Tag: TV

Animation Studies and Cartoon Science 

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A review of Animating Film Theory, edited by Karen Beckman, Duke University Press, 2014.

Animating Film TheoryI must confess I am averse to film theory. The little I have read in this field confirms me in my opinion: film theory is empirically useless, epistemologically weak, and aesthetically unappealing. Nothing of substance has been written about the topic since Plato’s Cave, the allegory that has people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The books and articles that are collated to form the discipline’s canon are a mixed bag of philosophical references, journalistic musings, and academic jabber. In my opinion, Deleuze’s two-volume work on film, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, are among his weakest books. They do not amount to a philosophy of cinema, or a theory of film: at best, they are reflections on time and space that take cinema as a pretext and Bergson as an interlocutor. In textbooks and introductory chapters, film theory is a collage of quotations by cultural critics, mostly from the early twentieth century, who have commented on the birth of cinema in the context of mass culture and reproduction technologies. Remarks written in passing by Walter Benjamin or Theodor Adorno are elevated to the rank of high theory and revered as sacred scriptures by a discipline desperately in need of founding fathers. The French contributors to the Cahiers du Cinéma dabbled in film critique as a hobby and did not think of themselves as serious thinkers: they were puzzled to see cinema studies emerge as an academic discipline, and they certainly would have disapproved the emergence of a canon of officially approved texts that includes their own. When film theory tries to build a firmer intellectual grounding, it mobilizes thinkers who have written outside the purview of cinema studies and have never commented on films: Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Lacan, or Baudrillard. Gilles Deleuze for the French domain and Stanley Cavell in America stand as the two exceptions: they have devoted whole books to cinema as part of a program of applied philosophy. My preference goes to Cavell over Deleuze.

Animated films and live-action movies 

My biases against film theory were compounded by this volume on animation film theory. If a theory of films rests on shaky ground, what about a theory that takes animated movies as its object and proposes to build an autonomous discourse on this subset of film media? A discipline is not defined by its empirical topic, but by its methods and the way it builds a scientific object as a matter of scholarly investigation. The existence of animated movies and frame-by-frame films—which predate the birth of cinema—is in itself no justification to devote an academic discipline to their study and to engage them theoretically. I do not mean to say that animation movies should be forever marginalized and ignored by cinema specialists and cultural critics. They can provide food for thought for many disciplines and, in some instances, are valuable sources of theoretical engagement. But a discourse on animation does not a theory make. Building an animation theory has more to do with intellectual posturing and academic differentiation than with scientific rigor and sound scholarship. A caricature of the attitude that I have in mind is provided by Alan Cholodenko’s contribution to this volume. An American-Australian scholar who retired in 2001 from the University of Sidney, Cholodenko describes himself as the godfather of animation theory: “theorizing of and through animation has been my project for the last twenty-three years.” His claim of having come first to lay the “first principles” of the discipline doubles the proposition that “historically as well as theoretically, film is the ‘stepchild’ of animation, not the other way around.” Drawing inspiration from the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, and postulating animation as the mother of all disciplines, his contribution to this volume amounts to little more than self-promotion and personal aggrandizement. 

What came first, film or animation? And who can claim the privilege of having “invented” animation cinema, in theory and in practice? A central tenet of the fledgling discipline is that animation represents the past and the future of all cinema. Lev Manovich, an author of books on digital culture and new media, made that claim in 2001: “Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case of animation.” The division of cinema into live action and animation has been recently blurred by the digital turn: through CGI and pixel-by-pixel editing, live-action movies are merging with animation in a way that makes them undistinguishable. The cartoonization of live-action movies is propelled by special effects and computer graphics that makes whatever the mind can conceive achievable on screen. Some actors, Jim Carrey for instance (but the same could have been said of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton), have built a whole career acting like cartoon characters. Contributors to Animating Film Theory show that the dividing line between film and animation has never been clear-cut. Photographs and moving pictures have always been mixed with drawings and text editing, such as in Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (Film Truth) experimental newsreel series in 1922-25, or in cartoons in which drawings “come to life” or live scenes are inserted in graphic sketches, a common practice since the silent movies era down to Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The incorporation of animated beings into real-world settings is only one example of the blurring of distinctions between animation and film. Whole movies, like Disney’s 2019 version of The Lion King, are photorealistic renderings of live action scenes in which each detail of character and scenery is animated step-by-step by computer graphics (the sole non-animated shot in the entire film is the sunrise in the opening scene.) 

