EUscreen publishes the open access journal VIEW, which explores Europe’s television history and culture. We’re proud to announce the publication of our winter issue, which is now available in its entirety at www.viewjournal.eu. This eight issue, on the use and re-use of moving image archives in various productions, was co-edited by Claude Mussou, head of InaTEQUE, and Mette Charis Buchman, senior manager of archive research at Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR).

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EUscreen publishes the open access journal VIEW, which explores Europe’s television history and culture. We’re proud to announce the publication of our summer issue, which is now available in its entirety at http://journal.euscreen.eu. This seventh issue was co-edited by Andreas Fickers, Professor for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg, and Anne-Katrin Weber, lecturer at the University of Lausanne.

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The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a collaboration between the Library of Congress, WGBH Boston and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, launched a new website at americanarchive.org on April 7, providing the public with access to a collection of American public radio and television content dating back to the 1950s.

These audio and video materials, created by more than 120 public broadcasting organizations across the United States, have now been digitized and preserved, and will be a resource for scholars, researchers, educators, filmmakers and the general public to delve into the rich history of public broadcasting across America.
 
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In March, we published the call for papers for the sixth issue of our open access journal VIEW, which explores Europe’s television history and culture. At the end of December, this latest issue found its way online and it is now available in its entirety at http://journal.euscreen.eu. All articles can be read on screen, where source materials can be found embedded in the article text, or saved as a PDF for reading offline.

The sixth issue is co-edited by Gabriele Balbi, Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the Università della Svizzera italiana, and Massimo Scaglioni, Assistant Professor of Media History at the Catholic University of Milan.

On the eve of the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a unique exhibition entitled ‘Roads to 1989. East-Central Europe 1939-1989.’ was launched in the German capital. The exhibition documents the complicated process through which this part of Europe regained its freedom from communist dictatorship. The exhibition is part of ‘Freedom Express’, a social and educational campaign organised by ENRS, ministries responsible for culture in Poland, Germany, Hungary and Slovakia and local partners. EUscreenXL Consortium and Europeana are partners of the project.

The exhibition concentrates on the various ways in which civil liberties were limited in the former communist block and on attempts made to regain them. It focuses especially on the question of what connects and divides remembrance of the events that preceded the fall of communism in Central and Eastern European. The content of the exhibition reveals a story of the different faces of freedom. Individual parts of the exhibition are devoted to freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion and belief, economic freedom and other themes.

EUscreenXL contributed to the exhibition by creating a unique, moving and historically meaningful video production. It includes archival content that shows important and commonly recognizable personalities and events from the political transformation time in Europe of 1989 and depicts crucial social phenomena also typical for the period. It represents one of the first try-outs of the EUscreen Network activities aimed at reaching new audiences and stepping out of the online world by preparing a physical exhibition.

The video was created by EUscreenXL partners – Deutsche Welle, The Lithuanian Central State Archive, RTV Slovenia, Czech Tevision, National Audiovisual Archive of Hungary, National Audiovisual Institute of Poland (in collaboration with Video Studio Gdańsk), and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

The exhibition will be shown on 4-10 November on Dorothea-Schlegel-Platz – a square located close to the historic Friedrichstraße train station, which, between the years 1961 to 1990, served as a railway border crossing between East and West Berlin.

After Berlin, ‘Roads to 1989’ will be shown this year in Brussels (14-24 November) and Warsaw (28 November-15 December).

Alongside the European tour of the exhibition, its digital version is also available at: http://1989.enrs.eu/exhibition.

Freedom Express is asocial and educational campaign organised by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. Its first part was a study trip whereby a group of young artists, journalists and historians visited Solidarity’s Gdańsk, then Warsaw, Budapest, Sopron, Timisoara, Bratislava, Prague and Berlin. The trip’s agenda of meetings, workshops and artistic activities was made possible thanks to the cooperation of a number of institutions involved with 20^th century history.

More information is available at www.freedomexpress.enrs.eu

You can also follow the event on Facebook.

Source: ENRS press information and own materials.
Photos: Krzysztof Dobrogowski, Copyright: European Network Remembrance and Solidarity

Scope is a fully peer-reviewed online journal edited by staff and students in the Department of Culture, Film and Media and Institute for Screen Industries Research at the University of Nottingham. Scope provides a forum for discussion of all aspects of film and television history, theory and criticism.

Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies issue 26 has been recently published.  The open-access resource is available here:  http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/february-issue-26.aspx

VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture Vol. 3, Issue 05.

Deadline for abstracts: February 1st, 2014.
Deadline for full papers: 15 March, 2014.

While recent comparative and transnational approaches in the field of European television history have demonstrated the need for (post)socialist television histories in Europe, there is currently limited scholarship dedicated to this geopolitical area of television in Europe. This area of study has mostly been relegated to the margins of other disciplines and remained isolated by national languages inaccessible to non-native scholars.

