Showing papers in "Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television in 2000"

Watching Africans Watch Films: Theories of spectatorship in British Colonial Africa

Abstract: (2000). Watching Africans Watch Films: Theories of spectatorship in British Colonial Africa. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 197-211.

‘Dear Owen’: The CIA, Luigi Luraschi and Hollywood, 1953

Abstract: (2000). ‘Dear Owen’: The CIA, Luigi Luraschi and Hollywood, 1953. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 149-196.

The Ballykissangelization of Ireland

Abstract: It is ironic that a country which established its national identity largely through recourse to historical and mythical narratives has now, with equal fervour, adopted a policy of commodifying those narratives for the purposes of developing its second largest industry, tourism. It is a further irony that the major consumers of Irish heritage tourism are the former colonizers, the British. Irish culture e nds itself in a double bind, promoting itself through its past, whilst simultaneously denying much of what is signie cant in that past. This cultural imperative has given rise in turn to a specie c cycle of e lms made in and about Ireland, an Irish heritage cinema. A parallel discourse has emerged in television representations, typie ed by the highly successful series Ballykissangel. The regressive discourses of these heritage productions trade on a very specie c image of Irishness which has resonances for the way in which areas such as community, gender and history/the past are depicted. The evolution of the stereotype of the ‘Irish Paddy’ has already been widely discussed; this article focuses less on how that particular e gure has transferred into recent e lm and television works than on other aspects of comic representations of Irishness, in particular how themes of interdependency have been treated historically and in the present. This article emphasizes comedy and its centrality to the heritage cinema and related television programmes. The kind of pleasures offered by comedies have tended to obscure their value as cultural documents. For example, no serious academic work has been carried out on Ballykissangel or the earlier British comedies set in Ireland, which function simultaneously as post-colonial texts and as pleasurable outings for the vicarious heritage tourist. My emphasis is on how the texts circulate between English and Irish audiences and e lm makers and to speculate on what these heritage e lms can tell us about the complex relationship between former colonizer and formerly colonized. Before dee ning in greater detail what is meant by the term heritage cinema, I want briee y to trace its origins both in tourist narratives and earlier comic treatments of the themes of interdependency. Finally, I want to question to what extent we, the Irish, collude in this image-making process and for what reasons.

Protecting the Family and the Nation: The official censorship of American cinema in Ireland, 1923‐1954

Abstract: In 1941, shortly after his retirement as Ireland’s Ž rst Film Censor, James Montgomery contributed an article entitled ‘The menace of Hollywood’ to the Jesuit publication Studies. In the piece he wrote that while in 1922 the newly formed Irish Free State was still in danger of Anglicization, it was combating that particular in uence through the educational system as it sought ‘to foster a national culture’ [1]. However, he considered that Hollywood Ž lms were undermining this national project:

Is There a Future for Foreign News

Abstract: It was both disruptive and stimulating that the Windsor Castle Symposium should convene on the day which followed the outbreak of the Ž rst war on European soil since the defeat of Adolf Hitler. The con ict in Kosovo did not turn out to be quite so momentous as the Second World War, but at its outbreak it certainly raised moral, political and strategic issues of the greatest signiŽ cance. In media terms, it was the biggest foreign news story for some considerable time. As such, 10 or perhaps even 5 years earlier we might have expected the newspapers to clear their front pages, to produce stirring headlines and photographs stretching from the masthead to the newspaper fold, designed to state conŽ dently that readers and journalists alike were agreed upon the importance of these events that they would dominate the national conversation. If good newspapers exist to ventilate what is on a society’s mind, then surely society could agree on the focus here, at least for a few days. However, this was not what happened. Instead, the war’s outbreak was greeted, among the broadsheet newspapers in particular, with a telling reminder of a different war—the war for circulation in a period when editors have become less and less conŽ dent that hard news will sell their newspapers. One of the standard responses to the problem of Ž ckle contemporary readers among the broadsheets has been the creation of the ‘skyline’ or promotional panel, a device which became widespread in the 1980s and which appears either above or below the masthead of the newspaper, where it reassures readers, particularly the important passing trade in newsagents’ shops, that there is more to that edition of the paper than the main news of the day. So, on the day of the outbreak of NATO’s Ž rst war in Europe, the editor of The Times also wanted us to know that we could read about Bruce Chatwin’s love affair with Jasper Conran and receive Dr Thomas Stuttaford’s advice on dental health. The Guardian likewise offset its reporting and analysis of the war with a top of page 1 trailer for its item ‘Doctors—the New Fertility Gods’, which might just as easily have appeared in a monthly women’s magazine. Nor did the Independent want us to think life was all military death or glory. It advertised a piece about the best and worst ‘England managers’—the assumption was made, correctly or not, that Independent readers would realise this was a story about football, rather than any other type of management. It was left to the Daily Telegraph to do what a decade ago any news editor would have done as a matter of Ž rst instinct and stream this massive news story right across the top half of the newspaper’s front page. There could not be clearer conŽ rmation of the fact that Britain’s newspaper editors have indeed lost conŽ dence that news, whether domestic or foreign, will sell newspapers. They entered this great military and political episode assuming that their circulation Ž gures would not be assisted by a war and it turned out that they were right. The gradual erosion of British’s national newspaper sales continues remorselessly, through

