For virality experts Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley, “viral events are a naturally occurring, emergent phenomenon facilitated by [an] interwoven collections of websites”.[1] Although digital media facilitate such events, they note that viral content “stands out as remarkable in a sea of content”.[2] This remarkable content is deemed worthy of sharing and, eventually, a positive feedback loop begins to sustain the visibility and impact of the content across multiple platforms. During its 12-episode run from October to December 2014, the podcast Serial became a viral internet sensation of the kind described by Nahon and Hemsley, as well as other scholars of digital culture such as Limor Shifman,[3] whose set of factors that lead to virality I will consider further below.

Serial tells the story of the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, a Baltimore high-school student whose ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was convicted of the crime. There was little evidence to link Syed to the crime, with his conviction largely resulting from testimony given by Jay Wilds – a friend of Syed’s – who claims he helped Syed to bury Lee’s body. Serial was made by Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder as a spin-off from WBEZ Chicago’s long-running radio show, This American Life (Chicago Public Media, 1995–). But while This American Life dedicates single episodes to theme-based short stories, often told as first-person narratives, the premise with Serial is that particularly complex stories warrant an extended structure. In this case, Koenig was contacted about Syed’s case by a lawyer (and family friend) who believes he was wrongfully convicted due to a flawed trial. Over the course of 12 episodes, Serial’s producers ultimately conduct their own investigation into the death of Hae Min Lee, one that appears, at times, to be more thorough than the official investigation.

Like with This American Life, Serial’s episodes are arranged thematically. Episodes vary in length, from 28 to 55 minutes, with podcasts dedicated to topics such as “The Breakup”, which focuses on the likelihood that Syed would have killed Lee for ending their relationship, and “Inconsistencies”, which highlights the continuous changes in Jay’s testimony. Each podcast includes interviews between Koenig and individuals loosely or closely connected to the murder. Koenig also interviews independent experts, such as Deirdre Enright, head of The Innocence Project: a centre at the University of Virginia Law School that investigates and litigates wrongful convictions. In addition to including extensive conversations between Koenig and Syed (whom she talked to for over 40 hours using a prison phone line), Serial incorporates recordings from the original trial and a range of atmospheric music.

By November 2014, Serial had achieved five million downloads in record time for a download, and by Christmas it had been downloaded 40 million times.[4] Its popularity continued to grow, with total downloads doubling to roughly 80 million by April 2015. Given these and several other podcasting records that Serial broke, the series can thus be described as “going viral”. While the data for Serial demonstrates its popular impact, the series also received critical accolades: it became the first podcast to win a prestigious Peabody award for public service achievement in the media, and Koenig was named as one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” for 2015.[5] The success of Serial continues, with Koenig embarking on a series of public talks about the podcast’s production and reception throughout 2015, as well as developing the second series due for release late in 2015.

If, as Nahon and Hemsley argue, selected content goes viral due to its remarkability rather than by chance, then what made Serial’s content stand out? And, indeed, what is the relevance of this to a journal dedicated to cinema (albeit a special issue on virality and intermedia culture)? The producers of This American Life provide an answer, one which indicates a certain kinocentrism found in contemporary culture, when describing their show: “We’re not really formatted like other radio shows at all. Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio.”[6] Serial’s connection to This American Life likely played an important role in its viral success since, as Shifman outlines in her discussion of the factors influencing what content goes viral, prestige and careful digital positioning strategies can increase the dissemination of certain content.[7] In the case of Serial, it benefited from This American Life’s reputation as a high-quality radio show – one that prides itself on certain cinematic properties – as well as from its producers’ network of media influencers who helped increased Serial’s visibility.

Explaining the difficulty they have summarizing This American Life within standard radio categories, the producers also describe it as “a documentary show for people who normally hate documentaries”.[8] Both the original show and the Serial spin-off draw on audiovisual – as well as audio – culture, and this article aims to make the show’s claim of being “like movies for radio” more concrete by comparing techniques used in Serial to those of documentary cinema, and to what Jason Mittell terms “complex TV”.[9] Looking at both the podcast’s production and reception, I consider overlaps between Serial and Errol Morris’s influential documentary, The Thin Blue Line (USA, 1988), and analyse how Serial uses digital materials (including the kind that Mittell terms “orienting paratexts” in relation to TV serials) to complement audio storytelling. I contend that although Serial is generally categorised as a podcast, its remarkability largely results from the way the series uses transmedia storytelling to negotiate new territory between historic and contemporary media techniques and distribution channels: in particular, I am concerned with Serial’s provision of supplementary “evidence” on their website, and the way this encourages listeners to engage with the series more deeply through a package of 12 podcasts and related imagery.

This participatory engagement will also be used to explain Serial’s virality since, as Shifman explains in her discussion of what makes content go viral, dissemination can be enhanced “if people are encouraged not only to share a certain item, but also to carry out other activities related to it.”[10] By exploring digital interactions between Serial’s listeners and the podcast’s producers, I also relate the podcast to Henry Jenkins’ concept of “convergence culture”,[11] which unites old and new media and encourages audience participation, as well as to Chuck Tryon’s concept of personalized “on-demand” media consumption.[12] Serial’s production and reception is thus used to illustrate the ways that – in today’s intermedia culture – cinema, radio journalism, television and digital content can influence and interact with one another, as can the producers and consumers of this intermedia.

But first it’s worth contextualising Serial’s relationship to inter-media with reference to seriality more general. Distilling the proceedings from a 2011 conference on “The Mechanics of Serialization”, Shane Denson explains that since “serial forms exist in all media” then seriality studies is “an inherently interdisciplinary, comparative, and plurimedial field of study”.[13] Although this article is not focused on the seriality aspect of Serial, my analysis nonetheless acknowledges the importance of the underlying structure. Furthermore, regardless of the independent appeal of Serial’s long-form story, it seems unlikely that the show would have been so successful if contemporary audiences were not already primed for its serial structure. As Denson summarises, serialised forms of entertainment have been growing in popularity and esteem in recent years, leading to “the widespread impression” that serialised products are more sophisticated, more complex and “just plain better” than other forms of mass-produced entertainment.[14] Mad Men (AMC, 2007-2015) is one such example from the realm of television. Mittell cites the show’s impeccable style and expert production values as traits that mark it out as “quality” television.[15] While Serial’s sound production qualities are equally of a high standard, Mittell’s description of Mad Men’s “slow-burn seriality”[16] is perhaps the quality which best unites the two shows, and a good starting point from which presently to consider the relationship between Serial’s seriality, its pace, and its appeal.

The pace and structure of Serial could be considered a case of art imitating life, or form imitating content: murder trials are long and detailed, so a production based on one – particularly one that serves as a form of re-trial by media – should be, too. Analyses of Serial have already identified its novel relationship to contemporary media practices in terms of speed. Publicity material for one of Koenig’s public talks describes how, “[a]t a time when being first and being fast dominates the media, and quick sound bites are offered at every turn, Serial did exactly the opposite […] taking its time and proving that slow-motion journalism could captivate and sustain its vast podcast listenership.”[17] As this description suggests, Serial is the antithesis to the accelerated pace of much contemporary media: constantly updating Twitter feeds; television shows that condense or eschew credit sequences; “intensified continuity” editing in cinema;[18] video essays that use split screens to compare scenes. Despite listeners using the internet to access Serial, its narrow focal point and largely audio format provide us with a temporary reprieve from the speed of new media and the overwhelming quantity of visual images with which we come into contact on a daily basis.[19] Because although Serial’s website offers supplementary images and interactive maps, it is possible to comprehend and be engaged by the story without also consulting these.

To some extent, the unprecedented success of Serial’s “slow-motion journalism”[20] is evidence against discourse (yet to be proven definitively) on the negative impact of digital media on our attention spans. As Leonard Shyles summarises, digital natives are often thought to have trouble assimilating long-form information, since “much of the information on the Web is delivered in short, easily digestible, and graphically enhanced packets”.[21] Serial worked against this trend for brief digital content (or perhaps it is an exception that proves the rule): “scenes” within each episode could be long and detail-heavy, with exchanges between Koenig and interviewees often requiring careful concentration. Although there were advertisements at the start and end of episodes, Serial otherwise ran uninterrupted for up to 55 minutes. More broadly, in addition to withholding instant gratification (from the perspective of providing listeners with easy answers), the show only provided a partial form of delayed gratification, since it comes to no conclusion with respect to Syed’s guilt.

Re-trial by Media: Serial and the Legacy of The Thin Blue Line

Although I will return to comparisons between Serial and serialised “quality” television, any discussion of Serial’s intermedia status also requires that attention be paid to documentary. In terms of subject matter, there are considerable overlaps between Serial and The Thin Blue Line, though differences emerge as a result of their different formats and the timing (26 years apart) of the two productions. Morris’s film charts the real-life murder of a policeman in Dallas in 1976. The documentary was instrumental in freeing Randall Adams, who was wrongfully sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder. The film is also renowned for its pioneering use of reconstructed footage. By the end of the film, Morris has elicited a confession from David Harris, who had effectively framed Adams for the murder of the police officer. Although Serial reaches no such resolution, Syed (like Adams) was largely convicted on the basis of a single verbal account, rather than any substantial physical evidence linking him to the crime.

As with The Thin Blue Line, Serial highlights a variety of inconsistencies in the evidence used in the trial, including the key witness’s inconsistent account of events, as well as the failure of Syed’s defense attorney to contact a student who claimed to have been with him at the time of the murder. Partly as a result of the inconsistencies raised by Serial’s producers during their reporting-cum-storytelling, Syed’s appeal was reopened in February 2015. The Maryland Court of Special Appeals agreed to hear arguments for why Syed should get a new trial as a result of his trial attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, providing ineffective assistance of counsel. Thus, both Serial and The Thin Blue Line have used their respective media to enact tangible change in the lives of their subjects. Serial could also be said to build on the legacy of “reflexive” documentaries, such as Morris’s, which helped audiences to see that real-life events are molded into the same kinds of narrative structures as fictional ones. Bill Nichols includes The Thin Blue Line in the category of reflexive documentaries – those in which filmmaker(s) engage in meta-commentary about the process of representing real-life events.[22] Linda Williams expands on this in her analysis of memory and truth in The Thin Blue Line, explaining how the film is “acutely aware that individuals whose lives are caught up in events are not so much self-coherent and consistent identities as they are actors in competing narratives”.[23]

In the late-1980s, Morris’s foregrounding of the way that “real” documentary subjects become embedded in partly-fictitious stories was considered new and progressive, but, perhaps as a result of their exposure to such documentaries, Serial’s key players explicitly acknowledge their roles as “actors”. When Koenig interviews a detective, for instance, she jokes that he is a real detective while she – a journalist and producer by trade – is “playing one on the radio”. Both Koenig and Syed also use language that conflates the crime and subsequent trial with that of narrative storytelling. In episode 1, Koenig notes that cell records “bolster the main plot points” of principal witness Jay Wilds’s story, and in episode 6 Syed refers to people believing “the narrative of what Jay is saying” – a narrative that incriminates Syed. Syed recognises himself as a “character” both during his trial and once again through the making of the podcast: he claims to have drawn from the television show Matlock (NBC, 1986-1995) when he asked for a lawyer upon learning that he was being charged with first degree murder. Syed also acknowledges a performative approach to his role in the podcast when he explains how he is intentionally keeping his exchanges with Koenig impersonal. More so than Morris’s subjects in The Thin Blue Line, our primary contacts in Serial reveal their own media literacy when they draw parallels between their real lives and their constructed representations. In Morris’s documentary, David Harris instead seems unaware (or at least unconcerned) with the potential impact of what he is saying on camera.

Like The Thin Blue Line, Serial incorporates details of its own construction. At the beginning of most episodes, we hear the same automated voice that Koenig hears each time she speaks with Syed: “This is a Global-Tel link prepaid call from Adnan Syed, an inmate at a Maryland Correctional facility.” On occasion, their conversations are cut-off or interrupted, reminding us of the tedious labour involved in accumulating the audio recordings that we are now hearing. Morris’s documentary also incorporates details of its own construction, as well as making a feature of the problems experienced during the shooting, as when a camera malfunctions while interviewing David Harris: this means that, despite Morris’s tendency to show his interviewees talking into the camera, The Thin Blue Line’s closing confession is only heard, accompanied by a close-up of the tape recorder playing Harris’s confession back (Figure 1).

Figure 1

This is the only scene in which we hear Morris question anyone, with the format (as well as the content) foreshadowing Serial precisely in that we hear Morris interview Harris about a murder, just as we hear Koenig interview Syed. The audience has no visual drama to distract from Harris’s confession; his words are all that matter. The visual focus on the tape recorder highlights that a piece of cheap audio technology was sufficient to achieve the documentary’s aim of proving who committed the murder. Koenig uses audio recording equipment to similar effect (although without eliciting the same kind of revelation) in Serial. Since verbal accounts are largely what landed Adams and Syed in jail, both Morris’s and Koenig’s approach to their subjects suggest they realise that words, rather than physical evidence, could also set them free. Yet, as I will consider in further detail towards the end of this article, Serial’s mystery and appeal can partly be attributed to the expressive power of the voice.

Showing vs. Telling: Supplementing Audio Content with Visual Material

Morris doesn’t use a voice-over in The Thin Blue Line, but such narration is a staple of what Nichols terms the “expository” documentary mode (which often uses an extra-diegetic narrator to provide an authoritative commentary on unfolding events).[24] Given the podcast’s natural absence of images, Koenig instead has to summarise important visuals, as well as commenting on them critically (much like the typical documentary narrator). There is a self-awareness to the way that she tries to remain impartial when describing materials that listeners can’t see. When reading handwriting from a detective report, Koenig comments that while it looks like “Alright, I come clean”, it could also be read (nonsensically, but on the basis of the handwriting) as “A bright eye came down”. At certain points, however, she has little choice but to summarise and draw a conclusion from what she sees.

Episode 5 provides perhaps the best example of a “scene” that could frustrate listeners and make them wish they were watching a documentary, rather than listening to a podcast. Koenig and one of the producers, Dana Chivvis, re-enact a sequence of events described by Jay, after Syed insists that his incriminating timeline would be impossible to execute in 21 minutes. Although the sequence is one of the most overtly dramatic of the series (the producers couldn’t disprove the timeline, although they did show it to be highly unlikely), it is somewhat frustrating to listen to: they are revisiting the crucial locations in Lee’s murder, but all we hear is Koenig and Chivvis driving and commenting on the time. This route, and the school where they begin – where Lee was last seen alive – is fundamental to the entire season, but listeners have no choice but to imagine it rather than see it for themselves. This problem, which ultimately comes down to one of media specificity and the limits of audio storytelling, calls into question the contradictory idea evoked earlier by This American Life’s producers of “movies for radio”. This is not to say that listeners do not enjoy imagining things for themselves, but that the precise details of a crime story are not suited to visualization. Rather than accepting this limitation of audio crime storytelling, Serial’s producers employ transmedia techniques to address, and partly resolve, the issue.

At the end of most episodes, Koenig mentions that there are supplementary pictures, maps and documents available on the website, serialpodcast.org. Each of the podcasts is titled, numbered, and accompanied by an image related to that particular episode (Figure 2). These supplementary materials point to the fact that, no matter how compellingly Serial crafts its audio story, audiences can crave something more visual: a picture of Hae Min Lee and Syed (the murdered schoolgirl and the man imprisoned for her murder), a map of the area in which the crime took place (Figure 3), or a scan of a letter that provided an alibi for Syed, but which his attorney never pursued (Figure 4). Again, The Thin Blue Line could be considered as an influence, since in that film David Resha explains that – aside from the documentary’s many filmed interviews – 67 per cent of its shots are cutaways to things like official documents, photos and maps (see Figures 5 and 6).[25] Both Serial and The Thin Blue Line therefore show awareness that, no matter how much information is provided verbally, audiences benefit from visible “evidence” which they can see with their own eyes.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

The Thin Blue Line embeds these materials throughout in the form of cut-away shots, while Serial’s producers embed them on their website. From an audience perspective, the latter may be superior. Cutaway shots can last for as long as the director/editor deems necessary but, when images and documents are instead available through easily accessed links on the Serial site, listeners have the time and freedom to digest them as they see fit. For example, Koenig notes that two full days of Syed’s trial were dedicated to the cell-phone records, including testimony from technological experts. Data from Syed’s phone – which he lent to Jay on the day of the murder – made up a significant portion of the case against him: at several points in the timeline, Syed’s phone connected with cell-phone towers in incriminating locations (although the accuracy of such data is uncertain, and this is still under question in respect of Syed’s case). If Serial can be seen as a form of re-trial of Syed by media, then it is fitting that we (the unofficial jury) have the resources to properly examine these same records (see Figure 7). The same holds true with the blueprint diagrams of crime scenes, which both The Thin Blue Line and Serial make use of, and which audience members may want time to examine (Figures 8 and 9). Thus, while Shawn Rosenheim describes The Thin Blue Line as requiring viewers to “act for themselves as historical interpreters, detectives sifting the evidence”,[26] Serial’s historical interpreters have substantial evidence to sift through (including letters, an affidavit, cell phone records, hand-drawn maps, and blueprints), and more time in which to do it. The evidence provided on Serial’s website is still only a selection – that which the producers deem most important – but it nonetheless provides the show’s listeners with a chance to become more immersed in the material.

Figure 7

Figure 8

Figure 9

Serial’s use of such paratexts[27] encourages comparison with the television serials that Jason Mittell theorises in Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (2015). In fact, if you replace the word “viewing” with “listening”, then Mittell’s description of complex television as enabling an audience to “build up their own comprehension skills through long-term viewing and active engagement” holds equally for Serial.[28] Like with the podcast, complex TV shows such as Lost (ABC, 2004-2010) benefit from using digital platforms to expand their storyworlds and to encourage active engagement by listeners in the performative online sphere. Mittell dedicates two chapters to transmedia storytelling and to what he refers to as “orienting paratexts”. As he explains, transmedia storytelling generally involves “paratexts whose prime goal is to expand the storyworld and to extend narrative engagement with the series”, while orienting paratexts “reside outside the diegetic storyworld, providing a perspective for viewers to help make sense of a narrative world by looking at it from a distance”.[29] In other words, paratexts can be used to provide us with greater detail into, or a broader perspective of, any given story. Serial’s digital resources include elements of both. The producers developed orienting paratexts, such as an interactive evidence map and a people map (Figure 10), both of which help listeners to keep track of the story unfolding. Other materials, such as hand-written letters by the victim, Hae Min Lee, and Asia McClain (who believes she was with Syed at the time of Hae’s murder) instead deepen our engagement with the story and its principal players.

Figure 10

Mittell reveals why transmedia storytelling’s ability to “support and strengthen the core television narrative experience” is especially important for serials, since “gaps between episodes and seasons provide time for viewers’ attention to wander”.[30] Here, Mittell draws on Jenkins’ analysis of The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999) and transmedia storytelling in Convergence Culture (2006).[31] Serial’s audio format created even more gaps for the audience than a TV serial, with even further potential for wandering attention. This, in turn, gave rise to a range of supplementary materials, with Serial’s producers anticipating demand for both orienting and transmedia paratexts. Serial’s paratexts are also in keeping with the kind of transmedia storytelling that Mittell and Henry Jenkins describe as being designed with “coordinated precision”.[32] Each time you click on an episode to download, the website highlights certain paratexts as being “related to episode X”. Listeners do not have to search for this supplementary information: that coordination has been done for them.

Serial as “Forensic Fandom”

Mittell explains that transmedia narrative models “encourage forensic fandom with the promise of eventual revelations once all the pieces are put together”.[33] Although he uses the term “forensic” in a general sense (pertaining to public discussion or debate), the technical description of forensic science (as the investigation of crime scenes with a view to providing impartial evidence in a court of law) is particularly apt to describe Serial’s content, as well as the producers’ investigative and impartial approach to it. When, in episode 4, Koenig explicitly encourages listeners to “figure out this case with me”, she also brings to mind Jenkins’ argument that collective intelligence (between media producers and consumers) is a key cultural shift taking place in the new millennium.[34] In addition to Koenig telling us that “now is the time to start paying close attention because we have arrived, along with the detectives, at the heart of the thing”, Serial’s thorough approach to fact collection encourages the kind of attentive listening and digital discussions that allow “virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members.”[35]

A key benefit of collective intelligence is that it enables problem-solving for things that “we cannot know or do on our own.”[36] Such collective problem-solving is evident in the many online communities used by Serial’s fans to analyse the details of the case, with a view to unraveling the mystery. For example, on Reddit.com there are over 400 responses to a detailed blog post by legal associate, Susan Simpson, entitled “Evidence that Jay’s Story Was Coached to Fit the Cellphone Records.’’[37] Simpson’s January 2015 post incorporates transcripts from Serial, as well as additional materials which the author sourced, such as aerial views of locations from Google Earth and hand-written letters from one of the detectives involved in the case. Serial also inspired other interactive offshoots, including detailed online polls regarding Syed’s guilt and involvement,[38] and Koenig’s interactive public talks, which allow listeners to quiz her on the case directly.

Such participatory behavior can also be related to conceptions of Web 2.0 culture. As Shifman discusses in relation to memes, sharing user-generated content is a dominant activity in Web 2.0 environments.[39] In the case of Serial, although a certain amount of user-generated content was uploaded to the show’s crowded Reddit forum (including humorous memes which, given the subject matter, were often in bad taste), Serial’s listeners generally focused on sharing information: either new theories or existing evidence reworked into new arguments.[40]

Serial as “On-Demand” Media

In a telling acknowledgement of the podcast’s reception, several of the public talks that Koenig is giving in 2015 are entitled “Binge-Worthy Journalism”.[41] The term binge-viewing is commonly used to describe how audiences increasingly consume one or more seasons of a television programme within a short space of time. Initially, DVD boxsets made this possible, with streaming sites such as Netflix and Hulu further enabling such extreme viewing habits.[42] Implicit in the term “binge-worthy journalism” is an understanding that journalism rarely elicits such obsessive behaviour. Yet just four weeks into Serial’s twelve-week run, producer Dana Chivvis posted an update on the website entitled “A Question of Binge Listening”, in response to listeners’ requests for the full season to be released at once. Chivvis explained that this was not possible since they were making the episodes as they went along (of course, it did become possible to binge listen to Serial once the series was complete.) But the fact that listeners felt entitled to demand all of Serial at once, and that the producers felt the need to respond to these requests, speaks to the nature of what Chuck Tryon (writing on cinema and television) calls “on-demand culture”.

For Tryon, “on-demand” digital culture provides viewers with “new forms of immediate access to movies and television shows”.[43] As Tryon demonstrates throughout On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (2013), such immediate access can shift audience expectations for how quickly content should be delivered. Listeners who requested all of Serial’s episodes at once seem to reflect a new kind of impatience; one that immediate access might be seen to create. The requests from Serial listeners – and the way in which the producers promptly responded to them – also reflect an increase in audience control that Tryon identifies as another side-effect of individuals having near-constant access to entertainment through digital platforms: “access to entertainment is promoted as mobile, persistent, and interactive, allowing the user far more control than in the past”.[44] In terms of interactivity, Serial’s website and social media accounts provided quick and easy avenues for listeners to request more episodes, with the producers receptive to such interaction. Chivvis thanks listeners for their patience and enthuses that “we couldn’t be happier that you’re as absorbed by this story as we are”.[45] But, even if the producers had already made all of the episodes, would or should they have indulged demands for the whole season to be released?

Little research has been done on the impact of media “binges” on audience satisfaction and engagement. From the producer’s perspective, however, there are certain benefits to a more staggered release. This allowed Serial’s producers to capitalise, literally, on the podcast’s success: towards the end of the twelve-week run, the producers appealed for listeners to donate money for a second series. Within a few weeks, enough money had been raised and the second season is due for release in the winter of 2015-2016. The staggered release also allowed Serial to gain momentum, with new listeners joining each week. The increased listenership was partly due to word of mouth – people urging their friends and family to listen so that they could discuss it – and partly due to the sustained attention from popular sites like Vulture.com, which created 36 short-form articles on Serial, both during and after its run. Again, this recalls Shifman’s point about positioning material at important media “hub” in order to increase their spreadability.[46]

Perhaps more importantly, Serial allows the producers to incorporate new information, some of which trickles in as a result of Serial’s popularity. As late as episode 12, Koenig reveals information provided by two important figures: Don, Hae Min Lee’s boyfriend at the time she died, who had declined Koenig an interview months earlier, and one of Jay’s co-workers to whom Jay had talked about the murder. Naturally, this new information could not have been incorporated had the series been completed or broadcast in one go: these contributors came forward with new information only because they, too, got caught up in the hype of the show. This unusual feature of Serial’s production captures how, in many ways, what makes it stand out as remarkable in a sea of content (to use Nahon and Hemsley’s description of viral media) is that it managed to be both uncommonly slow, in terms of pace, and uncommonly up-to-date, in terms of the speed with which new information (such as details from further interviews) was shared with listeners. Participatory engagement by audience members is common in today’s digital landscape, but Serial is remarkable in that selected listeners (albeit those already connected somehow to the events) were able directly to contribute to subsequent episodes. This element, along with the many and varied listener investigations on sites such as Reddit, have allowed Serial’s global audience to contribute to the show’s unraveling of a complex real-life event.