The French did it first

The history of animation intersects with movie history but they do not necessarily move at the same pace. The Lost World (1925) was the first feature-length film made in the United States, possibly the world, to feature model animation as the primary special effect, or stop motion animation in general. The Enchanted Drawing is a 1900 silent film best known for containing the first animated sequences recorded on standard picture film, which has led its director J. Stuart Blackton to be considered the father of American animation. As for the first animated cartoon, it is attributed (by the French) to Emile Cohl, who produced the short movie Fantasmagorie in 1908. Others point to the French inventor Charles-Emile Reynaud and his 1877 patent of the praxinoscope, an animation projection device that predated the invention of the cinématographe by Louis Lumière in 1895. Other optical toys from the nineteenth century or earlier go by the names of zoetrope, thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, and camera obscura. Likewise, animation film theory has many fathers and the competing quest for precursors, pioneers, and key figures oppose various nations, periods, and individuals. One (French) contributor to this volume casts a Frenchman named André Martin as “the inventor of animation cinema” and 1953 as the date when his invention was recorded. Another (Japan specialist) author exhibits another figure, Imamura Taihei, as the first critic to devote a whole book on animation, A Theory of Cartoon Film, first published in 1941. It turns out André Martin used the expression “cinéma d’animation” in the body of a Cahier du Cinéma article about the Cannes festival, thereby donning prestige and dignity to a genre situated at the intersection between “le septième art” (French jargon for movies) and “le neuvième art” (graphic novels and comic strips). As for Imamura Taihei, he confirms the fact that Japan stands as a key site for animation and for theory. His genealogy of cartoons and comic strips goes back to the twelfth century’s emaki picture scrolls, and also includes acting techniques found in the Nō theater and folding screen paintings from the Edo period.

To build a theory of animation, Karen Beckman, the editor of this volume, has mined systematically the writings of film theory specialists to search for references to animation. As she states in the opening chapter, “animation’s persistent yet elusive presence within film theory’s key writings make it both easy to overlook and essential to engage.” These key writings include texts by Norman McLaren, Peter Kubelka, Vachel Lindsay, Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, Germaine Dulac, Miriam Hansen, and André Bazin, none of which I was familiar with. Throughout the book, the rare mentions of cartoons and animation movies in the writings of cultural critics and philosophers are treated as precious discoveries. Theorists of film and mass culture such as Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno repeatedly turned to Disney cartoons and Looney Tunes characters in articulating their reflections on aesthetics and politics. Eisenstein devised a category of “plasmaticness” that he evoked in order to stress the originary shape-shifting potential of the animated movie, the way an object or image can potentially adopt any form. For Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.” Adorno and Horkheimer found nothing funny about cartoons and argued that Donald Duck actively participated in the violent oppression of the proletariat by the forces of capitalism. Writing later in the century, Stanley Cavell mulled over the “abrogation of gravity” in cartoons where Sylvester the Cat or Wil E. Coyote run over the edge of a cliff and continue their course in midair. This allows the author of the last chapter in the volume to enunciate the “first theorem of cartoon physics”: “Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation” (the second theorem states that “Any body passing through solid matter (usually at high velocity) will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter”.)

Cartoon physics

Animation theory is not necessarily tied to film theory: indeed, many contributions to this volume do not start from the pantheon of film theory authors or the key concepts of the discipline. Animation can be engaged with and theorized from other perspectives: as a strand of critical thought that focuses on subaltern cultures, as in Japan, or within an epistemology of scientific objectivity and experimental representation, or from the point of view of graphic art history and media art. Several chapters focus on the link between scientific visualization practices and the history of animation. The scientific experiment plays a central role in the history of cinematography. Animation itself rests on a scientific fact: by presenting a sequence of still images in quick enough succession, the viewer interprets them as a continuous moving image. This persistence of retinal perception was exploited by the early devices of animation that used a series of drawn images portrayed in stages in motion to create a moving picture. One contributor even sees the origins of 3D animation in a 1860 invention by French entrepreneur François Willème. A glass dome, housing a perimeter ring of twenty-four cameras directed inward at a central subject, allowed camera shutters to open simultaneously to produce a “photosculpture” that was not unlike the bullet-time sequence in the film The Matrix. The experiment of film allows the viewer to experience the world in a novel way: animation, like the scientific experiment itself, becomes the way to think at the limit of understanding in an attempt to get past that limit. Scientific uses of animation include medical anatomy and health education, dimensional modeling in biology or in physics, mathematical abstraction, and all kinds of pedagogical materials. Animated images do not only illustrate: they are instrumental in the process of discovery. Climate science would be less potent without the time-lapse images of shrinking glaciers and melting polar ice caps.