Being Beastly to the Germans: Music, censorship and the BBC in World War II

Abstract: (2000). Being Beastly to the Germans: Music, censorship and the BBC in World War II. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 513-525.

Projecting the Past: Historical documentary in Ireland

Abstract: (2000). Projecting the Past: Historical documentary in Ireland. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 335-350.

Advertising for Peace: The State and Political Advertising in Northern Ireland 1988-1998

Abstract: For 10 years a small but not insigniŽ cant part of British government policy in Northern Ireland has been a television advertising campaign. Since 1988 the Northern Ireland OfŽ ce has commissioned television advertisements from McCann–Erickson, the advertising Ž rm. Ostensibly the initial purpose of these adverts was to publicize a conŽ dential telephone line, urging people to call if they had any information pertaining to terrorist activities. This campaign continued, increasing in sophistication, up to the period of ceaseŽ re from August 1994. At this point the campaign shifted tack to promote the ‘peace process’ under the slogan ‘wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time’. Shortly before the collapse of the Ž rst IRA ceaseŽ re in February 1996 some of the pre-ceaseŽ re adverts were re-broadcast and the campaign began to move into a different phase of generally anti-sectarian advertisements urging viewers to ‘heal the hate, free the future’. It remains to be seen how, in the period of ceaseŽ re and negotiation, the Labour government will choose to continue with a campaign begun by the previous, Conservative administration. The Northern Ireland OfŽ ce (NIO) advertisements are interesting for three main reasons. First, their changing contents re ect shifting attitudes on the part of government towards terrorist organizations. As we shall argue, the adverts progressively shift from a straightforward demonization of terrorism to a qualiŽ ed ‘humanization’ of terrorists as themselves victims of circumstance. Second, and at a deeper textual level, the adverts construct an intriguing (and revealing) ideological schema positioning a notional public in relation to terrorism and state security forces. The earlier sequences revolve around interlocking discourses of community and family, deŽ ning family in terms of the threat it faces from violent forces that disrupt domestic life and which can only be protected by a certain kind of state security. Thus, political organizations seeking legitimacy on the basis that they represent and defend a particular community are challenged on precisely these grounds. They are represented as threatening the family while the state seeks to position itself as the only legitimate protector of domesticity. The post-ceaseŽ re advertisements continued to revolve around such discourses but, revealingly, did so in terms of a manifest infantilization of the Northern Irish people, who were portrayed primarily as children occupying a rural idyll that contrasted with the dark and threatening urban landscape that dominated earlier advertisements. Third, these advertisements are intrinsically interesting within the context of understanding government use of the media in general, beyond the difŽ cult context of Northern Ireland. The deep divisions of Northern Irish society tend to preclude any neutral public sphere of discussion. In this void the government seems to consider it worthwhile using advertising as an attempt to occupy some sort of public space. Thus,

National Body: Gina Lollobrigida and the cult of the star in the 1950s

Abstract: (2000). National Body: Gina Lollobrigida and the cult of the star in the 1950s. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 527-547.