As the above analysis suggests, Serial’s success can partly be explained by its effective combination of a fast and a slow pace, and of documentary traditions and transmedia storytelling. But this alone may not have resulted in Serial breaking a variety of podcasting records: Koenig deserves some of the credit, and her narration merits particular attention.

“She was talking just to me”: Creating Intimacy with Millions of Listeners

As evident from the attention that Sarah Koenig has received in the media and from fans of the series, her style of narration – which provides us with personal insights and summative judgments as well as facts – was important to Serial’s success. In Episode 1, for instance, Koenig introduces us to Rabia Chaudry, the lawyer who approached her about Syed’s case. Koenig quickly summarises Rabia’s appearance and personality: “She’s got a beautiful round face framed by hijab. She’s adorable looking, but you definitely shouldn’t mess with her. She’s very smart and very tough.” Since Koenig previously produced and presented on This American Life, the notably popular radio show and podcast that spawned Serial, it is worth briefly considering how its impact and appeal relate to that of Serial. As Corey Flintoff details, National Public Radio began podcasting in 2005 and, within several years, public radio podcasts were regularly appearing on iTunes “most downloaded” lists. This American Life was particularly popular; by 2007, it had a weekly audience of 1.7 million and was played on over five hundred radio stations.^[47] Flintoff attributes the show’s success to the interview style of its creator, Ira Glass (who also serves as editorial advisor on Serial) and who analysed oral storytelling traditions when developing This American Life. Glass aimed to replicate traditional interview patterns, while combining them with his own witty, literary commentary.^[48] There is an equally literary quality to Koenig’s descriptions of events; as when she describes the difficulty of trying to recreate the muddled timeline for the murder, metaphorically, as “like trying to plot the coordinates of someone’s dream”. This is important since, unlike a documentary narrator, Koenig has to provide us with mental images of the key people and places without boring listeners with overly-mundane descriptions.

Koenig’s openness with listeners also includes reflective fluctuations about Syed’s guilt, likely echoing listeners own conflicting opinions. Discussing who could have made two anonymous phone calls in episode 4, Koenig explains that “I only have guesses that I can’t responsibly say out loud.” Her attempts to remain impartial continue until the final episode, when she reassures listeners that – in addition to the measured information she shares in the podcasts – the producers speculate about all kinds of things that would be inappropriate to share. Again, the narration builds trust between listeners and Koenig (who reassures us that she is tracking the “spin”) and further contributes to the sense of intimacy. While some listeners may have wanted Koenig to get off the fence regarding her opinion of Syed’s guilt, her unwillingness to do so is perhaps the ultimate testament to Serial’s reflexivity and the producers’ unwillingness to contribute further to the problem that they have been unable to solve. With the “story” of Hae Min Lee’s murder still unresolved after 16 years – and despite Serial’s eighteen-month investigation – attempting to provide “resolution” to their series would be misguided in the absence of proof of someone’s innocence or guilt.

Serial’s intimate narration is foregrounded in the TIME article on Koenig as one of the year’s most influential people. In keeping with the magazine’s premise of having one famous person sing the praises of another, actor Ewan McGregor describes how Koenig “talked to me in the bath, in the kitchen and in the subway, and although I knew there were plenty of others listening […] she had an uncanny knack for making me feel like she was talking just to me.”^[51] This sense of closeness between the radio broadcaster and her audience is certainly not unique to Serial. Scholars of radio often use the term “the illusion of intimacy” to capture how, as Wayne Munson explains, radio can simulate direct interpersonal communication through “the closeness and timbre of the voice, the affect of the speaker, and [the] apparent direct address”.[52]

Koenig is not the only person whom listeners, willingly or unwillingly, become close to. Koenig spent over forty hours talking to Syed in prison and these interviews are featured throughout. As we learn over the course of the series, Syed did not speak at his own trial,[53] a common defense strategy but one that he describes as exceptionally difficult. In episode 11, Syed indicates that he sees his involvement in the podcast as a delayed form of cross-examination. He describes how he has attempted to give Koenig only the facts, and not to make it personal, or try to get her on his side. In many ways, Serial allows Syed the chance to be heard, with Koenig performing the role of benevolent (and potentially biased) cross-examiner. Koenig manages the difficult task of both interrogating and befriending Syed. Not only is she open with listeners about her fluctuating opinions on his guilt, but she tells Syed when she finds out things that “look bad” for him.

The intimacy between Syed and Serial’s listeners is one way in which the podcast departs from Morris’s treatment of the man found to be innocent in The Thin Blue Line. As Williams explains, in the documentary Adams “remains a cipher – we learn almost nothing of his past”.[54] By contrast, Serial’s addictiveness partly occurs because we hear Syed, and others, talking about his past in such detail. At one point, Koenig is taken aback when Syed says that she doesn’t really know him, and yet she has told us that she half-expects to catch him in a lie if she talks to him long enough (this never happens). A similar tension exists for listeners. We hear Syed talk at great length, but without ever knowing if he is lying or telling the truth. The tentative nature of our identification with Syed is never resolved, since Serial doesn’t find him to be innocent or guilty. An expectation that the mystery would be solved – one grounded in both fictional media and real-life jury proceedings – likely contributed to the podcast’s addictive nature.

The fact that we never see Syed being interviewed also lends Serial an added source of mystery and appeal. Through its focus on the audio, Serial taps into the expressive power and revelatory nature of the voice. The set-up, like that of other radio shows, leads to an intense concentration on vocal, in addition to verbal, properties (something that Michel Chion equally notes in respect to cinema: he classifies non-verbal utterances as the most cinematic form of “speech”[55]). Koenig seems aware that it is not just what people say, but the way that they say it. In episode 8, she plays what she describes as her favourite piece of tape from the entire season. The segment features Laura, a friend of both Syed and Jay, reflecting on her feeling that neither of them was involved: “Well then who the fuck did it? Like, why would— it doesn’t make sense. Why would— (stuttering) Hae was— I can’t— I’m probably just as confused as you are.” This may seem like an odd moment for Koenig to select as her favourite piece of recording, since it certainly isn’t revelatory in terms of the content. But, listening to Laura start and restart sentences as she struggles to find the words to reconcile things, we sense her frustrated confusion, something to which Koenig and many listeners can relate. Pauses also become pregnant with meaning. Is Koenig pausing because someone has just said something that gains meaning in the larger context? Is Syed pausing to fabricate an excuse? In episode 6 Koenig asks Syed why he didn’t page Hae Min Lee after she disappeared: at one point in this exchange, there is a long pause before Syed asks (seemingly confused), “Are you asking me a question?” The fact that we can’t see Syed also allows us to forget that he is in prison. This makes it more disconcerting when the automated voice of the prison telephone system occasionally cuts him off mid-conversation. The audio storytelling format thus creates intimacy while keeping us at a certain enigmatic distance.

Conclusion

Significant changes have taken place in the media landscape between The Thin Blue Line’s release and Serial’s digital broadcasting 26 years later. As Jenkins explains in his discussion of media convergence, the assumption “that new media was going to push aside old media” was rampant in the 1990s.[56] Although the hope/fear that the internet would replace conventional broadcasting was not entirely misguided, Serial simultaneously embraces digital developments and traditional storytelling strategies, including those of documentary cinema. By using physical documents and images to supplement the podcast, the producers draw on the traditions of radio journalism and the appeal of oral storytelling, while taking advantage of new media in order to address potential “gaps” that emerge from telling a crime-based story through an audio medium. Channelling the transmedia storytelling practices of various long-form television serials, Serial provided materials that could orient listeners, expand their understanding of the storyworld, and encourage the kind of “forensic fandom” that Mittell identifies as characteristic of complex television fandom.

Explanations for Serial’s appeal and impact, however, should not understate Sarah Koenig’s distinctive presence. Koenig fulfils a variety of crucial roles: investigative journalist, interviewer, confidante, storyteller. While this presumably required considerable effort, she moves almost seamlessly through these roles, and risks frustrating listeners in order to maintain the integrity of the series by providing a clear picture of events (within the confines of her, and our, expanding knowledge) without entering into hearsay. Serial is somewhat characterised by tensions of this kind: moments that are heard but might be better seen; Koenig’s overlapping roles; Serial as a confluence of various old media techniques (radio journalism and documentary cinema) and new media distribution strategies (podcasting and digitally-enabled paratexts, such as interactive maps). Although focused on the past, Serial provides an exceptionally up-to-date recounting of that past by incorporating new information provided by “witnesses” related to the story the podcast tells. The producers’ openness to questions of “truth” – to letting the information itself dictate each episode’s content and length – means that it departs from much of the small-scale, easily-digested infotainment that is characteristic of contemporary media culture. Instead, Serial taps into the timelessness of the whodunit narrative, as well as the willingness of its global listenership to contribute to the creation of a version, however fragmentary, of real-life events.

Acknowledgements

Serial’s success was partly down to the way it motivated listeners to discuss the show’s content: thank you to Maria Pramaggiore, Eva Forman, Keavy Gallagher, and Moira White for the various Serial discussions, and to the reviewers for their helpful insights.

[1] Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley, Going Viral (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 2.

[2] Ibid, original emphasis.

[3] Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Cultures (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2014). Shifman analyses virality as part of her dominant aim of understanding memes. For Shifman, the main difference between a meme and a viral video or image is that the former is always a collection of texts.

[4] Amy Roberts, “The ‘Serial’ podcast: By the numbers,” CNN.com, 18 December 2014, accessed 20 August 2015, http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/18/showbiz/feat-serial-podcast-btn.

[5] Ewan McGregor, “TIME 100 – Pioneers: Sarah Koenig”, time.com, 15 April 2015, accessed 1 August 2015, http://time.com/3823276/sarah-koenig-2015-time-100/.

[6] “This American Life”, “About Us.” thisamericanlife.org, accessed 20 August 2015, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/about/about-our-radio-show.

[7] Shifman, 2014, 66-73.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NY; London: NYU Press, 2015)

[10] Shifman, 2014, 72.

[11] Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York; London: NYU Press, 2006)

[12] Chuck Tryon, On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013)

[13] Shane Denson, “To be continued…: Seriality and Serialization in Interdisciplinary Perspective.” Conference Proceedings of: What Happens Next: The Mechanics of Serialization. Graduate Conference at the University of Amsterdam, March 25–26, 2011. In: JLTonline, June 17, 2011, accessed 10 November 2015, http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/conferences/article/view/346/1004.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Mittell, 2015, 228.

[16] Ibid, 228.

[17] “The Long Center”, “Long Center Presents: Sarah Koenig.” thelongcenter.org, accessed 20 August 2015, http://thelongcenter.org/event/sarah-koenig/.

[18] See David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity Visual Style in Contemporary American Film”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3, Spring 2002.

[19] In Rebecca Ora’s abstract for a paper on Serial at the Visible Evidence XXII conference in August 2015, she notes that it is apt that Serial lacks visible evidence since its story took place in the 1990s, a time before “the obsessive documentation about to take flight with cell phone cameras and Google Earth”. Ora’s abstract also draws comparisons between Serial and The Thin Blue Line, although she focuses more on how each treats the (un)knowability of their respective truths. See “Visible Evidence 22 Panelist Bios & Abstracts”, accessed August 27 2015, http://visibleevidencexxii.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/VE-2015-Panelist-Bios-Abstracts-Sheet1.pdf.

[20] “The Long Center”.

[21] Leonard Shyles, Deciphering Cyberspace: Making the Most of Digital Communication Technology, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), 174. Shyles refers here to the impact of digital media on children in particular.

[22] Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991, 56-7.

[23] Linda Williams, “Mirror Without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 46 No. 3, Spring 1993, 12.

[24] See Nichols, 1991, 32-8.

[25] David Resha, The Cinema of Errol Morris (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015), 55.

[26] Shawn Rosenheim, “Interrotroning History: Errol Morris and the Documentary of the Future”, in Marcia Landy (ed.) The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001) 326.

[27] The use of the term “paratexts” in audiovisual culture is an extension of Gérard Genette’s conception – in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997) – of liminal devices that mediate between book, author, publisher, and reader.

[28] Mittell, 2015, 51.

[29] Ibid, 294; 261.

[30] Mittell, 2015, 295.

[31] See Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 93-130.

[32] Ibid, 314.

[33] Mittell, 2015, 314.

[34] Jenkins, 2006, 3-4 (but also discussed throughout his book).

[35] Ibid, 37.

[36] Ibid. See Pierre Lévy’s Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (1997) for a more definitive account of information sharing in digital culture.

[37] Susan Simpson, “Serial: Evidence that Jay’s Story was Coached to Fit the Cellphone Records.” ViewfromLL2.com, January 13 2015, accessed 10 November 2015, http://viewfromll2.com/2015/01/13/serial-evidence-that-jays-story-was-coached-to-fit-the-cellphone-records/. As of 10 November 2015, there are 406 Reddit comments related to Simpson’s post. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/serialpodcast/comments/2sdcwb/view_from_ll2_blog_post_evidence_that_jays_story/

[38] Websites such as Legal Talk Network and BuzzFeed conducted polls on Syed’s guilt which included multiple detailed questions. See “Legal Talk Network”, “Serial’ Podcast Poll: Do You Think Adnan Syed is Guilty?”, 18 February 2015, accessed 20 August 2015, http://legaltalknetwork.com/serial-podcast-poll-think-adnan-seyed-guilty/. See also Julia Furlan, “The Definitive Serial Obsessive Poll”, BuzzFeed.com, November 4, 2015, accessed 13 August 2015, http://www.buzzfeed.com/juliafurlan/the-definitive-serial-obsessive-poll#.vi3KWj7Lv.

[39] Shifman, 2014, 19. Shifman takes this point about sharing from Nicholas John, “Sharing and Web 2.0: The Emergence of a Keyword,” New Media and Society, July 3, 2013.

[40] It is worth noting here that, although Serial can be said to align with Shifman’s concept of viral content as 1) having prestige; 2) being well positioned in the media; 3) encouraging audience participation, Serial is less in keeping with the other factors Shifman identifies: positivity; provoking high-arousal emotions (wow or angry responses); and the packaging of messages in a clear and simple way.

[41] For example, The Connecticut Forum has titled their September 2015 event, “Binge-worthy Journalism – Backstage with the Creators of Serial”, accessed 20 August 2015, https://www.ctforum.org/binge-worthy-journalism.

[42] It is the decision to “binge” on a single show that is novel; this departs from the long-standing figure of the “couch potato” who binges on television more generally.

[43] Tryon, 2013, 1.

[44] Ibid, 4.

[45] Dana Chivvis, “A Question of Binge Listening”, serialpodcast.org, October 2014, accessed 10 August 2015, http://serialpodcast.org/posts/2014/10/a-question-of-binge-listening.

[46] Shifman, 2014, 72.

[47] Corey Flintoff, “The Public’s Radio: All Things on the Dial”, in Michael C. Keith, ed. Radio Cultures: The Sound Medium in American Life (New York; Washington: Peter Lang, 2008), 179.

[48] Ibid, 178-9.

[49] Williams, 1993, 13.

[50] Ibid, 12.

[51] Ewan McGregor, “TIME 100.”

[52] Wayne Munson, All Talk: The Talkshow in Media Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 34.

[53] In fact, there were two trials: the first ended in a mis-trial and, as Koenig explains in an early episode, it appears that the jury from the first trial were leaning towards acquitting Syed.

[54] Williams, 1993, 13.

[55] Chion uses the term “emanation speech” to describe such non-verbal utterances which, he argues, constitutes a film character’s sound “silhouette”. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, translated from French by Claudia Gorbman (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press) 85.

[56] Jenkins, 2006, 5.

Notes on Contributor

Jennifer O’Meara holds a PhD in Film Studies from Trinity College Dublin. She lectures in Film Studies at the School of English, Media and Theatre Studies in Maynooth University. Her most recent publications include contributions on film sound, performance and dialogue to The New Soundtrack, The Cine-files, The Soundtrack, and Cinema Journal. Jennifer is in the process of completing a monograph on engaging dialogue in independent cinema, and is currently researching the participatory reception of film posters and dialogue across digital platforms.

Bibliography

Bordwell, David. “Intensified Continuity Visual Style in Contemporary American Film.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3, Spring (2002), 16-28.

Chion, M. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated from French by Claudia Gorbman, New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 85.

Chivvis, Dana. “A Question of Binge Listening.” serialpodcast.org, October 2014. Accessed August 8 2015. http://serialpodcast.org/posts/2014/10/a-question-of-binge-listening.

Denson, Shane. “To be continued…: Seriality and Serialization in Interdisciplinary Perspective.” Conference Proceedings of: What Happens Next: The Mechanics of Serialization. Graduate Conference at the University of Amsterdam, March 25–26, 2011. In: JLTonline, June 17, 2011. Accessed November 10 2015. http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/conferences/article/view/346/1004.

Flintoff, Corey. “The Public’s Radio: All Things on the Dial.” In Radio Cultures: The Sound Medium in American Life, edited by Michael C. Keith, 171-187. New York; Washington: Peter Lang, 2002.

Furlan, Julia. “The Definitive Serial Obsessive Poll.” BuzzFeed.com, November 4, 2015. Accessed August 13 2015. http://www.buzzfeed.com/juliafurlan/the-definitive-serial-obsessive-poll#.vi3KWj7Lv.

Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York and London: NYU Press, 2006.

“Legal Talk Network”. “‘Serial’ Podcast Poll: Do You Think Adnan Syed is Guilty?” Legaltalknetwork.com, February 2015. Accessed August 20 2015. http://legaltalknetwork.com/serial-podcast-poll-think-adnan-seyed-guilty/.

McGregor, Ewan. “TIME 100 – Pioneers: Sarah Koenig”, time.com, April 15 2015. Accessed August 1 2015. http://time.com/3823276/sarah-koenig-2015-time-100/.

Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, NY; London: NYU Press, 2015.

Munson, Wayne. All Talk: The Talkshow in Media Culture, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

Nahon, Karine, and Hemsley, Jeff. Going Viral, Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013.

Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Ora, Rebecca. “Invisible Evidence: Serial and the New Unknowabilities of Documentary.” Conference paper delivered at Visible Evidence XXII, University of Toronto, August 20 2015. Abstract accessed on August 27 2015. http://visibleevidencexxii.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/VE-2015-Panelist-Bios-Abstracts-Sheet1.pdf.

Resha, David. The Cinema of Errol Morris, Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015.

Roberts, Amy. “The ‘Serial’ podcast: By the numbers,” CNN.com, December 18 2014. Accessed on August 20 2015. http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/18/showbiz/feat-serial-podcast-btn/.

Rosenheim, Shawn. “Interrotroning History: Errol Morris and the Documentary of the Future.” In The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy, 316-330. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014.

Shyles, Leonard. Deciphering Cyberspace: Making the Most of Digital Communication Technology, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003.

Simpson, Susan. “Serial: Evidence that Jay’s Story was Coached to Fit the Cellphone Records.” ViewfromLL2.com, January 13 1015. Accessed on November 10 2015, http://viewfromll2.com/2015/01/13/serial-evidence-that-jays-story-was-coached-to-fit-the-cellphone-records/.

The Long Center. “Long Center Presents: Sarah Koenig.” thelongcenter.org. Accessed August 10 2015. http://thelongcenter.org/event/sarah-koenig/.

Tryon, Chuck. On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Williams, Linda. “Mirror Without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 46 No. 3, Spring (1993), 9-21.

Media sources:

Lost (ABC, 2004-2010)

Mad Men (AMC, 2007-2015)

Matlock (NBC, 1986-1995)

Serial (WBEZ Chicago, 2014)

The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)

This American Life (Chicago Public Media, 1995– )

Secret Cinema, which held its first event in 2007 with a screening of Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (2007) in a disused railway tunnel, delivers live, immersive, and participatory cinema-going experiences in London. In its original format, audience members would purchase a ticket without knowing what the screening was going to be, and would then be required to make preparations before attending the event. For example, for Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, USA, 1942) audience members were provided with identification papers and instructions on what to wear, and then on arrival at the event were subjected to an ‘experience’ in which the film was literalised in a location, both prior to the screening in order to set the scene for the film, and then throughout the film viewing experience itself. Other notable Secret Cinema events have included a 2012 screening of The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont1994), which attracted over 13,500 people. For this particular event, audience members were summoned to a court hearing and instructed to wear long johns. Upon arrival at Bethnal Green Library, audience members were individually sentenced before being transported in buses with blacked-out windows to a disused school where they were stripped of their belongings and entered into the world of a prison as inmates. Closely aligned to physical immersive theatre experiences, such as the promenade theatre of Punch Drunk (2000–) and the on-street installations of Blast Theory (1991–), these original Secret Cinema “in-film” experiences have been described by Ed Potton as “combining film-going with the visceral anarchy of site-specific theatre and the clandestine thrills of an illegal rave”.[1]

More recently, events have been delivered for new releases, acting as a promotional mechanism embedded into the film’s marketing strategy. Prometheus (Ridley Scott, USA/UK, 2012) was the first new release that Secret Cinema screened, with the film making more money as a Secret Cinema event than on its opening night in London. Similarly, the number one box office position of The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014) was largely attributable to the £1.1m generated by Secret Cinema, thus heralding the film industry’s recognition of the influence and revenue generation opportunities that are presented by this new and highly profitable event-led distribution model.

These commercial successes mark a notable shift in both the organisation’s approach and the type of audiences that they are starting to attract. The events, which have previously been marketed in a clandestine way via word of mouth and social media in which knowing participants are instructed to “tell no one”,[2] are now being launched through high-profile press releases. The organisation has now rebranded these different modes of experience as Secret Cinema Presents…, building on a known film and are advertised in this manner, such as 2014 screening of Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) which constitutes the focus of this article, and more recently a 2015 screening of Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980). This has inevitably led to tensions between the expectations of an early adopter ‘hipster’ elite (those who attended the initial Secret Cinema screenings) and the much broader public of Secret Cinema Presents…, including Back to the Future fans, affectionados and aficionados, who are the focus of this article.

During the build-up to the Secret Cinema Presents… Back to the Future event, a compelling conflict played out on social media between the creators and the audience. In this article we retell the story of how that drama unfolded in the lead-up to the opening night of the event, and how the surrounding social media communications became a site of audience engagement and participation. We also outline the way in which these channels made visible a proliferation of divergent fan and anti-fan practices and contested viewing pleasures.

The Back to the Future event was unprecedented in many ways: the venue had the capacity for 3,000 audience members, all of whom were willing to pay £50 for a ticket. Over the months of July and August 2014, 45,000, tickets were sold in total, generating a final box office gross of £3.37m – all for a film that is 30 years old.[3] The build-up began – as does that of all Secret Cinema experiences – via online social media channels weeks before the live event itself, and it is these online spaces (as opposed to the event itself) that are the key site of our analysis. Crucially, it is these spaces that both the audience members and the organisation sought to shape, control and influence in contradictory and conflicting ways. This article illuminates the conflicts, tensions and re-negotiations of control embedded in both the experience and surrounding fan and anti-fan discourses, in which the event and the organisation were dismantled in public view, and we argue that the audience reclaimed both the social media spaces and the filmic text of Back to the Future as their own.

The Back to the Future experience was to operate under the same ‘secret’ rubric as all the preceding Secret Cinema events – whereby participants are playfully instructed to “tell no one”, the location of the screening event is withheld until the very last minute, and cameras, phones and recording devices are surrendered at the door. This event also spawned an unprecedented extension of the film’s storyworld into these online spaces. Back to the Future’s fictional Hill Valley town and community were recreated on numerous in-fiction websites as well as in the physical spaces of Hill Valley ‘pop-up’ stores that opened up in East London in the weeks leading up to the main event, in which visitors were greeted and served ‘in character’ by actors playing Hill Valley residents. The film’s famous time-travelling DeLorean also made several appearances at various sites across London along with Secret Cinema actors dressed as Doc Brown and Marty McFly. Articles were frequently published both online and in physical newspapers, leading up to the Hill Valley fair (the proposed context of the physical event), and a Hill Valley TV station, HV-TV, started broadcasting on YouTube. Facilitated by the increased revenue generated by ticket sales, these elaborations and embellishments of the fictional world went above and beyond previous Secret Cinema events and were aimed at making the shows increasingly interactive and immersive based on audience demand.

