and we all legged it out the back. A helpful squaddie from the advanced party suggested I keep a respectable distance to prevent self-immolation. I’m so glad he told me because it allowed me to pin several rounds of bread to my chest both as protection and for a late breakfast. What a racket this thing makes when it hovers and the down-draught is incredible, much worse than a helicopter. However, because it’s a jet, it’s the heat that gets you. The bread proved a winner, but he landed a little too quickly for my liking. Despite this thing costing hundreds of millions, I couldn’t believe it when they used an extremely old wooden window cleaning ladder for his dismount. Presumably, there’s a window cleaner in Rutland using a very expensive set of steps to ply his trade. Once in the grasp of mother earth, he was beckoned for the interview with Marian Foster. If I remember rightly the answer to the first question was, ‘10 years’, the second, ‘head for Leicester, straight down the M69, right at the M6 and left at Spaghetti Junction’ and the third, ‘in time for afternoon tea’.

The writer was a little annoyed when readers commented on small details of the blog, such as questioning if the plane had actually come from Rutland. In a subsequent message to me, he explained that they were missing the point of the story, which he’d written to be amusing, as well as informative. To him it did not matter if the plane had come from Rutland or Somerset, he couldn’t actually remember Marian Foster’s questions, and the window cleaner’s ladder and the toast were obviously pure fabrication. This brings into question the purpose of material on the website: should it always be objective and as accurate as possible, or is it just as acceptable to tell an amusing story in the spirit of a particular incident? The problem arises if the tone of a particular piece is not clear, resulting in ambiguity for the reader. Across the website the tone of the material is generally factual and objective, but blog posts, authored by individuals, sometimes have a more humorous tone.

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Allied to issues of accuracy and authenticity is the propensity of individuals reflecting on incidents through the prism of ‘rose-tinted spectacles’: remembering things as better than they actually were at the time, although this is not always the case. We obviously remember the past through the actuality of the present, and this colours our recollections, and distorts the memory. The experience of particular incidents may become heightened in the act of remembering, resulting in a greater polarisation between positive and negative. Sometimes the posting of a photograph on the website elicits a very strong response; this was the case with a production still from the 1992 drama Witchcraft (BBC 1992). Here are a couple of the comments: First assistant director: This show was a nightmare. As 1st AD I ended up being the go-between between a ‘difficult’ director and the crew – many of whom used to be in tears because of something the aforesaid director had said/implied. I went prematurely grey and X (the designer) left show-business as a result! Assistant editor: I was assistant editor, working with Y (the editor). A bonkers production. Z (the director) was hideously good at divide (and rule) and the best advice we were given right at the start was to take notes of what he said so that when someone else said, ‘Oh no, he said that’ we could point to our notes and say ‘Oh no he didn’t’ and thus maintain unity […] We had a cutting room bottle of brandy, which I’d hide so that Y couldn’t drink it all at once. Great to have after some crazy viewing or other. It lasted right through to final cut, I can remember the final toast.

Similar sentiments were offered by a number of people working on the drama. There seemed to be a collective sense of wanting to discuss and remember the problematic production, ameliorating the experience even though it was twenty years on. Despite the negative experience, there are touches of humour prevalent in these comments. The cutting room bottle of brandy hints at what was, and was not, perceived as acceptable working practice. Such a solace would be unlikely to be tolerated in today’s workplace. Negative comments on website posts have to be considered carefully, and may require moderation, or removal, particularly if they are defamatory, offensive, overtly political or risk infringing someone’s privacy. There can be a tendency, particularly when commenting on platforms like Facebook, to make unguarded or ill-judged remarks. On one occasion photographs were posted on the website of a long running popular drama series recorded at Pebble Mill. The make-up designer on

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the series added information about the location recordings, remembering how the lead actress, who was very well known, had sadly suffered a miscarriage during filming, although this was not common knowledge at the time. Fortunately she realised that this comment was inappropriate for a public forum shortly after posting it, and deleted it, but it highlights the dangers of failing to think through the implications of a particular comment. Whilst online and social media enjoy wide participation, many people, and perhaps particularly older people, are reluctant to become involved with it; research by Ofcom shows that adults over the age of 60 are less likely to use the Internet than younger people (Ofcom 2009). BBC Pebble Mill was operational from 1971-2004 and therefore many of the former staff are an ageing population, and could be unwittingly self-excluded from the project. The result is that particular viewpoints, artefacts or information could be lost if the website and Facebook group are the only ways of engaging with potentially interested individuals. Besides the online activity there have been a number of offline events, such as screenings, which have helped to bring other perspectives to the project. Additionally, some former employees hold regular reunions, which could prove another valuable source of contributions. Another potential limitation of the archive being online is the reluctance of some former staff members to share their photographs or memories. For some people this is due to concerns over how materials might be used by third parties, whilst others wish to keep their memories private, and whilst the archive might well benefit from these people’s contributions, their views must obviously be respected.

Fragility The website and Facebook group are by their nature perhaps as ephemeral as some of the television programmes that they document. Online digital archives, whilst widening participation, should not be thought of as necessarily synonymous with the long-term preservation of artefacts. They are virtual rather than physical spaces, and therefore particularly vulnerable. This was illustrated recently when the server that hosts the Pebble Mill website crashed. The website was unavailable for a number of hours, highlighting not only the intangibility of the online world, but also the lack of control, and potential impingement by forces totally unrelated to the project. The success of the project hinges on the contributions of the Facebook group, and yet Facebook seems even more vulnerable and impermanent than the actual website. Facebook comprises of global and

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corporate-designed systems, where users’ contributions are rule-bound and homogenised (Garde-Hansen 2009). Facebook claim intellectual property rights over contributions, and can change the site in any way at any time; users therefore have very little control. It is also impossible to search by subject, therefore in order to provide this function, I copy the majority of the Facebook comments and update the original website post with the new information, explaining where it has come from. In this way the Facebook conversations are preserved and searchable, on the website at least.

My Position Both a benefit and a potential limitation of online, community archives, such as the Pebble Mill Project, is the individual, or group of people who run the site and post the content, who could be termed “citizen curators”. The Pebble Mill Project would have been highly unlikely to flourish if it had not been set up by a former member of staff. Although I do not personally know, offline at least, many of the people who contribute to the site, we are likely to have mutual contacts. This builds trust, and therefore gives me access to information that would be very difficult for an outsider to negotiate. There is a shared understanding of the production culture, which can begin to add meaning to a seemingly dull artefact. This trust is very important, and could be seen to be abused if, for example, I decided to try and commercialise, or politicise the site. At present there is an unspoken contract between myself and the contributors to the site, that the purpose of the site is as stated: to document and celebrate the programme making that went on at Pebble Mill. When the website began I did not anticipate its popularity, nor the implications or responsibilities of running it. It has become a community archive, and therefore it needs to serve the needs of the community: material should be structured in a logical way, categorised, and searchable, so that it can be retrieved easily, as is the case with a more orthodox archive. Material needs to be checked for factual accuracy, where possible, and posts should not be offensive or defamatory. If posts are inaccurate or substandard in some other way then this reflects on the quality of the site and diminishes the esteem users hold it in. Additionally the copyright of the artefacts on the site needs to be protected as much as is possible within the scope of digital interactivity, and amidst the sometimes conflicting desire to share information as freely as possible. Running the website takes a considerable amount of time, and whilst I find it very rewarding, I may not want to do it indefinitely; equally I would not want the website to stagnate, or worse, to become defunct or

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decommissioned. The long-term future of the website—and its relationship with curators—therefore needs further consideration.