Philip Donnellan, Ireland and Dissident Documentary

Abstract: (2000). Philip Donnellan, Ireland and Dissident Documentary. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 351-365.

The Media and Popular Protest in Pre-democratic Taiwan

Abstract: (2000). The Media and Popular Protest in Pre-democratic Taiwan. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 565-580.

American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? The Sound of Music (1965) fails in Germany and Austria

Abstract: (2000). American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? The Sound of Music (1965) fails in Germany and Austria. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 63-78.

Kevin Brownlow's Historical Films: It Happened Here (1965) and Winstanley (1975)

Abstract: ‘There is no point whatever in making a historical Ž lm’, says Kevin Brownlow, ‘unless you are going to show what happened’ [1]. This eminently sensible attitude fuelled the making of his two feature-length historical dramas It Happened Here (1965) and Winstanley (1975). Yet, as will be seen here, not even Brownlow, who has devoted his life to the history and preservation of the Ž lm medium (and whose Ž erce integrity towards the historical record is legendary) can always live up to his proposition. Although both Ž lms seem at Ž rst glance to be strikingly dissimilar—It Happened Here (1965) is a ‘counterfactual’ history of ‘what might have happened’ had the Nazis won the Battle of Britain and invaded England and Winstanley is a scrupulously researched and mounted chronicle of the adventures of Gerrard Winstanley and his ‘Diggers’ in the turbulent times of seventeenth-century Cromwellian England—both Ž nd commonality in their challenges to the conventional historical Ž lm. Both are driven by distinctly ‘presentist’ concerns, i.e. both consciously regard their subjects from the perspectives of present-day social, artistic and autobiographical contexts and both succeed ultimately in painting imaginative landscapes of their own devising onto the maps of history. Absent from circulation since their initial release, It Happened Here and Winstanley will be a surprise to viewers who know Brownlow only from his passion for silent Ž lm history, as documented in internationally acclaimed books (The Parade’s Gone By, The War, the West, and the Wilderness and Behind the Mask of Innocence), television documentaries made in association with the late David Gill (Hollywood: The Pioneers, The Unknown Chaplin and Cinema Europe) and classic Ž lm restorations (Napoleon and The Wedding March). Unlike these works, however, It Happened Here and Winstanley encountered obstacles at the outset in Ž nding popular audiences. It Happened Here outraged and baf ed many viewers with its controversial subject matter and idiosyncratic, pseudo-documentary cinematic techniques. It was censored and, eventually, withdrawn altogether. And Winstanley’s arcane subject matter, not to mention its catalogue of ‘inside’ cinematic references, made so few concessions to the formulas of mainstream entertainment that it quietly faded from public view. Now, 30 years later, both have resurfaced, vindicating Brownlow’s original visions and testifying to their own ability to survive the vicissitudes of history. Available through Milestone Films, It Happened Here has 7 minutes of its most controversial footage restored and Winstanley’s meditative, smouldering beauty has been restored and polished to a new lustre [2].

The Kate Smith Hour and the Struggle for Control of Television Programming in the Early 1950s

Abstract: The rapid rise of television in the postwar years led to a important struggle by broadcasters, advertisers, and even entertainers in the United States over who would have the greatest say over the nature of television programming [1]. The struggle was not over whether television should be an advertising-supported medium dominated by three national networks and a handful of major station owners. That was a given in all policy debates, and it was not an issue that was ever raised before Congress of the general public in the 1940s as the scarce television channels were turned over to private interests so they could maximize proŽ t. Whereas the early radio industry had faced strong opposition to its commercializing efforts, the aspiring television industry faced none of these obstacles [2]. Those most involved in planning television’s development—the electronic manufacturers and the commercial broadcasters—deŽ ned television as both a consumer product for the home and an ‘audio-visual showroom for the advertiser’s consumer goods’ [3]. In a very short period of time it became clear that television possessed commercial potential unlike that of any other medium, including radio. ‘Television,’ stated a trade publication in 1950, ‘is a SALES medium—not merely an entertainment medium’ [4]. The struggle that emerged early on in television was over who would have control over the editorial content on this lucrative commercial medium. The young television industry initially adopted the commercial structure that was handed down from radio, where the main networks, the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), had Ž rst established the format for commercial broadcasting. So it was that except from few sustaining shows produced by the networks, television programming was left to advertisers who produced their own programming (that surrounded their explicit advertisements) in what were usually 15, 30 or 60-minute time-slots rented from the network [5]. In this system, the network played a small role and the control over programming was housed in a few major advertising agencies along New York’s Madison Avenue. It did not take long, however, before network executives realized that the system used in radio was inhibiting their potential growth and proŽ tability. Sentiment emerged among network executives that rejected having the networks serve as mere carriers of sponsor produced programming. These executives argued to the contrary that networks should produce their own fare. The role of advertisers in this set-up would be to buy advertising space on the network produced shows [6]. For sponsors, this had some appeal as it permitted smaller advertisers to afford to get on television, but it also meant that the direct over programming, which had proven so useful in radio, would be lost. Broadcast historians have documented this Ž ght, which did not end until the late