As part of the ‘fictional’ social media strategy, the Hill Valley website[4] required ticket-holders to log in using an access code that was sent in an email prior to the event. Audience members were assigned a new identity and issued with a set of printable business cards, which they were instructed to bring along, and which contained their new name, address and telephone number, as well as an assignation to one of the Hill Valley community’s nineteen organizations.[5] Audience members were then given specific instructions regarding what to wear and what to bring to the event dependent on their organisation. For example, Hill Valley High School students were required to bring their homework, photographs of family members and of favourite movie stars (at the event students could then decorate their own locker in the school building). Town Hall staff members, meanwhile, were asked to bring a commemorative flower wreath as well as banners, flags, posters and rosettes to support the Mayor Red Thomas re-election campaign. Those assigned to the Twin Pines Ranch were asked to bring homemade produce such as honey, taffy, flower crowns and knitted socks. And the Texaco garage participants were instructed to bring a chamois leather to “polish the cars to perfection” and to learn the Texaco song and dance (as presented in advance on the HV-TV YouTube channel).

Accessing these online activities and content enabled audience members to engage with the fabric of the Back to the Future filmic universe. These activities also worked on the level of introducing new characters to the audience, who didn’t necessarily feature in the film, but who offered diegetic extensions of the fabula of Back to the Future. For example hairdressers, shopkeepers and garage attendants had features on the website giving them a significance far beyond that of the film. They also enabled audience members to contribute to the textual spaces of the experience. On the Hill Valley Telegraph staff page, members were asked to write one or more brand new articles on recent news or the latest report for the gossip pages, which in some cases were included on the event’s dedicated website.[6] At Hill Valley Stationers, audience members were asked to create poster designs for the Hill Valley Fair and for all trading Hill Valley Stores, which could then be printed onsite at the stationery store and purchased (for real-world pound sterling).

The online pre-event offer also included the introduction of an in-fiction communications channel, the Hill Valley telephone exchange,[7] for which audience members were assigned their own unique telephone number and PIN, and were encouraged to leave and access telephone messages for one another. The answering-machine system also included access to a number of ‘set pieces’ from famous Hill Valley residents, including Emmet Brown, Lorraine Baines, George McFly, and Biff Tannen. The interface also enabled access to the 1955 Hill Valley phone book, in which all audience member identities were listed with a telephone number (this was also accessible on-site in physical print form). Audience members were also provided with instructions on the most appropriate clothing to wear through the link to a downloadable Hill Valley ‘Look Book’.

These preparations enabled audience members to occupy the physical space of the narrative diegesis of the Hill Valley fair and to engage in events and activities outside of the filmic narrative. This created an intra-diegetic play space in which audience members took on a role through their embodiment of in-world characters and immersed themselves in the fabula world created in these online spaces (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Examples of the different diegetic spaces that Secret Cinema created both online and in the real world – The Hill Valley Stores – a pop-up shop and café opened in East London for the duration of the event – participants could buy clothes in preparation for the event and have their hair cut in the salon.

The Back to the Future event began its life using the same methods and infrastructure that had been deployed in previous campaigns, and which are/were characteristic of an independent organisation. However, this infrastructure proved insufficient for coping with audience demand, and within ten minutes of the hotly-anticipated tickets being released for sale the ticket provider’s servers crashed and no one was able to purchase tickets. Although the tickets were then re-released two days later with a new, larger, shinier and well-known provider, customer anger nonetheless quickly bubbled up through the social media channels, with comments regularly relating to the film text (for example, about the organiser’s being able to travel back in time to sort out the problem – and needing 1.21 giga-watts of power, the amount needed in the film to send the DeLorean back in time, to fix their servers). This anger quickly subsided when customers were able to secure tickets, with more screening dates being announced to cope with the high demand.

In the following weeks, email communications started to flow from Hill Valley. These were multiple, detailed and frequently confusing. Real-world instructions were buried in in-world fictional links, and dense (fictional) textual detail about Hill Valley Town Fair confused and frustrated the recipients. For example, the long awaited link to the map showing the event location was a hyperlink buried in an email communication. Ticket holders reported that this link did not work in all browsers, nor was it immediately evident that there was a significant link in the text. Secret Cinema’s Twitter and Facebook sites were used to loudly bemoan the lack of clarity and to demand practical information such as transport links and nearby accommodation (see Figure 2). This was not a local, London-based, hipster audience but one drawn from all over the UK, Europe and even further afield.

Figure 2: Illustrative participant complaints delivered via Twitter.

A dichotomy quickly emerged as Secret Cinema used these online spaces to allow audience narrative engagement whilst also deploying these same sites to administer marketing, selling and instructions for their audience in key preparations required for the event. They also heavily policed these spaces – issuing requests for audience-generated content to be taken down. A confusing communications strategy, which interchanged between fiction and non-fiction registers, manifested – of the sort that Andrea Phillips would describe as a “badly-drawn play space.”[8] For Phillips, such a space is one in which the rules of engagement for participants and the required playful behaviours are poorly delineated and/or badly communicated.

Participants were addressed across a number of confusing and potentially conflicting registers: as knowing ‘players’ of Secret Cinema experiences; as devoted fans of Back to the Future; as customers to be provided with precise and demanding ‘joining’ instructions; and, frequently enough, as unruly bodies to be controlled through orders and commands. In the examples given in Figure 3, we can already see the extent to which assumptions of audience technicity (their adoption of and familiarity with specific technologies, as well as their tastes) governed the dissemination of information. Embedding links in emails and assuming a certain technoliteracy is just one key example, making it easy for many to miss critical information and thus producing a confused flurry of tweets and Facebook postings asking for clarification. Figure 3 also shows the secret location on Google Maps – hidden behind the ‘Hilldale, California’ link within the email text.

Figure 3: Email sent to participants with a hidden embedded link which revealed the secret location via a Google map

There were of course many other assumptions around taste and disposable income that played in to the participant discontent as time progressed. The organisers, who clearly wanted to establish audience relations in what Henry Jenkins[9] describes as “collaborationist” mode, did not appear to appreciate the complexity of operating across the “transmedia storytelling” register whilst also engaging with fans schooled in the use of social media for community building and personal display of textual expertise. At minimum, the organisers certainly played out a lot of channel confusion through a blurring between in-fiction storyworld elaboration and audience instruction. As this confusion took hold the struggle for ownership within the virtual space was swiftly apparent. The speed and reach of dissemination of discontent in the social media context was also very clearly a factor. Figure 4 illustrates some of the numerous conflicts that played out as participants exposed details of the event’s location on Secret Cinema’s social media streams.

Figure 4: Secret Cinema instruction to remove location image

This was the first time that a Secret Cinema Presents… event engaged with a pre-existing and well-formed fan community. Back to the Future has highly visible formal and informal fan communities, both of which have intensified their activities in the run-up to the film’s thirtieth anniversary in 2015[10].

A key challenge that Secret Cinema faced was the expansion of their audience and a new diversity of participant subjectivities. In a study of engagements with the Lord of the Rings storyworld (across book, board game, video game and film), Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy identified the complex interaction of fan tastes, technical competency and textual expertise in the display of fan subjectivities.

In these conditions of intermediality our responses to such texts will crucially be dependent upon our technicity – that combination of taste and competence that determines our ability to access a storyworld as well as our individual style of interactions with it. Technicity can therefore be seen as a key marker of a subject’s ability to exercise the flexible repertoire of interpretive responses demanded by increasingly intermedial cultural landscapes.[11]

The online spaces detailed above allowed devoted fans of Back to the Future to display and celebrate their thorough knowledge of the characters, dialogue and narrative – even when critiquing or satirizing the event organisers/organisation.

The critiques that emerged came along a number of different axes of participation. Many fans used the social media channels to display their virtuoso command of not just the film text but the communication channel itself as they made their criticisms very public. In Figure 4 we also see how one of the fundamental rules of Secret Cinema was broken: the Back to the Future unfinished location was repeatedly photographed and revealed in an act of ongoing defiance and exposure, an activity that can be aligned to the fannish behaviour of a “set tracker”, which according to David Brisbin[12], is the industry name given to fans who locate film sets to photograph and share with other fans in open displays of subcultural capital.

The conflict between Secret Cinema and its audience continued to manifest as Secret Cinema attempted openly to exert its control with cease-and-desist-type tweets couched in its playful “tell no one” language, which somewhat undermined their apparent collaborationist stance (again, see Figure 4 above). This attempt to reassert control was responded to quite differently depending on fan subjectivity, as we shall see below.

Fan-to-fan conflict started to emerge at this stage between the core Secret Cinema audience and the newer Back to the Future contingent, a conflict that might also be characterised as being between devoted Back to the Future fans and newer Secret Cinema fans. There were many incidents in which Secret Cinema fans berated the newer fans for failure to read the instructions, to properly engage with the concept or understand the significance of the secrecy in relation to the overall experience. This further highlighted the ways in which these social media channels might need careful managing in relation to different kinds of fan address and fan subjectivities. In terms of the complexities of these audience subjectivities, we might want to signal at least two key axes of distinction here. The first is primarily about the engagement with the novelty of an immersive experience of any cinematic text. This, we might argue is the subjectivity occupied by the hipster elite/early adopter/technorati, who have been driving investment in ‘new’ or ‘novel’ experience design that expands our engagements with (and crucially our financial commitment to) a particular intellectual property (in this case a film). The second is aligned with the ‘collection’ and ‘completion’ of, as well as a deep engagement with, a particular story or text; this is the participant who will buy the book of and the ‘making of’ special, who will collect the merchandise, take the fairground ride, watch the reruns, play the board game and so on. What these latter fans share is the complex and profound commitment to a particular text or storyworld. These complexities and differences were clearly not well understood in the design of the Secret Cinema online communication strategy.

The growing dissatisfaction and annoyance is illustrated in Figure 5, in which we see how comments continued to be met with criticism and disdain by the Secret Cinema fan community.

Figure 5: Further examples of inter-subjective fan conflict.

As participatory cinema practices have already taught us, even the most dedicated and knowing fans need guidance. Indeed, in Figure 6 we see the precisely timed instructions and the specific prop list provided online for any potential participants of the Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, UK/USA, 1975), which, given that it has been requiring audience interaction for around 40 years, might be forgiven for assuming at least some audience awareness of required behaviours. Although there were already these existing fan communities for Back to the Future, this was the first occasion in which they could – and indeed were required to – interact with the story world in this way.

Figure 6: http://www.rockyhorror.com/participation/

Conflict for control manifested itself once more when one adept fan put an FAQ together to support the participants. This received an immediate and very positive response in the form of 7,000 hits on the first day. Indeed, the FAQ was a model of clarity, revealing nothing that would undermine the overall engagement with the event and which was clearly produced out of a profound love for both the Secret Cinema experience and Back to the Future. However, Secret Cinema requested that it immediately be taken down with the assertion that it was “confusing the audience”. In this way, Secret Cinema appeared at this point to be adopting what Jenkins[13] describes as the “prohibitionist” stance. The Secret Cinema response also demonstrated a further contradictory position in relation to the fans’ level of participation/engagement, since it was clearly at odds with their earlier invitations to contribute (by submitting stories, voice messages, shopping in the pop-up store, preparing costumes and buying props for the event). It would seem that the organisation was attempting to own and to control a social space that was set up specifically for fans to engage with in advance of attending the event itself. This fannish productivity, an attempt to ease understanding and to provide translation across participant subjectivities, was discredited by Secret Cinema as they tried to secure and maintain control.

A perfect storm of confused communication had been created, fueling the swathe of fan/audience responses that followed at the point of the final breakdown in communication relations. The event hit delays and the launch and the opening night of the show were cancelled, with audience members (who had left their mobile devices behind as per instructions) being given just 60 minutes notice. As we discuss below, the backlash to these delays and cancellations was considerable.

In a vehement response, the audience quickly began to manipulate and re-appropriate the Back to the Future text as a mechanism through which to critique the producers, clearly highlighting that Secret Cinema were not really the authors of Back to the Future, being instead appropriators and adaptors of the original text.

Initially this re-appropriation of Back to the Future by the event participants was done through the use of text-based tweets and Facebook posts that, as with the previous crashing of the website, incorporated famous lines from the film interwoven with complaints and vitriol (see Figure 7). The resulting text playfully reworked the original meaning of lines from the Back to the Future script to create an unintentionally synchronized, crowd-sourced, alternative storyline of the ‘Secret Cinema Cancellation Debacle’. In this way, the audience voice now became prominent in the social media realm as participants enacted critical and cultural production practices. This new storyline was also serialized in the mainstream news as we describe below.

Figure 7: Illustrative examples of fans’ text-based manipulation.

This criticism can still be described as a potentially pleasurable form of engagement – a mechanism through which to express anger and frustration at Secret Cinema – but it also provided an opportunity to flex and display subcultural prowess. We see fans engage in these practices whenever a remake or adaptation of a well-loved text is attempted. We can observe this at the start of Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy; it has also been true of game to film and book to film adaptations/translations such as Silent Hill and the Harry Potter series. Indeed, these Back to the Future fans were displaying what we referred to above as their virtuoso command of this text/story world, as well as their technical competence and cultural capital (or technicity).

Figure 8: Illustrative narrative-based re-appropriation.

This textual manipulation and re-appropriation quickly advanced to the practice of visually manipulating still imagery taken from the Back to the Future film. The initial spark for this new vein of activity seemed to be the appearance of a controversial image showing the unfinished set of the event on the opening night. This was quickly taken and re-contextualised within the text of Back to the Future. One such example repurposes Doc Brown’s line ‘Please Excuse the Crudity of this Model’ taken from the scene where he has built a model of Hill Valley to demonstrate the lightning capture process placed over the image of the unfinished Secret Cinema set (see Figure 8). This was then followed by a rapid succession of newly manipulated images. As Jonathan Gray has observed, “[f]ans live with in-built, intricately detailed memories of their text(s)”[14] and so these responses, demonstrating the audience’s affective involvement and investment in the Back to the Future text, came thick and fast (see Figure 9).

Figure 9: Illustrative examples of fan image-based manipulations.

Many of these images were taken and reproduced in blogs that documented the seeming demise of Secret Cinema, as well as being printed in mainstream press as the cancellation made national headline news. This is perhaps the ultimate desired destination for the handiwork of a textual re-appropriator: to gain widespread recognition, kudos and cult status. Perversely these emergent critical paratexts, which could be seen not so much as flame-bait but as flame-fodder, actually diffused the situation, providing moments of humour and a release of tension for the communities affected by the cancellation.

Figure 10: Participants display dark humour in response to the cancellations.

The comment shown in Figure 10 hints at a darker side in which viewing pleasure is derived from looking on at a serialised disaster; this impromptu fan-driven storyline around the cancellation has thus become a media spectacle in its own right, a perspective that then found support through mainstream media coverage, which in turn helped to escalate the visibility of the ‘Secret Cinema Cancellation Debacle’. This mainstreaming and high visibility of the cancellation storyline then provided others with the mechanism to caution for a sense of proportion. The high profile coverage prompted a critique of the banality of the Secret Cinema backlash, as this cancellation trended on Twitter alongside bigger news stories such as the Gaza conflict (see Figure 11) with the story receiving a high ranking on mainstream news agendas.

Figure 11: News hierarchy showing Secret Cinema debacle achieving a prominent position alongside serious world events.

In this backlash, we see manifestations of anti-fan critique, the anti-fan being a useful mechanism with which to reverse the lens of fan studies in order to consider other equally intense relationships to content, as Jonathan Gray[15] and Cornel Sandvoss[16] have argued. That is, in order to fully understand what it means to interact with texts we must also examine anti-fans.

With regard to the string of events surrounding the cancelled Back to the Future screening, the anti-fan discourse emerged at several places on a spectrum ranging from outward displays of hatred, anger and vitriol to mild critique and poking fun (see Figure 12). With regard to the former Fabien Riggall, the event’s organizer and the founder of Secret Cinema, was presented especially as emblematic of a hipster cultural elite. Furthermore, in this instance he was held up as a folk-devil figure and was ridiculed as a “trustafarian”, what the Urban Dictionary describes as “a rich young person who adopts an ethnic lifestyle and lives in a non-affluent urban area”. Kimberly Springer defines such hatred as “hateration” – as an anti-fan activity distinguishing anti-fandom and hatred from “trolling, flaming, and other undesirable web-based behaviors”.[17] Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum anti-fans critiqued Secret Cinema–goers as middle class, and part of a cultural elite, and poked fun at the hundreds of lost, costumed participants and their indistinction from hipster Hoxtonites (residents of London’s Hoxton area) in general.

Figure 12: Serious hateful commentary of Rigall and Secret Cinema, including mild condemnation of Rigall as founder of Secret Cinema (Click for Larger).

Riggall, regarding his initial ambition and speaking positively during the development of the event, acknowledged both the agency and the authority of the fans:

At the event, each audience member is getting their own unique character and story, so they’re written into the script. It’s turning out to be a pretty intense summer. But you can’t do Back to the Future and not aim high. We’ve been infected by the spirit of the movie: this strange, innocent optimism. Which is dangerous, because it means we think that we can do anything… I’m shitting myself because this film is so well-loved, so if we mess up anything we’re in trouble![18]

A deliciously prescient comment. At the outset it was clear that as a producer-fan Riggall well understood some of the risks that lay ahead in adapting this particular text.

As an aside, we also saw some intriguing behaviour that we describe as ‘dark marketing’ – the specific practice whereby trending metadata related to an unfortunate incident, accident or disaster is reframed and exploited for commercial imperatives. So in this example these ‘dark marketeers’ were able to capitalize upon the Secret Cinema cancellations to reap very specific rewards in relation to their own profile, publicity and new participants. As shown in Figure 13, Crate Brewery, Rufus Hound and Madame Tussaud’s all offered, inter alia, discounted entry rates and/or free beer to those suffering through the cancellations. This was a canny use of a high trending fan/creator debacle being played out in the highly visible spaces of Twitter and Facebook. But, crucially, there was of course the widely understood happy ending in terms of both audience satisfaction and commercial success. Fans across the spectrum swiftly asserted their pleasures post-event (see Figure 14). The fan-authored storyline and the spectacle of the ‘Secret Cinema Cancellation Debacle’ had a satisfying and conventional happy ending.

Figure 13: Incidences of these “dark marketing” practices.

Figure 14: Delighted audience feedback.

Earlier we mentioned what Andrea Phillips describes as the errors attendant to a “badly drawn play space”.[19] What we have examined here is the battle for agency and authority that can play out between audience and producer when the communication strategy is inadequate to the complexity of the engagement afforded. The lack of clarity and distinction between channels was the fissure that allowed the adoption of a critical stance on the part of the participants in Secret Cinema Presents… Back to the Future. It also became the site of contestation that demonstrated that this is a space where fans (and anti-fans) can swiftly overtake and dominate through virtuoso technicities. Secret Cinema believed their audiences loved them enough to go with the sprinkling of information and inconsistencies. But critically their audience comprised of more than their devoted, tolerant and adept Secret Cinema cognoscenti, but also more unruly and demanding Back to the Future fans with passions not strictly aligned with Secret Cinema.

In this year’s Secret Cinema experience – The Empire Strikes Back – we see that the organisers have learned the lessons from the debacle described above. This time the ‘secret’ aspect became critical to what we could describe as the ‘digital scenography’. Within the social media mise-en-scène, secrecy became a fundamental aspect to the interpellation of the audience and intrinsic to the pre-event experience. Instead of resisting the covert approaches taken in other events (creating problems such as those identified above) the audience could now readily engage in the ‘stay disconnected’ narrative, performing in-character on social media. Core to this secrecy was an additional invitation to be part of an underground rebellion. The overlapping nature of the narrative architecture and the apparatus used to engage the participants produced a unique convergence of aesthetics, which captured a particular mood in the post-election malaise of May 2015. Taking the story underground and offline to secret rave-like spaces (there were a number of pre-event pop-up night clubs as well as the Secret Cantina, which was open for the duration of the official event in a secret location in London) and engaging the audience through a rhetoric of rebellion seems to have taken exquisite advantage of this dominant mood in the run-up to the actual launch. This convergence eliminated the moments of disharmony and discord amongst the participants and signaled the ability of Secret Cinema to continue to adapt this novel format in relation to fan practices and resistances.

[1] Sarah Atkinson, Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 47.

[2] http://www.secretcinema.org

[3] These figures have since been exceeded by this year’s Secret Cinema Star Wars – The Empire Strikes Back event – including not just an increase in the scale of the event but also in the run (four months, between June-September 2015) and the ticket price (£75)

[4] http://www.hillvalleycalifornia.com

[5] These were the Town Hall, Otis Peabody’s Farm, Texaco Garage, Ask Mr. Foster Travel Service, JD Armstrong Realty, Hill Valley Telegraph, Elite Barbers, Hill Valley TV and Wireless, Ruth’s Frock Shop, Hill Valley Broadcasting, Broadway Florists, Hill Valley Stationers, Sherwin Williams Paints, Hal’s Bikes, Roy’s Comics, Roy’s Records, Hill Valley High School, Bank of America and Lou’s Café.

[6] http://www.hillvalleycalifornia.org/hill-valley-telegraph-express/

[7] http://www.hillvalleycalifornia.com/phone/

[8] Andrea Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011),

[9] Henry Jenkins, “Prohibitionists and Collaborationists: Two Approaches to Participatory Culture” [online] http://henryjenkins.org/2006/07/prohibitionists_and_collaborat.html, July 19, 2006.

[10] For the former see http://www.backtothefuture.com and for the latter http://www.hillvalleycity.com

[11] Jon Dovey, & Helen W. Kennedy, (2006) `Playing the Ring: Intermediality & Ludic Narratives in the Lord of the Rings Games’ in Ernest Mathijs ed., The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context Wallflower: Columbia University Press. p.254 – 270.

[12] David Brisbin, “Instant Fan-Made Media,” Perspective, December 2009–January 2010, 55

[13] Henry Jenkins, (2006) “Prohibitionists and Collaborationists: Two Approaches to Participatory Culture” [online] http://henryjenkins.org/2006/07/prohibitionists_and_collaborat.html, July 19, 2006.

[14] Jonathan Gray, “New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans.” SAGE 6.1: (2003): 67.

[15] Gray, “New Audiences”, 67.

[16] Cornell Sandvoss, (2005). Fans: The mirror of consump­tion. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

[17] Kimberly Springer, “Beyond the H8R: Theorizing the Anti-Fan.” The Phoenix Papers, Vol.1, No.2. Ed. J. Holder Bennet. Denton: FANS Association, 2013: 55-77.

[18] Secret Cinema: The Inside Story The phenomenon’s creator, Fabien Riggall, gives us the skinny [online] http://www.empireonline.com/interviews/interview.asp?IID=1916

[19] Andrea Phillips, Hoax or Transmedia? The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction (Austin, TX:SWSX, 13 March 2011).

Notes on Contributors

Sarah Atkinson and Helen Kennedy are undertaking the first piece of national industry research on the Live Cinema sector with Live Cinema UK, funded by Arts Council England Grants. This collaboration marks the latest project from Atkinson and Kennedy, who are leading research into live, event and expanded cinema experiences and audiences. Their recent research into Secret Cinema has been published in the G|A|M|E Journal and presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Montreal. They are currently editing the first special issue journal of its kind dedicated to live/event cinema.

Bibliography

Atkinson, Sarah. Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences, New York: Bloomsbury, 2014

Atkinson, Sarah and Kennedy, Helen W. ‘Tell no one: Cinema as game-space – Audience participation, performance and play’, G|A|M|E: The Italian Journal of Game Studies, Number 5 (2015).

Brisbin, David. ‘Instant Fan-Made Media,’ Perspective, December 2009–January

2010: 54–59 (2009)

Dovey, Jon and Kennedy, Helen W. `Playing the Ring: Intermediality & Ludic Narratives in the Lord of the Rings Games’ in Ernest Mathijs ed., The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context, Wallflower: Columbia University Press, 2006

Gray, Jonathan. “New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans.” SAGE 6.1: 64-81, (2003)

Jenkins, Henry. “Prohibitionists and Collaborationists: Two Approaches to Participatory Culture”, July 19, 2006, [online] http://henryjenkins.org/2006/07/prohibitionists_and_collaborat.html,

Phillips, Andrea.. Hoax or Transmedia? The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction, Austin, Texas:

SWSX (2011)

Phillips, Andrea., A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms. New York: McGraw Hill, 2012

Potton, Ed ‘Film Spy: Why Secret Cinema’s Shawshank Ups the Ante for Immersive Film-Going’, The Times, 3 December 2012.