Conclusion The Pebble Mill Project provides material which informs a historiography of television production at BBC Pebble Mill, concentrating particularly on exploring the relationship of evolving television production technology with innovation in programme making. The website and Facebook group have been a valuable resource for academics not directly involved in the project; for example Rachel Moseley (2013), Ben Lamb (2012) and Paul Long (2011) have all used the archive and community to further their research. This impact is beyond the scope of the initial project, and hints at the potential of online community archives to feed in to wider research into television histories. Despite its obvious limitations and challenges, social media does provide television historians with a potential new tool in documenting screen histories, particularly for those programmes or practices less likely to be archived in any detail through traditional methods. We obviously need to be mindful that the results may only provide us with a partial picture, but perhaps one that is not easily accessed elsewhere, and one that can be supplemented by resource to the institutional archives. The Pebble Mill Project is perhaps a singular case, but it does illustrate the potential for using social media in the research of television history, and could provide a model for developing other projects along similar lines.

Bibliography BBC. 1969. Broadcasting in the Seventies. London: British Broadcasting Corporation. Brandt, George ed. 1993. British Television Drama in the 1980s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonner, Frances. 2003. Ordinary Television. London: Sage Publications. Cooke, Lez. 2005. “Regional British television drama in the 1960s and 1970s”. Journal of Media Practice 6:3: 145-155. Douglas, Susan. 2010. “Writing From the Archive: Creating Your Own”. The Communication Review, 13:1. 5-14 Ellison, Nicole, Charles Steinfield and Cliff Lampe. 2007. “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12:4, article 1. Available at:

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http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html Garde-Hansen, Joanne ed. 2009. Save as…Digital Memories. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Catherine. 2007. “Negotiating value and quality in television historiography”. In Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography, ed. Helen Wheatley, 55-66. London: I. B. Tauris. Lamb, Ben. 2012. “The Roses of Eyam: reassessing the theatrical legacy of studio-shot television drama”. Conference: Theatre Plays on British Television. University of Westminster, 19 October. Leadbeater, Charles. 2008. We-think: Mass innovation, not mass production: The Power of Mass Creativity. London: Profile Books Long, Paul. 2011. “Representing Race and Place: Black Midlanders on Television in the 1960s and 1970s”. Midland History, 36:2: 262–77. Moseley, Rachel. 2013. “‘It’s a Wild Country. Wild … Passionate … Strange": Poldark and the Place-image of Cornwall”. Visual Culture in Britain, 14:2: 218-237. O’Reilly, Tim. 2005. Design Patterns and Models for the Next Generation of Software. [Online]. http://www.oreillynet.com/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web20.html. Accessed October 19, 2012. Ofcom, 2009. Digital Lifestyles: Adults aged 60 and over. [Online]. http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/medialiteracy/archive/medlitpub/medlitpubrss/digitallifestyles/ Accessed February 22, 2013. Putnam, Robert, D. and Lewis, M Feldstein. 2003. Better Together. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rolinson, Dave. 2005. Alan Clarke. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spigel, Lynn. 2010. “‘Housing Television’: Architecture of the Archive”. The Communication Review 13:1: 52-74. Wheatley, Helen ed. 2007. Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography. London: I. B. Tauris.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN HISTORICAL SUBJECTIVITY AND FILM STYLE: RE-ENACTMENT AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL CINEMA ADAM GALLIMORE

In this chapter, I wish to explore the potential of contemporary filmmaking practices to represent the historical past and to reconsider the role that style has in the construction of historical meaning. Placing particular emphasis on The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005) and Public Enemies (Michael Mann, 2009), I argue that the contemporary historical film provides a new range of techniques and approaches that revise the themes and motifs typically associated with historical cinema, in order to provide narratives that engage more subjectively with the past to present a form of historical experience. Reading the contemporary historical film alongside the work of Paul Ricœur, Robert Rosenstone and Robert Burgoyne, I draw attention to the ways that modern historical cinema foregrounds the subjective experience of past events as a form of historical agency, emphasising the emergence of recent digital filming and editing practices, in addition to particular forms of historical re-enactment. Traditionally, historical cinema has been understood as playing an important role in shaping cultural understandings of the past, apparent in its tendency to arouse public controversy. For Robert Burgoyne, the historical film is recognised for “its ability to establish an emotional connection to the past, a connection that can awaken a powerful sense of national belonging or a probing sense of national self-scrutiny” (Burgoyne 2008, 1-2). In order to understand these forms of historical representation and interpretation within broader filmmaking contexts across cultural, ethnic and geographic boundaries, we need to move away from the position that cinema merely allows us to view history. For instance, Tony Barta states: “Watching a costume drama or a historical documentary we want the screen to be a window on the past” (Barta 1998, 2). We need to

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consider how we move through the window, how we experience and relate more directly to the history in front of us at the level of involvement as opposed to passive spectatorship. This chapter also explores the way modern historical narratives have been shaped by a range of technological and stylistic devices, and how this impacts on the presentation of the past. Burgoyne notes that, like many genres, “the historical film has developed several different variants, branching off into distinct subtypes such as the war film, the epic, the biographical film, the topical film, and evolving new, contemporary forms such as the metahistorical film” (Burgoyne 2008, 4). With reference to the films studied in this chapter, each has a basis in a documentable past, allowing it to be interpreted as a variant of the historical film that employs a range of contemporary film techniques and technologies to construct a re-visioning of the past. These films have been produced in a period of technological change, and demonstrate how the historical past is recreated, re-enacted, and re-visioned through particular aesthetic and representational strategies. The contemporary historical film represents, in its production cultures and contexts, subject matter, and narrative forms, a range of cultural expressions and national mythologies. Recent forms of historical representation signify a resurgence of historical consciousness in a period marked by heightened national and cultural discourses relating to both the past and the present. For these reasons, the historical film should be considered as more than a genre, and its variety and scope in transnational and global film cultures make it important for contemporary study. Among several questions considered here is the link between historical representation and production practices relating to digital technologies. Writers such as Kirsten Moana Thompson (2011), Shilo T. McClean (2007), and Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale (2010) have examined the progression of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and its impact on the historical film, but I wish to look beyond this to consider additional technological influences. Thompson’s work in particular considers the impact of CGI and digital enhancement on epic cinema, breaking down the pervasive role that visual effects have had in the transformation of the historical epic into three fields of intensification: spectacularity, monumentality, and immersiveness. She provides a detailed analysis of the digital techniques employed in contemporary epics such as Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004) and Alexander (Oliver Stone, 2004), demonstrating how they have been used to enhance historical spectacle, and tracks the advances in visual stylisation. Thompson also questions how digital special effects have transformed the aesthetics of the historical epic, noting

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how in Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000), for instance, visual effects serve to “enhance verisimilitude and spectatorial immersion […] and to be functionally seamless, if not invisible” (Thompson 2011, 42).1 While Hall and Neale note the impact of digital advancements within the areas of production, distribution and exhibition—such as CGI, video games, IMAX (and other large formats), 3D cinema, and the advent of DVD and Bluray—they make only brief mention of digital projection and do not consider the influence or expressive potential of other forms of digital filmmaking. This is something I wish to rectify by addressing the manner by which historical cinema has been shaped in recent years by digital techniques. Recent approaches to historical material in films such as The New World, Public Enemies, Che (Steven Soderbergh, 2008), and Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010) have reflected a change in film style that significantly affects how the past is represented and how the spectator is situated within the historical experience. I propose that these new interpretations and treatments of history result from five key factors. Aside from period authenticity, which has always been a key element for creating historical verisimilitude through set design, period costuming, and hair and makeup, together with an inevitable amount of dramatic license in the adaption historical narratives that must be taken into account, this study will focus on forms of historical re-enactment, and new digital filming and digital editing techniques.

