Press release from Utrecht University

Date: February 4
Place: Utrecht

The dissertation “The Power of Television: Including the Historicizing of the Live Romanian Revolution” by Dana Mustata’ will be available soon after her defense on Friday, February 4 at Utrecht University. Mustata also works for EUscreen as a researcher where she focuses on contextualisation and the use of online television content in academic research. Her dissertation is a first history of Romanian television, dealing for the first time with the history of television under a former communist regime. It shows that despite the oppressive regime, television was not necessarily and not always an instrument of political control.

The dissertation develops an innovate method for understanding television in a coercive regime. The method studies television as an agent of power. Based on this method, the dissertation reveals brand new data on the televised Romanian Revolution in 1989: the event was not a spontaneous public outburst, but a decade-long rehearsed process that took place in the private spaces of television viewers and which was silenced, controlled and manipulated by the Securitate, the former Romanian secret services.

Being a first television history of a former communist country, the dissertation opens up this field of research in Eastern Europe, making a significant contribution to European television history. The dissertation is based on so far undisclosed and classified documents of the Romanian communist secret services.

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Announcement

The edition of the BUFVC Handbook 2011 is now available and contains an overview of activities the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) is involved in and a description of resources that are useful for the academic community. In more detail, the handbook focusses on:

• University audio-visual centres
• UK film archives
• Important media festivals and awards
• Video distributors in the UK
• Film and media training courses
• Media legislation and reports issued during the last year
• TRILT and the BoB National service

EUscreen is featured in this handbook as one of the research projects which can be used as a resource by academics who have an interest in European television history. The BUFVC Handbook 2011 is primarily written for specialists, students, teachers and academic service providers and can be ordered here.

The first EUscreen International Conference took place on 7 and 8 October, 2010 and was hosted by Cinecittá Luce in Rome. The theme of this years conference was Context Selection Policies and Contextalisation. Over 100 participants attended the conference. The programme provided different angles on this theme with lecturers coming from the academic domain, the archives domain and the audiovisual production domain. With such a rich and interesting programme, many issues regarding online audiovisual content were addressed. In the conference report we will focus on only a few of these issues, notably contextualisation, collective memory and different users and uses.  The full conference report written by Andy O’Dwyer, Sian Barber and Wietske van den Heuvel can be read here.

Besides being the EUscreen projectmanager, Quirijn Backx also works as a photographer. She has taken photos during the conference which can be viewed here.

By Marco Rendina and Wietske van den Heuvel

The EUscreen project was presented to a professional audience during the FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2010 which took place in Dublin from October 16^th to 18^th. Johan Oomen gave a plenary presentation about the project and its links to Europeana and addressed questions of how to safeguard the audiovisual heritage. This presentation was held in conjunction with a presentation about the European Film Gateway, represented by Georg Eckes.

In the afternoon of the 18th, Rob Turnock, Johan Oomen and Marco Rendina showed the current status of the project during a EUscreen dedicated workshop. The workshop focused on how EUscreen makes television history ‘real’ and about the kind of television history EUscreen is representing. The presentations included the content selection policy and the metadata schema. The event was attended by a large audience and it was a success.

By Wietske van den Heuvel

Berber Hagedoorn has published a book review of Jonathan Bignell & Andreas Fickers’ ‘A European Television History’ in the Dutch journal ,  ‘Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis‘. The book has been the first collective result of the European Television History Network (ETHN), and is also the first European project that researches the European television history from a comparative perspective.

“European Television History brings together television historians and media scholars to chart the development of television in Europe since its inception. The volume interrogates the history of the medium in divergent political, economic, cultural and ideological national contexts.

• Taking a comparative approach to the topic, the volume is organized around a set of common questions, themes, and methodological reflections.
• Deals with European television in the context of television historiography and transnational traditions.
• Case study chapters written by scholars from different European countries to reflect their specific areas of expertise. “ (From: Wiley.com)

Hagedoorn works as a PhD researcher at Utrecht University, one of the founders of the ETHN and co-ordinator of EUscreen. As a researcher, Hagedoorn is closely involved in the contextualisation of EUscreen content. In her review, she has also referred to EUscreen in relationship to ‘A European Television History’.

Acces the review here

More information about the book