Vladimir Sappak's Humanism on Soviet TV (original) (raw)
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As a popular consumer good, television transformed Soviet households' material culture and lifestyle. It interconnected time and space in a new way and helped to constitute the Soviet audience as 'emotional communities'. It did so by providing a specific entertainment culture that supported the regime's claim of guaranteeing a decent lifestyle to many groups of Soviet society. Oral history interviews reveal that people's representations of Soviet television are a still persistent source of emotional commitment to the former Soviet life.
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This journal provides a unique, national forum for emerging Canadian researchers. Encompassing communication studies approaches to the often overlapping "streams" of culture, politics and technology, Stream challenges conceptions of these subjects with innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship. Visit www.streamjournal.org for more information. The editors would like to thank and acknowledge the work of all those who volunteered as peer-reviewers. Submit to Stream Stream is interested in publishing articles and book reviews by Canadian graduate students in communication studies and related fields. Papers should fit into one of the three proposed "streams," but we invite contributors to challenge their conceptions of these subjects with interdisciplinary approaches to these subject areas. We hope that this student initiative will become a space for graduate students to publish new work and expand upon new ideas, contributing to a thriving graduate intellectual culture. Visit www.streamjournal.org for full author guidelines and register to submit a paper.
Fragmented Mythologies: Soviet TV Mini-Series of the 1970S
2003
My dissertation provides an analysis of the Soviet television mini-series released between the late 1960s and early 1980s, specifically the spy thriller, the police procedural, and the detective series. I argue that serialized production were an ideal form for the negotiation of the inherited models of individual and collective identity with the new cultural, social, and political values that came into play during the Brezhnev era. Chapter One provides an overview of Russian and Western studies of Soviet television and describes the methodology used in the three analytical chapters. I approach the three genres as variations of the socialist realist masterplot, which undergoes fragmentation and transformation in mini-series. Chapter Two discusses the spy thriller, which addresses the issue of "inside" vs. "outside" of the political system, revealing the absence of a stable meaning behind the category of the Soviet "us." My case studies in this chapter are Evgenii Tashkov's His Highness's Adjutant (1969) and Tat'iana Lioznova's Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973). Chapter Three analyzes the genre of police procedural. The "institutional" version of the genre-The Investigation Is Conducted by Experts (1971-89)-lays bare the absurdity of the Soviet economy, while The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Stanislav Govorukhin 1979) redefines police narrative as a populist story of idealized past. Chapter Four discusses detective mini-series. As case studies I use the Aniskin series of made-for-TV films (1968, 1974, 1978) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (Igor' Maslennikov 1979-86). These Introduction: Object and Outline of the Dissertation My dissertation provides an analysis of Soviet serial television productions of the 1970s and early 1980s-the decades when television finally emerged as the dominant popular culture medium in the Soviet Union. The last two decades have witnessed major changes within the field of Slavic Studies. First, scholars have abandoned the exclusive emphasis on the literary canon in favor of more extensive research in cinema, visual arts, and popular culture. Second, Soviet culture was re-integrated into the field of Slavic Studies as a "worthy" subject of analysis. Soviet television, however, has benefited little from these new directions of research. The study of 1970s television was constructed to fit Cold War models and was, consequently, associated exclusively with the ideological freeze during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev-the period in late Soviet history referred to as Stagnation. Unlike more "expressive" cultural periods-Stalinism, the Thaw, or perestroika-Stagnation bears the stigma of political conservatism and cultural bleakness. As the mouthpiece of the ideological state, Soviet television before perestroika appears as monological, ideologically driven, and a "simply" boring medium, whose primary (and virtually only) function was political, social, and cultural brainwashing of the populace. But, to quote Richard Taylor's pioneering article on Boris Shumiatskii and "Soviet Hollywood" of the 1930s: "if we do not ask different questions, we shall never get different answers or, indeed, much new information at all" (193). 1 Studies of Soviet television are in dire need of the same (re)-animation through asking "different questions." Political and sociological studies of the Soviet television, which have defined the field up to this time, have failed to
From Media Systems to Media Cultures Understanding State Socialist Television
In From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television, Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable delve into the fascinating world of television under communism, using it to test a new framework for comparative media analysis. To understand the societal consequences of mass communication, the authors argue that we need to move beyond the analysis of media systems, and instead focus on the role of the media in shaping cultural ideals and narratives, everyday practices and routines. Drawing on a wealth of original data derived from archival sources, programme and schedule analysis, and oral history interviews, the authors show how communist authorities managed to harness the power of television to shape new habits and rituals, yet failed to inspire a deeper belief in communist ideals. This book and their analysis contains important implications for the understanding of mass communication in non-democratic settings, and provides tools for the analysis of media cultures globally.
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2019
In From Media Systems to Media Culture, Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable bring together research from a large pan-European project on popular television and everyday life in Socialist Eastern Europe-a fascinating comparative project that takes its starting point in empirical historical material from the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, East Germany, Poland, and Romania. The authors argue that television in countries under communist rule has received marginal interest from mainstream media and communications research and has been judged of limited relevance to the broader field of media studies. The task of this book is to remedy this and demonstrate how a study of state socialist television indeed can make a contribution. Three such contributions are suggested: to "reorient the focus of comparative media research from media systems to media culture"; to "unsettle some of the key concepts in contemporary communication and media research and question their global relevance"; and to enhance the understanding of "mediated communication in non-democratic settings." Mihelj is professor of Media and Cultural Analysis and Huxtable is visiting fellow in Media and Cultural History at Loughborough University. "Media culture" is conceptualized in relation to other macro-oriented approaches such as Hallin and Mancini's concept of "media systems," which they wish to expand beyond its emphasis on news and political communication. Media cultures, they argue, should be understood as "patterns of ideas and practices tied to specific forms of mediated communication, which shape processes of meaning-formation across instances of production, reception and use." Presumably because of the wide-ranging empirical implications and the difficulties of studying media cultures in their entirety, the authors narrow this down to a focus on television cultures in state socialist contexts in Eastern Europe. Basing the analysis on a broad range of archival sources, "paratexts," program and schedule analysis (mainly between the years 1960 and 1990), and oral history interviews with television viewers of three generations, Mihelj and Huxtable situate their analysis in a broader historical perspective of "entangled modernities." This provides a rich historical context for state socialist television, detailing the introduction, spread, 855634J MQXXX10.1177/1077699019855634Journalism & Mass Communication QuarterlyBook Review book-review2019