Digital filming In The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (1985) suggest that the adoption of new technologies in filmmaking has three principal functions: it provides greater efficiency, offers product differentiation, and raises quality standards. The shift from analogue to digital production has allowed for smaller crews and has lowered print costs, and the adaptability and flexibility of the digital format facilitates the production and integration of 3D and other visual effects. It has also resulted in smaller, lighter, more mobile cameras, thus making the filmmaking process more efficient. Shooting digitally has become more widely accepted by studios in producing mainstream commercial films, being simpler to use for filming and editing and allowing for more cost 1

McClean makes a particular distinction between invisible and seamless effects, with seamless effects being “discernible if subjected to scrutiny and consideration,” and therefore open to individual perception (2007, 76-85).

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effective filmmaking on a general scale. In terms of differentiation, there now exist a plethora of digital cameras that are widely available and offer a broad spectrum of qualities, resolutions, shutter speeds, chip sizes, tones and colour ranges. Different equipment can be employed to create divergent aesthetics and novel or immersive experiences, while simultaneously advancing cinematic traits of historical verisimilitude and photorealism.2 The effect of these technologically-enabled approaches can serve to heighten the historical spectacle and enhance engagement with the period diegesis. The digital production context of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies relates to the construction of both its narrative and its aesthetic. For historical cinema, digital filmmaking practices provide a range of aesthetic features and possibilities, but they also represent a new and still emerging set of industrial and technological conditions. This relates to broader issues of historical representation and digital approaches to history that attempt to capture and relate the past using new technologies. The use of the digital camera in the historical film can be related to the genre’s tradition of technological innovation; as Burgoyne notes, films such as The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915), All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930), and The Longest Day (Ken Annakin and Andrew Marton, 1962) each established new camera and optical techniques for the purposes of realism (Burgoyne 2008, 14). I have argued elsewhere that the synthesis of historically-minded period diegeses with digital filmmaking practices works to construct narratives that emphasise their presentness through immersive and immediate styles (Gallimore, 2013). By considering the historical implications of this practice—of pushing the viewer to experience the past as part of their present—I investigate how the modern gangster film can revise its view of history, in this instance through the application of a digital aesthetic. There is a refractive quality in this practice that comments on the cultural form and contemporary societal forces within Public Enemies, a reference to both classical and post-classical manifestations of the genre that supersedes a nostalgic reevocation or conscious replication of past cultural forms. Public Enemies covers the final few months of bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) as he is pursued by FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). Set during the Great Depression, its structure is one of pursuit and escape, of constant movement and flux, emphasising how

2

There is, of course, an issue of spectatorial perception in differentiating between digital and film, and there has been a technological push to produce digital images indistinguishable from celluloid.

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history is catching up with Dillinger. The film was shot using highdefinition, lightweight digital video cameras, principally the Sony CineAlta F23, which offers technical and mechanical flexibility, as well as a compact and rugged design. Public Enemies uses digital video to present a visual construction of this period that has not been captured or experienced before. This extends from the classical gangster cycle, made up of films such as Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931), The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931) and Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932), to the revisionist cycle, including Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (Roger Corman, 1967) and Dillinger (John Milius, 1973), and the “retro” gangster cycle of the 1990s that includes Miller’s Crossing (Joel Coen, 1990), Bullets Over Broadway (Woody Allen, 1994) and The Newton Boys (Richard Linklater, 1998). The effect of presenting the past through a digital aesthetic can be thematically impactful but also considerably jarring, especially considering that relatively few period films shot on HD digital video have been produced. Recent depictions of this era, such as Road to Perdition (Sam Mendes, 2002), The Good Shepherd (Robert De Niro, 2006) and J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2011), have adhered to a more classical film style. The establishment of shallow depth of field and muted colour palettes evince a noirish, chiaroscuro quality, and steady camera movements, achieved through the use of dollies and cranes, further emphasise the artistry of set decoration and period costuming. Mann is counteracting the sense that is usually emitted by the historical film, that of its placement of pastness, reconstruction or retrograde observance. High definition brings with it the intensity and immediacy of instantaneous coverage, with the camera constantly in motion and delving into tight, claustrophobic areas unavailable to larger, more ungainly equipment. Yet this creates a style that can also detract from the film’s immersive intentions. The aesthetic approach is an attempt to show carefully researched historical events in a fashion that is concurrently realistic and dramatic. Features characteristic of this approach—the proximity of the mobile camera, the fast-cutting of scenes—have been identified by David Bordwell (2006) as symptomatic of modern filmmaking within his theory of “intensified continuity,” and the amplification or extension of these traits through the use of the digital camera enhances both the film’s realism and its historicity through a highly controlled and carefully modulated formalism. David Eldridge connects the film industry’s turn to technology in the 1950s (in response to its economic crisis) to the history film, with the genre chosen to showcase the innovations of 3D and other formats. The

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development and introduction of a range of film processes, screen sizes, camera lenses and sound systems were all employed to introduce a new level of spectacle to the cinema that would encourage audience attendances. Eldridge states, “All of these technological advancements and gimmicks, so characteristic of 1950s cinema, were launched with one foot firmly in the past—heralded by history films” (Eldridge 2006, 57), citing such examples as The Robe (CinemaScope; Henry Koster, 1953), Around the World in 80 Days (Todd-AO; Michael Anderson, 1956) and The Ten Commandments (VistaVision; Cecil B. DeMille, 1956). As John Belton suggests, these widescreen processes demonstrated more than just the dimensions of the screen: they “introduced a level of visual spectacle that often threatened to overwhelm the narrative” (Belton 1992, 194). Eldridge further sees these new technologies as “expand[ing] the filmmaker’s conception of history as an extravagant pageant” (Eldridge 2006, 59). The adoption and advancement of these technological innovations in the historical cinema of the 1950s is comparable to the impact of new digital technologies on modern history films. Unlike this period of technological progression that Eldridge identifies, modern history films have not been “selected” to showcase the capabilities and scope of the technology, but they do represent a significant engagement with this technology in terms of its impact on the aesthetic and narrative concerns of historical cinema. For instance, Michael Mann’s insistence that the use of digital video on Public Enemies creates a more realistic and immersive aesthetic is reminiscent of the affinity between 3D and history established in 1950s cinema. While the rhetoric used to promote 3D and widescreen history films of this period sold spectacle as a participatory event, Eldridge notes the change in promotional language to “witnessing” the past rather than active participation. William Paul further states that the notion of participation only makes sense “if we could give ‘participate’ more of a passive meaning” where the audience “give themselves up to the image that has taken over our field of vision” (Paul 1993, 336). Similarly, Mann’s emphasis on narrative immediacy may induce a passive response in the “witnessing” of the past rather than “participating” in it: the “liveness” of this imagery removes a conscious framework for structuring the action and engages with a modernist documentary style, albeit one amplified and kineticised to the point of hyperrealism. Eldridge also notes how the “realistic” experience of 1950s historic spectacle was undermined by poor 3D effects and the necessity of wearing anaglyph glasses, and the digital aesthetic of Public Enemies also proved distracting in its jarring (sometimes blurred) motion and disjunctive style. This compromises the realistic depiction of events by foregrounding the artifice of historical