Sandvoss, Cornell.. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005

Springer, Kimberly, “Beyond the H8R: Theorizing the Anti-Fan.” The Phoenix Papers, Vol.1, No.2. Ed. J. Holder Bennet. Denton: FANS Association, 55-77 (2013)

Women’s history and women’s television, referring to television made with a discernibly female focus and targeted at a presumed female audience, can both be said to be marginalised within the wider context of their respective fields. The necessity of the “women” prefix imbues them with an otherness which segregates them from mainstream or traditional narratives – both in history and on television. In her 2013 article, Vicky Ball makes a convincing case for female ensemble drama as a space in which women’s screen histories as well as women’s history on screen can be re-examined in a female-centred context. This article examines two female ensemble dramas; Land Girls, created by Roland Moore and first distributed by the BBC in 2009, and The Bletchley Circle, written by Guy Burt and first distributed by ITV in September 2012. Both dramas are located within prime time schedules and pitched towards a presumed, largely female audience, accustomed to consuming conventionally structured popular history dramas.  The article seeks to explore the ways in which these two Second World War dramas offer at once a progressive, centre stage space in which women and their experiences of the Second World War can be explored, whilst at the same time culminating in resolutions which re-situate women within more conventional roles, reasserting implicitly conservative gender norms.

The BBC’s Land Girls follows a group of women recruited to work as members of the Women’s Land Army (WLA) to supplement agricultural labour on Pasture Farm, part of the fictitious Hoxley Manor Estate.^[1] The characters in the BBC series represent a cross section of typical recruits; young women away from home for the first time, living and working with other women from different classes and backgrounds, and  the series derives its narrative from the girls’ attempts to adjust to their new surroundings, new jobs and to each other.

The second series this article will examine is ITV’s drama The Bletchley Circle. Set 7 years after the end of the Second World War, it features four former code breakers at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. The four women apply their analytical and deductive skills to identify codes and patterns in the behaviour of a serial killer. As well as functioning as a standard murder mystery narrative, in which a group of investigators combine their individual skills to tackle previously unsolvable crimes, The Betchley Circle also explores the post-war experience of many women forced to return to the home after wartime service, highlighting their attempts to reconcile their changed identities and wartime experiences with a society seeking to erase both.

These two dramas can be seen to offer a simultaneously progressive, yet clearly delineated space for telling women’s history. In terms of wartime narratives, the removal of men to active service serves as a “narrative device to produce central female protagonists to whom things can happen”.^[2] In their removal from men, the women in these two dramas are rendered available as heroines while their status as wives, sweethearts, mothers confirms them “as being properly feminine (men have wanted them)”.^[3] Ball’s point that the stigma attached to “women’s issues” and “women’s stories” in popular culture results in such dramas being perceived as having little cultural value, has interesting parallels with the status of women’s history and, by extension, women’s history on television^[4]. The discrepancy is particularly acute in the context of war stories. Televisual representations of women’s wartime experience such as Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle are differentiated from “proper” war stories represented in male centred dramas such as Band of Brothers (HBO 2001) or  Dad’s Army (BBC 1968) in which female characters are often incidental and firmly positioned as secondary to the main narrative.

In terms of war films, women have fared similarly. Although, as Penny Summerfield notes, women in British films made during the Second World War itself “were neither insignificant nor lacking in competence, maturity, and independence”, in films made since the 1950s female representation has been somewhat limited.^[5] In the immediate post-war climate, priority in films was given to male experiences of the Second World War, with women taking central roles in just four of the fifty most watched war films of the 1950s and 1960s.^[6] Although this number has certainly increased, with female characters taking prominent roles in big budget war films such as Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007), Charlotte Grey (Gillian Armstrong, 2001) and Suite Française (Saul Dibb, 2015), romantic melodrama remains the dominant medium through which feminine war stories are told in cinemas.^[7]  

The televisual exception to this, perhaps, is Tenko (BBC, 1981),which, as Ball highlights, foregrounds not only ‘marginalised aspects of women’s history in terms of war’ but also marginalised identities, i.e. lesbians^[8]. The setting of Tenko within a female prisoner-of-war camp is conducive to more recognisable wartime narratives.  This removes it from the domestic and elevates it beyond the dichotomy of the masculine front line and the feminine home front.

In a similar manner to Tenko, both Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle situate women in a traditionally male genre and, in positioning them centre stage and granting them narrative agency, place them in typically male roles.^[9] This challenging of gender stereotypes could problematise both texts’ creation of textual realism. However, as well as the historical fact of women taking up such roles, Charlotte Brunsdon notes that “the realism of a television programme is constructed through a range of devices and conventions which derive their significance primarily from generic and textual histories, rather than from any direct relation to the real”.^[10] Thus the sense of reality, and therefore their success in telling these stories, comes not entirely, or even in the majority, from their basis in historical fact, but rather in their successful utilisation of narrative devices from their respective genres to create recognition and familiarity. While deviations from historical accuracy, such as the absence of the blackout in Land Girls and the fact that few women actually worked as cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park (most performed administrative roles), could be seen as problematic in texts ostensibly concerned with the telling of history, there is undeniably validity in the power of such generic devices to “breathe life into the past … and [imbue] … sometimes stale facts with individual power and relevance to a contemporary audience”.^[11] In the case of Land Girls, this generic affiliation is primarily with women’s drama hence its foregrounding of love, relationships and family issues, whereas The Bletchley Circle functions also as a crime thriller, arguably giving it more narrative scope in terms of realism and acceptability. Therefore, despite questions about the authority of television history, the familiarity of generic devices used in both Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle grant them scope to tell unfamiliar and sometimes transgressive stories.

It is also interesting to consider both series in relation to the recent trend of using television as a nostalgic space, a repository of culture in danger of being forgotten. From accusations of cultural amnesia and erasure there seems to be a subtle shift towards the construction of television as both an object of nostalgia, threatened as it is by digital platforms and online streaming services, and a source of nostalgia and collective remembering.^[12] As well as Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle, furtherexamples of this shift can be seen in the expansion of remembrance themed programming on the BBC around Remembrance Sunday and the proliferation of television shows whose primary function is to represent and commemorate specific events, such as the BBC’s 2011 drama United (BBC Two on Sunday 24 April 2011), which represents the events around the Munich Air Disaster. Interestingly, in terms of previous discussion of accuracy and realism in historical television dramas, United was praised by critics for its depiction of 1950s Old Trafford and its evocation of football culture at the time.^[13] However the drama was harshly criticised by relatives of some of the people portrayed, for misrepresenting their characters and omitting altogether some of those who had died in the crash.^[14] Thus the series can be seen to have achieved realism in its aesthetic recreation of the past, but perhaps be lacking in its characterisation of the people involved. Whilst this can be seen as problematic, as people were actively offended by perceived inaccuracies, as with Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle, it does not necessarily affect the success of United as a historical television drama.

Both The Bletchley Circle and Land Girls can be read as nostalgic spaces in which marginalized and largely untold histories can be explored and preserved . Land Girls was created by Roland Moore and commissioned by the BBC in 2007 explicitly to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. As the first period drama commissioned by BBC daytime, controller Liam Keelan hoped the series would “pay tribute, not only to the many lives that were lost in the Second World War, but also to the land girls who played such an important role on the home front.”^[15] The first series, broadcast at 17:15 on consecutive days, beginning on Monday 7th September 2009, was situated as part of a “unique week of programming” designed to celebrate “everyday heroes on the Home Front.”^[16] It was billed alongside The Week We Went To War (BBC1 7 -14th September 2009) presented by Katherine Jenkins and Michael Aspel, who discussed his own experience of being evacuated, and focused on everyday experiences of ordinary people living on the Home Front during the Second World War, placing Land Girls in a context of previously untold stories outside of dominant historical narratives. Creator Roland Moore wanted the series to shine an “overdue spotlight on the land girls” but also to explore some less well known realities of life on the Home Front, such as the use of prisoners of war as agricultural labourers and the treatment of Italian nationals.^[17]

The Bletchley Circle, written by Guy Burt and broadcast on ITV, beginning in September 2012, did not have the same explicit purpose of commemoration, but rather an implicit sense that it was telling previously untold histories. It also provided an innovative take on traditional crime drama. In foregrounding four female characters the series allowed them to appropriate and control the interrogative gaze and discursive authority.^[18] Anna Maxwell Martin, who plays Susan in the series, attributed this as part of the show’s unique appeal; “People enjoyed seeing four intelligent women on TV”.^[19]

Television’s association with marketable nostalgia and the domestic makes it a safe and regulated space in which history can be told. Television shows’ familiar structure and repeating patterns create a controlled space in which marginalised histories, narratives and identities can be represented, but also controlled and defined within specific contextual limits. In both Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle the familiar pattern and seriality of television drama renders the unstable constructions of femininity (unstable insofar as the female characters transgress gender norms and occupy traditionally male narrative spaces) on display in both textssafe in its repetitious and closed nature. Transgressive or problematic storylines, such as unwanted pregnancy, adultery, domestic abuse, rape and sexually motivated murder, are neutralised by the need for closure and resolution at the end of each series.

Both Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle function as narratively complex dramas, with individual stories interweaving with overarching group narratives.^[20] This allows, within the closed structure of both dramas, for continuous resolution and perpetuation of storylines and character arcs. This pattern, familiar to any regular viewer of television drama, allows narratives of social change to be played out in a safe and formulaic way. In this way, storylines perhaps alien to a modern viewer, such as Susan’s struggle to reconcile her past identity as a code breaker with her postwar identity as an “ordinary” housewife in a society struggling to reconcile the wartime need for female labour along with the post war desire to reassert male competency, become a more familiar representation of the struggle of a woman reconciling her career and family life, rendering them visible in soap opera and TV dramas.^[21] The end result is that both series present their audiences with a safe version of female empowerment and emancipation, framed within a post-feminist media discourse. The Second World War, a period of instability and social upheaval, is presented through familiar characters and dramatic structures that reassure the viewer that the outcomes are known and will present no radical challenge to their conceptions of gendered identity. Thus while female ensemble dramas offer a somewhat experimental space, their familiarity downplays any real challenge to hegemonic narratives.

In the first episode of The Bletchley Circle, Susan expresses her doubt over her role in post war society by asking Millie, “When this is over, won’t we have to be ordinary?”.^[22] Susan’s participation in war work and her place in this new society of women – the huts at Bletchley are depicted as a female-dominated space, while men are acknowledged as being ‘up at the house’ they are not visible – has elevated her beyond the status of an “ordinary woman” and allowed her to fulfil a higher purpose.^[23] As previously discussed, in terms of historical accuracy, this depiction of the huts could be seen as problematic, however in terms of the narrative it is key, as the absence of men renders Susan, and the other women, as viable heroines.  Furthermore, Susan’s war record allows her to enter into the male dominated public sphere to present her ideas on the murders and have her theories accepted as credible by the police.^[24] Susan’s desire to cling on to her wartime identity positions her in direct contrast to her husband, Timothy, a former soldier who has had his “fair share of excitement for one lifetime”.^[25] Thus the usual gender roles are reversed with Timothy representing the domestic ideal upon which Susan is turning her back. Similarly, Land Girls’ Annie has achieved liberation from her status as both victim of domestic abuse and unhappy wife through her service in the Women’s Land Army. The WLA presents her with an alternative space in which she can be free of her father without relying on her husband.

Both women make a conscious choice to remove themselves from the safe, feminine domestic sphere and place themselves in a new context defined by the women around them. Annie’s sense of freedom within this new community of women, is made absolute when news reaches her that her husband is missing presumed dead.^[26] Within the safety of the group Annie is able to confess her guilt over feelings of relief, and the new, liberated Annie is ultimately able to break out of the role of the unhappy wife/grieving widow and find love with another man.^[27]

Bea in the BBC series seeks to shed her innocence and achieve sexual liberation. She wants to grow up and experience the world her sister Annie has been attempting to protect her from. Through the WLA she becomes aware of and engages with social issues, such as segregation in the US army, from which she would otherwise have been sheltered.^[28] She also, through encountering Italian POWs labouring on the farm, imagines the possibility of travelling, seeing the world and moving beyond the role prescribed for her by society.^[29]

However, this transcendence, for all of the women, is limited and – once achieved and acknowledged by patriarchal figures such as husbands, farmers, authority figures-  it is willingly relinquished. The matriarchal communities they find themselves in as a result of the war, i.e. the Women’s Land Army and the female-dominated space depicted within the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, create a space within which the women can find liberation and self-discovery. Once removed from these communities, they fall back into their various dysfunctional tropes. For instance, Millie’s natural charisma and talent for languages allow her to be useful and vital in her work for the British Government; outside of it she is reduced to an ageing socialite, working at first as a translator for the German enemy she once fought against and later as a black market fence.^[30]

Having also removed themselves from the physical safety of the traditional, domestic, feminine sphere, the women in both series face considerable physical and emotional danger. The experience of war has removed them from the safe parameters of normal society and they must now define themselves in relation to each other and find safety within their new community.

Whilst Bea’s (Land Girls) physical safety is never placed in jeopardy, her desire for sexual liberation makes her vulnerable to emotional dangers. In seeking out GI Cal at a village dance, she removes herself from the protective gaze of her older sister and separates herself from the rest of the Land Girls. After sleeping with Cal, Bea becomes pregnant, jeopardising her place in the WLA and opening her up to shame, disgrace, and the possibility of being sent back to her abusive father.^[31] Esther (Land Girls) refuses to confide in the rest of the girls about her inability to pay for an operation for her son and is reduced to selling her body while opening herself up to shame and ridicule.^[32] Susan is exposed to physical danger when she confronts a serial killer, whom she has tracked down with the help of the other women, and to emotional damage when she witnesses the  realities of death and violence that must be confronted in the traditionally male space of war.^[33] Moreover, Susan faces the danger of failing as a wife and mother. At several points in the series she is forced to consider the consequences of her actions, such as tracking down and confronting a murderer alone, and the real possibility that her children will be left without a mother.^[34] This is symptomatic of the traditional division of wartime labour, as hundreds of thousands of men faced the possibility of leaving their children without a father and yet their duty to fight was privileged as a higher calling.

Transcendence of traditional gender roles and societal positions is fraught with danger for all of the women and, like wartime reality, understood to be a temporary state, limited to a finite period of time. Although the two series are set in different time periods, Land Girls taking place during the Second World War and The Bletchley Circle beginning some seven years after its end, both place their narratives of social liberation within a context of exceptional circumstances.

Familiarity in terms of characters, narrative structure and historical content is key to the success of both series as television dramas and serves to make the past relevant and recognizable to the present.^[35] Familiarity is reinforced in both series by their deployment of a cross section of recognisable and relatable female tropes, a common characteristic of female ensemble dramas, which appeal to the broadest possible female fan base. It is by coming together as an alternate community removed from men that these arrays of women are able to transcend fixed identities and escape the limits of the patriarchal structure within which they operate. Familiarity is also achieved through the type of history being told. Both series use familiar imagery to imply that what they are imparting are new aspects to a known story. In this way the series “invite the viewer into the text ‘as knowledgeable citizen’”, and foreshadow the ultimate re-positioning of the female characters back into traditional gender roles and maintenance of the status quo.^[36] The use of recognisable archival footage and historical imagery create, in both series, a “naturalistic recognition effect” which helps to situate the drama in the past and bolster realism.^[37] In the same way that the series draw on familiar generic devices, the use of recognisable war time news footage (a prominent feature of the visual culture of the Second World War) adds authenticity to both series and contributes to the wartime aesthetic, giving them greater authority to tell their stories.

In foregrounding human relationships both series seek to make female social experience of the Second World War immediate and personable to their target audiences. The Female Ensemble Drama format and women’s issue themes lend emotional realism to situations that would otherwise seem historically/temporally distant and unrelatable. In the industrial context of prime time drama, Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle do not primarily seek to document history, but rather to dramatise it, providing enough cultural capital and recognisable history to appeal to those who want to consume the series as an educational vehicle, without alienating others who simply wish to enjoy the story and broad nostalgia.^[38] In this way neither series could be described as radical, or even particularly challenging in their retelling of history, and nor could they be if they are to function as viable, primetime family drama. While they go some way towards foregrounding marginalised narratives, both frame their stories within dominant, white, heteronormative structures, with the eventual upholding of the status quo largely predetermined by the historical subject matter and the narrative form. In their similar characters, narratives and plot lines The Bletchley Circle and Land Girls create a sense of sameness which is consistent with other female ensemble dramas, soap operas and women’s television in general and serves to de-historicise them as women’s issues. Thus historical distance is eliminated and the quest for love, romance, marriage, a family and home are eternalised as the things with which women always have and will be primarily concerned with.

This follows the move in the 1980s towards a post-feminist, new traditional, ideology in women’s television. Vicky Ball and Elspeth Probyn both emphasise the connection between images of the home and discourses of post-feminism and re-traditionalisation.^[39] The proliferation of a “post-feminist vision of the home to which women have ‘freely’ chosen to return” re-asserts maternal and domestic imperatives for women and re-locates the home as a woman’s natural place.^[40] New traditionalism marked the gender-political landscape of the late 80s and saw “the categories of ‘mothers’, ‘kids’, ‘love’ … presented as immutable truths”, the rejection of which marked a woman as deviant and other. Probyn argues that, while Post-Feminism does not challenge this ideal of the home as the natural source of a fulfilment for women, it does at least offer women the option of seeking fulfilment in careers, however always with the option of returning home.^[41] The home is privileged as a space of return and safety guaranteeing fulfilment rather than requiring women to fight for it.

The image of the home is particularly important in both Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle, because of its connotations as reward, safe place, as point of return once the danger and upheaval of war have passed, and, ultimately, the thing for which one is fighting. In both series the home functions as a neutralising/naturalising space to which women can return in order to reclaim their pre-war identities, or, alternatively, to contrast and confirm newly realised identities against pre-war conceptions of themselves. Thus the home is conversely presented as the place from which women have been liberated and the space to which they freely choose to return once their war work has been completed and their liberation acknowledged. For Susan in The Bletchley Circle her home is both her sanctuary and her prison. Encapsulating her identity as a wife and mother as the place where she can be with her husband and children, it also contains the hidden parts of herself in the newspaper clippings she keeps behind her mirror. It is the place she longs to escape, but also where she retreats after her ordeal at the hands of the killer and where she rediscovers herself as a wife and mother.  For Bea and Annie (Land Girls), home is the place they seek to escape as a result of an abusive and violent father. The space of the WLA at Pasture Farm offers them liberation, but it is a temporary one, to be occupied until both women can find a new home in which to reclaim the identities of wife and mother. Joyce’s (Land Girls) home, destroyed by German bombs, can no longer anchor her identity, therefore her sense of self becomes heavily dependent on  her husband John. Her point of reference is her identity as his wife and the prospect of the home they will make together in the future. Thus while the concept of home in both series is destabilised by the experience and dislocation of war, it is constructed instead as the goal or reward for properly conducted femininity to an even greater extent within the two works.

In this dislocation and de-stabilising of the home and the foregrounding of women as heroes which is fundamental to the female ensemble drama, women are required to occupy the non-traditional narrative space of ‘those who do, rather than those who are done to.’^[42] This inevitably raises questions regarding the “femininity and competence contradiction” which Brunsdon describes as “mutually exclusive terms outside certain limited spheres.^[43] By showing women working the land or women solving crimes using mathematical techniques and deductive logic, all traditionally male traits and occupations, both series are required to reassert the femininity of the characters through narrative devices and the reliance on recognisable feminine tropes and characteristics. Whilst carrying out their transgressive identities, all of the women are also required to carry out traditional performances of femininity. Preparations to attend a local dance, tableaux of domesticity such as cooking and knitting, singing, or a love of fashion are all examples of such devices within the two texts. Thus an unstable time for gender roles is rendered stable in another way by its translation through stable gender stereotypes.

Furthermore, consistent with the requirements of serial prime time drama, both series provide resolution and an ultimate relocation back into more traditional feminine roles for their female leads. In taking on the role of the investigator in The Bletchley Circle, Susan’s appropriation of agency and “occupation of public space” exposes her to danger, but also alienates her from her husband. She is ultimately forced to violate the Official Secrets Act, the tangible bond of secrecy that tied her to the other women, and reveal her wartime identity to her husband. In his acknowledgement of her past, Susan is able to reconcile with her postwar identity and fully assume the role of wife and mother. Bea’s (Land Girls) marriage to farmhand Billy saves her from being sent home and the shame of living as an unwed mother.^[44] However, her time as a liberated woman is cut short as she becomes a wife and a mother. Joyce’s (Land Girls) constancy is rewarded when her husband is returned to her and she is allowed to reclaim the identity of wife.^[45]

Charlotte Brunsdon, in her 1987 analysis of Widows, a seminal female ensemble drama featuring a group of women whose husbands are killed during an armed robbery and who then decide to team up and carry out the crime themselves, noted a similar process of relocation, with the culmination of the second series seeing “come-uppances … ‘get’ the women, and push them back to much more traditional feminine narrative roles.”^[46] Widows, Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle are alllimited by the requirements of prime time television drama, dwindling conceivable storylines once the initial premise has been exhausted and the need to provide a resolution that would sit well with the show’s audience.^[47] Brunsdon argues  that “in order to conclude this rather unfamiliar story, the unfamiliar element -women as heroes – must be transformed.”^[48]In the same way as Lynda La Plante’s Widows, the Land Girls and women of The Bletchley Circle can only find resolution when they have been transformed, when they have completed the work which removed them from their normal place in society and returned, willingly, to their traditional roles. Their achievements are acknowledged and celebrated, both within the texts and by their audiences but their transcendence was only ever to be temporary. As well as the limitations of generic structure, Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle are limited by their historical subject matter, which dictates a limited scope of narrative resolutions.

This is not to downplay the potential of female ensemble drama in representing marginalised aspects of women’s history such as women’s social experience of the Second World War. Clearly the location of female ensemble dramas outside of mainstream television narratives and consumption, even within the context of television as a feminised medium, affords them greater freedom in terms of representation of women. However, these representations must be translated through recognisable tropes and often stock characters. Whatever its limitations, female ensemble drama clearly offers a beneficial and exciting space in which untold stories and marginalised identities can be explored.

^[1] Commonly referred to as “land girls”, members of the WLA were billeted on farms or in hostels around the country as required to supplement male farm labourers lost to the armed forces. Often with little to no prior experience or training, the land girls performed a huge variety of tasks on the farms, most of which were highly physically demanding and sometimes dangerous.

^[2] Charlotte Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres for Women” in Boxed in: Women and Television, edited by H. Baehr and G. Dyer(London: Pandora Press, 1987), 187.

^[3] Brunsdon “Men’s Genres” p. 187.

^[4] Vicky Ball, “Forgotten Sisters: The British Female Ensemble Drama” Screen 54:2 (2013), 245.

^[5] Penny Summerfield, “Public Memory or Public Amnesia? British Women of the Second World War in Popular Films of the 1950s and 1960s” The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 48:4 October 2009p. 936, accessed January 27 2015 doi: 10.1086/603598.

^[6] Summerfield “Public Memory”, 938.

^[7] Marcia Landy “Melodrama and Femininity in World War II British Cinema” in The British Cinema Book, edited by R. Murphy(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 232.

^[8] Ball,”Forgotten Sisters”, p. 246.

^[9] Discussion of women in men’s genres in Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres”, p.184 – 203.

^[10] Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres”, p. 187.

^[11] Glen Creeber, Serial Television; Big Drama on the Small Screen (United Kingdom: BFI Publishing 2005), p. 27.

^[12] For further discussion of this see Amy Holdsworth Television Memory and Nostalgia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Andreas Huyssen Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995).

^[13] Jim White, “Jimmy Murphy’s central part in the resurrection of Manchester United as the key reason to watch United” Daily Telegraph, April 22^nd 2011, accessed May 5, 2015: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-united/8467086/Jim-White-Jimmy-Murphys-central-part-in-the-resurrection-of-Manchester-United-is-the-key-reason-to-watch-United.html.

^[14] Jim White, “Sir Matt Busby’s son ‘disgusted’ at United TV film” BBC New Online Manchester, April 24th 2011, accessed May 5, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-13181651.

^[15] BBC Press Packs, Land Girls Introduction, accessed March 13, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/08_august/18/land_girls.shtml

^[16] BBC Press Packs, Land Girls Introduction, accessed March 13, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/08_august/18/land_girls.shtml

^[17] BBC Press Packs, Land Girls Introduction, accessed March 13, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/08_august/18/land_girls.shtml

^[18] S.Thornham and T. Purvis, Television Drama: Theories and Identities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 122.

^[19] ITV Press Pack The Bletchley Circle Series 2, accessed March 13, 2015.http://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-packs/bletchley-circle-s2.

^[20] Trisha Dunleavy, Television Drama: Form, Agency, Innovation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 149.

^[21] Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (Communication and Society) (London: Routledge, 2000), 195.

^[22] The Bletchley Circle, Episode 1, Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 1, ITV, 6 September 2012.

^[23] The Bletchley Circle, Episode 1, Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 1, ITV, 6 September 2012.

^[24] The Bletchley Circle, Episode 1, Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 1, ITV, 6 September 2012.