Japan is in a league of its own when it comes to animation theory. As mentioned, a book on the theory of anime, Manga eiga-ron, was written as early as 1941, with subsequent editions in 1965 and in 2005. In Japanese, eiga-ron has a different meaning from “film theory”, and a different history as well. Contributions to Animating Film Theory show how animation needs to be thought in relation to media beyond film to account for the singular place of animated images in Japan. One author explores how experimental Japanese Xerox artists in the 1960s operated a crossover between animation and graphic design that sheds light on the specific context within which the issue of technological reproduction and duplication was discussed. The first translation in Japanese of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” was published and discussed in Graphication, Fuji Xerox’s corporate PR magazine that presented itself as a cutting-edge publication venue for graphic art and media criticism. More generally, the great divide between commercial and academic publications that marks the intellectual landscape in America does not exist in Japan, where the bulk of critical theories are translated, published and disseminated through non-academic journals as well as mass-market books and “mooks” (a magazine in book format.) Two of Japan’s main animation critics and public intellectuals, Otsuka Eiji and Azuma Hiroki, have organized part of their critical work outside the circuit of academia and write for a broad public readership consisting of hardcore fans of media subcultures. They invite a re-reading of the question of realism in animation: beyond photographic realism and a drawing style inherited from manga comics, anime films hint toward a new style of transmedia realism without any real-world referent. The vibrant worlds of Japanese anime, manga, and video games form the basis of an alternative sphere of expression that popular Japanese critics theorize from outside the realm of film studies.

Whither animation theory?

For Gilles Deleuze, the primary operation of philosophy is problematization, the cultivation of problems such that philosophy can then go about the task of fabricating concepts. What is the problem of animation that it requires a theory? What are the key concepts that may allow animation theory to make sense and generate meaning? Film studies, in their classical form, evolved from questions of ontology, to questions of reception, to questions of context. What is film and its relationship with reality? How does film have an effect on its viewers? What is the social and political context in which film is made and received? Starting from a different set of questions, animation theory must take its own course and develop its own methodological tools. Animating Film Theory only points toward that goal, and merely sketches out the challenges that theory-makers and philosophers of the moving image might have to grapple with. The first question, already pointed out by Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein, has to do with the quality of “animism” that turns people into objects and objects into animate creatures: what makes a world animated and imbued with a life of its own? A second set of questions could coalesce around the issue of self-reflexivity: animation movies are aware of themselves as works of imaginary creation, and the hand of the drawer is never far from the drawn picture. What separates us from the world of fiction, and how can we inhabit it by breaking the fourth wall that separates screen characters from the audience? The third indication we might learn from animated movies is not to take life too seriously: as the last chapter on “cartoon physics” indicates, we will always enjoy a good Tom-and-Jerry cartoon and the hilarity that courses ending in midair and cat-shaped holes might provoke.

Let’s Talk About Sex

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A review of Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia, edited by Purnima Mankekar and Louisa Schein, Duke University Press, 2013.

Transnational asiaThis is not a book about Asian sex videos. Indeed, reading Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia should lead the reader to question why the category “Asian sex video” exists in the first place, why Asian bodies are disproportionately represented in Internet porn, and how we should react to such unregulated flow of images. In fact, none of the entries in this book deals with explicitly erotic content or with pornography, and the only chapter that concerns the Internet as a medium, a study of online discussions about correspondence marriage between the US and the Philippines, insists on rejecting facile analogies with the sex trade or with mail-to-order catalogues. For scholars and for feminists—and most authors in this volume are women—, the erotic has to be distinguished from the sexual. And writing about eroticism should in no way lead to stoke the base instincts of the reader. The erotic extends beyond sex acts or desires for sex acts to become “enmeshed in, for instance, yearnings for upward mobility, longings for ‘the homeland,’ formulations of nationhood and citizenship, and ruptures of ethnic and racial identity.” Desires for sexual encounters intertwine with those for commodities and lifestyles. Such a paneroticism may break gender, class, ethnicity, or age boundaries. Synonymous with desire, it may be at odd with an Orientalist vision of Asia as feminized and the West as setting the standard for homo- and heteronormativity. For instance, “what constitutes ‘lesbian’ desire may look both and function differently than it does within Euro-American social and historical formations, and draw from alternative modes of masculinity and feminity.”