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construction despite a vérité styling that attempts to communicate the “liveness” of events by documenting them in such a manner as to express the “experiencing” of the past. Period films necessarily present challenges of authenticity, but we must consider whether telling a period narrative by means of modern, digital media is any more anachronistic than its telling through the medium of film. As Jonathan Walker points out, “Most complaints on the issue of anachronism concern questions of content or mentality” regarding modern impositions on historical characters and events (Walker 2010, 91). For Walker, the deliberate use or acknowledgement of formal anachronism is a central feature of what he defines as “textual realism,” a form of intertextuality that creates a tension between modern storytelling techniques and strategies of the past.3 The emphasis on the visual in these experiential accounts serve to highlight what is missing in written accounts, while signifying its own value as a form of historical discourse. This opposition emphasises the distance between lived experience and representation, and in the case of Public Enemies this operates to the detriment of its immediate narrative. The film’s aesthetic calls attention to itself in its distinction from classical style, striking an uneasy balance between realism (historical re-creation, re-enactment, dedicated research) and artifice (the heightened cinematic elements of the digital image, editing, camera positioning and movement). The central irony of a film style that attempts to create an amplified sense of reality is that in marrying frantic, yet fluid, digital cinematography with a finely detailed and realised period setting, the film makes its history less intelligible and often reminds the viewer of its artifice through its digital abstractions. The positioning of the gangster figure in a heightened, hyperreal past as opposed to the densely actualised near-present of the classical gangster film, or the dead, empty past of the revisionist biographical gangster cycle, marks the immediate visioning of the past as another form of realising period spectacle. Walker’s conception of re-enactment involves violating the integrity of the past by exposing its relativity, reassembling the fragments of the past to form new narratives. This process, in refusing to suppress the anachronistic elements that increasingly arise from formal strategies of digital editing and filming techniques, emphasises the distance between past and present. Moreover, it represents alternate modes of approaching

3

This is a strategy that redefines realism by re-enacting the way the past represented itself, in contrast with the “blank parody” of pastiche that pretends this tension does not exist.

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the past in order to engage with new critical meanings and levels of historical discourse. The digital imagery of Public Enemies is atypical in terms of both the gangster genre and the historical film more generally as the film’s stylistic attributes present a new range of iconography that is lacking in retrospective or nostalgic intent. Moreover, the reworking of the aesthetic conventions of the gangster picture through digital filmmaking practices further extend features of “intensified continuity” to the historical film. The unconventional emphasis of artifice (digital video) to convey reality (documented history) thus has an expressive purpose by giving a sense of hyperrealism through the subjective experience of the past and accentuating the movement through historical space.

Digital editing Terrence Malick’s The New World demonstrates a dedication to historical verisimilitude in the realisation of its period diegesis, from shooting on location in Virginia and re-constructing authentic structures to revitalising an extinct native language. However, its approach to the foundation narrative of the discovery of America is distinct from traditional historical cinema in terms of its discontinuous editing structure. Although the film is largely based on Captain John Smith’s comprehensive (though obviously biased) account of the establishment of Jamestown, his Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, Malick’s screenplay presents its narrative in such a way as to acknowledge both its historical context and its status as national origin story. Following the establishment of the Jamestown colony in Virginia by the English in 1607, the film concerns Smith’s (Colin Farrell) experiences with the indigenous people he encounters on his expeditions. After he is saved from execution by the chieftain’s daughter, Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), they fall in love, but Smith returns to Jamestown and eventually leaves in search of the Northwest Passage. Pocahontas, informed that he has died at sea, marries John Rolfe (Christian Bale), with whom she has a child, and she leaves for England where she dies. Burgoyne classifies The New World as a metahistorical film, together with such films as JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991), Courage Under Fire (Edward Zwick, 1996) and Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006), a type of film that interrogates the traditional representation of history (Burgoyne 2008). This is similar to Robert Rosenstone’s concept of “revisioning” history in which films reject notions of historical realism in favour of “expressive modes of representation that expand the vocabulary of the historian” (Rosenstone 1995). Rosenstone further states that “film is

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not history in our traditional sense, but it is a kind of history nonetheless […] Film has given us tools to see reality in a new way—including the realities of a past which has long since vanished from our sight” (Rosenstone 2006, 158). While he acknowledges that the fact that some historical films are not built on documentary evidence and therefore may compromise the use of the term “historical,” Rosenstone believes the notions of “historical thinking” and “historical understanding” are still pertinent when dealing with historical issues, contexts and interpretations. The film downplays Smith’s heroic qualities and focuses more on the spiritual experiences of Pocahontas regarding her encounters with Smith, nature, and her visit to England, as well as granting a significant role to John Rolfe in her final months. While the film was carefully researched in terms of both historical events and ethnographic detail, this is not where its emphasis lies; instead, it focuses on the romantic, transformative and transcendental experiences of Smith and Pocahontas. This is a sensual experience, one of touch, taste and smell in the intimate interactions between Smith and Pocahontas, as well as the more perceptible aspects of sight and sound. The New World is a radical departure from the realist style of historical narration that has dominated the Pocahontas story,4 presenting instead a history told through subjective voiceovers, disarming camera movements and perspectives, and disjunctive, non-continuity editing. In this way, the film represents the revision of a specific interpretation of the past, albeit a past enshrouded in myth rather than established historically. With this in mind, The New World seems to exemplify Burgoyne’s concept of the metahistorical film as “a work that starts by questioning the dominant understanding of a particular event, and that challenges the way the history of that event has been written and disseminated” (Burgoyne 2008, 125). Much like Burgoyne’s analysis of JFK, The New World can be seen to present a “counter-myth” to the myth of the discovery of America and the Smith-Pocahontas romance. This form of historical practice is more ambiguous and less focused on defining one version of the past, presenting multiple perspectives and shifting subjective agency. However, in the case of The New World, the impossibility of historical truth derives from the unreliability of Smith’s personal accounts and the remoteness of the period.

4

Films such as Pocahontas and John Smith (Bryan Foy, 1924), Captain John Smith and Pocahontas (Lew Landers, 1953) and Pocahontas: The Legend (Danièle J. Suissa, 1995) preceded Disney’s animated historical fantasy, Pocahontas (Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, 1995).