^[25] The Bletchley Circle, Episode 1, Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 1, ITV, 6 September 2012.

^[26] Land Girls, Series 1, Episode 2: Secrets, BBC1, 8th September 2009.

^[27] Land Girls, Series 1, Episode 5: Destinies, BBC1, 11th September 2009.

^[28] Land Girls, Series 1, Episode 1: Childhood’s End, BBC1, 7th September 2009.

^[29] Land Girls, Series 2, Episode 2: Displaced Loyalties, 18th January 2011.

^[30] The Bletchley Circle, Series 2, Episode 3: Unaccustomed Goods, ITV1, 27th April 2014.

^[31] Land Girls, Series 1, Episode 2: Secrets, BBC1, 8th September 2009.

^[32] Land Girls, Series 2, Episode 3: Final Reckoning, BBC1, 19th January 2009.

^[33] The Bletchley Circle, Series 1, Episode 3: Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 3, ITV1, 20th September 2012.

^[34] The Bletchley Circle, Series 1, Episode 3: Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 3, ITV1, 20th September 2012.

^[35] For further discussion of this idea see Glen Creeber: Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: BFI Publishing, 2005) and Colin McArthur: Television and History (London: BFI, 1978).

^[36] S. Cunningham quoted in John Tulloch: Television Drama: Agency, Audience and Myth (London: Routledge,1990), p. 92.

^[37] Tulloch Television Drama, p. 93.

^[38] Creeber, Serial Television, 20.

^[39] Vicky Ball, ‘The “Feminization” of British Television and the Re-Traditionalization of Gender” Feminist Media Studies 12:2, 248-264 and Elspeth Probyn, “New Traditionalism and Post -Feminism: TV Does the Home” in Feminist Television Criticism A Reader, Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, Lynn Spigel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 128.

^[40] Probyn, “New Traditionalism,” 128.

^[41] Probyn, “New Traditionalism,”131.

^[42] Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres,” 188.

^[43] Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres,” 189.

^[44] Land Girls Series 1 Episode 5 Destinies BBC1 11th September 2009

^[45] Land Girls Series 3 Episode 5 Last Days of Summer BBC1 11th November 2011

^[46] Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres” 190.

^[47] Discussed in Brunsdon “Men’s Genres”.

^[48] Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres” 198.

Notes on Contributor

Cat Mahoney is a first year PhD student in the Department of Media and Communications at Northumbria University. Her research focusses on depictions of female participation in the Second World War on British Television and role of television in preserving and re-imagining women’s history.

Bibliography

Andrews, Maggie, and Sallie McNamara. 2014. Women and the Media: Feminism and Femininity in Britain, 1900 to the Present. United Kingdom: Routledge.

Baehr, Helen, and Gillian Dyer. 1987. Boxed in: Women and Television. United Kingdom: Rivers Oram Press/Pandora List.

Ball, Vicky. “The ‘Feminization’ of British Television and the Re-Traditionalization of Gender.” Feminist Media Studies 12:2 (2012): 248–64.

—-“Forgotten Sisters: The British Female Ensemble Drama.” Screen 54:2 (2013): 244–48.

Bignell, Jonathan, etc., and Stephen Lacey. 2000. British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Is Television Studies History?” Cinema Journal 47:3 (2007): 127–37.

Brunsdon, Charlotte, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel. 1997. Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader. 1st ed. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Caughie, John. 2000. Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Christine Geraghty and David Lusted. 1998. The Television Studies Book. New York: Distributed exclusively in the USA by St. Martin’s Press.

Cooke, Lez. 2003. British Television Drama: A History. United Kingdom: BFI Publishing.

Creeber, Glen. 2005. Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. United Kingdom: BFI Publishing.

Creeber, Glen, Toby Miller, and John Tulloch. 2001. The Television Genre Book. United Kingdom: British Film Institute.

Dunleavy, Trisha. 2009. Television Drama: Form, Agency, Innovation. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Geraghty, Christine. 2000. British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’. United States: Routledge.

Harris, Geraldine, 2007. Beyond Representation:Television Dra: Beyond Representation Hb: Television Drama and the Politics and Aesthetics of Identity. United Kingdom: Manchester University Press.

Holdsworth, Amy. ‘“Television Resurrections”: Television and Memory’. Cinema Journal 47:3(2007): 137–44.

———. 2011. Television, Memory, and Nostalgia. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hughes, Steve, Daniel Wilson, Ian Barber, Paul Gibson, and Matt Carter. 2015. Land Girls (TV Series 2009– ). BBC. Accessed March 15, 2015.

Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge.

Landy, Marcia. 2009. “Melodrama and Femininity in World War II British Cinema” in The British Cinema Book, edited by Robert Murphy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lowry, Brian, Brian Lowry TV Columnist @blowryontv. 2013. “TV Review: ‘The Bletchley Circle”’, April. Variety. http://variety.com/2013/tv/reviews/tv-review-the-bletchley-circle-1200369763/.

Masterman, Len. 1984. Television Mythologies: Stars, Shows and Signs. United Kingdom: Comedia Pub. Group/MK Media Press.

McArthur, Colin. 1978. Television and History. United Kingdom: British Film Institute, London.

Murphy, Robert 2009. The British Cinema Book. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

‘Press Office – Land Girls Press Pack: Introduction’. 2015. BBC – Press Office. Accessed March 13, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/08_august/18/land_girls.shtml.

Probyn, Elspeth. 1997. “New Traditionalism and Post -Feminism: TV Does the Home” in Feminist Television Criticism A Reader, Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, Lynn Spigel. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Richardson, Niall, Clarissa Smith, and Angela Werndly. 2013. Studying Sexualities: Theories, Representations, Cultures. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sobchack, Vivian. 1997. The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event. 1st ed. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, Inc

Summerfield, Penny. “Public Memory or Public Amnesia? British Women of the Second World War in Popular Films of the 1950s and 1960s.” The Journal of British Studies 48:04 (2009): 935–57.

Thornham, Sue, and Tony Purvis. 2012. Television Drama: Theories and Identities. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tulloch, John. 2005. Television Drama: Agency, Audience and Myth. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, Inc.

White, Jim. “Jimmy Murphy’s central part in the resurrection of Manchester United as the key reason to watch United.” Daily Telegraph, April 22^nd 2011. Accessed on May 5, 2015.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-united/8467086/Jim-White-Jimmy-Murphys-central-part-in-the-resurrection-of-Manchester-United-is-the-key-reason-to-watch-United.html

—-“Sir Matt Busby’s son ‘disgusted’ at United TV film.” BBC New Online Manchester, (April 24th 2011). Accessed on May 5, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-13181651

Filmography

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007).

Band of Brothers ( 2001). TV Mini-Series, HBO.

The Bletchley Circle. (Andy De Emmony, Sarah Harding, and Jamie Payne, 2012, 2014). TV Series, ITV.

Charlotte Grey (Gillian Armstrong, 2001).

Dad’s Army (Jimmy Perry (creator),1968-1977). TV Series, BBC.

Land Girls. (Roland Moore (creator), 2009-2011). TV Series, BBC.

Suite Française (Saul Dibb, 2015).

Tenko (Lavinia Warner (creator), 1981). TV Mini-Series, BBC.

United (James Strong, 2011).

WWI in Belgian Cinema

La bataille de’lYser/ The Battle of Yser, shot prior to 1918 (no exact data is known) is an important war document made by the SCAB (Service Cinématographique de l’Armée Belge / Cinematographic Service of the Belgian Army).^[1] This short documentary of less than 19 minutes portrayed the bravery of Belgian soldiers defending, until the end of the war, the last patch of free Belgian territory at the Yser Front. During the interwar years sequences from this film were constantly reused in documentaries and features, sometimes in accordance with the initial intentions of its makers, sometimes totally against them.

In terms of cinema history, I will discuss the question of how these recycled pictures have been used in accordance with the intention of their makers, or against it. In terms of theory, I will focus on the question of how far the initial material can determine the meanings of secondary films, which recycle it. The argument will be presented on the examples of two documentaries: A la gloire du troupier belge/ To the Glory of the Belgian Soldier (SCAB, 1922) and Met onze jongens aan de Ijzer / With Our Boys at the Yser (Clemens De Landtsheer, 1928-1929), as well as two feature films:  La petite martyre belge / The little Belgian Martyr (Martin, 1928) and its voiced remake La Tragédie de Marchienne / The Tragedy of Marchienne (Martin, 1937).^[2]

By looking closely at the four films, made by recycled material from La bataille de l’Yser and other original war documentaries, I will try to show different approaches to this visual material, which in peacetime served different, sometimes contradictory political and social purposes, and formed an important part of the Belgian national debate.

To illustrate different types of palimpsestic use of the war documentaries I will refer to the concept of palimpsest by Gérard Genette and the concept of bricolage, as defined by Claude Lévy-Strauss. These structuralist concepts, also used in film studies,^[3] will help to understand how the heterogeneous pictorial material of mixed origin, used for different, sometimes opposing purposes, formed a visual basis for national mythology needed in interwar Belgium, a country that was insecure about its international status, and torn apart by internal conflicts between the Flemish and the Walloon populations.

La bataille de l’Yser: The Original Propaganda Film

La bataille de l’Yser, the starting point of my further comparisons, is remembered as one of the eldest Belgian films, and probably the eldest Belgian war documentary. It was made by the already mentioned SCAB, a cinematic unit of the Belgian Army, formed in 1916, and staffed mostly by film amateurs. Historically, the material shot by the SCAB is of unique value, as it focuses on the most glorious episode of Belgian participation in WWI.^[4]

Although the SCAB lacked experience, and was only allowed to work in a relatively small area near the static front on the Yser, the team managed to deliver some iconic pictures that would live many new lives in later productions. The area of the Yser Front was of great importance for Belgian propaganda. It was the place where, in the autumn of 1914, the Belgian Army succeeded in stopping a German offensive called “The Race to the Sea,” and keeping a small portion of free Belgian territory between the Yser river and the North Sea–for four long years.

The Yser Front, apart from its military and political meaning, became a symbolic site of Belgian war effort, and also of conflicting Belgian identities. The Kingdom of Belgium is populated in the northern part by the Dutch-speaking Flemish population, and by the French speaking Walloons in the South. Belgium became an independent state in 1838, and since then the governmental, administrative and military structures had used only French language. Although Flemish intellectuals were striving to achieve equal rights and privileges for the Dutch speakers, at the eve of WWI the Dutch-speakers were factually excluded from government positions. Apparently, at that time it was difficult to define a common Belgian identity that would appeal to the two conflicted groups.

The German invasion strengthened patriotic feelings and the sense of unity, but it did not save the divided nation from internal conflicts, which sprang from the unequal status of Flemish and Walloon populations. Importantly, most of the rank-and-file soldiers were of Flemish origin, while the majority of officers represented the Francophone Walloon population. The Flemish soldiers believed strongly that their military effort would help the Flemish population to gain equal rights with the Walloons. After the war, when their situation not only did not improve, but actually deteriorated because some Flemish activists had openly collaborated with the Germans, the Yser Front became a symbolic site of Flemish martyrdom and political injustice.

La bataille de l’Yser is an important film not only because it immortalizes the illustrious defence of the Yser Front, but also because it is the longest original Belgian documentary from WWI, as most of the original SCAB material was lost; it was probably destroyed by aerial bombardment in 1940.^[5] The catalogue of the OPB (Office de Propagande Belge / Office of Belgian Propaganda) mentions about 124.000 meters of film, divided into 1637 titles, made by the SCAB in 1917 and 1918. This impressive amount of titles is somehow misleading, as they were merely very short pieces of documentary material, meant to be further pasted into newsreels or larger documentaries. Today, the original SCAB wartime material exists almost entirely as incorporated fragments in documentaries and features which recycled older footage in the interwar period.

La bataille de l’Yser is a good example of limitations faced by the SCAB team in their coverage work. The film consists mostly of photos, animated maps and intertitles, explaining military movements and the overall situation in occupied Belgium. The documentary sequences amount to about 25 percent of the screening time. The film opens with intertitles describing the retreat of Belgian Army in August and September of 1914, and the concentration of the army on the Yser at the beginning of October. The concentration is shown by means of an animated map. Then comes the information about “our injured, decimated, almost despairing army” reaching the Yser, without losing a single cannon, followed by documentary footage of troops marching through Veurne, a city in the Yser area, where Belgian headquarters were located.

Pic. 1. The Belgian troops in Veurne. From La bataille de l’Yser.

The four phases of the campaign on the Yser are illustrated with animated maps and documentary shots from the front area. The most dramatic sequence in the film is the flooding of the Nieuwpoort area. By opening sluices in drainage canals, the Belgians managed to stop Germans on the other shore of the Yser and to keep them there until the offensive in 1918. This was the first time during WWI when German armies were stopped. Although the victory was achieved by non-military means, it was presented as a great triumph of Belgian army. La bataille de l’Yser shows the damaged sluices and the flooded landscape.

Pic. 2. The flooding of Nieuwpoort area from La bataille de l’Yser.

These pictures, along with the shoots of Belgian army marching through Veurne, became iconic and reappeared in many later films. Subsequent intertitles inform about the German panic and retreat, shown on the animated maps. The documentary ends with the anticipation of victory, by quoting from an unidentified, presumably French, newsreel showing a victory parade passing the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, as a promise of future Allied triumph in the war.

The flooding sequence became palimpsestic due to its canonical function in Belgian national imagery. In the following two examples I will show how the sequence functioned in two documentaries. The first one, A la gloire du troupier belge (1922), was evoking the sense of Belgian heroism and military glory and propagating the picture of a homogeneous nation, united in struggle against the enemy. The second one, Met onze jongens aan de IJzer / With Our  Boys at the Yser (Clemens De Landtsheer, 1928-1929), citing both the original SCAB documentary La bataille de l’Yser, and the footage from the 1922 A la gloire du troupier belge, was made to support and justify the Flemish movement, a separationist tendency within the Belgian unitary state.^[6] By questioning the sense of Flemish bloodshed, the documentary operated with the well-known pictures in a different context, and was travestying the earlier films for a more recent political purpose.

A la gloire du troupier belge: Affirmation of Belgium’s Unity and Belgian War Effort

A la gloire du troupier belge/ To the Glory of the Belgian Soldier, made by the SCAB team in 1922, was a five-part documentary showing the Belgian war effort from the mobilisation until the end of the war and included foreign material and acting sequences. The film opened and closed with a fictional story of a young soldier, leaving his mother to join the army and coming back alive and telling the story of the heroic death of a neighbour’s son. This story of an individual fate set a framework for the larger national story of common effort and triumph over the enemy.

Pic. 3. The staged final reunion scene from A la gloire du troupier belge.

The heterogeneous film, combining animation, acting, and footage from Belgian, Allied and German war documentaries was a good example of bricolage, that is, “of molding different ingredients into a new form.” At that stage of film history, according to Nanna Verhoeff, bricolage was crucial for the development of longer films and the creation of new film genres.^[7] In 1922, A la gloire du troupier belge was the longest Belgian documentary ever made, and therefore a milestone in developing the Belgian narrative about WWI.

On an ideological level, the documentary contested the British concept of “poor little Belgium”, invaded, raped and mutilated by the Huns. The concept originated in Britain; it was introduced in Robert Bryce’s “Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages,” and made popular worldwide by the cartoonist Louis Raemakers (both were working for the British Department of Propaganda).^[8] For Belgians, hoping to establish an important position of their country in postwar Europe, the concept was important for the creation of a convincing picture of Belgian military achievements and fortitude. ^[9]

For the purposes of Belgian internal politics the film was spreading a picture of a homogeneous Belgian army, and avoided any form of distinguishing between Flemish and Walloon soldiers. The intertitles appeared in both languages, French and Dutch, so that both populations, the Walloon and the Flemish, could be addressed as one nation.

The main goal of showing Belgian military effort required some borrowings, not only from SCAB’s own production, La bataille de l’Yser, but also from foreign newsreels. The recycling of material shot by the Allied can be perceived not only as a necessity but also as a form of manifested participation in the Entente’s military struggle against the Germans, entitling Belgium to share the profits reserved for the winning side. ^[10]

The German invasion was pictured in a partly acted, partly animated sequence of an anonymous hand, reaching from German territory deep into Belgium, and a symbol of a spiked helmet set over the city of Liege and marking Belgium’s great defeat. German progress was depicted on the map with change of colour, so that the small area on the other side of the Yser was easily recognizable by remaining dark, while the rest of the country went brighter, as if incorporated in the territory of the German Empire.

Pic. 4 and 5. Symbolic sequences from A la gloire du troupier belge.

This rather unsophisticated sequence is worth mentioning, as it is a good example of palimpsest. The sequence creatively compiles two ideas presented in an earlier feature, La Libre Belgique / Free Belgium (Armand Du Plessy, 1920-1921), telling a thrilling story of collaborators of an authentic Belgian independent newspaper, published and distributed secretly under the German occupation. La Libre Belgique was a hybrid film, combining footage from Allied and German newsreels, British propaganda cartoons, and staged scenes.

One of the ways of showing the German invasion was a picture of Belgian territory changing colour and being incorporated into Germany, followed by scenes from German newsreels. The second one was taken directly from the propaganda cartoon Britain’s Effort (Lancelot Speed, 1918) with a staged scene of an anonymous German soldier wearing a spiked helmet, reaching with both his hands over Belgium’s territory and incorporating it into Germany. The scene, which in La Libre Belgique was pasted from the British film, was transposed into the SCAB documentary and became a palimpsest of higher degree by recalling the Belgian feature and the British cartoon at the same time.

Pic. 6. Original scene from La Libre Belgique.

Pic. 7. Scene from Britain’s effort, incorporated into La Libre Belgique.

A German documentary, showing the advance of German infantry and cavalry, used in A la gloire du troupier belge to illustrate the fall of Liege, served another important purpose. By including this piece of enemy propaganda, Belgian production disarmed the piece of German newsreel, and used it against its original meaning. Originally intended to serve t as proof of German supremacy over Belgium, it had been re-used as a testimony of a final Belgian triumph, extending into the area of pictorial memory, and giving the winner the right to re-shape it according to their needs and wishes.

Pic. 8. A German newsreel used in A la gloire du troupier belge.

A la gloire du troupier belge was the first Belgian documentary combining SCAB’s own material with foreign newsreels, without differentiating or marking the quotes. An earlier example was a feature film, La Libre Belgique. The wide use of bricolage, using fragments of documentaries, photos, letters, staged scenes, scenes from foreign propaganda films, prepared ground for the practice of using sources against their original intention and purpose. Initially the practice was limited to the use of German newsreels in A la gloire du troupier belge. A few years later, however, the SCAB documentary footage, derived from films that affirmed Belgian unity in battle and neglected the issue of Flemish soldiers, had been reused in a strongly propagandist picture serving the Flemish cause.

Met onze jongens aan de IJzer: Questioning the Official War Narrative

A la gloire du troupier belge, a hybrid documentary, quoted from La Bataille de l’Yser, setting the well-known pictures in a wider national context and prolonging their life within collective memory. This SCAB documentary, glorifying Belgium’s war effort and the heroism of Belgian soldiers, had served as a palimpsest for another documentary, made by Clemens De Landtsheer, a Flemish activist who questioned the loyalty of the Belgian state to its Flemish citizens.

De Landstheer was representative of a larger movement, claiming equal rights for the citizens of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. In remembering the war, it was widely believed that there were more casualties among the Flemish soldiers than among the Walloons, and that all the commanding postings were supposedly given to French-speaking officers, recruited from the Walloon part of the country. During the wartime occupation, Flemish Belgians were subject to intense German propaganda appealing to their supposed sense of Germanic origin. However, the Belgian king Albert I was also trying to win the Flemish over by promising them equal treatment. None of the promises were fulfilled after the war, and the Flemish Movement, a fiercely nationalist organisation, assumed an increasingly separatist agenda. The war effort, seen from this ideological position, was pointless, and the hard won freedom only led to bitter disappointment and injustice.

De Landtsheer’s film, circulating beyond the official cinema circuit, became an important statement in the Flemish cause. The documentary, based on Belgian and French material which De Landstheer purchased from the SCAB and studied thoroughly, can be seen as another example of bricolage, combining Belgian and foreign newsreel footage with some added acting scenes. The film, described as “highly subversive, unintentionally parodist” ^[11] in its citations from A la gloire du troupier belge and other sources, provides a perfect example of palimpsest as travesty and persiflage.

The filmmaker’s statement in the opening titles reads: “This film is made of genuine undoctored material and film shot in the trenches of Yser. Not one image was tampered with. Everything you will see is an original war document taken from actuality.” However, already in the first minutes it quotes from the acted sequence of the soldier’s farewell in A la gloire du troupier belge. This frame device, known from the earlier film, is being distorted and destroyed by the final sequence. Instead of the soldier’s return, the film ends with a picture of a young widow mourning at an anonymous grave in no-man’s land, consoled by a child.

Pic. 9. Staged final scene from Met onze jongens aan de IJzer.

This last sequence, playing at the ambiguity of despair and hope, is followed by the closing picture of the IJzertoren / Yser tower, a colossal monument erected to commemorate the fallen Flemish countrymen. The pilgrimage to this symbolic place, co-organized yearly by De Landtsheer, was an important event, unifying Flemish combatants. In De Landtsheer’s documentary the IJzertoren appears as the last future hope for the Flemish cause.

The way De Landtsheer manipulates the sources deserves detailed scrutiny. He added new complexity to Belgian national film imagery by using sequences from the Nieuwpoort and Veurne documentaries, which already had an iconic status, and the well-known opening scene from of A la gloire du troupier belge as well as other archival material used in this documentary of Belgian national history. De Landtsheer tells the story of “our” Flemish boys, betrayed by the Belgian state, using the pictures reserved, until then, for the great unifying national narrative. In this sense, his use of canonized pictures of national history is highly subversive as it questions the value of the Flemish sacrifice and problematizes the Belgian victory, which had been bought, in his view, with Flemish blood.

The comparison of A la gloire du troupier belge and Met onze jongens aan de IJzer clearly shows that the same footage, which consisted of fragments from La bataille de l’Yser, and sequences from mostly French, sometimes British and German newsreels and propaganda films, could be used for totally different purposes. Both films are telling the story of a heroic fight against the mighty and cruel enemy, and yet, while the SCAB’s documentary affirms Belgium as a homogeneous entity, participating in the Entente victory as an equal partner of the Allies, the De Landtsheer film deals with internal Belgian issues and goes as far as questioning the sense of the struggle against the German invader, and requiring an immediate compensation to soldiers from their own Belgian government.

In the following sections I will take a look at the second life of documentaries, both Belgian and foreign ones, in the interwar feature films. I have deliberately decided to focus on two films, which are variants of the same story, and which make a similarly free use of war documentary material. Unlike De Landtsheer’s film, they focus on the Walloon community and its wartime heroism, which is typical for the entire interwar film production. While the first film (1928) was summarizing Belgian sufferings during WWI, the second one (1937) hinted indirectly at the imminent danger of future war: La petite martyre belge / The Little Belgian Martyr (Francis Martin, 1928) and its voiced remake La tragédie de Marchienne / The Tragedy of Marchienne (Francis Martin, 1937).

Feature films: La petite martyre belge and La tragédie de Marchienne

La petite martyre belge is a hybrid film, combining acting scenes with newsreel footage. The tragic story of Yvonne Vieslet, a ten-year-old Walloon girl shot accidentally by a German soldier while trying to give some food to French captives,^[12] was used in both cases as a framing device for a patriotic film, portraying the individual sacrifice as part of the national war effort.

Pict. 10. German soldier threatening Yvonne, La tragédie de Marchienne.

While the original production from 1928 uses the acting scenes as a proper framework, opening and closing a long documentary section, the 1937 remake combines documentary war footage with scenes from Yvonne’s life and a fictional story of a young Belgian woman helping French soldiers by hiding them from Germans. The original material in the first film takes about half of the screening time, and the story of Yvonne is reduced to commonly known facts. La petite martyre belge mostly cites newsreels, combining material of various origins, which is sometimes astonishingly or comically incongruent. Along with the essential images of Nieuwpoort and Veurne, it shows, for instance, shots of French and British colonial troops charging (separately) through unspecified landscapes to rescue Belgium.

Pic. 11 and 12. Colonial troops appearing in La petite martyre belge.

This somewhat awkward combination of global and local elements can be interpreted as an attempt to integrate the story of a little Belgian martyr into the general history of WWI, or as a reminder of the Belgian share in the victory. While re-cycling the popular image of innocent Belgian suffering, the film accentuates the redemptive aspect of martyrdom and death.

The religious metaphor, suggested in the earliest documentaries, is permanently present in La petite martyre belge. The girl is presented as a modern saint, her emblem is a white lily that bleeds after her death. Her readiness to share her bread with a starving French captive, enables her to give her life away for his sake. In the original version Yvonne’s death remains unpunished, while in the 1937 remake it causes a rebellion among the POWs and, after a questioning by a German officer, leads to the execution of the German soldier who shot and killed her.