Editing a volume for Duke University Press

The book is an edited volume composed of ten chapters and a dense introduction in which the two editors explain what they mean by “media,” “erotics,” “transnational,” and “Asia.” It is difficult to strike the right balance in the introductory chapter of a collection of scholarly essays written by different authors. One the one hand, the editors want to add value to the book chapters by giving coherence and theoretical depth to the assembled pieces. On the other hand, they need to reflect the diversity of the contributions and leave open their conceptual relevance for theory-building. The introduction is often the book’s signature, its most ambitious part and the text for which it will be remembered. The risk is to promise more than the book chapters can deliver by engaging in intellectual virtuosity, or to remain at the plane of immanence and offer a paraphrase of the book’s content. Mankekar and Schein lean on the theoretical side. Their introduction is thick, sometimes obscure, and heavily referenced. Their ambition is to “construct a transnational analytics” to account for the mediation of erotics in Asia and beyond. They position the book for a broad audience spanning several subdisciplines—Asian studies, media studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies, as well as anthropology and critical theory. And yet they address scholars, and it is as scholarship that they want their contribution to be noticed and remembered. My reading as a non-scholar may therefore miss the mark or misinterpret the intent of the authors. But this is a risk I am willing to take.

One way of studying erotics through transnational media in Asia is to read texts, watch pictures or videos, listen to recordings or radio shows, and then to write about their form and content using the tools and methods of literary criticism and media analysis. This is not how the authors in this volume proceed. For them, desire and erotics can only be revealed through participation in mediated worlds, in a combination of textual analysis and ethnographic research. Erotics is what people make of it: a medium or a text can only be deemed erotic if the viewers invest it with fantasies and emotional longings. Eroticism is in the eye of the beholder: we should “suspend any bounded or determinate option of what comprises erotic texts.” The preferred method of studying erotics is through ethnography and participant observation, or face-to-face interviewing. But the ethnographer cannot only approach his or her informants and say: “Let’s talk about sex.” As Purnima Mankekar notes: “I deemed it neither ethical nor culturally appropriate to interrogate my lower-middle-class and working-class informants about their attitudes toward sex or, worse, their sexual practices.” She doesn’t explain why she considered sex talk inappropriate or unethical, but her reticence probably has something to do with academic norms of proper behavior as much as with cultural sensitivities in a lower-middle-class Indian context. In any case, some of the contributors to this volume do talk to informants about media and sex, as in Friedman’s analysis of the film Twin Bracelets and its reception among interpretive communities in the United States, Taiwan, and China, or in Manalasan’s discussion of the reception of the movie Miguel/Michelle among queer Filipino audiences in Manila and in New York. In other situations, the ethnographer had to listen to her informants’ “silences, hesitations, and discursive detours” and “go beyond the verbal, the discursive, and the visible.”

Getting a book published

When writing a text and seeking publication, the scholar has to choose between three options: the self-standing book or monograph, the journal article, or the chapter in an edited volume. Getting a book published by an university press is the most difficult option: academic publishing houses are fortresses guarded by stern gatekeepers, and getting access involves a long process of book project’s proposal, manuscript editing, and peer review. The publication of a first book, commonly one that is drawn from a dissertation, is a critical event in the career of a scholar, and the book will usually remain the author’s signature to the wider academic community for the rest of his life. Publishing a journal article is more standard: for a scholar, a good publication record is a sine qua non, and life on the academic front is ruled by the discipline of publish or perish. Getting published depends on the prestige and disciplinary slot of the academic journal and necessitates a capacity to adjust to scholarly criteria of presentation without necessarily requiring literary talent. The book chapter is the most flexible contribution: contributing authors are usually invited by the editors to write a chapter for the book, based on presentations they made at conferences or in a rewriting of previously published research material. The editors will be reviewing and accepting the chapters and also be suggesting the authors if any revisions are needed. Though they are supported by their publishers, editors remain of sole responsibility when it comes to the content integrity of their book. Again, the importance of writing an excellent introductory chapter cannot be overstated. The introduction should serve as a “lure” that attracts the reader, allows the reader to comprehend the book’s intent, and encourages the reader to continue reading.  In terms of bookshelf longevity, the full-fledged book comes first, then the edited volume and, last, the scholarly article.