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Contemporary cinema, for the most part, steers clear of distancing or decentring practices that stand in opposition to the ideal of re-enactment. The New World, however, engages in a process of making the past remote from the present and repudiates the American ethnocentrism implicit in the traditional historicising of its discovery. As Paul Ricœur asks, “why would the effect of strangeness not go so far as to make us feel we are in a foreign, unknown land?” (Ricœur 1984, 16). This sense of unfamiliarity seems to be Malick’s intention by forming a history that places its viewers at a remove and presents this world as both “other” and “new.” This process accentuates the differences and temporal distance between the past and the present-day, while allowing for allegorical readings of events concerning colonialism, civilisation and environmental issues. For Ricœur, the process of detemporalisation results in events appearing neither near to us nor far away from us: “In this way the epistemology of the individual can appear to eclipse the ontology of the past” (Ricœur 1984, 19). The editing style of Malick’s films has been described as “diffuse, elliptical, and structurally radical” (Wisniewski 2008), creating a discontinuous structure through jump cuts and flashbacks. In considering the impact of film editing technology on Malick’s own practices, a key distinction here is in the shift from analogue to digital editing. This is a transition that seems to have received little critical investigation despite the fact that the postproduction process has largely been digitised since the 1990s. On a flatbed analogue editing system, the process is linear and physical, i.e. the celluloid itself is cut and spliced together. On non-linear digital systems, such as Avid and Final Cut Pro, options can be tested simultaneously and results can be viewed immediately.5 Non-linear video editing permits greater flexibility and cost-effectiveness compared to flatbed editing systems, such as Steenbeck and K.-E.-M. The aesthetic implications of this system change are harder to define, which, as Wisniewski states, is due to the fact that digital editing systems, “by and large, don’t make the things we see in movies possible; they make them easier to achieve” (Wisniewski 2008). Digital editing makes it easier to cut more frequently and reorder or reshape footage without strict adherence to continuity editing. Malick’s films are famed for being reconstituted in the editing room, and the collaborative nature of the film’s editing—by four different editors in various locations—signals that the film is very much a digital product,

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This process requires that the raw celluloid footage is transferred to a digital intermediate so that it can subsequently be edited on a computer using video editing software.

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with Malick presiding over all.6 His process of trimming, extending, and reshaping the film over three released versions7 emphasises his debt to non-linear digital editing. Of this process, editor Richard Chew says: We also had to understand that Terry likes the eccentric frame. Nothing can be right on. In editing, he was always telling us not to use too perfectly framed shots. He wanted to be on a shoulder or see part of the face or cut the face in half. Or he’d like being behind the person. One of his favorite angles is over the shoulder to relate distance and relationship between two characters (quoted in Rogers 2005).

Editing is used to convey the dramatic and spatial relationships between characters rather than to provide a central focus. Malick disregards continuity editing and conventional narrative storytelling, violating the 180-degree rule and using jump cuts and insert shots to heighten discontinuity. While this editing style is present in his earlier work, such as Days of Heaven (1978), digital editing has allowed for his style to become even more elliptical and fragmented, creating further temporal and spatial incongruities, but ones that are also more textured and complex. The historical narrative becomes fleeting, ambiguous and ephemeral: as Wisniewski states, “images, moments, and sequences don’t so much build as accumulate” (Wisniewski 2008). Sound plays an important role in bridging scenes that cut back and forth between the two, creating a flow between two separate events without establishing either their chronology or how they relate to one another. While Wisniewski’s hypothesis is tentative, it also relates to Bordwell’s theory of “intensified continuity” in terms of the importance of coverage— the industry practice of shooting a scene with several cameras from a variety of angles (from masters to close-ups)—that allows for multiple options in the editing room. But Malick also combines this with shooting scenes multiple times, frequently encouraging actors to improvise during these repeated sequences, and asking the camera crew to shoot unexpected or unrehearsed events.8 It could then be argued that this is a technologically deterministic framework in which non-linear digital editing systems has a direct influence on the shooting process by allowing filmmakers to shoot

6

For more on the production of The New World, see Rogers (2005). The film had a limited 150-minute release in December 2005 before being reedited to a 135-minute wide release in January 2006. In October 2008, a 172minute “extended cut” received a commercial home release. 8 This would account for the fact that over 1 million feet of film was shot for The New World, compared to the 100,000 feet used for Days of Heaven. 7

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as much coverage as is desired, as it would be almost impossible to work through such a massive amount of footage with reel-to-reel flatbed editing. While advanced editing tools and methods can account for different approaches to filming (evidenced in standard industry practice), in the case of The New World this must also be commensurate with Malick’s changing aesthetic sensibilities and the specific historical world envisioned by the film.

Historical re-enactment Robert Burgoyne has stated that “[d]ramatic historical films convey the events of the past in a variety of ways, […] with cinematic style, narrative design, and mode of address defined by specific codes of expression depending on the focus and approach of the film” (Burgoyne 2008, 5). For Burgoyne, what brings these different orders of representation together is “the concept of reenactment, the act of imaginative re-creation that allows the spectator to imagine they are ‘witnessing again’ the events of the past” (Ibid., 7). In his discussion of historical re-enactment, Paul Ricœur follows the conception put forth by R.G. Collingwood in The Idea of History which calls for “the past as history’s absent partner” (Ricœur 1984, 5). Collingwood affirms that “all history is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind” (Collingwood 1994, 215), but Ricœur’s caveat is that “re-enacting does not consist in reliving but in rethinking, and rethinking already contains the critical moment that forces us to take the detour by way of the historical imagination” (Ricœur 1984, 8). The notion of historical re-enactment is a paradoxical one that requires the historian to compose a coherent and functional account, and also to “construct a picture of things as they really were and of events as they really happened” (Collingwood 1994, 246). Re-enactment abolishes the temporal distance between the past and the present by the act of rethinking what was once thought, thus challenging the definition of history as “an imaginary picture of the past” (Ibid., 248). Implicit in the conception of reenactment are the notions of process, acquisition, incorporation, development, and criticism, notions that are complicated when we consider what Ricœur describes as “the survival of the past in the present” (Ricœur 1984, 12), an act that views historians as inheriting surviving traces of the past. Rosenstone argues that, unlike historians who are bound to linear narratives, filmmakers are able to create the past in a way that “is at once serious, complex, challenging, and ‘true’ in its ability to render meanings rather than the literal reality of past events” (Rosenstone 1995, 202). For

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filmmakers, re-enactment is a method that involves paying careful consideration to context and material conditions in order to create a text or performance worthy of the term, going beyond Collingwood’s call for intellectual reassessment. The re-enactment of past events employs a variety of techniques in order to create a powerfully immersive experience for the spectator. But, for Burgoyne, re-enactment also involves a form of double consciousness in the rethinking of the past: “Reenacting the past necessarily calls forth the historical imagination on the part of the filmmaker and the spectator” (Burgoyne 2008, 8). Both parties need to project themselves into the past in order to create and experience this historical reality in this process of reimagining. This is emphasised by the presentation of the historical locale, of shooting on site in the real places where events took place. This addresses the connection between past and present by demonstrating that the location continues to exist and is therefore a site of importance. The locationspecific element is central to the mise-en-scène in redressing it for the period, with the emphasis on locations as physical historical sites acting as a fundamental way of proving that these events actually took place. As Jerome de Groot argues, “History somehow has to ‘live’ while acknowledging its very ‘pastness’” (de Groot 2009, 113). The need for visual and locational authenticity raises a set of issues relating to realism, a trope in cinema that always relates to the production of authenticity. Reenactment signifies an attempt to create a realist discourse, one that can be furthered by documentary-esque or subjective shooting and editing styles. The historical period of The New World is established by its title sequence that narrates the history of early Virginia through animated 17th century prints. Malick and director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki chose to shoot on location at the Chickahominy River in Virginia, a tributary of the James River not far from the original Jamestown settlement, in order to render forests and rivers “in a visual style that is original and poetic” (Benjamin 2005, 49). In designing the production, the filmmakers reproduced the architecture, customs, clothing and artifacts of the time in highly detailed fashion. Structures in the Jamestown settlement and the Algonquin village were built according to historical and archaeological evidence, using traditional materials and tools. A 3-acre field was planted with strains of Indian corn and tobacco, and Blair Rudes, professor of linguistics at the University of North Carolina, even reconstructed the extinct Virginian Algonquin language used in the film.9 9

Rudes claims that this insistence on authenticity came from Malick’s desire to hear Pocahontas speaking these true words in her own dialect (Boyle 2006).