The former film belongs to an earlier stage of Belgian productions with an uncompromising image of German oppressors, while the latter represents a subsequent, openly reconciliatory tendency towards Germany, a result of Belgian acceptance of the pacifist turn in international politics and the sensibility of German diplomats towards critical pictures of their countrymen. “The war films of the late 1930s were paradoxical in nature: on the surface, they seemed to point to cultural demobilization, but on a deeper level they testified to intensify political tension and remobilization of war culture”^[13].

In La tragédie de Marchienne this deeper level is constructed by archival features, reaching from typical Belgian war pictures to valuable and well known shots from foreign films. Among other sources, the film quotes from American newsreels showing global mobilisation, and features the most famous images from The Battle of the Somme (Charles Urban and Geoffrey Malins, 1916), including the ‘going over the top’ sequence, as well as the sinking of a cruiser, taken, most probably, from the American feature The Little American (Cecil DeMille, 1917).

Pic. 13. The legendary shot from Battle of the Somme, reused in La tragédie de Marchienne.

The selection of ideologically powerful pictures sends a clear signal to the audience. While watching a melodrama telling the story of Yvonne, and the story of the soldier she was trying to help (who was married to a Belgian woman and wanted to name his child after Yvonne), the audience also watched documentary images of the most brutal moments of war. The intertextual layers made of war footage were thus undermining the reconciliatory message of the feature film. The audience was actually watching two films of contrary meanings and was invited to make its own choices.

Conclusion: Bricolage and Palimpsest in Belgian Interwar Films

La tragédie de Marchienne is a good summary of the development of Belgian historical cinema in the interwar period, with its the subversive potential discovered and used frequently by Belgian bricoleurs, combining different genres, documents of different origin, and playing skilfully with commonly shared images of war. Using the potential of collective memory, they were repetitively creating and re-creating the First World War. This narrative strategy enabled them to illustrate subversive, controversial ideas with well-known images, considered as common heritage.

The 1.637 titles, made by the SCAB during the First World War and burnt during the Second, are now accessible only through other films, but even in the interwar period they could not be seen separate from the historical, political and sociological context of their many re-cycled lives. This seems paradigmatic for the functioning of original, ‘real’ pictures of historical events in general. Most of such images have been recycled so many times and loaded with so many additional meanings, that they now exist more as palimpsests than as originals. The Belgian war footage, in its ghostly existence within other films, functions within the network of permanently changing culture and is still part of recent debates.

The permanent recycling of Belgian war documentaries demonstrates a wider problem: the factual non-existence of an image without an ideological narrative frame. The urge to reuse and recreate well-known heroic images seems also characteristic for a society in need of common lieux de memoire, mnemonic pictures, translating the traumatic war experience into commonly accepted and understandable visual imagery, which, in the process of bricolage, could be applied to various, contradicting narratives, and which could be charged with constantly changing meanings.

^[1] For the SCAB history and activity, see: Bénédicte Rochet, “Plongée au coeur des prises de vues du service cinématographique de l’armée belge : un matériel visuel de la Grande Guerre à multiples usages”, in La petite Belgique dans la Grande Guerre: une icône, des images: actes du colloque de Namur, 24, 25, 26 et 27 novembre 2010, Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, ed. Bénédicte Rochet, Axel Tixhon, (Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur. 2012), 111-125; Leen Engelen, “Film/Cinema (Belgium)”, in 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. http://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10320, accessed 3 February 2015); Michël Amara, “Une icône… des propagandes – Au coeur du conflit – Les grands défis de la propagande belge durant la Première Guerre mondiale”, in La petite Belgique dans la Grande Guerre : une icône, des images: actes du colloque de Namur, 24, 25, 26 et 27 novembre 2010, Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, ed. Bénédicte Rochet and Axel Tixhon, (Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur. 2012), 21-35; Guido Convents, “Van gefilmde actualiteiten tot bioscoopjournaal in België: De ontwikkeling van het nieuws op het witte doek (1896-1918)”, in Revue belge d’Histoire contemporaine, 1-2 (2009), 27-52

^[2]All the films I am writing about are available online at europeanfilmgateway.eu

^[3] For the key definitions see: Gérard Genette. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) and Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind. (Letchworth: The Garden City Press Ltd, 1966). For an elaboration on the position of palimpsest see: Bruno de Weever, “Prologue: Historical Film as Palimpsest” in Perspectives on European Film and History, ed. Leen Engelen, Roel Vande Winkel, (Gent: Academia Press, 2007), 5-11.; Gordon E. Slethaug, “Palimpsest and Bricolage: Playful and Serious Citations in Broken flowers and Snow White’s offspring”, in Adaptation Theory and Criticism: Postmodern Literature and Cinema in the USA, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 191-246.

^[4] For a general history of Belgium in WWI see: Sophie De Schaepdrijver, The Great War. The Kingdom of Belgium during the First World War (Amsterdam: Atlas, 1997). For the Yser Front see: Paul van Pul, In Flanders’ Flooded Fields: Before Ypres there was Yser. (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2006).

^[5] Rochet, “Plongée au coeur …”, 112.

^[6] For history and meaning of the Flemish Movement see: Karen Shelby, Flemish Nationalism and the Great War: The Politics of Memory, Visual Culture and Commemoration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

^[7] Nanna Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 184; see also Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 29, 48-49.

^[8] For the usage of the figure of “poor little Belgium” see: Bernhard Liemann, “Transformation of Local Public Spheres: German, Belgian and Dutch Border Towns during the First World War Compared”, in Other Fronts, Other Wars?: First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, eds. Joachim Bürgschwentner, Matthias Egger, Gunda Barth-Scalmani, (Leiden: Brill), 349-369.

^[9] Engelen, “Film/Cinema (Belgium)”.

^[10] Directly after the armistice Belgium hoped for some territorial gains and financial contributions. These hopes had not been fulfilled.

^[11] Rochet, “Plongée au coeur …”, 121.

^[12] Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 206.

^[13] Engelen, “Film/Cinema (Belgium)”.

Notes on Contributor

Natalia Stachura (MA Dutch and German Studies, PhD in South African Studies) is researcher at the Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań. In the framework of the HERA project Cultural exchange in a time of global conflict: Colonials, Neutrals and Belligerents during the First World War (CEGC), she is writing a monograph about film propaganda in the Netherlands.

Bibliography

Amara, Michël, “Une icône… des propagandes – Au coeur du conflit – Les grands défis de la propagande belge durant la Première Guerre mondiale”, in La petite Belgique dans la Grande Guerre : une icône, des images: actes du colloque de Namur, 24, 25, 26 et 27 novembre 2010, Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, ed. Bénédicte Rochet, Axel Tixhon, 21-35. Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 2012.

Best, Brian. Reporting from the Front: War Reporters during the Great War. Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2014.

Convents, Guido, “Van gefilmde actualiteiten tot bioscoopjournaal in België: De ontwikkeling van het nieuws op het witte doek (1896-1918)”, in Revue belge d’Histoire contemporaine 1:2 (2009): 27-52

Engelen, Leen. “Film/Cinema (Belgium)”, in 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. Accessed 3 February 2015.  http://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10320.

—–.  “Cinematic Representations of the Enemy in Belgian Silent Fiction Films”, Warfare and Belligerence. Perspectives in First World War Studies, ed. P. Purseigle, 359-378. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005.

Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997[1982].

Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Jones, Heather. Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Letchworth: The Garden City Press Ltd, 1966[1962].

Liemann, Bernhard. “Transformation of Local Public Spheres: German, Belgian and Dutch Border Towns during the First World War Compared”, in Other Fronts, Other Wars?: First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, eds. Joachim Bürgschwentner, Matthias Egger, and Gunda Barth-Scalmani, 349-369. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

Rochet, Bénédicte. “Plongée au coeur des prises de vues du service cinématographique de l’armée belge : un matériel visuel de la Grande Guerre à multiples usages”, in La petite Belgique dans la Grande Guerre : une icône, des images: actes du colloque de Namur, 24, 25, 26 et 27 novembre 2010, Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, ed. Bénédicte Rochet and Axel Tixhon, 111-125. Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 2012.

Slethaug, Gordon E. “Palimpsest and Bricolage: Playful and Serious Citations in Broken Flowers and Snow White’s Offspring”, Adaptation Theory and Criticism: Postmodern Literature and Cinema in the USA, Gordon E. Slethaug, 191-246. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

Verhoeff, Nanna. The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.

Weever, Bruno de. “Prologue: Historical Film as Palimpsest”, in Perspectives on European Film and History, ed. Leen Engelen and Roel Vande Winkel, 5-11. Gent: Academia Press. 2007.

Filmography

La Bataille de l’Yser (SCAB, <1918).

The Battle of the Somme (Charles Urban and Geoffrey Malins, 1916).

Britain’s Effort (Lancelot Speed, 1918).

A la gloire du troupier belge (SCAB, 1922).

La Libre Belgique (Armand Du Plessy, 1920-1921).

The Little American (Cecil B. DeMille, 1917).

Met onze jongens aan de IJzer (Clemens De Landtsheer, 1928-1929).

La petite martyre belge (Francis Martin, 1928).

La tragédie de Marchienne (Francis Martin, 1937).

War Requiem, the film adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s musical piece directed by British film director Derek Jarman, is a case study in the politics of the memory of war, with WWI as its focal point. Made in 1988, the film does not coincide with any specific commemoration, and while being a significant cultural venture in an ambition to challenge consensual memory about war, it is also, I argue, the director’s personal endeavour to understand how history and his family’s past have impacted the development of his own self and his artistic expression.

This work will demonstrate how Jarman’s imaginative representation of WWI takes the form of an accumulation – rather than a confrontation or contradiction – of past representations of this historic moment. Through an unusual interplay between text (the poetry of Wilfred Owen), images (wordless re-enactments of Wilfred Owen’s life events and terrifying archival images of war), and music (the War Requiem by composer Benjamin Britten), the film deconstructs in an experimental fashion the conventionality and illusion of commemorative representations of war as well as their different sites and practices. The film uses a variety of material and sources which are very distinct regarding the level of distance at which they engage with the reality of the atrocities, or the different layers of mediation and vision interposed between beholder and signifier. In this respect, the film questions the memorialisation value and impact of different commemorative tropes, such as poetry, moving images (both documentary and fictional), and music. Through these mechanisms, I will examine how the film appeals to the viewers’ consciousness and criticality as regards these representations, and generates a profoundly significant engagement with the event and the artistry of its re-presentation.

By the time Jarman directed War Requiem, he was an established director of experimental films and had already been involved in the making of several music videos for prestigious singers and musical groups. His engagement with Britten’s musical masterpiece can thus be seen as his desire to bring it to life. In addition, written in the aftermath of WWII, the requiem could be said to echo Jarman’s own traumatic experience of a military hospital, where he spent a few days as a child (he was born in 1942), alongside the wounded of WWII. Moreover, made at the beginning of post-modern theory and aesthetics, the requiem and its anti-war message provided a perfect platform for the development of a subject matter to which Jarman felt personally and politically very close, while exploring the complex interaction between film, music, and poetry. There are indeed few WWI battle scenes in the film, and they occupy the same hierarchical position as scenes from other wars, such as the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002), the Cambodian Civil War (1970-75), and the Vietnam War (1955-75), as well as the bombing of Hiroshima (6 and 9 August 1945). The geographical and temporal scope of documentary extracts demonstrates that Jarman’s film is indeed a plea for world peace.

Lacking simple narrative and continuity, the collage of poetry, images, and music in Jarman’s film does not lead to any real understanding of the historical and political specificities of the wars to which it refers, but this is beyond the point. Through artistic experimentation regarding suffering and violence, Jarman modulates different forms of affects engaging the viewer sensorially to make them experience emotions ranging from intense passion and anger to deeply-felt pity, thus demanding and provoking a moral response. In the words of Judith Butler, “[t]here is no thinking and judgement without the senses, and there is no thinking and judgement about war without the senses assuming a social form […]. Waging war in some ways begins with the assault on the senses; the senses are the first target of war.”^[1]

This essay will first look at the different formal and aesthetic strategies used by Jarman to engage the viewer. These include the film’s contrasting structure between documentary and fiction as well as between past and present; its narrating devices, such as the portrayal of fictive characters located in both time periods in the film and Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting”; and the use of photographic pathos in archival stills. In its second section, the essay will examine how the notion of the “re-framing of war” is developed in Jarman’s film in opposition to state propaganda and consensual memory of war through an exploration of Owen’s biography and poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, ultimately questioning the notion of war as being a part of human nature, and therefore its necessity. Drawing on this distinction between “good and evil”, the third part will highlight Jarman’s juxtaposition of Britten’s music, Owen’s poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, and a complex portrayal of religion, thus establishing a tension between the atrocities of war and religious aspirations. The fourth part of the essay will look at the film as part of a cathartic process for Jarman on a personal, familial, and artistic level.

On a visual level, the structure of War Requiem alternates past and present through flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks, as well as through spatial and temporal jumps. There is archival material related to the conflict – such as WWI newsreel footage, alongside images of 20th-century wars – on the one side; the fictional love story between British soldier and poet Wilfred Owen (Nathaniel Parker) and the army nurse (Jarman’s muse Tilda Swinton), on the other. This crosscutting creates a contrasting pattern between black and white documentary and the vividly colourful fiction of the love story which highlights the constructed meaning of both types of images for the viewer, who finds him/herself at the centre of a mediated, yet individual, experience of the past.

The use of archival material within the fictional love story in War Requiem recalls a post-modern use of the cuttings of paper and fragments of other material in Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s late Cubist collages. Such fragments not only act as a reminder of reality and its materiality, but they also make the viewer aware of the artificiality of the film as an artistic construct. According to John Golding, “we identify [the collaged items] without effort, and because they form part of our experience of the material world around us, they make a bridge between our customary modes of perception and the artistic fact as it is presented to us by the artist. […] In Braque’s own words, he introduced foreign substances into his paintings because of their ‘materiality’, and by this he was referring not only to their physical, tactile values, but also to the sense of material certainty they evoked.”^[2] In this perspective, Jarman could be said to use archival material within the film as an intellectual and visual device to assert the reality of his vision. As the pseudo-narrative of the film is interrupted by archival footage, we know as viewers that we are confronted with a constructed reality whose deconstructed montage we are required to re-address, like we would the destruction of the world. The archival material also acts as clues to a greater library of horrific imagery, the specificity of which is left to our imagination, an imagination which is sadly guided by the accumulation of images repeatedly viewed in the media.

On a more fundamental level, the contrasting pattern between the archival material and fictional love story brings into play the tension between past and present, the horrors of war and the beauty of love, and life and death. Personal and spectatorial engagement is at its strongest in the sections of the film which focus on the love story between Owen and the Nurse. At the beginning of the film, set in contemporary England, a nurse (Tilda Swinton) pushes the Old Soldier in a wheelchair, a WWI veteran (Laurence Olivier in his final screen appearance). After he has shown her the Edwardian photograph of his departed beloved, to whom the Nurse bears a strong resemblance, the Old Soldier narrates his war memories. Thus the story unfolds through his eyes, as he begins his tale with a stanza from Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting”.

This choice of poem seems to introduce the spectator into a dream-like world of craters, caves, and tunnels, whose Hell is convincingly reflected in the Gothic labyrinth of Dartford’s Darenth Park Hospital where the film was shot. “It seemed that out of the battle I escaped/ Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped/ Through granites which titanic wars had groined”.^[3] The poem’s introduction not only sets the scene of conflict on a gigantic scale, but also puts two narrators on stage: Owen himself and the person who delivers his message. The oscillation between the internal first-person perspective and the external third-person perspective in the poem is echoed in the film with the Old Soldier telling the viewer the story of the Owen character, which in turn creates a mise-en-abyme between images and commentary. These devices conduct the viewer to embrace several perspectives and become very active in the constructive process of the story. Jarman’s choice of “Strange Meeting” as the introductory voice to his film therefore denotes a conceptual and formalist approach.

In the documentary part of the film, however, Jarman explores a different aspect of sorrow and relies on a different type of empathy on the part of the viewer. The palpably faded and blurred nature of the archival stills of WWI places the viewer’s position away from a collective commemoration of the past to a mediated, yet individual experience, which eventually results in a lesser distance from the very idea of death. According to Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, the photographic image is already beyond the present moment to convey the pathos of past times. It “does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been” (author’s emphasis).^[4] It is, by its very nature, located in history, but in this very specific instance, it is also looking implicitly at the perspective of death. This point is also made by Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others: “Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people”.^[5] This haunting resonance, it would seem, would produce in the viewer an understanding of the vulnerability and finite nature of human life. This characteristic of Jacques Derrida’s concept of “absolute pastness”, to be applied here to the archival footage, would then be the condition for the grievability of its subjects, whose lives are in the process of non-being, and would therefore lead to a compassionate engagement of the viewer.

Having examined Jarman’s use of different formal and aesthetic strategies to engage the viewer in the cinematic process, the essay will turn its attention to his “re-framing of war” through a filmic exploration of Owen’s biography and appropriation of his anti-war poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”. In the film, the Old Soldier’s wartime memories commence in 1918 with the Nurse weeping over the dead body of Wilfred Owen, whom we then see in his  younger days hanging out the washing with his mother while a young woman arranges a bouquet of flowers in a vase. He is then drafted and goes to fight in the war. Immediately after this scene, we witness the Nurse reading “Anthem for Doomed Youth” over his grave.

These few minutes of the film, a condensation of Owen’s life, summarise the small chances of survival once enlisted: in 1917, the year of Owen’s conscription, the life expectancy of an officer on the front line was measured in days. Indeed, Owen died a year later, at the age of twenty-five. Like all his comrades, he had been completely unaware of the reality of trench warfare, as the newsreels shown of the Front were heavily censored. Indeed, according to Laurent Gervereau in Les Images qui mentent, WWI marks the beginning of what will become “image propaganda”.^[6] It is therefore as a reaction against the legitimation and “romanticisation” of warfare by the British nation state and its persuasive military power of the time, to which he had succumbed, that Owen’s poetry developed. After his one-year stay at Craiglockhart Hospital due to shell-shock, where he met anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon, Owen considered the function of poetry as testimony more important than ever before, because it counteracted state propaganda with what he saw as a necessary anti-war message.^[7]

When considering “image propaganda”, it is interesting to note that Owen’s poetry locates itself firmly outside its parameters, as it is sometimes very descriptive of the specificity of war, its weapons, both mechanical and chemical, their effects on the human body and psychology. This is potently the case of “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, which Jarman has directed the Nurse to read over Owen’s grave. Written between September and October 1917 at Craiglockhart Hospital, the sonnet is indeed a mournful elegy to young soldiers, dignifying and celebrating their courage and suffering, whose lives were unnecessarily lost in WWI for the sake of wealthy bankers – which are represented in the film as heavily made-up men. More specifically, the octet consists of a list of deafening sounds of trench warfare – “monstrous anger of the guns”, “stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle”, whose alliteration echoes the sound itself, and “wailing shells”.^[8] In his film, Jarman counteracts the absence of the harsh realities of war from state propaganda by presenting the viewer with archival footages of soldiers digging tunnels in the snow, burning cities, and soldiers marching over hills and preparing for battle. According to Judith Butler, the state regulates the public reception and understanding of violence by framing a certain version of reality. In this perspective, she suspects that the framing act becomes a part of “the materiality of war and the efficacy of its violence”.^[9] In the film, I would argue, Jarman proposes an alternative re-framing of the war, and like Owen, directs the beholder towards a greater understanding of the materiality and violence of war, thus counteracting past and future state propaganda.

Moreover, in addition to re-framing the consensual version of the reality of war, these images have an immediate poignancy, encompassing both life and death at the same time. In several scenes of the film’s fictional part, this tension between life and death is drawn upon  the juxtaposition of childhood innocence and the traumas of war, in particular with the inclusion of Owen’s idyllic childhood sequences, shot on Super-8, albeit reminiscent of his earlier feature film The Last of England (1987): three young children emerge, dressed up in army uniforms, and bury a teddy bear; the Nurse, caring for a wounded soldier at night, observes a young Owen outside the window of the army hospital; the young Owen plays drums and dances with a group of soldiers in drag against a backdrop of the Union Jack; young Owen and his Mother decorate a Christmas tree. Set against the cruelty of war, the images of carefree innocence and everyday gestures explore the human relationship with nature and culture, reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the primordial state of human beings which contains their essential characteristics, the ones that culture will eventually repress or pervert.^[10] In this respect, it could be argued that these images of childhood might act as a reminder of men’s primordial goodness which war only perversely subverts.

Following from Jarman’s re-framing and questioning of the war, the third part of the essay will now show how Jarman establishes a tension between the atrocities of war and religious aspirations in his film through a complex juxtaposition of Britten’s musical piece, the final section of Owen’s poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, and a subversive portrayal of religion, ultimately evading the reductive notion of “good versus evil”. The film’s soundtrack does not contain any spoken dialogue, but instead uses the choral music and lyrics of Britten’s War Requiem. This includes the “Latin Mass for the Dead” and some of Owen’s poems reflecting the atrocities of war: “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, but also “But I was Looking at the Permanent Stars,” “The Next War”, “Sonnet On Seeing a Piece of our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action”, “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”, “The End”, “At a Calvary near the Ancre”, and finally “Strange Meeting”.^[11] While Jarman establishes a correspondence between archival images and the message of the poetic text, he facilitates a similar dialogue between the final section of Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and the music performed in the film. In the poem, the sounds of trench warfare are all set against the restrained atmosphere of the church, with an abundance of religious imagery, symbolic of the sanctity of life and death: the “passing-bells” tolled to announce someone’s death, the “orisons” or funeral prayers, “voice of mourning”, “choirs”, “candles” – which are lit in the room where a body lies in a coffin, “holy glimmers of goodbyes”, “pall” – or a coffin cloth.

This juxtaposition in Owen’s poem suggests the inadequacy and pointlessness of institutionalised religion when confronted with such butchery: the expression “die as cattle” conjures up the image of a slaughterhouse. In particular, the word “mockeries” and the expression “patter out their hasty orisons” seem to articulate such a tension, while “choirs of wailing shells” is an astonishing metaphor uniting both God’s and the Devil’s world. As such, the poem is a clear rejection of religious structures in which Owen was brought up.

Progressively, the poem moves away from the fighting front to funeral rituals with “bugles” commonly played at military funerals conducted by the families of the dead “from sad shires”, the English counties and countryside from which a large proportion of the soldiers came. Tone and pace change from harsh fervour to regretful and solemn reflection, until the poem quietly closes with the “drawing down of blinds”, whose corresponding dimming of the light is echoed in the dusk descending onto earth in a slow, finite gesture, as though to let the dead person lie in peace.^{[12] [13]} This tension between the atrocities of war and religious aspirations can also be found in “Britten’s War Requiem” as described by Peter Evans in the following manner:

The change here is more radical than before, to a new tonal perspective and a new urgent pulse, to the immediacy of solo voice and instruments and the unequivocal directness of the vernacular-Owen’s poem, Anthem for Doomed Youth. The effect is dramatic but not melodramatic: both poet and composer offer a challenge to the luxury of opulent mourning, ‘mockeries from prayers or bells’, that implies a conflict between this and the preceding sections. The athleticism and wiry textures of the new, but related, theme (bass of Ex. 3-also another distant relation of the Sinfonia’s Lacrymosa) seem like a reproach to the heavy propulsion of Ex. i, even though they depict the rifle’s rattle and the wailing of shells.^[14]

Just like in Owen’s poem and Britten’s music, Jarman does not seem to find an outlet for human suffering in religion. Accordingly, he shows images of burning cities simultaneously with the choir singing Britten’s Requiem. Moreover, although using oratorios of Britten’s War Requiem sung in Latin as soundtrack and an elaborate Christian iconography, the film inserts interesting twists into Christian motifs and stories, such as the comparison between Owen’s and his fellow soldiers’ fates to Christ’s martyrdom. For instance, when the Unknown Soldier is buried, Owen imagines himself as the Biblical Isaac, whose life, according to the Genesis narrative, had been about to be sacrificed by his own father Abraham in order to prove the latter’s faith to God. In the film, however, he is portrayed lying on an altar with his throat slit by his father, while a group of grotesque-looking men are laughing.