Most contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia have published a book, sometimes two or even three, with Duke University Press. Having read and reviewed some of these books on this blog, I will draw a comparison between the full-length books they have published and the chapters in this volume. My favorite author in the sample is Everett Yuehong Zhang, author of The Impotence Epidemic, a study of changing attitudes about sexuality in an increasingly globalized China. The chapter he offers here could have been included in his previous book and centers on the host and participants of a radio talk show addressing sexuality from a clinical perspective. It is only loosely connected to the twin themes of media and erotics that define the edited volume: radio broadcasting is not the medium we first think about when studying transnational media, and there is nothing erotic in talking about premature ejaculation, masturbation, or erectile failure with a medical doctor—even though desires to be normal, to enjoy a fulfilling sexual life, and to have fun talking about personal matters after decades of Maoist silence are also addressed. Dr. Ma, the talk show host, treats both male and female sexual issues and is very open about discussing sexual desire and pleasure in public. His co-host, Ms. Sun, recalls how uncomfortable she was at first using the technical term for masturbation, shouyin, with two characters meaning “hand lust,” and how talking about masturbation became easier in the 1990s with the adoption of a new word, ziwei, meaning “self-consolation.” This change of words signals a transition from the desire to be moral to the desire to be normal, and from a moral economy of seminal essence and revolutionary ardor to the realm of medical normality and individual gratification.

From the book to the article

Whispering Tonight, the call-in radio show and its case study by Everett Zhang, is a microcosm of all the issues raised by The Impotence Epidemic. One the one hand, it contextualizes sexuality within the social changes brought by recent economic reform and through the production of various desires in post-Maoist China. It relocates the body from the periphery where it was confined under Maoism toward the center of public attention, private concerns, and emotional investments. It provides a thick description of call-in patients’ complaints and doctor’s comments, based on extensive fieldwork and ethnographic documentation. On the other hand, and perhaps more explicitly than in the book, this volume’s chapter is a piece of applied theory. It draws on a rich array of concepts borrowed from French theory, and especially Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of flows and affects. Deleuzian notions are sometimes hard to grasp and may provide more obscurity than light, but Zhang uses them in a simple and straightforward way, giving added depth and relevance to his text. The second piece of medical anthropology in this volume, a chapter by Judith Farquhar on “Self-Health Information in Beijing in the 1990s,” also echoes a book by the same author (Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China), but is written in a more personal and reflexive way. Farquhar starts by describing her encounter with two men poring over an illustrated sexual disease textbook in a bookstore, and wonders what meaning this experience had for them—seeking sexual satisfaction or documenting a medical condition—and for the anthropologist, who didn’t dare interrupt and ask. She then examines a number of methodological problems that plague efforts to understand the popular and the everyday in any scholarly project. Self-health manuals, pop psychology books, and other mass-consumption publications can be used as an archive of everyday living in post-socialist China, but do not reveal how this information is read and assimilated by readers.

In addition to the introduction, Purnima Mankekar provided a chapter in this volume that is based on the research she presented in her two books published by Duke University Press, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics and Unsettling India. I usually prefer to read full-length books in anthropology than journal articles or edited volumes. My feeling is that the author needs space in order to set the scene, present the characters, and flesh out his or her argument, and that a single book chapter or article usually falls short on these three counts. But Mankekar’s chapter in this book, “Dangerous Desires,” nicely complements the two books she wrote based on the same ethnographic material: the reception of TV programs, and in particular state-sponsored television serials, viewed by upwardly-mobile, yet lower-to-middle class urban women in New Delhi. Her objective in this chapter is to examine the place of erotics in the reconfiguration of gender, family, class, caste, and nation, through the eroticization of commodity desire in TV commercials and the proliferation of sexual content in programs broadcast by transnational satellite networks. As noted above, she couldn’t just go out and ask her informants to have a “sex talk” on what they were viewing; she had to learn to watch alongside them and over their shoulders, interpreting bodily cues and discursive detours that saturated their conversations. For instance, many women she spoke with expressed their erotic longing via their yearning for certain commodities. On other occasions, her informants expressed their attitudes, feelings, and, very occasionally, their experiences of sex and erotics while discussing television programs. Desire for commodities and sexual longings were very often perceived as threats to proper gender behavior, to social status, and to the Indian nation as a whole. But Doordarshan state-run television no longer has a monopoly of public broadcasting, and the proliferation of satellite channels is having an impact on perceptions and values.

