Television Studies Workshop

That was the prudent theme of what proved to be a grand conference at the Royal Library Auditorium in Stockholm in the end of October. On behalf of FIAT/IFTA, Sveriges Television (SVT), Stockholm University and University of Southern California we were happy to welcome a dozen of the most interesting scholars on Television Studies from North America and Europe. And over one hundred delegates from Europe took part in the conference.

The conference was coordinated by Professors Jan Olsson, Stockholm University and Lynn Spigel, University of Southern California, with the assistance of the FIAT office and the SVT TV-archive. Sponsors were the Institute for Future Studies and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (National Bank the Tercentennial fund), this made it possible to offer the conference free of charge to delegates. The Royal Library generously held their new Auditorium at the disposal of the conference.

The Royal Library generously held their new Auditorium at the disposal of the conference.

What's in it for us?

That was the question put by our Director at SVT when we reported back to him about the successful event. We were a bit puzzled by the question as we had been working with this project for more than a year and considered its merits obvious. Perhaps it is a question that should be obvious in any kind of participation in a FIAT event?

The event this time was something new for FIAT, since it was the first major event in the very young history of FIAT's Television Studies Workgroup (TSW). This work group was formed under the support of the FIAT/IFTA Executive Council to create a possibility to open up the broadcasters' and other audiovisual archives for scholarly research. Very few countries have an institutionalized system to allow scholarly research in audiovisual archives, still less combined with a statutory deposit law. It works two ways - the archives can also benefit from scholarly input. Catalogues can be corrected and refined, "undiscovered" films can be revealed, program ideas can be sparked from the interaction. The scholars can be used to increase the knowledge level of the archive staff.

To accomplish this in a wider sense, this conference was decided as a joint effort between the parties above. Thanks to the Professors Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, we managed to gather twelve of the world's most renowned film and television scholars to this conference in Stockholm.

So what's in it for us? The value of theses mutual relations and contacts are obvious. But also the content of the papers presented, one after the other gave new and thrilling aspects on our medium's role in society. Let us emphasize that this is our very brief and personal summary of a full two day's conference on sometimes a very high theoretical level.

Lynn Spigel presented a most intriguing discourse, "Commercial Television and Modern Art in Postwar America", on the rivalry between art and early television. In the early years, TV wasn‚t suitable for presenting art at all. "The most successful cook book is cooking, the most successful art book is looking". One of the first examples of the change of attitude to art in television was illustrated with a clip showing Jackie Kennedy guiding us among the paintings of the White House in the early sixties.

She also showed a long sequence in color of Barbara Streisand performing in a Museum of Modern Art from 1967. From then on art in television could be considered accepted.

David Morley, University of London, gave a fascinating picture of the play between the physical locality and the intrusion of TV in our homes. Accordingly the title of his paper was "At Home with Television". One point in his discourse emanated from the fact that half of the UK population live within five miles from where they are born their whole lives and that rich people move and poor people prefer to stay if they have a free choice. In this community of course television was considered a strange element.

Anna McCarthy, Assistant Professor at the New York University, introduced us to "Waiting Room TV", where the television set has it‚s own place-bound identity. The title of her paper is "The Rhythms of the Reception Area: Crisis, Capitalism, and the Waiting Room TV". She stated that the "act of waiting is like being in adungeon". She illustrated this by showing pictures that she had taken herselfduring several years in lots of locations of people in different waiting rooms. They are isolated and alone even if among others, with their vision glued to the television set. In the US there are several networks specializing in "waiting-room productions". One of the more spectacular projects was the a short (3 min) documentary film of the quasi-guerrilla art piece "Capitalism Stops at Nothing", that ran on video monitors in the San Francisco subway system (BART) last year. (If you want to check it out the address is: http://www.ifilm.com/films.taf?film_id=41823) .

Our Norwegian friend Professor Jostein Gripsrud from the Bergen University, took a more provocative approach and told us that all the modern trends in television like inter activity, pay-per-view, digitization is just unrealistic. People are conservative in their viewing habits and they do not have the strength to view more then today. Time-shifting is already since long in everybody's possession through the VCR. Nobody will want to watch television on their PC and the television will not replace the PC for word processing. Just as you and I always want to share our experience with one another, we also want to continue to share our television viewing. The titel of his paper is: Broadcast Television: The Chances of its Survival in a Digital Age?

Professor John Hartley‚s (Cardiff University) paper "Towards A ‚Republican' Television Studies" argues that citizenship and textuality have been co-requisite throughout modernity. It concludes that concepts such as writing and authorship need to be rethought, and focuses attention on the extension of writing TV as well as reading it. In such a context, it is argued that televisions early ironclad order of video is evolving into a more decentralized republic of media, and that a republican television studies is needed to promote this process.

"A Tale of Three Cities: Hollywood, Hong Kong, and Chicago Television", was told by Associate Professor Michael Curtin, Indiana University: " In most countries around the World television was a force for economic integration and collective political imagination. Yet it was also a producer of new patterns of social difference and hierarchy. Television was never a great homogenizer but rather an organizer and mediator of social differences within a national context. More recently, the national features of television have begun to blur as we witness an increasing transnational flow of imagery and the production of new audiences that subdivide or transcend the national mass audiences of the priorera. As this process intensifies, we have witnessed the emergence of a multicentric global media environment, which is based in a number of media capitals around the world, such as Cairo, Bombay, and Mexico City.".