The appropriation of the notion of the grotesque, if associated with the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, reveals this scene as a transgressive one in that it presents a metaphor for a temporary reversal of order in which the constructed boundaries between symbolic categories of political and religious hierarchy and values are blurred. Rather than presenting an inversion of the status quo, the grotesque thus enables a transgression of the established binary system of representation, as it is a hybrid form containing all these sets of oppositions together.^[15] This is why Jarman’s use of Christian iconography appears to be a complex one: while using its aesthetic motifs, it subverts its content. The same subversive process is at play in the cumulative power of two scenes. In the first of these scenes the Nurse, in a white, yet mud- and blood-covered dress, puts a crown of thorns onto the head of the Enemy Soldier, who carries the body of the Unknown Soldier. In the final scene, he himself appears as Christ holding the body of Owen. In a true Nietzschean fashion, these blatantly opposite scenes demonstrate Jarman’s bypassing of the idea of “good and evil” to reveal the destructive impact of war on both sides of the front. This idea is forcibly expressed in the film through the archival footage of conflicts in Cambodia and the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, followed by the image of a large field of skulls.

From the outset of Jarman’s oeuvre, Death had been a guiding philosophical concept developed within a diversity of historical backgrounds, but in War Requiem, I would argue that it took on a personal dimension, as this was Jarman’s first artistic project since he had learnt he was HIV positive (he died six years later). The fourth part of the essay will therefore look at the film as part of a cathartic process for Jarman on a personal, familial, and artistic level.

Jarman’s own father was a Lancaster bomber pilot in the Second World War, and the artist believed that his father’s despair, depression, and violence impacted greatly on his own artistic vision and sense of self. The depression from which his father suffered had been attributed to the feeling that a bomber would experience when surviving his brothers-in-arms and killing innocent civilians. Such notion of survival guilt is explored, I would argue, by Jarman in War Requiem through Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting”, which concludes the film and is the last poem to be quoted in Britten’s Requiem. In Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud deals with such notion, allocating the role of the super-ego to the process of internalising and transforming the lost other as a recriminating voice. This voice then speaks out exactly what the ego would have said to the other if the latter had stayed alive.^[16] This dialogue is precisely what is exerted in “Strange Meeting”. The following lines exemplify this point:

“Strange friend,” I said, “Here is no cause to mourn.”
“None,” said the other, “Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here”.^[17]

The sense of guilt is also what seems to be at play in the fictional part of the film when the Unknown Soldier is playing the piano while the Enemy Soldier playfully throws snowballs at him, but Owen misinterprets the Enemy Soldier’s behaviour and shoots him. Before the Enemy dies, he stabs the Unknown Soldier.

This remembering of the past recalls Slavoj Žižek’s idea that “the true choice apropos of historical traumas is not the one between remembering and forgetting them: traumas we are not ready or able to remember haunt us all the more forcefully. We should therefore accept the paradox that, in order to really forget an event, we must first summon up the strength to remember it properly.”^[18] Re-enacting a psychoanalytical process in his film, Jarman can only come to terms with his family’s past through the compulsive telling of painful and repressed memories, which are integrated in the film in the present, thus forming an integral part of his identity and sense of self.

This psychological process has been explained by Jacques Lacan in his seminal “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis”:

Let us not forget that when Freud presents the concept of transference to us, he says – what cannot be remembered is repeated in behaviour. This behaviour, in order to reveal what it repeats, is handed over to the analyst’s reconstruction. § One may go as far as to believe that the opacity of the trauma – […] in my terms, its resistance to signification – is then specifically held responsible for the limits of remembering. And, after all, it is hardly surprising, given my own theorisation, that I should see this as a highly significant moment in the transfer of powers from the subject to the Other, […], the locus of speech and, potentially, the locus of truth.^[19]

One cannot but deduce that, through the film, Jarman was attempting to come to terms with his own family’s past, and, through a Surrealist use of the collage technique, to artistically explore his unconscious.

This, I think, is the crux of the matter: while the documentary part of the film brings into play the process of seeing, the fictional narrative exploits the process of telling. Together with the sensuous experience of poetry and music, the act of vision and that of narration on the part of the beholder are two complementary forms in the questioning and understanding of the past and its necessary integration in the development of identities for both the artist and viewer.^[20] The remembering of internalised traumatic experiences is thus instrumental in the psychological development and recovery of all involved, be it through musical, literary, or filmic processes. It is by making the mechanism of the constructiveness of the past apparent that Jarman’s venture remains contemporary, as the viewer can apply this process of deconstruction to all social, political, historical, and cultural constructs, thus showing a critical engagement far beyond the film and WWI. The use of archival footage of WWII and the wars in Vietnam and Angola is a case in point. Set amidst the general context of Britain in the 1980s, with “the rise of the City and the fall of the unions, the wider retreat of the left and the return of military confidence, the energy of a renewed entrepreneurialism and the entropy of a new, entrenched unemployment, […], the property bubbles, the beleaguered 1984-5 miners’ strike, the 1986 deregulatory Big Bang in the City,” and, last but not least, the Falklands War of 1982, Jarman’s War Requiem is one of the most compelling appeals for peace in cinema.

^[1] Judith Butler, Frames of War – When is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009), xii–xiii.

^[2] John Golding, “Cubism,” in Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Nikos Stangos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 62.

^[3] Wilfred Owen, The Poems (New York and London: Norton, 1985), 125.

^[4] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 85.

^[5] Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003), 70.

^[6] Laurent Gervereau, “Le Vrai contre le Faux,” in Les Images qui mentent (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 91.

^[7] As a recognised poet and officer decorated with the Military Cross, Sassoon publicly condemned the ongoing conflict as a “war of aggression and conquest” in his Public Statement of Defiance in July 1917. In order to avoid court-martial, he was transferred to Craiglockhart. Sassoon was thus effectively silenced, his case clearly showing the power of the State to ‘neutralise’ anti-war sentiment.

^[8] I have analysed the poem in my publication: Caroline Perret,“Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale (2007) and Gillies MacKinnon’s Regeneration – Behind the Lines (1997).” In The Great War in Post-Memory Literature, Drama and Film, edited by Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz and Martin Loeschnigg, Berlin: De Gruyter (‘Media and Cultural Memory series’), 2014.

^[9] Judith Butler, Frames of War – When is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009), xii–xiii.

^[10] See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de l’Inégalité parmi les Hommes,” in Parcours Philosophiques, Gérard Durozoi et al. (Paris: Éditions Nathan, 1985), 47.

^[11] As the film has no spoken dialogue, it is surprising to note that it was only released in English-speaking countries, the UK, Canada and the US, between January 1989 and 1990. Limited  VHS and Laserdisc editions were also released shortly afterwards.

^[12] In this respect, it is interesting to note that War Requiem was performed for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1963, which was built after the original fourteenth-century structure was infamously destroyed by the Luftwaffe in a World War II bombing raid in 1940.

^[13] Wilfred Owen, The Poems (New York and London: Norton, 1985), 76.

^[14] Peter Evans, “Britten’s War Requiem,” Tempo 61-62 (Spring-Summer 1962): 22.

^[15] Stuart Hall, “For Allan White: Metaphors of Transformation,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 290-92.

^[16] Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957 [1917]), 243–258.

^[17] Wilfred Owen, The Poems (New York and London: Norton, 1985), 125.

^[18] Slavoj Žižek, “Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance,” in Welcome to the Desert of the real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002), 22.

^[19] Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 129.

^[20] Here I use concepts developed in Judith Mayne, “Hiroshima mon Amour: Ways of Seeing, Ways of Telling,” in The 1978 Film Studies Annual (West Lafayette: Purdue University, 1978), 49-51.

Notes on Contributor

Dr Caroline Perret is currently Research Associate for the Group for War and Culture Studies at the University of Westminster, and researches the impact of war on cultural production. She is particularly interested in art, illustrated books, literature, films and poetry in the historical, political, social, and cultural context of WWI and WWII in both Britain and France. Her most recent publication is ‘Wilfred Owen and his War Poetry in Jeremy Paxman’s “Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale” (2007) and Gillies MacKinnon’s “Regeneration – Behind the Lines” (1997)’, in The Great War in Post-Memory Literature, Drama and Film, edited by Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz and Martin Loeschnigg, De Gruyter’s ‘Media and Cultural Memory series’, October 2014.

Acknowledgments

With all my most sincere thanks to Helena Scott for her constant help and support.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

Beckett, Andy. “Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s by Graham Stewart – Review: a study of Thatcher’s era that leaves vital questions unanswered.” The Guardian, January 17, 2013.http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/17/bang-history-britain-1980s-review. Accessed April 10, 2015

Butler, Judith. Frames of War – When is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2009.

Evans, Peter. “Britten’s War Requiem.” Tempo 61-62 (Spring-Summer 1962): 20-24 / 29-39.

Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. Translated by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1957 [1917].

Golding, John. “Cubism.” In Concepts of Modern Art, edited by Nikos Stangos, 53-81. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991.

Gervereau, Laurent. “Le Vrai contre le Faux.” In Les Images qui mentent, 91, Paris: Seuil, 2011.

Hall, Stuart. “For Allen White: Metaphors of Transformation.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 290-92. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin Books, 1977.

Mayne, Judith. “Hiroshima mon Amour: Ways of Seeing, Ways of Telling.” In The 1978 Film Studies Annual, 49-51, West Lafayette: Purdue University, 1978.

Owen, Wilfred. The Poems. New York and London: Norton, 1985.

Perret, Caroline. “Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale (2007) and Gillies MacKinnon’s Regeneration – Behind the Lines (1997).” In The Great War in Post-Memory Literature, Drama and Film, edited by Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz and Martin Loeschnigg, Berlin: De Gruyter (‘Media and Cultural Memory series’), 2014.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de l’Inégalité parmi les Hommes.” In Parcours Philosophiques, edited by Gérard Durozoi et al., 47, Paris: Éditions Nathan, 1985 [1755].

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance.” In Welcome to the Desert of the real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, New York: Verso, 2002.

Filmography

War Requiem (Derek Jarman, 1988).

“The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution now unfolding is a great revolution that touches people to their very soul and constitutes a new stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country…”^[1]

“Whatever the measures chosen for erasing facts and people from memory, the erasures even when perfectly programmed, only set in motion a memory that does not forget and that is seeking to be inscribed”.^[2]

 Within contemporary Chinese cinema, the tension of official remembrance and silencing persists through particular histories such as the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). What is troubling about the struggle for memory in this decade is how the tragedy and traumatic event of the Cultural Revolution continues to be censored, re-written, and ultimately forgotten. The Revolution continues to be silenced and replaced with idyllic narratives within cinema that seek to inspire an audience towards the greatness of Communist ideals. In this article, I interrogate the official remembrances of the Cultural Revolution and how the memory of a Communist utopia is produced through state strategies of soft power in contemporary popular Chinese cinema. Soft power leverages popular culture to attract and co-opt intended audiences to accept particular views without resorting to coercive methods.^[3] My paper focuses on the pop culture importance of blockbuster film. Specifically, my discussion focuses on Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), a blockbuster film adaptation of a popular “8 Model Opera” that has resulted in tremendous box office profits in domestic Mainland Chinese markets. I discuss the film’s idyllic perceptions of the People’s Liberation Army, the Communist army that served as the precursor to the infamous Red Guards during the Maoist era. Then I juxtapose many of these official remembrances alongside a legacy of revolutionary posters from the Cultural Revolution that convey persistent narratives of Communist utopian ideals.

Remembrances and Forgetting

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee (CCPCC) sought to establish a legacy of memory that could live on for generations by initiating “a revolution to touch people’s souls”^[4]. In order to produce such memories, the streets of society saw an abundance of revolutionary posters distributed widely. These posters served to touch and inspire the people towards communist revolutionary ideals.^[5] Powerful, still visual imagery from these posters praised Mao Zedong and directed children and adults alike to take up arms and join the revolutionary cause. These posters also portrayed the Revolutionary army with pleasant brushstrokes that described how soldiers served the people, helped the poor and weak, and could even be equated to one’s family.^[6]

The Communist utopia ideologies expressed through these posters were brought to life within the artistic execution of the 8 Model Operas (yangbanxi). These eight operas were the only plays, ballets, and performances allowed by Chairman Mao and his state authority during the Cultural Revolution era. Among the most popular operas that are recognizable today are the Red Detachment of Women and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, which has inspired Tsui Hark’s film, The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014).

These idyllic remembrances, however, betray a forgotten, traumatic, and haunting legacy. Censored by the state, the Cultural Revolution was a period in Chinese history where Mao Zedong and his brand of Communist China imposed anti-tradition policies and extremist anti-bourgeois actions involving mass murders that left millions dead. The mandate to destroy the state’s enemies at all costs took its bloody toll throughout Chinese society. Diane Lary offers a striking comparison of the Cultural Revolution: ‘The upending of all traditional values had something in common with the Holocaust, but with a major difference: The Nazis turned on non-Aryan races; the Chinese turned on each other’.^[7]  The infamous slogan, “My parents may love me, but not as much as Chairman Mao” was a manipulative but powerful motivator for Mao’s followers^[8]. Dissenters accused of being disloyal to Revolutionary ideals were punished with “struggle sessions”, an act of intense public shaming and humiliation. The dissenters were tied up, labeled with accusatory signage, and then physically beaten in front of large crowds and witnesses.^[9] These punishments were intended to overturn the bourgeois and wealthy (e.g. landowners), while attacking intellectuals and those sympathetic to old ideas (e.g. Confucianism).

Unfortunately, many films that remember the trauma of painful, haunting histories such as the Cultural Revolution have increasingly faded. Notably, the Fifth Generation directors had begun to address these subjects as part of a ‘search-for-roots’ movement. Escaping or exiled to the West in the 1980s and 1990s, these directors adapted their own experiences under Maoist rule into film that was critical and indicting of Communist political atrocities.^[10] For instance, director Tian Zhuangzhuang was banned for 10 years due to his film, Blue Kite (1993). This film implicated the Chinese Communist regime. Blue Kite commented on how the CCP’s rise to power in 1949 began with an idyllic promise and hope of a better life for all people. But Tian’s film depicted how abuses of state power and sanctioned injustices affected individuals, families, and communities, eventually leading to the horrific Cultural Revolution. While Blue Kite was critically acclaimed in Western countries, China’s punishment on Tian would have a clear impact on his filmmaking. Since Blue Kite, Tian’s subsequent films to this date have not ventured into any more political critiques of the CCP.^[11] With bold, provocative cinema, Fifth Generation Chinese directors such as Tian Zhuangzhuang searched for “roots” that were far different from the Communist value of rediscovering one’s “roots” within the feigned ideals of the Communist Motherland. However, since the new millennium, these Fifth Generation directors have largely chosen to exercise greater caution after receiving criticisms and bans from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of their films and/or themselves during the 1980s and 90s. The closest that any of these directors have come to commenting on the censored Cultural Revolution in present day can be found, for instance, in Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home (2014). However, as I have argued elsewhere, while this film is set at the onset of the Cultural Revolution, it “skips” over the Revolution’s decade and refrains from offering condemning scenes of this period or the soldiers. In fact, the Red Guards are depicted as helpful, noble, and graceful. This is subtly reinforced with the inclusion of the model opera Red Detachment of Women within the film.^[12]

Furthermore, this nostalgic remembrance of the Communist ideal is evident in Zhang Yimou’s tenth film, The Road Home (1999). This was his second film since he had become much more politically submissive to the decisions of Chinese film studios, and in turn, the regulations of the Chinese authorities.^[13] The Road Home is significantly a film that produces a sentimental memory of China and its people through the narrative of a man’s reminiscence of his parent’s courtship in his home village.^[14] The film evokes lush pastoral settings, majestic scenery and landscapes, and vibrant colours of a village and countryside in 1960s China (likely also during the Cultural Revolution). Rey Chow suggests that the production of this film can be “traced to a residual socialist sentimentalism with its faith in the import of human action”.^[15] That is, The Road Home operates under the guise of romantic nostalgia and its melodrama evokes an (over)engagement with the personal (that is, within the private family sphere), while neglecting the larger historical contexts of national history. Its very problematics in terms of memory are due to how it carries ideological sensibilities of the Communist ideal by analogizing the public with the private. The Road Home’s melodrama carries a particular kind of “nostalgic sentimentalism” for a socialist humanism within the public sphere that articulates a nationalist quality. It attempts to convey a remembrance of a Communist era utopia by salvaging hope and humanity with themes of redemption within the innocence of a countryside.^[16] Thus, what is produced is a memory that neglects the realities of China’s history, as if suggesting that the atrocity of the Cultural Revolution could be gladly forgotten through the idyllic notion of reconnection with one’s ancestral roots and reunion with one’s family.^[17] These are similar ideals of one’s roots and reunion that also persist strongly in the narrative of Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014).

Part of the intent within soft power strategies is to bring greater visibility to remembrances that the state desires versus those that are preferred forgotten.^[18] For instance, the growth of “Confucius Institutes” in strategic Western cities (e.g. London and Vancouver) has led to valuable international partnerships of cultural, artistic and language exchange with Western social and educational institutions. However, the political ideology and practical concerns of these initiatives have been critiqued in both popular press and scholarly literature.^[19]

Within cinema, Chinese blockbuster films have also leveraged soft power strategies to produce particular memories of China in both domestic and international markets. For example, the state-produced film, The Founding of the Republic (2009), remembers the 60th anniversary of the CCP by unapologetically promoting its nationalist stance within a politics of commemorating Mao Zedong’s rise to power. The film attempts to attract audiences in both Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong markets by leveraging popular celebrity culture through the casting of numerous Mainland and Hong Kong film stars and directors. Commemorations of particular national wounds are also pervasive within the historical wartime blockbuster, Flowers of War (2012). This film remembers the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, depicting a traumatic history that saw Imperial Japanese soldiers murder, torture and rape hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens. In contrast to Founding the Republic, Flowers of War demonstrates a soft power strategy to reach international markets by casting an “A-list” American Hollywood actor, Christian Bale (The Dark Knight Trilogy), as the protagonist. ^[20] This film’s vision of China remembers the pain, humiliation, and suffering at the hands of a foreign, oppressive enemy. Black-and-white characterizations reveal Chinese characters depicted as heroic, brave, and sacrificial, while the Japanese are shown as villainous, sinister and ruthless. Such dualisms create a collective, national identification around an officially produced memory that cheers the good and deeply begrudges the evil with little space for ambiguous or sympathetic characters.^[21] This phenomenon of suffering and victory can be understood as the “logic of the wound”, where cinema speaks “bitterness” but also seeks to remedy the trauma of the situation through some resolution.^[22]

A War for Memory on Tiger Mountain

However, for Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain (hereafter Tiger), particular wounds need not be remedied, because references to the traumatic memory of the Cultural Revolution are nowhere to be seen. This invisibility may not be surprising, given that the film itself is set a couple of decades earlier in 1946, right after Imperial Japan’s surrender in World War II and during the Communist’s civil war against the KMT (Kuomingtang).^[23] The semi-historical story’s importance to the Revolution was likely due to the heroism of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the original historical circumstances. Thus, depicting a narrative that celebrates the PLA’s great victory allows for audiences to trace the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) legacy to the PLA’s glorious feats of heroism. In order to repeatedly produce and consolidate this particular vision of the CCP, it is thus unsurprising why the story of Tiger once served as one of the most popular 8 Model Operas during the Cultural Revolution.

To attract a new domestic and international audience, Tsui Hark’s adaptation of the opera attempts to reclaim the impact and influence of the original narrative. Tsui re-imagines and pays homage to the story’s history as both model play and filmed stage opera during the Cultural Revolution era. However, Tsui’s cinematic tribute perpetuates the same tropes of power and memory production that rendered the Cultural Revolution invisible. For example, dualistic tropes persist with black-and-white characterizations of “good”, Communist heroes (PLA), “bad” KMT villains and their allies, the “evil” bandits. The attractive spectacle and emotional poignancy of the film’s melodrama and nostalgia produces a dominant visibility of preferred history while forgetting the traumatic remembrance of state-sanctioned atrocity. This presents an incredible amount that is quite “visible” through the melodrama and spectacle of Tiger and its method of memory production.

Leveraging its legacy and popularity as an 8 Model Opera, its big budget, special effects, intense action, 3-D conversion effects (within cinemas), and meticulously planned screens, The Taking of Tiger Mountain was released in China on December 23, 2014.^[24] The sensory excess and spectacle of this film solicits and attracts the spectator’s attention through the visual novelty of Hollywood-style blockbuster aesthetics.^[25] Attempts to attract a new generation of Chinese spectators to Revolutionary opera were extremely successful. This modern update became the tenth highest-grossing film of all time in China within two months.^[26]

Briefly, the story of the 2014 version of Tiger was based on Qu Bo’s novel, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy or also known as Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Lin hai xue yuan). The basic premise of all versions revolves around a contingent of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—a precursor to the Chinese Communist Party—and their conflict with various infamous gangs of bandits who have overtaken a strategic location in Northeastern China. The story centres around the heroic main protagonist, Yang  Zirong, who goes undercover to infiltrate the largest bandit gang in order to secure the PLA’s own survival and future military advantage in their civil war with the KMT (and the bandits).

The unique element of Tsui Hark’s film is a device that sandwiches the central drama of Tiger between present-day New York and China. It focuses on an ethnic Chinese character named Jimmy who lives in New York and who decides to take temporary leave to return “home” for Chinese New Year.  The past events in Tiger are immediately staged reflexively in the context of memory and spectatorship as the film first presents the first act of the central drama through the gaze of Jimmy. For example, in the taxi on his way to the airport, we see Jimmy streaming a film on his mobile phone using the Chinese video streaming website Youku. He appears to be watching an old version of the stage opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (see Figure 1).

The inclusion of Jimmy permits the audience to know that they are, in fact, watching something “staged”, not unlike the experience of live theatre or opera. This operatic consciousness is further evident in the director’s choice of makeup for some of the actors, the at-times comical and melodramatic dialogue and acting, and also in the dualistic noble hero/evil villain dichotomy. Notably, the exaggerated makeup on selected characters included an exaggerated use of “rouge” for the cheeks (especially for the children and the supporting actress), extensive dark eye makeup for the male protagonist in some scenes (perhaps to point to his stature as the hero of this story), alongside postures and gestures that also portray this operatic influence. Thus, Tsui clearly pays tribute to the very operatic traditions of the original genre through the film’s depictions of “histrionic” or faux acting.^[27] The 2014 version thus subtly whispers to the spectator a tribute to stylized spectacles of past performances.

Fig. 1. Staging the central narrative: Jimmy turning on his phone to stream an old version of Tiger

Fig. 2. Yang Zirong and his heroic gaze

The director’s exuberance for the story is expressed visibly through the second ending, which depicts a high octane, excessively dramatic, special effects-laden version in which Jimmy re-imagines his “preferred” vision of the history after the film first shows the audience a regular ending. Amidst the sheer spectacle of the action-packed side of this “popcorn flick”, however, the film still wants the audience to take the subject matter seriously and with respect.

Absolutely no space is allowed to question, doubt, or critique the success, nobility, and intelligence of the PLA. They are flawlessly portrayed as noble, heroic, and brave. Yet, in spite of the operatic elements of the film, it also demonstrates a historicism and self-seriousness that clearly references the ideology of Cultural Revolution imagery and the desire to again inspire and “touch” its viewers towards Communist ideals. For instance, the camera angles, poses, and gestures of the PLA protagonist, Yang Zirong, in particular, enhance the ideological presentation of the film. Notably, we can see the camera actually frame Yang with the “socialist realist gaze”, a common camera device used in Mao era revolutionary film (see Figure 2).^[28] This gaze offers an intense look directed off-screen, suggesting a sublimely frozen, timeless moment in the narrative that depicts Yang’s ideological resplendency.^[29] In stark contrast to the heroism of the PLA, the villains are instead depicted with an almost cartoon-like exaggeration of sinister insidiousness. Thus, this film is intent on re-appropriating its propagandistic legacy to its new contemporary audience.

Producing the Communist Utopia

Significantly, Tiger’s idyllic presentation can be unrelenting in its attempts to preserve a particular nostalgia of the Maoist era while producing an unflinchingly positive perception of the PLA (and in turn, the Chinese Communist Party and its Red Guards). Portrayals of this Communist ideal in Tiger can, interestingly, be traced to the dominant visual media of the Cultural Revolution era: its Revolutionary posters. The significance of these posters are not to be underestimated, as many of them depict the very gestures, scenarios, imagery and ideologies that helped define memory production during the Maoist era. Interestingly, similar depictions can also be seen within different scenes of Tiger itself. Such imagery (whether moving image or still) clearly serves to evoke what Huang describes as the “isms” or key ideologies that the state wants to preserve of its “communist utopia”^[30]. Producing this utopian ideal was significant as the prevalence and potency of memory production during this era witnessed Mao and how he “created the terms of political discourse—created correct thought—by transforming his reading of the past into the only possible reading”.^[31] From the perspective of Chairman Mao, how the Chinese people remembered history determined the course of success, power, and influence for the CCP.