The policing of cinema: troubled film exhibition in Northern Ireland

Abstract: (2000). The Policing of Cinema: Troubled film exhibition in Northern Ireland. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 385-396.

The Robert Clark Account: Films released in Britain by Associated British Pictures, British Lion, MGM, and Warner Bros., 1946‐1957

Abstract: (2000). The Robert Clark Account: Films released in Britain by Associated British Pictures, British Lion, MGM, and Warner Bros., 1946‐1957. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 469-511.

Music Hall Dope and British Propaganda: Cultural Identity and Early Broadcasting in Ireland

Abstract: The article explores the history of early Irish radio, especially the political debate about the establishing of a radio station in Ireland in the years after the setting up of the state in 1922. Crucial to this debate was a concern about the power of the new medium to influence and change notions of national identity.

The Internet and the New Generation of Newsreaders

Abstract: (2000). The Internet and the New Generation of Newsreaders. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 37-42.

News and the Grand Narrative: Some further reflections

Abstract: As a historian, I sometimes surprise my journalist colleagues by suggesting that the journalist and the historian are really cousins. They are most deŽ nitely not brothers or sisters—but cousins. After all, we are both ultimately interested in the same thing, namely the truth. Historians and, perhaps more signiŽ cantly, social scientists frequently rely upon journalists to write the Ž rst rough draft of history. It is, admittedly, a very rough draft which historians have subsequently to correct. But the rules of operation for the news report and for the subsequent historical record are quite different. The journalists have to operate to a deadline measured in hours, minutes or even increasingly in real-time which denies them the opportunity to sift, evaluate and re ect on the story they are reporting. We may speculate on the consequences of this, from ‘dumbing down’ of the news to the temptations of downright speculation by non-specialised multipurpose reporters. Certainly the pressures of instantaneous, technologically driven news in a global competitive environment are redeŽ ning our traditional conceptions of news. It is likely, therefore, that the historian who enjoys those very spatial and temporal luxuries denied the journalist will have a greater task in the future when it comes to re-rewriting these Ž rst rough drafts. For the historian, context remains essential but, for the journalist —perhaps more so for the electronic reporter than the editorial or op-ed writer—this appears to dropping down the list of priorities. Does this mean that the considerable intellectual and practical symmetry is likely to remain unchanged? Historians are quite rightly nervous about becoming futurologists—which is why no-one predicted the end of the Cold War—but perhaps we need increasingly to show more courage in our convictions about predicting possible outcomes based upon our reading of past trends. Journalists have always tried to do this from their reading of current affairs and, perhaps—because of their ever-compressing deadlines—it could be argued that they now do it so badly that they should not do it at all. We may lament the decline of the specialised foreign or defence correspondent, the rise in journalistic speculation, the increasing preoccupation with human interest stories and the shifting of news programmes to accommodate more entertainment scheduling. Perhaps, as the Kosovo crisis revealed, we may in the future rely less and less on traditional sources of news about the happenings of the world around us and rely more and more on the information provided via new communications technologies such as the Internet. But we should remember that, throughout the history of communications technologies, everyone who has invented a new medium has made exaggerated claims for what it is going to do. Marconi said that radio would unite the peoples of the world, Arthur C. Clarke made similar claims for the potential of satellites and now of course we are hearing all sorts of fantastic claims about the potential of the Internet. When Godfrey Hodgson was speaking about his grand narrative, I confess I thought I was hearing