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This created a nearly authentic setting in which the actors were situated, complemented by both improvisational acting and Malick’s continuous shooting style: “We tried to capture the accidents, the things you cannot plan, the moments that feel the most real,” says Lubezki (quoted in Benjamin 2005, 52). The New World was shot using hand-held cinematography and Steadicams rather than dollies, cranes or tripods, in order to lend the film’s imagery a spontaneous, non-synthetic visual quality that embraces unsteady movement through real-world spaces. It also made much use of natural lighting, with very few artificial lights, and no digital enhancements.10 With Public Enemies, the filmmakers decided to establish the story’s period primarily through the use of actual locations, shooting in several places where events took place. These include Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin, the scene of a gunfight between Dillinger’s gang and the FBI, the Lake County Jail in Crown Point, Indiana, where Dillinger staged an audacious escape, and the Biograph Theater in Chicago, where Dillinger was killed after leaving a screening of Manhattan Melodrama (William A. Wellman, 1934). The transformation of the Biograph, for instance, required a major redressing given the gentrification of the street and other changes since the 1930s. Production designer Nathan Crowley described the finished street as “an amalgamation of research and design,” with cobblestones, 1930s storefronts, automobiles and streetcars. Mann states: We engineered it so that we were able to stage exactly where Dillinger was when he died—the same square foot of pavement that he died on—so that when Johnny [Depp] looked up he saw the last thing Dillinger saw. That means a lot to an actor and to a director… to find yourself in those environments where you can suspend your disbelief and give yourself the magic of the moment (quoted in Levy 2009).11

Mann was also able to provide Depp with the actual clothing and personal articles of Dillinger. By shooting digitally, they were able to work with the existing lighting to maintain a level of realism that would help to achieve the effect of immediacy, and the emphasis on location shooting—in addition to period wardrobe, vehicles and props—ties in with this concept of historical re-enactment. Public Enemies, in re-creating the world and events of 1933-34 and presenting the subjective experience of events,

10

The New World does feature one visual effect shot, with CGI used to recreate a pair of now-extinct Carolina parakeets. 11 For more on the extent of the film’s historical re-creation, see Bryan Burrough’s account of his role in the film’s production (Burrough 2009).

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attempts to create, in Collingwood’s words, the “immediate experience” wherein the agent is not reflective about that experience but perceives it instantaneously as the spectator does. Jerome de Groot examines the collectivised experience of historical reenactment that relates to live-action role playing of largely combat-based events, viewing it as an unconventional form of historiography. He states that “[r]e-enactment reminds the participant and the (potential) viewer of the essential otherness of history” (de Groot 2009, 105), presenting the past as continually different from the present. Mann and Depp’s testimony suggests that cinematic historical re-enactment shares the way in which “the past is reanimated through physical and psychological experience” (Ibid.) in order to capture the liveness of events. Paradoxically, this underscores the fact that re-enactment often intends to convey the individuality of a particular event. Furthermore, this form of re-enactment is practised for the consumption of both re-enactor and observer—as Della Pollock argues, the historicist performer is both subject and object (Pollock 1998, 7)—and while particular period details and authentic settings in Public Enemies (such as sleeping in Dillinger’s bed or wearing his original clothes) can for some actors contribute to the performance and character psychology, the experience of re-enactment is ultimately for the pleasure of the spectator. William Dray sees Collingwood as warning against “thinking that historical reasoning from evidence can recapture the immediacy of past experiences, the private mental process which an agent actually went through” (Dray 1995, 125). His defence of re-enactment as an essential dimension of historical practice puts forth the notion that historians should make an imaginative leap into the past in order to challenge contemporary knowledge and values on an intellectual level. Technology has clearly been an unforeseen part of modern re-enactments of historical events, but it is questionable whether the creation of hyperreal visual representations of the past through CGI and other digital technologies has enhanced this imaginative process. Historical re-enactment is, essentially and inherently, an act of falsification,12 and it has been a continual challenge to find a definition or delimitation of the subjects of realism and history. However, the exploration of these questions is central to this form of historical investigation.

12

The concept of re-enactment can be related to Jean Baudrillard’s vision of the contemporary appetite for realistic simulation as leading to the enthusiastic consumption of the simulacrum, a spectacle that never took place.

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Voiceover and historical subjectivity In his essay, “The Colombian Exchange: Pocahontas and The New World,” Robert Burgoyne argues that the film reorients the foundational myth of the Jamestown settlement in a way that “effectively defamiliarizes the viewer’s experience of place, history, and identity” (Burgoyne 2010, 121). Combining the mythological elements of the Smith-Pocahontas romance with historically documented material of the European discovery of the Americas is understood by Burgoyne as a form of historical “revisioning.” He argues that the film “portrays history both in terms of the ‘inside’ and in terms of the ‘otherness’ of historical events” (Ibid., 122). This notion of the “inside” is a reflection of the interiority of the characters, their thoughts, beliefs and anxieties, expressed through voiceover. The sense of “otherness,” on the other hand, is evident in the film’s unfamiliar setting of the past that distorts this perception of the interior, with the historical “realities” obfuscating the development of the “inside” voice. Burgoyne sees these two different approaches—close re-enactment combined with techniques of defamiliarisation—as comparable to Ricœur’s description of historiography under the sign of the “same” and under the sign of the “other.” By attempting to convey the interior process of Smith, Pocahontas and, to a lesser extent, Rolfe, Malick provides a subjective view of these historical events that prompts a stronger connection to the contemporary world. They afford, for instance, a balanced sense of Smith’s interpretation of the natives and Pocahontas’s understanding of the colonists. Viewing the Native community, Smith observes, “They have no jealousy, no sense of possession. Real, what I thought a dream.” While expressing his personal experience of encountering an unknown, this passage also demonstrates how his encounter appears to him as a new reality. But the voice of Pocahontas is more expressive and, perhaps, more central in steering the film away from the Eurocentric perspective that traditionally characterises this narrative by providing a native voice. Her internal monologue, conducted in English, both presents the vastness of the cultural differences from her perspective and relates her strong spiritual connection with nature. She intones at the film’s opening, “Come, spirit. Help us sing the story of our land. You are our mother; we, your field of corn. We rise from the soul of you.” While it could be argued that the use of voiceover represents a divergence from historical record, it serves the purpose of creating a greater understanding of the film’s historical context. In this manner, the film emphasises the cultural differences and uncertainties