Television Studies Workgroup

Steve Bryant, the chair of the FIAT/IFTA Television Studies Work group (TSW), opened the second day of the conference. He got the opportunity to explain the purpose of the TSW, the discussion on academic access to television archives and how it can be achieved. The feedback on the ideas on forming links between the academic and the broadcasting communities was prompt and positive audience.

The early Swedish media mogul Anders Sandrew was the initiator of Swedish commercial television before TV even existed in Sweden. How, why and where was vividly presented by Jan Olsson. It occurred during one week in May 1954. It was aired to the audience, but as no TV-sets existed in private homes, viewing was limited to shop windows and cinemas. The programs consisted of variety shows, light entertainment, sports, news - all interspersed with commercials. This was a very serious attempt to take the initiative and introduce commercial television instead of public service television in Sweden. The result was the opposite

Jan Olsson is one of the scholars that often has stated that image sources are just as important elements in a scholarly discourse as paper documents and other conventional sources. His paper, "One Commercial Week. Television in Sweden Prior to Public Service", was underpinned with several illustrations.

Professor William Uricchio, Utrecht University, says in his presentation of his paper "Zapping, Surfing and other Notions of Mobility" that he wanted to investigate the 'other side' of the televisual issues he had have been working with recently. The other side, that is, of simultaneity. Obviously television has been relying more and more on storage while other media have been picking up the slack by embracing, immediacy/ simultaneity/ connectivity. In his paper, he says, "I would like to poke around behind metaphors of televisual and internet access such as 'zapping' and 'surfing' as a way to explore several issues in an environment characterized by remote control access, multi-channel cable/satelite offerings, time shifting, storage media such as videos, laserdisks, etc."

Professor Siegfried Zelinski of the Kunsthochschule f€r Medien in Cologne presented the paper: "(An)Archaeology of Television". He opened by stating that TV could already been invented by the end of the 19th Century. Already in 1906 there was a rudimentary attempt to show TV pictures. His experiments in the early 70‚s with some kind of "virtual TV " were exiting. He also seriously tried to connect the emergence of the early TV with a philosophical basis. He managed to do this in a humorous and inspiring way that attracted not least the younger participants in the audience.

Professor Charlotte Brunsdon from University of Warwick could show very convincingly in the presentation of her paper, "Television Studies In A Grain of Sand", how programming had changed at prime time throughout the years. This change is connected to the change of women‚s role in society and is reflected in both when the programs are broadcast and the program content. She stated the fact that the class perspective is always relevant in television studies, but "pluralling up doesn‚t need to be dumbing down".

Julie d‚Acchi‚s (Associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison) paper "Cultural Studies/Television Studies and the Crisis in the Humanities" deals in a general fashion with the notion of disciplinarity (or not) and the protocols for constituting objects of study (or not) during this period of global crisis in the humanities. On a more specific level it deals with the relationships among cultural studies, television studies, and the newly reconfiguring humanities. It sets out arguments for thinking about the humanities and the kinds of knowledge they produce. Her paper also investigates the fraught relationships among cultural studies and the current humanities. Last but not least, it intriguingly examines the current debates about television as an object of study, involving the notions of disciplinary boundaries.

In his paper, "Television and the Logic of Difference", Professor Herman Grey, University of California, Santa Cruz, explored the theme that has been a persistent feature of the American television system and concern for television studies: The logic of difference, its recognition, management, and interrogation. He does this by focusing on three moments in the relationship between American television and television studies and the operation of this logic.

Firstly the formative years of American network television where the logic of broadcasting' sought to manage differences of ethnicity and social class in order to produce a conception of the nation as a national market and homogeneous body politics. The second moment is occasioned by the crisis of national unity. A crisis that among other things was provoked by the US civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam. The aftermath of this crisis resulted in increased recognition of differences based on race, sex, and gender, framed by a civil rights discourse. The third moment is marked by explicit political and ideological clashes about the nature of difference and its political implication for the national imaginary. Gray also states that this third moment is defined by profound transformation in the industrial structure of the television system and the appearance of new forms of service delivery.

Some institutions that support studies in Humanities on a wider level, as in this conference - the Swedish Institute for Future Studies and the Tercentennial fund of the National Bank - are aware of the importance of media in contemporary life and the urgent need to address media representations within an array of academic disciplines. The productiveness of such sources depends on the discourses deployed to frame them in shifting contexts.

Thanks to this kind of qualified support from research sponsors we foresee opportunities for future exchange between the archival and scholarly worlds. The Department of Cinema Studies in Stockholm is currently planning a conference due to take place in December 2000. Televisual issues are part of the agenda. The coordidnators, Jan Olsson and John Fullerton, expect an active input from the FIAT/IFTA.

Sten Frykholm (sten.frykholm@svt.se) & Lasse Nilsson (lasse.nilsson@svt.se), Sveriges Television