'Purely Sinn Fein Propaganda': The banning of Ourselves Alone (1936)

Abstract: The bitterness of religious antagonism between Protestants and Catholics invades the life of the community at every point ... An equivalent of a House of Commons and a House of Lords and of the British civil service system have been instituted in a province which could as well be administered by a couple of commissioners and the normal machinery of local government ... The government is in effect that of a loyalist dictatorship ... There is virtually no opposition. A civil authority special powers act makes possible the arrest and indeŽ nite imprisonment of any citizen without trial at the discretion of the authorities [1].

The End of the Grand Narrative and the Death of News

Abstract: All last summer, dozens sometimes hundreds of journalists sprawled in the Washington sun on what came to be called ‘Monica’s beach’. This was an expanse of concrete in front of the Federal courthouse and the journalists, with dozens of cameras and more than a dozen big scanner vans, earned their suntan by waiting in vain, day in, day out, in the hopes that Monica Lewinsky would appear. Well, it was a hell of a story. It would be distinctly po-faced to expect that the world’s media would take no interest whatever in the revelation, sound bite by tantalising sound bite, that the President of the United States (POTUS, to you) had been up to you-know-what with a girl not much older than his daughter, just outside the Oval and with a cigar. Still, as she recedes from infamy through mere notoriety into celebrity, poor Monica can be proud that she acted as the ultimate symbol of dumbing down. It drives news executives wild when anyone says so, but dumbing down is a fair enough name for a process that is undeniably going on. When I was the foreign editor of the Independent, before I could lay out my day’s menu of news at the morning conference, one of my senior colleagues (Murdoch trained it goes without saying) would sneer ‘Not bloody Bosnia again, I hope!’ Like many of his peers everywhere, this man had lost faith in the product he had been manufacturing and selling all his life. He was no longer sure that the readers—‘the punters’ as he would call them—wanted to buy his wares. The market for news is slowly drying up. Newspaper circulations are declining, gently in Britain, steeply in the USA and, within newspapers, it is news, as opposed to comment, features, sport and almost everything else, that seems to be least attractive to readers. Over the past 10 years, in Britain there has been an eightfold increase in the number of news outlets and a 20% fall in the number of viewers to watch them. In the USA, there is a consensus that fewer and fewer people are interested in foreign news or in the traditional ‘serious’ ‘categories of domestic news either. Business news, as the stock market continues to  oat into the empyrean, is a partial exception. To know that one is a couple of thousand pounds richer than last week is a pleasing experience, but it is not evidence of curiosity about the world and there will be days, soon enough, when it is more likely that you will Ž nd you are a couple of thousand pounds poorer. For the rest, news is increasingly gossip about celebrities or news about health, medicine, exercise, fashion and those various kinds of essentially ‘advertorial’ copy that pass under the collective rubric of ‘life styles’. A top executive at CNN, which passes for the last champion of classic international and political news, conŽ ded to me recently that CNN would be doing more and more health and less and less classic news and a few weeks watching the domestic CNN product last summer convinced me that he knew what he was talking about. The argument of this article is a double one. First, it suggests a reason why people

Non-Jewish Jews, Good Poles and Historical Truth in the Films of Andrzej Wajda

Abstract: (2000). Non-Jewish Jews, Good Poles and Historical Truth in the Films of Andrzej Wajda. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 213-226.

Elite Versus Mass: The impact of television in an age of globalisation

Abstract: (2000). Elite Versus Mass: The impact of television in an age of globalisation. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 43-49.