Telling better stories

Anne Allison, who provides the last chapter in this volume, teaches cultural anthropology at Duke University and has published several books on Japan. She wrote the book Nightwork on hostess clubs and Japanese corporate culture after having worked at a hostess club in Tokyo, and she has also researched erotic comic books and mother-son incest stories. The novel she reviews in her essay, Memoirs of a Geisha, doesn’t belong to the erotica literature: it is a fictional memoir of a Japanese geisha, penned by an American man and made into a movie by Steven Spielberg with Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi. Others would call it a story of cultural appropriation or a bad case of Orientalism; but Allison chose to focus on the reaction of (mostly female) American readers who, in the interviews she had with them and in the comments they wrote on Amazon, felt titillated by the fiction and enthralled by its exoticism. She reads erotic desire through the lens of the allure of fantasies generated by being transported to another place and time. In this case, desire is thoroughly political, but it doesn’t involve the masculine fantasies of empire and domination that Edward Said saw as the hallmark of Orientalist thinking. Exotica functions as erotica in the blurring of historical fiction and personal memoir, the minute description of sexual rituals such as the mizuage (by which a young geisha sells her virginity), and the allure of soft kimono fabric and intricate tea ceremony. “When readers described their experience of Memoirs to me,” writes Allison, “it was often in language befitting a love affair. They would smile and get excited, talk quickly and move their bodies. Passion, bordering on arousal, was palpable.” This, concludes Allison, raises a challenge for the anthropologist: “How to tell better stories that are imaginative and compelling, without falling into the trap of exoticizing or essentializing?”

TV-Glotzer

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A review of TV Socialism, Anikó Imre, Duke University Press, 2016.

TV SocialismIn her 1978 hit song “TV-Glotzer,” Nina Hagen sings from the perspective of an East German unable to leave her country, who escapes by watching West German television. She switches channels from East to West and stares at the tube where “everything is so colorful.” As she puts it, TV is her drug while literature makes her puke and she keeps eating chocolate that makes her fatter and fatter. The song was written when Nina Hagen was still living in East Berlin but made a hit in Western Europe, where “white punks on dope” could identify with the lyrics and share the spirit of “no future” rebellion. Anikó Imre’s TV Socialism gives a different perspective on television in socialist Europe. For her, television isn’t a drug but a matter of scholarly enquiry, and her book is a dense academic text that comes fully equipped with historical references, textual analysis, and footnotes. The book is a seminal contribution to the field of “socialist television studies” and challenges many ideas by which we assess Eastern Europe’s socialist past. But first, what does she mean by TV socialism? What links TV to socialism, and what makes socialist TV different from the television programs that were produced at the same time in Western Europe, in the United States, or in the developing world? How did television in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia or the GDR shape the imaginaries of viewers, and what remains from this socialization through small-screen images in a post-socialist world? Or to repeat Anikó Imre’s introduction title, “Why do we need to talk about socialism and TV?”

TV as a propaganda tool

According to conventional opinion, TV in socialist Europe was a propaganda tool. Its goal was to educate and enlighten all social classes, giving access to culture and information while also providing a light form of entertainment for the masses. Educational TV had to demonstrate social commitment to the cause of the State and the Party, show solidarity with the Soviet Union, acknowledge the superiority of European high culture, and contribute to the building of socialism. Teaching viewers how to be good socialist citizens was a central mission of national broadcasters. Lenin famously called on good socialists “to study, to study, and again to study,” and television was one of the mass media that could bring the study guide to the living room. Of course, socialist workers were not to be treated as students, for they embodied the knowledge and values that the sphere of culture only reflected. TV programs had to be relevant to the workers and understandable to them. TV was meant to be watched collectively in offices, factory clubs, and cultural centers. Instead of depicting life as it was, reality-based programs shifted the emphasis to teaching citizens how to behave in an ideal socialist society. But this consciousness-raising documentary realism was always articulated with the privates pleasures of television’s emotional realism. The doctrine of socialist realism also acknowledged the role of emotional expression to promote Soviet ideals. The same Lenin distinguished between propaganda, a way to convince through rational argumentation, and agitation, which mobilized emotion and affect. Like the theater according to Bertold Brecht, television was a tool of agit-prop and, as such, could lead to the creation of new forms of cultural expression, distinct from the dull productions of bourgeois culture.

This description above summarizes the standard view of socialist television, as held by critics and sycophants alike and as it was sometimes expressed by the rulers of socialist republics. But Anikó Imre shows that it was a far cry from reality. Really-existing socialist TV was not so much different from television as it existed at the time in Western Europe, and indeed there were many linkages and influences that crossed the iron curtain. To dismiss (or to hail) socialist TV as mere propaganda widely misses the mark. In her introduction, Anikó Imre articulates three surprising facts that help readers see TV and socialism from a different angle. The first surprise is that television in Eastern Europe was much more exciting and entertaining than its status as propaganda tool would make us believe. Authorities had to reckon with television’s power as a mass medium, and mostly left professionals in charge of its development. TV managers used this autonomy to operate under the radar screen of censorship, to play catch-up with Western broadcasting programs, and to formulate a light critique of the regime through irony and self-derision. The second surprise is that TV broadcasters cared about their audience, their viewer ratings and their domestic market share. They were commercially oriented, and operated in a competitive field where they had to fight for available human brain time. A large part of their revenue came from advertising. As a result, they provided the public with what people most enjoyed: quiz shows, pop music, comedy, and drama serials. It is these forms of popular entertainment, and not the live broadcast of classical music concerts or didactic science programs, that came to define what socialist TV was all about. As a third surprise, Anikó Imre shows that socialist TV was not bounded by state borders and national identities. It was transnational even before the word was invented, with border-crossing signals and program exchanges that allow the author to provide an integrated picture of Eastern European TV as opposed to a juxtaposition of country studies.

