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2036-461X
16328
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Anikó Imre, Timothy Havens, Katalin Lustyik (eds.), Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and Since Socialism, Routledge, New York/London 2013, pp. 285
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2012-10-01
2021-09-09
2012-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Francesco Pitassio
2012/10/01
Università degli Studi di Udine
2036-461X
19
en
Anikó Imre, Timothy Havens, Katalin Lustyik (eds.), Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and Since Socialism, Routledge, New York/London 2013, pp. 285
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16328/17195
12
                                                     borders of media and political power relation-
                                                     ships. This approach does not dismiss political
Popular Television in Eastern Europe                 agency in popular TV during Socialism (Kat-
During and Since Socialism,
                                                     Viehoff, An Evening with Friends and Ene-
                                                     mies: Political Indoctrination in Popular East
                                                -    Germany Family Series). However, the chosen
tural formations in Central and Eastern Europe       pathway enables single contributions not to
excluded television from academic discourse.
A number of reasons explains such a blind spot:      sociopolitical lens. Such a standpoint leads to a
the privilege accorded to traditional arts when      more thorough account for the development of
considering cultural production in the area;         television in the former Soviet bloc, its different
the reduction of mass media to their political       policies in terms of imports and broadcasting,
function; scholars’ limited access to national       its placement within a broader continental TV
productions, due to linguistic barriers that pre-    history. As Sabina Mihelj puts it, “an adequate
vented the developing of a truly transnational       understanding of these developments cannot
approach to the area; the dominance of a West-       rely on the perception of the Cold War as a
ern paradigm in media studies. The project                                                             -
                                                     ism and communism, nor can it proceed solely

                                               -     of post-socialist democratization and economic
ly development to the present date. As the edi-
tors state in their introduction: “such a volume     that many of the promises and challenges posed
might spotlight, nurture and reclaim Eastern         by television everywhere were similar, and that
European television studies from the margins         both popular and elite reactions to them often
of both television studies and Eastern Europe-                                                  Tele-
an media studies. As an intellectual endeavor,       vision Entertainment in Socialist Eastern Eu-
Eastern European television studies suffer from      rope, p. 25; see also Dana Mustata, Television
the Western nature of most television schol-         in the Age of (Post-)Communism: The Case of
                                                     Romania). Equally, post-Socialist reality ap-
European media studies almost exclusively            pears far more complex than its widespread
addresses questions of journalism, democracy         representation as the uncontrolled realm of
and civic life.” (p. 1).                             US production. US dominance cannot be un-
   The volume is organized in three main sec-        derestimated, and certainly affected regional
                                                 -   production, as children’s edutainment (Katalin
                                                 -            From a Socialist Endeavor to a Com-
balization and Eastern European TV;” the third       mercial Enterprise: Children’s Television in
one discusses “Television and National Identity      East-Central Europe), but persisting policies
on Europe’s Edge,” thus centering on a crucial       are to be discovered, as for instance broadcast-
question for the region, at least from 19th cen-                            Post-Transitional Conti-
tury onward. Compared to previous contribu-          nuity and Change: Polish Broadcasting Flow
tions, the three sections displace the discussion,   and American TV Series). At the same time,
                                                     European strategies to contrast US hegemony

                                                                                                    149
and foster continental cultural diversity seem     Soap). Finally, the term concerns also minori-
to follow rather a commercial, Western-based       ties and popular TV, especially telling within
logic (Timothy Havens, Evelyn Bottando, Mat-       a region where the strive for national identi-
thew S. Thatcher, Intra-European Media Impe-
rialism: Hungarian Program Imports and the         (Annabel Tramblett, Why Must Roma Minori-
Television Without Frontiers Directive).           ties Be Always Seen on the Stage and Never in
  The concern with the role of TV in nation-       the Audience? Children’s Opinions of Reality
al and regional culture enlightens the dialogue    Roma TV; Ksenija Vidmar-Horvat, Racing for
between multiple cultural expressions at the       the Audience: National Identity, Public Tv and
core of popular production, as Dorota Ostrows-     the Roma in Post-socialist Slovenia).
                                                      Popular Television in Eastern Europe During
1980s Polish TV series (The Carnival of the        and Since Socialism greatly contributes to a
                         Alternatywy 4 and         better understanding of cultural Eastern Euro-
                           ). By connecting                                                     -