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of this era, posing an interpretation that is less reliant on merely presenting historical events. As with its practice in documentaries such as In the Year of the Pig (Emile de Antonio, 1968) and The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988), voiceover commentary can both reinforce and undercut what is depicted onscreen in the historical film. As an example of narrational contradiction, Smith’s first interior monologue observes: “We will make a fresh start; nature’s bounty is bestowed on all. Here there is no need to grow poor. No cause but one’s labor.” This statement is immediately refuted as the colonists are depicted struggling in this new environment, with their crops having failed and their stores having spoiled. This subtle stream of contradictions and inconsistencies throughout Smith’s voiceover seems to criticise both his interpretation of events (with these observations deriving from his journals) and his role as narrator more generally. While his idealistic and somewhat blinded accounts of his first encounters in Virginia are incommensurate with the harsh realities of events, they do express the awe and wonder he later experiences in his relationship with Pocahontas. As Burgoyne notes, their elegiac love scenes are “set in a world that is devoid of strife and hardship, a mythical world of perfect beauty” (Burgoyne 2010, 130). His accounts also convey the sensationalistic rhetoric of an adventurer, an explorer and chronicler of new territories. Malick’s criticism of Smith’s history of events is emphasised through these contradictions that are based on other historical material, as well as shaping them to fit in with his desired thematic concerns regarding the mythological interracial romance. For Burgoyne, the film presents “a kind of dialectical reading of the historical period, and of the landscape itself, approaching it from the perspective of the past as well as the perspective of the present day” (Burgoyne 2010, 142). What Burgoyne emphasises here is that the construing of historical events is dependent on this dual system of perspective, contrary to other forms of historical cinema that either relate the perspective of the present on the past (through flashback and other linear devices) or more directly convey the historical perspective of the past. This strong relation of past and present is most clearly evoked in the film’s final sequence, in which the acknowledgement of the historical nature of events is evidenced in Rolfe’s voiceover in narrating a letter to his son as he leaves England to return to Virginia, stating that “the events of which I write will soon be but a distant memory.” Malick’s mythic and poetic treatment of history is ultimately paradoxical: it strives for historical verisimilitude in its presentation of the multifarious experience of the encounters and grounds it in a highly

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detailed setting; but it also takes great liberties with the historical facts and chooses to focus on the romantic relationship between Smith and Pocahontas that has long been considered a mythic element of this story. As Robert Sinnerbrink states, the film “presents nature as through history did not exist and history as if it were a piece of nature” (Sinnerbink 2009), evidenced by the embedding of figures within naturalistic landscapes. Despite the fact that Malick takes artistic liberties with the Pocahontas myth (as all filmmakers have done), he does so for an authentic purpose in presenting a false historical truth. The presentation of both historically documented and entirely fictional elements within an authentically realised setting is a problematic approach to this story, creating a dramatic impetus for the narrative while also playing with historically debated events. There are many significant elisions in the narrative—not least in the SmithPocahontas love affair—which both enhance the film’s fragmentary, transcendental style and emphasise the selectiveness and subjectivity of the historian’s process of placing significance on particular events and their causation. Working from Smith’s journals and other documented material, Malick has formed his own interpretation that acknowledges the elisions in the historical evidence while interpolating his own set of literary and thematic influences. It could therefore be argued that Malick’s interpretation of events has as much value as those of printed historical research. Historians also call on artistic license in the assembly of events and the presentation of evidence and history, after all, has its own story to tell. Speaking in the documentary Making ‘The New World’ (Austin Jack Lynch, 2006), producer Sarah Green mentions Malick’s claim to this privilege and his conscious alteration of historical fact, taking liberties with material that itself suffers from factual inconsistencies. Malick’s broad adherence to Smith’s journals allows him to play with temporality and causality as part of his historical narrative. Yet his role as a historian also seems to be focused on telling a balanced story, one that conveys the romance and conflict that derives from a clash of cultures.

Conclusions Both The New World and Public Enemies can be read as examples of historical spectacle designed to solicit a particular response. By reworking historical narratives through digital filmmaking and editing strategies, the films project a sense of subjective involvement in the past that can be seen as an amplified or enhanced form of historical expression. Taken together, these films represent a renewal of popular interest in particular historical

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periods and figures, as well as new aesthetic and narrative structures for their delivery. The process and adaptation to new technologies marks a significant chapter in the development of these generic and narrative traits, resulting in a range of interesting and controversial forms of representation. The realisation of a distinctively “realistic” rather than idealistic orientation towards characters advocates an experience of history whereby subjectivity becomes more complex and fluid rather than mediated, idealistic or bounded. Digital filmmaking practices do not necessarily undermine classical storytelling structure but may offer new modes of address and narrative construction. Recognisably “digital” aesthetics have a tendency to draw attention to themselves, but this depends on their construction and usage, and digitally-shot films are becoming less anomalous when contrasted with celluloid due to advancing technologies. Likewise, audiences have become more accustomed to digital editing strategies, in part as a result of the establishment of its practice, though its employment can be equally disruptive and disjunctive. Technology is often tied up in discourses around spectacle; for example, David Bordwell states that “Hollywood (from its earliest days) has eagerly employed spectacle and technical virtuosity as a means of artistic motivation” (Bordwell 1985, 21). Recent historical films may signal a shift away from spectacle, with digital filmmaking (and the techniques with which it is practised) offering particular artistic motivations that are separate from issues concerning spectacle, though both are motivated by narrative causality. The accomplishments of historical films demonstrate how they operate as specific works of history that put forth their own theses. Mann’s aesthetic is kinetic and confrontational, directing classic era filmmaking inward to become more excessive and to amplify the historical experience. The New World presents a discontinuous, experiential narrative that reflects the complexity of situations and sentiments felt by the historical figures. Instead of adhering strictly to the conventional historical record, Malick chooses to convey an interpretation of the human condition through a process of historical imagining. The impressionistic editing of The New World (shot on 35 and 65 mm film) is commensurate with the editing style of Steven Soderbergh’s Che (shot digitally using the Red One camera) with their floating, objectivist approaches far removed from classical notions of linearity and spatial unification. In Public Enemies and The New World, a heavy emphasis on period recreation over both CGI and virtual sets allows for a different form of historical exploration. Free from the restrictions of sets and interiors, the greater range of camera movements lends the films a directness in their

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visual approaches, anchoring the camera to the characters and subjectively positioning them and their experiences by following their actions more closely. The free-flowing, subjective style of these historical narratives is evident in the preference for fluid camerawork and disjunctive editing over classic coverage. As Robert Rosenstone notes, history can be thought of as a series of conventions for thinking about the past, but it can also be seen as a challenge, provocation or paradox (Rosenstone 2006, 164). New technologies provide the means to contest these conventions, granting filmmakers the ability to enter into, challenge and engage with historical discourses through a broader range of representational strategies.