The Banning of Titanic: A study of British postwar film censorship in Germany

Abstract: Some Ž lms achieve notoriety not for their own sake, but because of the circumstances surrounding their production or exhibition. Of few Ž lms is this more conspicuously the case than Titanic, made in Germany in 1942 and released in 1943. Its prominence in so many discussions of the Nazi cinema can be ascribed almost entirely to its unique and dramatic history. The essential facts are fairly well known. In the course of production, the director, Herbert Selpin, was reported to the authorities for making derogatory remarks about the armed forces. After a famous confrontation in Goebbels’ ofŽ ce, he was arrested, and two days later was found dead in his cell. The apparent suicide was subsequently followed by rumours that he had been murdered by the Gestapo, and that this had been instigated by Goebbels. A great deal of the writing about the Ž lm is concerned mainly with this episode, and if it had not occurred Titanic might have joined the hundreds of other Ž lms of this period that have never attracted the attention of critics or historians. In many ways, however, what happened to the Ž lm after it was completed is of greater interest. It was awarded the classiŽ cations of staatspolitisch wertvoll (of political merit) and künstlerisch wertvoll (of artistic merit) and was exhibited abroad, that is, in neutral and occupied countries, and in those countries allied with the Reich, but, for reasons that are still not clear, not in Germany itself. After the war it was banned by the Allied Occupation authorities. It is the story of this ban that is the subject of the present study. Although usually mentioned in the literature, if only in a cursory way, the details have never been fully investigated. It turns out to be an extraordinary episode which reveals much not only about the problems and procedures of censorship in postwar Germany, but also about the nature of Nazi Ž lm propaganda and the way it is perceived. At the end of World War II, the Allied Occupation authorities ordered the immediate conŽ scation of all Ž lms produced during the Third Reich. These were to be surrendered to designated ofŽ ces in each of the zones, the collection of Ž lms within the British zone becoming the basis for the Zonal Film Archive in Hamburg. During the subsequent months these Ž lms, numbering in the hundreds, were then classiŽ ed as (a) suitable for distribution, (b) acceptable if censored, or (c) forbidden [1]. Titanic appears to have slipped through this net. It is possible that because it had never been screened in Germany it did not appear on the Ž lm inventories held at the end of the war. In any case the British authorities appear to have been unaware of the existence of the Ž lm before it precipitated one of the most serious crises of the Occupation period, especially for the ofŽ cials concerned with Ž lm policy. The ofŽ ce exercising overall responsibility for the media in the British zone was the Information Services Division (ISD), based in Wahnerheide near Cologne. The Film Section, however, headed by Gregory Buckland-Smith, was located in Hamburg. This

The Future of International News on Television

Abstract: (2000). The Future of International News on Television. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 51-53.

Coming Up Next

Abstract: When I was asked to talk about news into the next century, my mind went back to a word that was common currency when one did national service some 45 years ago. The army often used the word excused. If a soldier had blisters, he was excused boots ... if he reported sick, he was excused heavy duties ... if there was not a place of worship of his denomination, he was excused church parade. As someone who has spent over 40 years in the daily news business—governed by deadlines just hours away—I think I have been excused a vision of the future. While in this re ective mood, I thought back to the days—in the early 1950s—when I started in journalism. That was in provincial papers in Yorkshire. I was 23 years old—having been to university and completed national service—and I was married. Getting started at 23 year old was not easy. I remember an editor taking me into a reporters’ room where a band of young journalists—all men, as I remember—were hard at work on their typewriters. They all started at 16 years, the editor told me. ‘Getting started at 23 years’, he said, ‘you are going to Ž nd it difŽ cult’. The Senator McCarthy hearings were at their height in America at the time and I had just read a book by two American investigative journalists about McCarthy’s background. They described how he became elected as the youngest judge in Wisconsin at the age of 29 years. He had no election machine or resources, so he wrote to every voter in his electoral district—a handwritten personal note. The voters had never been treated so personally before and he got elected. I thought this was a good idea. I wrote to about 100 newspapers whose names I got out of the telephone directory—no Yellow Pages in those days. Only two replied and one offered me a job as a reporter. The paper was called the WakeŽ eld Times—a weekly paper owned and published by one man and printed on a  at bed press. There was one other journalist on the paper, who went on to become one of the Rand Daily Mail’s top investigative reporters. The owner was a sort of Citizen Kane, a renegade conservative city counsellor, deselected by his fellow conservatives because of his way-out views. I remember him going through the council minutes one day and he picked on a plan to build a library on a new council estate. ‘Ridiculous waste of money’, he said. ‘I will write the lead story this week attacking the plan’, he said. ‘Then for next week’, he said looking at me, ‘you will write a page of readers’ letters for and against the plan. Then the week after that—with luck—we will get some genuine readers’ letters.’ Well, at least it was a strategy! The paper sold each week on one article—his critical reports on the local rugby league team, WakeŽ eld Trinity, whom he cruciŽ ed regularly in his article. So choked off were WakeŽ eld Trinity that they banned him from the press box. So he paid his tanner and reported from the terraces. They got wise to that and stopped him going through the turnstiles. From out of the blue came a letter from a Welshman who—he thought—must know something about rugby and would be admitted to the press box. And that is how I got started. Each week I had to write eight columns on the local rugby league team WakeŽ eld