culture, “edutainment series […] were instru-      geopolitical boundaries, instead, it proves how
mental in fostering national unity through tele-   productive a more problematic approach can
vision entertainment not despite but because of    be. It questions assumed historical paradigms,
the fact that they were mostly made up. In oth-    includes Eastern European popular TV in the
er words, their affective power and longevity      broader international history of the medium,
within national memory derives precisely from                                                     -
                                               -   al and transnational medial identities, and in-
dation of nationalism’s loose treatment of his-    cludes gender and ethnic varieties into a broad-
                           Adventures in Early
Socialist Edutainment, p. 37).                     culture could clarify the methods, and the is-
  A will to grasp cultural dynamics in popu-                                                     -
lar TV brings to close examination its role in     tions maintain the contradiction at the core of
                                                   the notion of popular: “On the one hand an em-
national ones (Adina Schneeweis, To Be Ro-         phasis on something produced for the ordinary
manian in Post-Communist Romania: Enter-           people, on the other, something approved by
tainment Television and Patriotism in Popular      the people. It is in the switch between the two
Discourse; Alice Bardan, Big Brothers and          emphases that we can locate the problematic
Little Brothers: National Identity in Recent       of popular culture.”1 Therefore, different ap-
Romanian Adaptations of Global Television          proaches are juxtaposed, coupling broadcasting
Formats). Otherwise, identities can be con-
sidered collectively, shaped by a memory of        social discourses on or through media, on ways
totalitarian past and traumatic shift triggered    of building identities, overcoming cultural, so-
through popular TV (Irena Carpentier Reifová,      cial and political traumas by appropriating pop-
                                      The Way      ular TV. Besides, the same notion of popular
We Applauded: How Popular Culture Stimu-           has been forged within and applied mostly to
lates Collective Memory of the Socialist Past in   Anglo-Saxon cultural production, but does not
Czechoslovakia); or political (Ferenc Hammer,
Coy Utopia: Politics in the First Hungarian        Eventually, an approach based on a symbolic

150
economy might provide this vivid discussion           1   Colin MacCabe,                            , in
                                             -            High Theory/Low Culture, edited by Colin Mac-
duction and broadcasting and cultural process-
                                                          in Id., The Eloquence of the Vulgar. Language,
                                                          Cinema and the Politics of Culture, British Film
                                                          Institute, London 1999, p. 76.
step, and further carry on the research.
                            [Francesco Pitassio,
                Università degli Studi di Udine]



Miriam Bratu Hansen,                                  her analysis of the developments of technolog-
Cinema and Experience. Siegfried Kracauer,            ical modernity, and of the new forms of experi-
Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno,
University of California Press,
                                                      of modernity, the scholar refers to the well-
                                                                                                        1
                                                                                                          ,
  A genuine testament of Hansen, who died             of the ‘public sphere’ “as a ‘social horizon of
                                                      experience’ grounded in the subjects’ ‘context
Cinema and Experience appears as the summa-           of living’, that is, the lived relationality of so-
                                                      cial and material, affective and imaginative re/
same time, a masterly confrontation with that         production.” The social and political role of
longstanding theoretical tradition (born in the
                                                      create a collective horizon of experience, in
                                                      which an ever more fragmented and alienated

antinomic way, upon modernity and the trans-
formations it had brought about, and upon the         Kluge, which has been for many years a recur-
                                            -         ring point of reference for her own research.
ry and tradition. Technological modernity is            In the preface, among various other autobi-
                                                                                                     -
fragmentation of sensory life, which is disinte-      rection of her research has overlapped with that
grated into its different parts in a sort of “apoc-                                                  -
alypse of the sensible.”                              versity, from 1967 to 1976, are contemporary
  It is “that great overhaul of the perceptu-         with the rise of the debate on cinema and media
al inventory that will modify again and in an
unpredictable way our image of the world,” as         than in France or the United States, but which
                                                      has been fundamental in identifying the cate-
contours of a new scopic regime and its huge
epistemological and social impact. As the sub-        theoretical scene in the following decades. As
                                                      a student of Theodor W. Adorno and Karsten
and Adorno are Hansen’s direct interlocutors,         Witte, who edited the writings of Benjamin
but Habermas, Negt and Kluge – the last expo-         and Kracauer respectively, Hansen began in
nents of Critical Theory – are fundamental in         those years that careful reading of these au-

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