The forthcoming issue of VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture is dedicated to the theme Television Histories in (Post)Socialist Europe. It aims to open up discussions of (post)socialist television in Europe beyond political histories of the nation-state, discourses of Cold War isolation and East-West antagonism. The very broad questions that motivate these aims are:

• Which empirical case studies help us understand (post)socialist television histories beyond stories of political control?
• Which primary sources allow us access to television histories that fall outside the mainstream histories of the socialist state?
• What methods do we need in order to decentralize the state in the production of (post)socialist television histories and analyze television histories that have resisted, subverted or negotiated the politics of communist regimes?
• How can we theorize (post)socialist television as an object of study that revisits the East versus West dichotomies that have been at the centre of television history in Europe
• How do (post)socialist television histories help us revisit the Cold War geography of Europe?
• How can we understand the shifting place of (post)socialist television within broader societal processes of communication?

VIEW welcomes contributions in the form of short articles (2000-4500 words), video and audio essays that take these broad questions on board and deal specifically with topics such as:

• empirical case studies that help us understand (post)socialist television histories beyond stories of political control;
• video and audio essays exploring television archival collections in Eastern Europe;
• video and audio essays presenting primary sources (e.g. oral interviews, audio-visual and written material) of television in former socialist countries;
• transnational cultures of (post)socialist television in Europe, namely: shared cultures of television production and professions, shared techno-political cultures of television and shared viewing cultures;
• memories of socialist television and nostalgia;
• popular television programmes during and since socialism.

This issue is guest edited by the European (Post)Socialist Television History Network in collaboration with the following guest editorial team:

• Kirsten Bönker (Bielefeld University, DE)
• Sven Grampp (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, DE)
• Ferenc Hammer (ELTE University, HU)
• Anikó Imre (University of Southern California, USA)
• Lars Lundgren (Södertörn Univerity, SE)
• Sabina Mihelj (Loughborough University, UK)
• Dana Mustata (University of Groningen, NL)
• Julia Obertreis (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, DE)
• Irena Reifová (Charles University, CZ)

Submission info

• Contributions are encouraged from authors with different kinds of expertise and interests in television broadcasting, from researchers to television professionals, to archivists and preservationists.
• Contributions can be in the form of conventional articles, illustrated commentaries or photo-essays.
• Paper proposals (max. 500 words) are due on February 1st, 2014. Submissions should be sent to the managing editor of the journal, Dana Mustata.

VIEW is published by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in collaboration with Utrecht University, University of Luxembourg and Royal Holloway University of London. It is supported by the EUscreenXL project, the European Television History Network and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture Vol. 2, Issue 04: The Hidden Professions of Television

We know little about the ‘behind the scenes’ of television. The fourth issue of VIEW provides a rich and eclectic series of contributions from which a lot can be learnt about its ‘hidden’ professions.

VIEW, the Journal of European Television History and Culture is the first peer-reviewed, multi-media and open access e-journal in the field of
European television history and culture. It offers an international platform for outstanding academic research and archival reflection on television as an important part of our European cultural heritage.

The journal is proud to present its fourth issue:
Hidden Professions of Television has been guest-edited by Andy O’Dwyer and Tim O’Sulivan and is freely available from: http://www.viewjournal.eu

The articles presented here bring under scrutiny the ‘behind the scenes’ activities of television and their hidden, often unrecognised and uncelebrated personnel and processes. They engage across a wide range of organisational, administrative and technical activities that have played their understated, often ‘invisible’ part in the historical formation and development of television. We wish you a pleasant and inspiring journey through the Hidden Professions of Television!

Table of Contents

• Editorial – Andy O’Dwyer, Tim O’Sulivan

DISCOVERIES

• Revealing Television’s Analogue Heroes – Vanessa Jackson
• Behind the Scenes: Costume Design for Television – Gamze Toylan
• Doing it Live! Planning and Preparing for a Live Drama Episode: A Case Study of ‘The Bill’; (ITV, 2005) – Joanna MacDonnell
• Whatever Happened to Vera? – Jo Henderson

EXPLORATIONS

• In-Vision Continuity Announcers: Performing an Identity for Early Television in Europe – Sonja de Leeuw, Dana Mustata
• Rational Wizards: Audience Interpreters in French Television – Jérôme Bourdon, Cécile Méadel
• An Unknown, but Key Player in the Television Market: The Television Retailer and the Case of Black and White TV Sets in France (1950-1987) – Isabelle Gaillard
• Hid(ing) Media Professionals: Constructing and Contesting the 1st AD – Daniel Ashton, Nic Jeune
• Invisible Mediations: The Role of Adaptation and Dubbing Professionals in Shaping US TV for Italian Audiences – Luca Barra
• Writing Games: Continuity and Change in the Design and Development of Quiz Shows in Italy – Massimo Scaglioni, Axel Fiacco