Addressing the Eye in Ireland: Thaddeus O'Sullivan's On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978)

Abstract: One of the peculiarities of the Ž rst 75 years of twentieth-century Irish visual culture was the persistent belief that the Irish are not a visual people. This stereotype, perpetuated more from within the country than from outside, found frequent indigenous media expression, and there can be no doubt that a certain early insecurity in mounting visual projects in Ireland resulted from the wide acceptance, or at least voicing, of this self-undermining message. One Ž lm maker who addressed this issue head-on is Thaddeus O’Sullivan. His remarkable Ž lm On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978) responds directly to the notion of an Irish nation lacking visual aptitude. The prevailing diegetic darkness of the Ž lm and its concern with varieties of storytelling insistently frame a received media discourse about Ireland’s putatively compromised visuality. In doing so, On a Paving Stone Mounted anticipates the neo-phenomenological strategies of recent Anglo-American writing about cinema, here represented by Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: a phenomenology of Ž lm experience [1]. The cognitive legacy to which O’Sullivan refers, and the distance between that heritage and classical Hollywood cinema, help to contextualize Ireland’s move into the global Ž lm market. Thaddeus O’Sullivan served as cinematographer for Cathal Black’s Our Boys (1980) and Pigs (1984), Joe Comerford’s Traveller (1982) and Waterbag (1984), and Pat Murphy’s Anne Devlin (1984), and his camerawork, characterized by immersion in gradations of darkness, has much in common with O’Sullivan’s pre-December Bride, black-and-white Ž lms, including A Pint of Plain (1972), The Woman Who Married Clark Gable (1985), and, of course, On a Paving Stone Mounted. The latter Ž lm has received almost no critical attention outside of summary treatment by Brian McIlroy in his 1989 volume on Irish cinema and the contemporaneous overview by Kevin Rockett in Cinema and Ireland. McIlroy Ž nds in Paving Stone a profound ‘sense of displacement’ expressed through shifting viewpoints, ‘subjective camera movement’, and the lack of a protagonist with whom the viewer can identify [2]. Indeed, Paving Stone meditates on the Irish experience of out-migration to England and how that demographic shift creates disturbances and possibilities, above all how it generates transitional spaces that are neither here nor there, neither British nor Irish. The Ž lm receives its title from the mythology surrounding the arrival in AD 432 of St. Patrick in Ireland. Patrick’s status as a Romano-British missionary who mythically sailed to Ireland on a stone slab makes him the most notable of the migrants who have crisscrossed the Irish Sea in search of livelihood, more favourable social conditions, and, alternately, a cozy sense of belonging and the exhilaration of anonymity. The Ž lm images relations between Ireland and England at the level of intersecting spatial Ž elds and the disjunctive fantasies that structure encounters on both soils of both

Punk on Celluloid: John Davis' Shell Shock Rock (1979)

