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From Disease Incubation to Disease Receipt: Representing Epidemics and Race in Pre- and Post-Second World War American Cinema (1931-1939 and 1950-1962)
This article analyses continuities and changes in how disease has been instrumentalised in cinema as a way of conceptualizing race—comparing five films depicting epidemics produced before the Second World War and five after. In the 1930s films, non-white populations often passively accept assistance in dealing with epidemic disease—a paternalistic white savior narrative—but not always with “gratitude”, and sometimes direct resistance. Here, epidemics take root in physical sites of economic “underdevelopment”, perpetuated further by perceived “premodern” cultural practices demarcated down the lines of race or ethnicity, and intersect with other gendered and socio-economic categories. After the war, while some cinematic tropes such as the “white knight” continue, other narratives emerge including a shift in emphasis away from the Othered environment as the nexus of disease (the disease’s “incubation”), and towards greater alarm about the appearance of disease within recipient, frequently white, communities
Decentring the Broadcasting Dispositif: Educational Closed-Circuits, Military-Industrial Entanglements, and Useful TV
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the introduction of ETV into classrooms was supported by ongoing experiments regarding the medium’s affordances and technological design: educators and financing bodies experimented with televisual forms that embraced non-commercial broadcasting, national and regional programming, and even transmissions by planes. Analysing educational television in the USA, this paper focuses on one specific dispositif, namely the televisual closed-circuit (CCTV). While the closed-circuit projects have been widely documented in the postwar period and have received some attention from television and media historians, the analytical focus has remained on educational CCTV. This paper suggests a shift in perspective that embeds the educational closed-circuit within a broader history of televisual CCTV. In addition to serving school reforms, postwar CCTV systems were frequently used in military and industrial settings, where they fostered automation, surveillance, and tele-command. The analysis of educational television through the lens of closed-circuits brings to the fore such military-industrial entanglements and their links with the educational sector, and shines a new light on the history of educational TV overall
Pleitbezorger van de voetbalkijker: Het discours over voetbal op televisie in de Nederlandse dagbladen tussen 1950 en 1980
Between 1950 and 1980, television in the Netherlands became a mass medium, which attracted a large audience, in part by broadcasting football matches and news. Scholars have theorised how the rise of a new medium creates anxiety and feelings of rivalry with established media as they are confronted with a new competitor. This paper focuses on this premise by examining to what extent and how such feelings of rivalry between television and newspapers are part of the metadiscourse on football and television within the ranks of Dutch dailies between 1950 and 1980. Based on the results of this qualitative discourse analysis, this paper argues that newspapers certainly discussed the rise of football coverage on television, but did not show any signs of being afraid that television would offer a harmful competition. Much rather, in defending the right to free news gathering as well as the interests of the audience, newspapers positioned themselves by and large as great supporters of football coverage on television
Editorial
This special issue of VIEW was inspired by a call from the final conference of the project “European History Reloaded: Curation and Appropriation of Digital Audiovisual Heritage” (CADEAH). The project brought together interdisciplinary expertise in the curation of digital audiovisual heritage, contemporary European history and Digital Humanities to study the ‘afterlife’ of digitized audiovisual heritage once it was made accessible and shared online, something that has seen a great deal of growth throughout the first two decades of this century. What happens to digitized audiovisual heritage once it is shared online? How does audiovisual heritage circulate online? To what extent do users re-use or re-mix audiovisual heritage? And, more specifically from an archival perspective: How do strategies of curation shape the appropriation of digitized heritage? What new perspectives on European history and identity do digital curations and appropriations of audiovisual heritage create? How can audiovisual archives better foster the re-use of Europe’s audiovisual heritage? With this issue we wanted to broaden our view and discuss our insights with scholars from diverse disciplines and with diverse professional backgrounds. These articles showcase the methodological and conceptual approaches that are being used across Europe to understand, and encourage, the use of audiovisual heritage, investigating contemporary practices of re-use and the ways that archives themselves think about these challenges
Unsettling Borders of Archives: Activating the Audiovisual Heritage of the Turkish Community in the Netherlands