Juxtaposing Revolutionary Posters and Images from Tiger 

The production of this communist utopia/ideal is articulated through several narratives in Tiger that find their thematic and visual parallels through revolutionary posters from the Cultural Revolution. These parallels, I argue, suggest how Tiger demonstrates state strategies of soft power influence through shared visual depictions and narratives of Communist ideals.

For example, one notable side-story in Tiger involvesa rebellious young child named Knotti, whose father was killed by bandits. His mother Qinglian also went missing (it is later discovered that she was abducted by the bandit leader). Knotti’s development from a traumatized, fiercely resistant and antisocial child into a responsible, young, and inspired child soldier of the PLA willing to sacrifice himself to destroy the enemy satisfies much of the Revolutionary ideology promoted during the Cultural Revolution. Notably, the Communist regime considered the development of young children into soldiers as absolutely essential. This was evident through the existence of the Young Little Pioneers (which later became the Little Red Guards). Shockingly, this encouragement for children to take up arms and participate in the Revolution was visibly present through prevalent revolutionary posters (see Figure 3).^[32] If we juxtapose some of these posters from the Cultural Revolution with screen captures from Tiger, we can see a striking attention to the similarity of socialist poses, gestures and expressions. In Figure 4, for instance, a poster appeals to children to be “brave against the enemy” and depicts a child grabbing the enemy by his hair and violently drowning him. This parallels with a scene where Knotti, out of anger at seeing his PLA adult comrade shot (this is a “righteous anger” in the eyes of the Communist narrative), takes up his rifle to attack the enemy.

Fig. 3. “Army and People are One Family”. A child holds a toy gun while receiving a haircut from a Communist soldier[33]

Fig. 4: “Be Brave Against Your Enemy”; Knotti taking up arms to fight the enemy in Tiger [34]

Fig. 5a. “A PLA man and indignant children on hillside, looking through the documents of some unseen enemy…”[35]

Fig. 5b. Original composition

Similarly, in Figure 5a, we can see another comparison by viewing the Revolutionary poster against a cropped screen capture of Tiger. In the latter still, male and female children (Knotti and Little Juan in Tiger) are both visible in a scene where they decide to join the PLA’s fight. Little Juan is armed with wooden staffs that parallel the weaponry seen in the poster by various children. Little Dove (the female army doctor/soldier in Tiger) and Knotti are holding on to pairs of skis, which demonstrates a willingness to fight patriotically. These skis were being used by the soldiers for both navigating and fighting on the snowy mountain. Both the poster and the screen capture also show a supervising adult soldier (see male soldier in poster) and Little Dove. The original composition of this camera shot shows Little Dove, Knotti and Little Juan framed in the centre of the shot. Two PLA soldiers also serve to frame the shot like a picture frame. Within Tiger, this framing conveys a heightened sense of the characters’ and the film spectator’s admiration (see Figure 5b).  While the children are allowed to participate in the journey up Tiger mountain to the site of the final battle (under supervision of Little Dove), they are however encouraged to stay safe and outside the more dangerous areas. The intent of this image, it seems, is therefore to convey the sense of Knotti, Little Juan, and Little Dove’s strong patriotism to the cause. This expression of patriotism is also visible in the gestures and themes of another poster. Much like the screen capture of Tiger in Figure 5a, Figure 6 also depicts a similar gender and role combination: an adult female soldier, a young boy, and a young girl. Again, the intent of such gender and role arrangements appears to centre around themes of patriotism, loyalty and participation.

Fig. 6. “I love the blue sky of the motherland”[36]

In the case of children taking up arms, there are no suggestions of involuntary or victimized “child soldiers” in either posters or the film. Instead, we, as spectators, see a carefully crafted narrative of children who willingly take up arms out of their innocence and inspiration to make a difference and help out their comrades and friends. Such visions of memory evoke a crude emotional response of “rooting for” these children to do their best.^[37] It is this positive, inspirational message that expresses a communist ideal in both posters and film. That is, the film’s remembrance of such Revolutionary imagery suggests Communist ideals emphasizing the importance of unity and standing together, regardless of one’s age or background. The spectator is therefore encouraged to serve a greater cause that serves the country no matter the sacrifice.

Also visible is a portrayal that expresses the PLA soldiers’ generosity for the villagers. In the Communist narrative, this depicts their heart for the people, especially the elderly, poor and weak. Notably, villagers are in this scene exemplified through an old woman and her son. In this scene, Yang and his crew are investigating a village for survivors. Mistaken for bandits, Yang and his comrades are attacked by the peasant son hiding in their own home, but Yang declares that they have in fact come in peace. Soon they discover the peasant son is in fact an old friend, Yongqi, of one of the comrades present. Yongqi’s elder mother has fallen sick and is fatigued from having run out of food. Noticing the situation, Yang is seen taking food from his own rations. Little Dove, the army doctor, quickly attends to the elder mother and cooks porridge for her from Yang’s rations. In turn, Yongqi joins the PLA cause, and the village becomes a key strategic defensive outpost for the PLA.^[38]

Paralleling the film, images from old Revolutionary posters also establish the PLA group as one that is noble, generous and advocates for and with the common people (see figure 7). Here, the PLA soldiers willingly help the sick, poor and weak and demonstrate their responsibility and passion of helping villagers.

Fig. 7. Soldiers and doctor help the elder in room full of peasants.[39]

Fig. 8. PLA soldiers helping an ill elder villager onto her bed (kang)

Fig. 9. Army doctor feeding the elderly villager food to help her recover

Figure 8 shows a scene similar to the one portrayed in Tiger (cf. also Figure 7). The Communist ideal depicted in these posters is that of soldiers attending to the poor and vulnerable as their defenders and caretakers. A similar portrayal can be seen in Tiger where Little Dove also attends to the elder woman laying on the kang by trying to feed her food and/or medicine with a spoon (see Figures 8 and 9). All these images across posters and film point to an important remembrance of the CCP as a party that champions for all those who cannot help themselves. Tiger, then, becomes a key strategic medium of soft power for the CCP to leverage the popular appeal of blockbuster films and influence a new generation of spectators to Communist ideals and causes.

What is the significance of these juxtapositions between revolutionary posters and screenshots from The Taking of Tiger Mountain? From my comparisons so far, it is evident how Tiger re-appropriates old poster propaganda into moving images that convey the ideology and memory of a Communist utopia for a new generation increasingly distant from the Cultural Revolution era. As Evans and Donald argue, Chinese posters during the Maoist era evoke power relations that display for us, the modern viewers, the official discourses structuring, establishing and producing memories of a particular, preferred version of that specific era.^[40] While it is clear that the Chinese Communist Party’s contemporary soft power strategies differ greatly from the past, it is interesting to spot an attachment and re-appropriation to old propagandistic imagery and their utopian ideals. Still, from a filmmaking perspective, a large degree of credit must be given to Tsui Hark and his crew for the research and  meticulous work done to replicate these gestures and poses of a Revolutionary past into a nostalgic remembrance for a very different present era and film audience. Nonetheless, such efforts do not negate the persistence of produced memory as evidenced by the idyllic scenes in Tiger. After all, the revolutionary posters served a clear propagandistic purpose during the Cultural Revolution era.

Roots and Memory: PLA as Family

The new generation that grows increasingly distant to 20th century war histories is exemplified by Jimmy and in how the director stages past and present together. The intention here is to assert the ideals of inter-generational connection and filial piety. While these are noble notions, the film implants Communist ideals once again. Cinematic melodrama and spectacle are leveraged once more in soft power strategies to articulate the connectedness and familial bond that can exist between government and citizens. For new generations of domestic or international diasporic Chinese, the film promotes a Communist leadership—through the example of the PLA—that offers the spectator a solicitation of trust. Significantly, this solicitation is directed to ethnic Chinese diasporas, especially those raised in countries apart from Mainland China. Such attempts court transnational spectators to a utopian vision of China as “home” or motherland where one’s cultural and ancestral roots can be recovered, and where histories can be (selectively) remembered.

These themes are evident towards the end of Tiger, in present day. Jimmy returns to his grandmother’s home for Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner, the most important meal of the year in the Chinese calendar, to be shared with close family and/or friends. At the dinner table, Jimmy notices how his table is filled with numerous food dishes, enough to feed an army. Jimmy asks, “Why are there so many guests?”. Grandma responds, “What guests? They are all family”. Indeed, this food is meant for the PLA squad that the spectator has come to know over the course of the film. In the subsequent scene, Jimmy imagines the ghosts of the whole PLA squad as family members, smiling as they join Jimmy at the table (see Figure 10). It is here where we also discover that Jimmy’s grandfather is in fact Knotti, the little boy in the PLA army. Jimmy immediately feels touched and inspired by his Revolutionary vision of his grandfather and his army-family. In tears, Jimmy creates for himself a poignant, joyful remembrance of what family truly means. Spectators, too, are invited to participate in this melodramatic sentiment. Diasporic ethnic Chinese in the West are also invited to re-discover cultural roots with a Chinese motherland that will protect and welcome us. Indeed, spectators are invited to adopt a prosthetic memory of the joys of Revolution, and amnesia of its brutal consequences.

Fig. 10. Chinese New Year’s Eve family dinner with Jimmy, his grandfather Knotti, and the PLA squadron

Again, the involvement of such soft power efforts in this memory production demonstrates the state’s compulsion to (re)create a singular Chinese people, unified and united, regardless of place, space or time for the consumption by both domestic and international audiences.^[41] The implications of this final “family” scene that stretches across time and across geographies raises questions about the intent of such memory production for transnational markets. The importance of Jimmy in this film is both descriptive of the diasporic Chinese situation as well as prescriptive in urging ethnic Chinese in the West to rediscover their roots and heritage through a vision of re-connecting with the Motherland. This discourse of return and recovery of one’s roots in the context of a national, collective identification renders problematic any progressive notions of diasporic return.^[42] The issue at stake here, then, is to what extent these soft power strategies are cultivating dominant relationships of power with overseas diasporas through such (re)productions of memory.  As Laura Marks suggests:

The relationships between cultures are also mediated by power so that the dominant regime….sets the terms of what counts as knowledge….They may evade expression because of censorship; because memory is inaccessible; or because to give expression to memories is to invite madness.  They may become subsumed to the dominant regime and forced to speak its language…. ^[43]

Thus, disrupting these relations of power is not easy.  Hegemonic interference makes it extremely difficult, if nearly impossible, for a new generation to discern the entanglements and tensions between history and memory. Interrogating the possibility of re-written histories therefore requires one to be critically reflexive of how these histories are being envisioned in film. In this way, spectators can see film more actively by asking what sorts of remembrances are being repeated and what images and histories might be actively silenced or ignored. Through such questions and self-reflexivity, one’s individual and collective cultural memory can thus subvert problems of power by examining where there may be gaps in histories and memories.

In this regard, Jimmy’s presence and role in the introduction, middle act, and coda of The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), might, for the more optimistic critic, spark a reflexive awareness of the spectator viewing the film. Perhaps this also reflects Tsui Hark’s subtle tension in articulating the opportunity for spectators to critically engage with the problematic spectacle and political intent of official state memory productions within this film. Even if this optimism is viable, the director’s attempts are nonetheless drowned in the sea of self-congratulatory, hegemonic imagery that is so intent on remembering state legacy and pushing on to the spectator a particular, prosthetic memory of Chinese history.^[44]

Conclusion

Regardless of the director’s intention in this film, identifying the gaps in mediated visions of memory and the processes of silencing often involves critically and reflexively noting what visual, mediated memories have become produced and rendered visible for the transnational audience/spectator. Within Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), this replication of Revolutionary themes is expressed through scenes depicting noble virtues of sacrifice, filial piety, courage, power, and the sentimental articulation of recovering one’s ancestral roots and heritage. These replications and re-appropriations reflect the Communist discourse that is rendered visible through Tiger’s revolutionary imagery. This visible imagery attempts to repeat and retell particular, chosen narratives through the presentation of the PLA. Therefore, these Communist ideologies reflect a utopian ideal that dominated Party politics during the Maoist era, and can be traced back to memory strategies during the Cultural Revolution, including the dominant visual mode of propagandistic posters.

Nonetheless, the state appears to prefer soft power strategies that attain the consent and participation of the population, even as they re-appropriate old propagandistic methods. While these issues of soft power and memory production must be reflexively engaged, to offer immediate scrutiny is perhaps too simplistic. In this article, my position has been to offer a critical yet thoughtful analysis on the hegemonic state production of official memory and (soft) power. However, it may also be important to consider, as Chua Beng-Huat argues, how soft power can also be understood as an important tool towards re-building a nation or society’s international perception, particularly if this society was once marginalized and oppressed by wealthier, more developed countries.^[45] Weaving through the tension of problematic and more optimistic positions of understanding power and memory in relation to the themes I have discussed here would certainly be worthy of future study.

Regardless of how or why power and memory is produced, what is fundamental for spectators is to reflexively examine these issues in light of reflexively considering what issues, histories, and remembrances are at stake and at risk of being lost due to the struggles and tensions of such power. Ultimately, wrestling with this tension through an active engagement may therefore offer a way of reading film that may seek to bring voice to those who are silenced and bring a critical awareness to what histories and memories are rendered visible and invisible.

^[1] Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century, compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, 2^nd ed., vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 474-475.

^[2] Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma (New York: Other Press, 2004), xxvii.

^[3] Beng-Huat Chua. Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012),  6. Originally, the concept of soft power developed from Joseph Nye’s critical analysis of United States strategies and its global influence. However, because of Nye’s America-focused discussion, the concept of soft power and its relevance in different cultural contexts continues to be debated in scholarly literature. Chua’s discussion of soft power adopts Joseph Nye’s arguments while effectively adapting it to East Asian cultural contexts. For the purposes of this paper, I also adopt Chua’s position in my discussion of China’s use of it within popular cinema. However, I want to acknowledge that ongoing scholarly debates critique Nye’s conceptualization of soft power and its applicability to cultural contexts apart from the US. While important, these nuanced debates are beyond the scope of this paper. For excellent discussions and debates on this concept, please see Joseph Nye’s seminal book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). See also Jacques E. C. Hymans article, “India’s soft power and vulnerability”, India Review, 4:2 (2009),  234 – 265. Hymans’ paper critiques the simplicity and applicability of Nye’s soft power in reference to the unique cultural conditions in South Asian contexts. For an excellent examination of the Chinese propaganda system that also departs from Nye and instead focuses on subjective Chinese conceptions, contexts, and perceptions of soft power, see Kingsley Edney’s monograph, The Globalization of Chinese Propaganda: International Power and Domestic Political Cohesion, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

^[4] Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald. “Introducing Posters of China’s Cultural Revolution”. In Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, edited byHarriet Evans and Stephanie Donald. (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999).

^[5] Evans and Donald, 1999,  2.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Diane Lary. The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social  Transformation. 1937-1945. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010),  12.

^[8] Clare Bagshaw. A China Moment.. (Xlibris Corporation, 2012),  54.

^[9] Mo Yan. Red Sorghum. (H. Goldblatt, trans.) (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1994).

^[10] Ban Wang. Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, History in Modern

China. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004),  6.

^[11] Other Fifth Generation Chinese films that critiqued the CCP and their Cultural Revolution include Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993)and Zhang Yimou’s To Live (1994). Both films were also critically acclaimed in European and North American festival circuits but were banned in China.

^[12] Nathan M.L. To, “Transgenerational Hauntings, Media, Memory and Power: Diasporic Visions of Historical Traumas in Modern China through Moving Images”, 2014. Manuscript submitted for publication; see also Nathan M.L. To, “Diasporic Montage and Critical Autoethnography: Mediated Visions of Intergenerational Memory and the Affective Transmission of Trauma”. In: B.T. Knudsen and C. Stage (eds.) Affective Methodologies, (forthcoming). Palgrave. The closest mainstream Chinese film to attempt a critique and commentary of the Cultural Revolution is Lu Chuan’s The Last Supper, based on Liu Bang (Gaozu), whose reign began the Han Dynasty. This film is also discussed in my 2014 paper cited here (see also Andrew and Rapp, 2002, 22).

^[13] Peter Rist. “Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home”. Off Screen, 6:8 (August 2002). Online Journal. [Accessed 03/14/2015].

^[14] The Road Home begins with a man’s return to his home village upon hearing of the death of his father. A flashback ensues, which reveals the film’s central narrative, which is to tell the courtship story of the man’s father and mother.

^[15] Rey Chow, “Sentimental Returns: On the Uses of the Everyday in the Recent Films of Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar-wai”. New Literary History, 33:4 (Autumn 2002),  648.

^[16] ibid.,  652.

^[17] ibid.

^[18] Zhang Xiaoling. China as an Emerging Soft Power: Winning Hearts and Minds through Communicating with Foreign Publics (Discussion Paper 35), October 2008. University of Nottingham: China Policy Institute.

^[19] Don Starr. “The Chinese language education in Europe: the Confucius Institutes”, European Journal of Education, 44: 1 (2009): 65-82.

^[20] To, 2014. The inclusion of Hollywood stars such as Christian Bale also points to the intention to reach an international market, and certainly a specific niche of diasporic ethnic Chinese in “Western” countries who desire to connect and re-connect with these histories. This issue raises questions about the development of a transnational, collective identification to a particular remembrance of history in relation to hegemonic power. For a more comprehensive discussion on this issue, particularly in regard to the Japanese imperial invasion with reference to theories of “affect” and “transgenerational haunting”,  see To, 2014.

^[21] To, 2014. For example, Lu Chuan’s film, City of Life and Death (2009) presents a chilling, graphic vision of the Nanjing Massacre. However, Lu’s film meditates on the difficult question of what defines one’s humanity if one commits great atrocities? Lu allows himself to portray some of these Japanese perpetrators with sympathy and moral shades of grey.

^[22] Rey Chow. “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem”, boundary 2, Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, 25:3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 6-7; Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China On Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 18.

^[23] In the context of the Tiger narrative, the PLA (Communists) were battling the KMT (Republicans) for control over China, continuing a decades long war for power and governance.

^[24] My paper was written based on viewing the 2-D version of this film. According to film reviews, some 3-D effects in cinemas focused on artillery and weapons-fire. These include flying bullets, shells, and cannon fire appeared to fire straight at the audience, and exploding grenades in slow-motion. Please see Yang Fan, “The Taking of Tiger Mountain,” Global Times, December 28 2014, accessed May 5, 2015, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/898920.shtml; “Film Review: The Taking of Tiger Mountain,” December 31 2014, Film Journal International, accessed May 5, 2015, http://www.filmjournal.com/content/film-review-taking-tiger-mountain; Maggie Lee. “Film Review: ‘The Taking of Tiger Mountain’,” Variety, January 1, 2015, accessed May 5, 2015, http://variety.com/2015/film/asia/film-review-the-taking-of-tiger-mountain-1201388202/

^[25] Box office earnings reached over $144 Million USD by March 2, 2015.

^[26] Tom Gunning. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant Garde.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Ed. Adam Barker, Thomas Elsaesser (BFI Publishing, 1990). 56-62. My assertion here refers to Tom Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions.’ Speaking about early American cinema, Gunning says that the cinema of attractions, “directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle- a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself” (p. 58). The debate between Chinese film and Gunning’s concept is beyond the scope of this paper but certainly worthy of future discussion. For excellent discussions on the cinema of attraction in reference to contemporary cinema technology such as 3D, please see Miriam Ross, 3D Cinema: Optical illusions and Tactile Experiences (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

^[27] Jason McGrath. “Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema”. The Opera Quarterly 26: 2-3 (2010): 343-376. This “histrionic” mode of acting contrasts the “verisimilar” mode, which is more similar to modern day approaches that preference a “natural”, realistic acting style that masks the very constructedness of acting.

^[28] McGrath, 2010, 11.

^[29] McGrath, 2010,  8-9.

^[30] Xuelei Huang, “Intellectuals and Cultural Production at the Mingxing (Star) Motion Picture Company (1922-1938)”. 2009. Doctoral Dissertation; McGrath, 2010 in discussion of the communist utopia.  See also Clark, 2008.

^[31] R.S. Watson (ed.), Memory, History, and Opposition Under State Socialism (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994), 2.

^[32] Evans and Donald, 1999,  2. See also Lufrano, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 474-475.

^[33] Poster M104. “Army and People are One Family”. University of Westminster Chinese Poster Collection, London, UK (Digital archive version), November 1973, accessed March 12, 2015, http://chinaposters.westminster.ac.uk/zenphoto/Children/1402_big_0000.jpg. The curator’s description says of this poster: “A soldier cuts a young boy’s hair. The boy carries a small toy rifle. A papercut in the window says ‘Embrace the army, love the people’.”

^[34] Poster M41, “Be Brave Against Your Enemy”. University of Westminster Chinese Poster Collection, London, UK (Digital archive version), January 1979, accessed March 12, 2015, http://chinaposters.westminster.ac.uk/zenphoto/Children/1353_big_0000.jpg.

^[35] Poster M38, “Fight Instigator”. University of Westminster Chinese Poster Collection, London, UK (Digital archive version). August 1976, accessed March 12, 2015, http://chinaposters.westminster.ac.uk/zenphoto/Children/1351_big_0000.jpg. The poster depicts a cropped image of Little Dove, Knotti and Little Juan getting ready to join the PLA at their final battle. In both the poster and in Tiger, wooden staffs are present in the poster.

^[36] Poster K6, “I love the blue sky of the motherland”. University of Westminster Chinese Poster Collection, London, UK (Digital archive version). June 1976, accessed 14 March, 2015, http://chinaposters.westminster.ac.uk/zenphoto/National%20Festival%20and%20Patriotism/1292_big_0000.jpg

^[37] Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

^[38] My initial thought of this scene was of it demonstrating the soldiers’ filial piety for their elder. While this might also be true, a more accurate Communist narrative is the revolutionary army’s commitment to the poor, and to the common people/villagers. In the Cultural Revolution, Confucian origins of filial piety were overturned by Mao. Sons and daughters would turn against their fathers and mothers and report them to the Red Army if they betrayed the Revolutionary cause. This also pointed to Mao’s status as the revolutionary’s “true” father. Nonetheless, within Revolutionary supporters, respect for senior authorities was embedded within cultural consciousness.

^[39] As described by the PLA 8181 Troop political department itself: “A PLA soldier wears a doctor’s coat and holds a stethoscope. Another PLA soldier plays a musical instrument, while a female soldier sits with an old lady on the kang. The room is full of peasants, and a barefoot doctor is carrying satchel on the table. Set in northern China.”

^[40] Evans and Donald 1999,  2.

^[41] To, 2014,  3.

^[42] Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller (2003). “Introduction: Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration”, in S. Ahmed, C. Castañeda, A Fortier, and M. Sheller (eds.), Uprooting/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg), p. 2.  In contrast to traditional notions of “diaspora” which can be problematic due to the issue colonial histories for some cultures, Ahmed et al. see diaspora differently. They argue for a position of ‘regroundings—of identity, culture, nation, diaspora—[that] can both resist and reproduce hegemonic forms of home and belonging’,  2.

^[43] Laura Marks, Skin of the Film (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2000), 24.

^[44] Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). According to Landsberg, “Prosthetic memories are adopted as the result of a person’s experience with a mass cultural technology of memory that dramatizes or recreates a history that he or she did not live”, 29.

^[45] Chua, 2012,  23,129. For Chua, this was evident in the development of the Korean wave. According to Chua, this helped transform the international, public perception of South Korea from a marginalized country enslaved as a source of comfort women for colonial oppressors like the Japanese imperial army, to one that became envied for their beautiful women, handsome men, and trendy fashion.

Notes on Contributor

Nathan M.L. To has a Ph.D from the Media and Communication Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research explores the entanglement between affect, media, diasporas and the intergenerational transmission of trauma through distributed, mediated visions of memory in the 2nd generation Chinese-Canadian experience. Prior to Goldsmiths, he studied his MA in Canada specializing in Counselling Psychology. He is certified as a clinical counselor in Canada and continues to consult as a Media Psychology/Clinical Researcher-Consultant. Overall, Nathan’s diverse background has developed interdisciplinary research interests including trauma and memory studies, cultural studies, critical media psychology, Asian studies, diaspora, and digital media research.

Bibliography

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Filmography

The Blue Kite (Lan feng zheng, Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1993).

City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing!, Lu Chuan, 2009).

Coming Home (Gui Lai, Zhang Yimou, 2014).

The Dark Knight Trilogy  (Christopher Nolan, 2005 – 2012).

Farewell My Concubine (Ba wang bie ji, Chen Kaige, 1993).

The Flowers of War (Jin líng shí san chai, Zhang Yimou, 2011).

The Founding of a Republic (Jian guo da ye, Han Sanping and Huang Jianxin, 2009).

The Last Supper (Wang de Shengyan, Lu Chuan, 2012).

The Road Home (Wo de fu qin mu qin, Zhang Yimou, 1999).

The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhì qu weihu shan, Tsui Hark, 2014).

To Live (Huo zhe, Zhang Yimou, 1994).