National leaders are watching TV

The way national leaders engaged with TV had a heavy influence on program content. János Kádár never watched TV as his taste drew him to high culture and concert halls. Leonid Brezhnev had his appointed head of Soviet television design programs especially for him and his wife, while his children and other relatives had the house equipped with another TV set and a Japanese VCR to watch shows and movies from the West. In the 1970s, Nicolae Ceaușescu opened his country screens to US series and German quiz shows in order to demonstrate his independence from the Soviet Union and to gain favor with the West, then in the 1980s he turned increasingly dictatorial and reduced television broadcasting to a few hours a week with programs lauding his every words and actions. Josip Broz Tito encouraged TV channels to draw on advertising income and even had a Slovenian station broadcast commercials in Italian to audiences across the border to get additional revenue. Erich Honecker redirected the course of East German TV when he famously diagnosed “a certain boredom” around television and urged its managers to create “good entertainment” at the Eighth Party Congress in 1971. What all these leaders had in common is that they tried to mold the new medium to their own purposes, but failed to dictate their taste and preferences to the public. Television’s lower cultural status allowed it to escape the strictures of official culture and to develop free forms of popular entertainment. Socialist TV shared with Western European broadcasters the same commitment to realism and the ethos of public service. Tight state control and censorship also characterized periods of Western European TV programming. De Gaulle famously gave orders and directives to TV channel managers that he himself appointed, and it was rumored that news anchors on French TV had an earplug that linked them directly to the ministry of information. As for the feeling of boredom that Erich Honecker perceived in the East German public, French téléspectateurs could feel it as well: “La France s’ennuie,” titled Le Monde in a famous editorial on the cusp of the May 1968 movement.

It may come as a surprise to a generation raised on Japanese anime and American TV series that TV programs from the East once had a not-so-insignificant market share in Western European markets. This was especially the case for children’s television. Growing up in the 1970s in the United Kingdom or in France meant watching a lot of imported East European children’s programmes. There was the Singing Ringing Tree with scary dwarves hailing from East German studio DEFA, Taupek the Mole which came from Czechoslovakia and used giggles or non-verbal exclamations instead of words to communicate, and something quite bizarre called Ludwig which was an animated series about a machine that played Beethoven to his animal chums. Some animation feature films were drawn from Continental Europe’s tales and legends, like The Snow Queen produced at the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Moscow or The Pied Piper by Czech studio Kratky Film; other animations developed Slavic themes like Gallant Robber Rumsaïs or Tchessilco the Magician, which were broadcast in France by ORTF. Not only did people in the Soviet satellites love their children too: they watched along with them what was recognized at the time as the best TV animation in the world. These animated pictures’ influence over Western animation, and over Western audiences, cannot be overstated. Anikó Imre doesn’t cover children TV in her book, but its development is quite similar to the other genres she reviews. The socialist reality-based, educational TV programs she describes were a kind of prehistory to the much more excoriated and inflamed reality-TV shows that took European channels by storm in the 1990s. Aside from proper language and decency, a lot was lost in the move from socialist realism to reality TV.

Did women have better sex under socialism?

Women are said to have had it better under socialism: better labor market participation, better jobs, better maternity leave and child care, and even better sex. Whether this is true remains controversial. Anikó Imre paints a mixed picture of women’s reflection in the mirror of socialist TV. On the one hand, television addressed many topics conventionally considered as women’s issues: child rearing and education, cooking and housekeeping, romance and family issues, and even birth control and sex life. But on the other hand, the default national viewer addressed by socialist television was most often the white, male, abled and working heterosexual citizen. Women as a homogenized social group were identified with special needs and tasks such as reproduction, family care, and emotional labor, and with inferior skills for political participation and mastering of technology. The blond female host was often associated with the pretty face and decorative position of the program announcer, while men anchors were clearly in control. This gendered hierarchy was also reflected in the two-tier production structure: television remained a male-dominated industry, and women typically worked below the line as technicians, make-up teams, or secretaries. The occasional powerful woman in television often did everything to efface herself and masquerade as one of the boys. Over the years, socialist television turned more feminine, if one identifies feminity with melodrama and consumerism. The thaw period beginning in the late 1960s brought political and economic changes that required socialist parties to readjust their gender policies. Women were presented as key agents of the “socialist lifestyle” and featured prominently in the genre that Anikó Imre labels the “late socialism soap opera.” Unlike historical dramas from the previous period, which removed the narrative into the past and revolved around heroic male figures, these domestic serials took place in the present and evolved around key female characters who acted as problem solvers and natural caretakers. This idealist image of the socialist woman who is independent, desirable and capable, is reflected the stunning photo portraits of Júlia Kudlik and Irena Dziedzic, with their fashionable hairstyle and modish dress, eliciting from the reader the male gaze that the author’s feminist agenda precludes.