This article explores issues with archival preservation and access in the case of the audiovisual heritage of migrant communities, which defies hegemonic categories of nation, race, ethnicity, language. As such, although these communities are somewhat present in archives, they are marginalised and remain absent, silent, and dormant. Through two case studies of audiovisual representations of Turkish migrants from Dutch public archives, the article tackles possible ways to unravel such hegemonic categories, thereby reflecting the multiplicities and instabilities of migrant archival objects. It explores the pivotal role of community engagement for more inclusive archival practices that undermine its constitutive limits –– to work with archives against the archives
The Paradox of Borders: Tracing the Clip of Laika the Soviet Dog in Three Digital Television Archives
While television has never been fully obtained by national borders, the archives that preserve its heritage have long been positioned within nation-centred frameworks. Through wide-scale digitisation, combined with the internationalisation of our societies, more international users are finding their way to these archives, resulting in a transnational (re)circulation of the collections. This article therefore sets out to understand how transnational flows are visible and findable by tracing a clip of Laika the Soviet dog within three digital television archives: EUscreen, the Internet Archive and the CLARIAH Media Suite. It is shown that television archives should paradoxically emphasise the national borders in their collections in order to facilitate transnational television research. While national demarcations may be debated, defining them clearly will guide researchers between and over them
Audio on Paper: The Merits and Pitfalls of the Dutch Digital Media Archive for Studying Transnational Entanglements during the Second World War
This paper traces the transnational entanglements in the Dutch digital media archive, with a focus on the propaganda battle between pro-Nazi and pro-Allied Dutch media during the Second World War. Reflecting on newspaper and radio source materials in the CLARIAH Media Suite, it points out significant differences in the availability of these two source collections. It argues that these imbalances can be explained by the historical context in which these sources were created as well as by archival policies after 1945. The main problem lies in the digitized radio archive which contains only a relatively small amount of audio and leaves out the enormous amount of documents, such as transcripts and monitoring reports. With our article, we ask for more attention for this form of ‘audio on paper’, which has previously been overlooked by scholars and archivists. In the conclusion we argue for the digitization of these source materials and inclusion in the Media Suite as a first step towards redrawing the borders of media archives, enabling a new research agenda aimed at studying transnational entanglements in war time propaganda
A New Numbering Plan Intended to Develop a Telephone Network
The 25th of October 1985, France numbering telephone plan was transformed from seventy telephone zones to two in just one night. The computerisation of France was highly promoted but the Telephone network was quickly running out of numbers. We analyse this overnight event as an infrastructural event and the biggest update in telephone history. It market a crucial step in the direction of network as a service, turning telephones into terminal while network fade in the background. By doing so, we insist on the historical specificity of what was a technocratic event, an innovation process with a highly closed script
Projecting Creative Processes: Art Films and Art Education in Post-war Britain
The relationship between film and art education has received little scholarly attention. This paper describes and discusses one instance in the long and multifaceted history of this relationship: the educational uses of nonfiction films about art and artists in post-Second World War Britain, known then invariably either as ‘films on art’ or ‘art films.’ As a new international genre (backed by UNESCO’s educational distribution schemes), it gained particular momentum in the UK with the Arts Council of Great Britain, a public body, set up after the war with a mission ‘to increase the accessibility of the fine arts.’ And one of the ways it did was via 16mm projection. Alongside building a substantial film library, in 1950 the Council, in collaboration with the British Film Institute (BFI), started a new mobile cinema scheme, the Art Film Tour, to directly engage with the nontheatrical cinema sector, especially its educational venues. By drawing on my research in the Arts Council Archive, I propose to adopt a ‘historical pragmatics’ perspective and to study the Art Film Tour’s media configuration as a dispositif (Kessler, 2018). In the 1950s, with an increasing number of art films dedicated to artists at work, art students encountered cinematic renderings of the creative process by renowned modern artists, such as Picasso, Henry Moore and Jackson Pollock. And therefore, I make a case for an inductive analysis of ‘showing making’ on screen and its implications within historicised art education contexts