Abstract: Punk was fast, loud, and short-lived. Some bands made it in the charts, but the vast majority were just ephemeral and are now forgotten. In Northern Ireland, the punk movement thrived, to the extent that its leading band members and followers came to view it as a way of life, as an identity. It was this cultural and musical phenomenon that a director from County Down, John T. Davis, decided to put on record in 1978. He started Ž lming bands that were either emerging or who had already made it in the international charts. With the help of the Belfast Arts Council, who provided a grant of £2500, John Davis carried out a project on a shoestring budget. The idea was born after he had the opportunity to Ž lm Stiff Little Fingers in Coleraine, and then the Undertones in Portrush. But the end product, Shell Shock Rock [1], released in 1979, also documented less well-known bands who were shown playing live in venues such as the Harp Bar in Belfast. After 2 weeks of intense shooting, Davis and his crew of nine were then left with the difŽ cult task of editing down more than 15 hours of footage into a 50-minute documentary. The result was a fast and raw Ž lm, fuelled with energy. Without adopting the documentary or testimony approach, its main achievement was to translate onto celluloid the very essence of punk. It thus became a cult Ž lm not only within the punk community at the time, but within Irish cultural documents. Davis’ Ž lm was the very image of the music it portrayed, which, in his own words, was ‘rough and reactionary and is all Punk, but contains a certain quality that speaks volumes on contemporary life in Northern Ireland’ [2]. Indeed, the relevance of punk was not essentially due to the creativeness of its musicians, but to the scene it created and the atmosphere that ensued and which Davis succeeded in capturing in Shell Shock Rock. Punk bands and followers in Northern Ireland somehow managed to retain the ethos that had characterized the movement at its early stages in Britain. Indeed, whereas punk music in the rest of the UK was being rapidly co-opted by the music industry and becoming a successful and proŽ table commercial product, it maintained its original characteristics in Northern Ireland. Roy Carr of the New Musical Express suggested that ‘whereas, in this country, even the most volatile punk rhetoric could, with few exceptions, be absorbed and exploited by the establishment which it attacked without causing empires to fall, in Ulster its effectiveness could prove more direct and widespread’ [3]. This was largely due to the very particular context of Northern Ireland in the latter part of the 1970s, when the political situation had reached an impasse and there seemed to be no prospect of ending the then 10-year-old con ict. This was an era when politics seemed to have exhausted all possible avenues to rid the province of its war. The brief experience of power-sharing in 1974 had been brought to an end by powerful Loyalist strikes, and by the following year, the British administration was concentrating on a twofold normalization strategy.

Television and history: A report from the XVIIIth IAMHIST conference in Leeds, UK, 14-17 July 1999

Abstract: ‘It is a truth not universally acknowledged that Leeds is the birthplace of the cinema.’ With this declaration, Richard Howells of the University of Leeds set the tone for the XVIIIth IAMHIST Conference in Leeds, 14–17 July 1999. ‘You laugh’, Howells told his attentive audience, ‘but this evening I’m going to show you some moving picture footage made in 1888, the earliest footage you ever will see—which predates the far-more famous footage by Edison and Lumiere by six or seven years.’ Armed with slides, archive Ž lm and diagrams, Howells proceeded to recount how, in 1888, Leeds resident Louis Le Prince designed and built a 16-lens camera that would capture ‘animated pictures of lifes’. Le Prince set up this apparatus and photographed carriage trafŽ c from the Leeds Bridge. Le Prince vanished without a trace in 1890. The bridge still stands. Of course there were other reasons why a contingent of more than 100 IAMHIST faithful—from the UK, USA, Canada, France, Denmark, Portugal, The Netherlands and Spain—converged in historic Leeds on 14–17 July 1999. The University of Leeds was the Ž rst British university to embark on the academic study of communications. Three decades ago, former president of IAMHIST Nicholas Pronay helped found the InterUniversity History Film Consortium (IUHFC), the aim of which was to promote the study of Ž lm and news Ž lm as essential source material for understanding twentiethcentury history. Since 1989 the university’s Institute of Communications Studies (ICS) has conducted research and teaching in various aspects of communications. Sculptor Henry Moore was born here. The National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television, newly renovated since its 1983 opening, is located a few miles down the road in nearby Bradford. Also nearby is the Haworth parsonage (home of the Bronte family) and the little town of Shipley, where ‘angry young man’ Tony Richardson was born in 1928. The conference theme, ‘Television and History’, tackled the always uneasy relationship between broadcast programmers and historians, past, present and future. Some of the speakers struck an optimistic tone, as in the opening speech by former president Nicholas Pronay, founder of the ICS at the University of Leeds; others were more downbeat, such as former president Pierre Sorlin, from Paris and Sam Kula from Ottawa. Pronay pointed out that a substantial increase in the last three decades in history programming on British television makes more history available to more people than ever before. As history itself has become a commercial enterprise, television can now be used as a library for the pursuit of history. History programming need no longer descend to the level of a mass audience; rather, because of the new, more selective