Bibliography Barta, Tony, ed. 1998. Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History. Westport, CT: Praeger. Belton, John. 1992. Widescreen Cinema. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, B. 2006. “Uncharted Emotions”. American Cinematographer 87 (1): 48-57. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge. Bordwell, David. 2006. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Boyle, Alan. 2006. “How a Linguist Revived ‘New World’ Language”. MSNBC (21 January), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10950199#.UGoTuU3LSBo. Burgoyne, Robert. 2008. The Hollywood Historical Film. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. —. 2010. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Burrough, Bryan. 2009. “Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger as Public Enemy No 1 Returns”. The Times, 13 June, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/ article6485337.ece. Collingwood, R.G. 1994. The Idea of History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. De Groot, Jerome. 2009. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Dray, William H. 1995. History as Re-Enactment: R.G. Collingwood’s Idea of History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

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Eldridge, David. 2006. Hollywood’s History Films. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Gallimore, Adam. 2013. “‘We Ain’t Thinking About Tomorrow’: Narrative Immediacy and the Digital Period Aesthetic in Public Enemies”. Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies (forthcoming 2013). http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk. Hall, Sheldon, and Steve Neale. 2010. Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Levy, Emmanuel. 2009. “Public Enemies: Interview with Michael Mann”. http://www.emanuellevy.com/interview/public-enemies-interviewwith-director-michael-mann-5/. McClean, Shilo T. 2007. Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Paul, William. 1993. “The Aesthetics of Emergence”. Film History 5 (3): 321-355. Pollock, Della, ed. 1998. Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Ricœur, Paul. 1984. The Reality of the Historical Past. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Rogers, Pauline. 2005. “Once Upon a Time in America: Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC and Team Recreate the Early 17th Century for The New World”. International Cinematographers Guild Magazine 76 (11). Rosenstone, Robert A., ed. 1995. Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosenstone, Robert A. 2006. History on Film/Film on History. Harlow and New York: Longman. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2009. “From Mythic History to Cinematic Poetry: Terrence Malick’s The New World viewed”. Screening the Past 26. http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/26/early-europe/the-newworld.html Thompson, Kirsten Moana. 2011. “‘Philip Never Saw Babylon’: 360degree Vision and the Historical Epic in the Digital Era”. In The Epic Film in World Culture, ed. Robert Burgoyne, 39-62. New York and London: Routledge. Walker, Jonathan. 2010. “Textual Realism and reenactment”. In Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Term, ed. Iain McCalman and Paul A. Pickering, 90-108. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wisniewski, Chris. 2008. “Terrence Malick: A Stitch in Time.” Reverse Shot 22. http://www.reverseshot.com/article/terrence_malick.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jilly Boyce Kay is a PhD candidate at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Her thesis is concerned with the history of debate programmes on British television and the shifting gender politics of television talk. She has taught across Media and Journalism courses at De Montfort University, the University of Leicester, and the University of the West of England. She has published journal articles on social movements and economic journalism, and has forthcoming book chapters on feminist media history and television talk. Hazel Collie is a PhD student in the Leicester Media School at De Montfort University. Her doctoral research is part of the AHRC-funded project “A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-1989”. It examines British women’s memories of television, and how their talk indicates the changing nature of gendered identities throughout life course and across generations. She has published on memory work with and through television. Dieter Declercq is a PhD candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the Moving Image, at the University of Kent. His doctoral research investigates the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in satirical animation. He has published an article on the satire of The Simpsons in the philosophical journal Ethical Perspectives entitled “The Philosophical and Ethical Significance of Humour: The Simpsons as Humorous Ethical Truth-Telling”. John Ellis is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London. He is chair of BUFVC (www.bufvc.ac.uk) and leads the ERCfunded ADAPT project on the history of technology in TV. He is also part of the www.euscreen.eu project which makes archival TV from around Europe available to all. His books include Documentary: Witness and SelfRevelation (2012), Seeing Things (2000) and Visible Fictions (1982). Between 1982 and 1999 he ran the independent TV production company Large Door, making the Visions series for Channel 4, and documentaries from The Holy Family Album to Distilling Whisky Galore and Brazil: Beyond Citizen Kane.

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Adam Gallimore is an Associate Fellow and teaches film studies at the University of Warwick, having completed his PhD in 2013. His current research focuses on historical cinema and digital filmmaking. His work has recently been published in Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, Networking Knowledge, Exchanges: The Warwick Research Journal, and The Guardian. Adam has also contributed to World Film Locations: Buenos Aires, ed. Santiago Oyarzabal and Michael Pigott (Intellect Books, 2014), with entries on The Motorcycle Diaries and Tetro. He is an editor for G|A|M|E Game as Art, Media, Entertainment and Alternate Takes. Vanessa Jackson is a former BBC series producer, and now course director of the BA (Hons) in Media and Communication, and degree leader of Television, at Birmingham City University, teaching practical television production skills to undergraduates. She is studying for a practice based PhD at Royal Holloway, in television historiography, under the supervision of Professor John Ellis. Her research interests include the history of television, as well as the uses of social media in community history projects. She has also published on the use of social media in enhancing student employability, and on student engagement. Laura Mee is a PhD candidate and part-time Lecturer at De Montfort University, UK, where she is completing her AHRC-funded thesis on contemporary horror film remakes. Her work has appeared in the international journal Horror Studies, and she is a co-founder of and contributor to the postgraduate blog and podcast In Motion. Steve Presence is a Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of the West of England, where he recently completed his PhD thesis, “The Political Avant-garde: Oppositional Documentary in Britain since 1990”. He is co-founder of the Bristol Radical Film Festival and of the UK Radical Film Network, is Digital Editor of the Journal of Media Practice, and manager of Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival Fringe Programme. Alex Rock is a historian of British cinema based at De Montfort University's Cinema and Television History Research Centre. He is completing his PhD thesis which looks at collaborations between the Metropolitan Police and the British film industry between 1920 and 1960. Currently, he is employed as an Engagement Officer at the QUAD Arts Centre in Derby.

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Caitlin Shaw is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at De Montfort University, where she also currently teaches genre studies and world cinema. Her research examines retrospective representations of the late 1970s and 1980s in post-2005 British film and television, focusing on the role of retro and nostalgia in the negotiation of contemporary British culture. Her writing has been published in the Journal of American Studies of Turkey. Sylwia Szostak is a PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham in the Department of Culture, Film and Media. Her research examines the impact of international media flows on Polish television in the post-Soviet era, with particular attention to the influence of American fiction television. She has a chapter in Timothy Havens, Anikó Imre, Katalin Lustyik, eds., Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and Since Socialism (Routledge, 2012). She has published articles in View: Journal of European Television History and Culture, Critical Studies in Television and Cinema & Cie.: International Film Studies Journal. Nathan Townsend is a final year PhD student studying at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York. His AHRCfunded thesis focuses on the industrial and cultural relationship between British and Hollywood cinema, particularly as it relates to the Londonbased production company, Working Title Films. His academic interests include issues relating to transnationalism and cultural specificity, particularly in the context of European and American cinemas. Johnny Walker is a Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University. He has published articles in journals such as the Journal of British Cinema and Television, and he is the author of Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and coeditor of Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (Bloomsbury, 2015). Thomas Joseph Watson is a PhD candidate and Visiting Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University. His thesis considers the role of film form in the augmentation of violence onscreen. He has a forthcoming article in the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance and is a coeditor of Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (Bloomsbury, 2015). Abby Waysdorf is a PhD candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam where she is part of the research project “Locating Imagination”. She received her BA in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of

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Washington and her MA cum laude in Media and Performance Studies from Utrecht University. Her research focuses on film and televisioninspired tourism and fan cultures. Helen Wheatley is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick and has research interests in various aspects of British television history. She has published work on popular genres in television drama in the UK, US, and beyond, and is the author of Gothic Television (Manchester University Press, 2006) and editor of Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (I. B. Tauris, 2007). She is currently writing a monograph on television spectacle and visual pleasure on television.