Anikó Imre’s description of socialist TV defies Cold War stereotypes of a gray, repressive, joyless and isolated Eastern Europe. Men and women beyond the Iron Curtain knew how to have fun: only they did it differently, infused with the traditions of Mitteleuropa and the contradictions raised by socialism. The ruling communist parties and the strictures of state socialism couldn’t be criticized upfront. But citizens could vote with their eyeballs by switching channels, turning to programs broadcasted from neighboring countries, or turning off TV altogether. The more elitist, austere, realistic, and educational television attempted to be, the more it was mocked and abandoned by viewers, who wanted fiction, humor, and entertainment. The public could also distance itself from really existing socialism through mockery and satire. The systemic deficiencies of socialism were treated with light humor: living conditions in housing blocks, queuing for acquiring consumer products, facing the maze of bureaucracy, and other absurdities of the era were addressed in a light and relaxing manner. Reality shows at once celebrated and poked gentle fun at socialist institutions and rituals. Some 1980s serials took subversion to surprising levels: as the author notes, humor “thrives on oppression and censorship, rather than being silenced by it.” Rather than a government-controlled soapbox that repelled humor, much of socialist TV programming was actually perceived by audiences as comic because socialism itself was absurdly comical. Television was an theater of the absurd: the distance between the utopian horizon of socialism and the existing conditions of life was too great to swallow without a heavy dose of humor. The comic absurdity of late socialism could also draw from older traditions of cabaret, farce and carnivalesque entertainment that echoed the “agit-hall” operetta from Weimar Germany or the monologues, dance numbers and songs from Viennese Kabarett. This tradition of political satire survived and in some contexts flourished in the late shows and New Year extravaganzas offered to TV viewers. Here again, as for reality TV, the author sees in this wave of derision a harbinger if not a direct influencer of the politically-charged entertainment programs that were later developed in Western Europe and the Unites States, from the Guignols de l’Info to The Daily Show.

The afterlife of TV Socialism

What remains of socialist TV in today’s Europe united by political integration and market consumerism? TV Socialism addresses the afterlife of socialist TV in three different guises: as postsocialist TV programming, as an archive steeped in nostalgia, and as an academic discipline. First, socialist TV continues to have an active social life in the countries that have made the transition from state socialism to market capitalism. There is much more continuity between late socialism and postsocialism than the narratives centered on Cold War and transition to market would make us believe. Many idiosyncratic genres, distribution patterns, and reception practices have perpetuated into the present day. Some shows and serials have continued into postsocialism; other contemporary programs have deliberately attempted to reproduce the mood and values of late socialist TV, giving it a nationalist twist; and there has also been some reruns of older TV shows, with specialized channels catering to a nostalgic public. New circulating formats, from DVD to on-demand catalogues and YouTube uploads, have brought a new lease of life to vintage programs that have acquired a cult-like status. Anikó Imre adopts a critical perspective on postsocialist nostalgia, known in Germany as Ostalgie, claiming that it is a naive and postimperial gaze on a mythified past. But her own attitude shows that there is pleasure and knowledge to be gained from delving into TV archives, and that the repertoire of antiquated shows and series should not be left to oblivion. Taking socialist TV seriously grants access to an image of life under socialism that stands in stark contrast to the clichés of Cold War stereotypes. Rather than scarcity, homogeneity, and brainwashing, TV Socialism conveys a mixture of familiarity and strangeness, which helps to defamiliarize some of the basic assumptions about Eastern Europe and socialism. As Anikó Imre notes, television has long been relegated to the status of a minor and inferior object for scholarly studies, both in the Slavic and Eastern European Studies departments of American universities and in the cultural studies programs that have burgeoned in Europe. By moving it centerstage, she deconstructs the opposition between high and low culture as well as the Cold War division between East and West and between socialism and postsocialism.