Modernization, Nation-Building, and Television History

Stewart Anderson,Melissa Chakars

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317677987
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Television

This innovative collection investigates the ways in which television programs around the world have highlighted modernization and encouraged nation-building. It is an attempt to catalogue and better understand the contours of this phenomenon, which took place as television developed and expanded in different parts of the world between the 1950s and the 1990s. From popular science and adult education shows to news magazines and television plays, few themes so thoroughly penetrated the small screen for so many years as modernization, with television producers and state authorities using television programs to bolster modernization efforts. Contributors analyze the hallmarks of these media efforts: nation-building, consumerism and consumer culture, the education and integration of citizens, and the glorification of the nation's technological achievements.

1
The Opening Ceremonies of Television in Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina

Mirta Varela

While histories of cinema tell how filmmakers rose from the obscurity of Le Grand Café in Paris to the summit of artistic recognition, histories of radio tend to emphasize the experiments carried out by passionate young men in homemade laboratories before radio became a widespread medium in the 1930s. In both cases, the story of a shift from the margins to center stage reveals legitimacy based on cinema or radio’s popularity, or the recognition of their technical or aesthetic virtues. In contrast, the launch of television in many parts of the world was marked by grandiose state rituals led by presidents in national public buildings that contributed to an external institutional legitimacy. Society did not take long to acknowledge this righteousness, since the state had already established its importance from the very beginning. This origin of television left no doubts about its value as a political tool to construct hegemonic power. By contrast, its aesthetic and revolutionary potential would always be regarded with suspicion. The history of television cannot be explained solely through its origin, but it is worthwhile to evaluate this initial moment that presented features common to many countries, as well as national nuances. In this regard, the inaugural ceremonies, which were attended by officials from the national governments with the explicit aim of reinforcing national values by way of modern technology, are events particularly suitable for comparison in the history of television.

The first countries to begin regular television broadcasts in Latin America were Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina between September 1950 and October 1951.¹ Although print media, cinema, and radio had been developed to different degrees in each of these countries, by the mid-twentieth century all four of these nations had a consolidated media market, and it is no coincidence that they were the first to inaugurate television systems in Latin America during a relatively early period in comparison with many other countries around the world. Argentina had released its first film in 1896 and celebrated its first radio transmission in 1920. In the 1920s, Argentina was the country with the highest literacy level of Latin America (higher than that of many European countries) and shared with Mexico a leading position in the publishing industries of the Spanish-speaking market.² Between 1938 and 1949, Mexican cinema experienced a true golden age that allowed it to compete for Hispanic markets. Film historian Eduardo de la Vega characterizes this process as an “economic and cultural sub-imperialism”³ on the continent. As for the Brazilian culture industry, it did not reach the levels of development of Mexico and Argentina during the first decades of the twentieth century, although the inauguration of television did coincide with a cultural expansion that would result in two key phenomena in Brazilian cultural modernization: Cinema Nôvo and Música Popular Brasileira.⁴

Finally, moving on to Cuba, the island had one of the most developed private broadcasting systems in Latin America by the mid-twentieth century, a system that was fully transformed after the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959. In this regard, television could be considered part of a history of technical and cultural modernization undertaken by other media sources in these countries in the past. However, television also coincides with a phase of major political, economic, and cultural transformations that changed the role of each of these countries on the continental market. During the two decades in which Latin American television systems were built, launched, and consolidated—from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s—much was changing in the Americas. Cuba became a cultural and political point of reference for Latin American artists and intellectuals as it was forced out of commercial trade; the Mexican cultural industry experienced solid economic growth; Argentina relinquished its hegemonic position; and the Brazilian cultural industry began to rise. Therefore, we could hypothesize that television starts just as the history of the cultural industry in each of these regions—and the relations among the principal domestic markets of cultural goods in them—had reached a turning point. Thus, analyzing the inaugural ceremonies from this perspective can offer unique insight into these processes.

In all four of the countries that are the focus of this study, there were events organized in conjunction with national administrations in order to officially launch television: Presidents Miguel Alemán Valdés (Mexico), Carlos Prío Socarrás (Cuba), and Juan Domingo Perón (Argentina) each gave a speech on the new medium during the inauguration of television in their countries. In short, these were ceremonies that brought into play a conception of what was public: the role of television and its place in national history. In this regard, it is useful to note that these ceremonies were not exclusive to Latin America, but instead characteristic of the beginnings of television almost worldwide. In the case of Germany, for example, the 1936 Olympic Games were chosen as the framework for the introduction of television by the Nazi regime. In the United States, it was the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, and the first broadcast images showed President Franklin D. Roosevelt giving a speech to an audience of international politicians that included the Queen of England. As for Spain, where television did not appear until 1956, the inaugural event was a mass led by a representative of the pope, broadcast from an altar that had been set up at the channel’s studio.⁵ In each case, the exhibition was about more than simply showing the power of each national administration. Instead, an appropriate framework was chosen to broadcast the symbols of the nation: the Olympic City and sports in Germany (sports, nationalism, and TV would become a strong trio from then on); the World’s Fair and technological modernity in the United States; and mass and Catholicism in the case of Spain. In Brazil, the topics and traditions that contributed to consolidating national myths became resources for legitimizing the new television medium at the service of national entrepreneurs, not of the state. In this way, the symbols of the nation prevail over the differences between commercial and public services. The relationship between television and the nation appeared even when technical infrastructure was not national at all.

However, focusing exclusively on these events can be problematic. In a certain way, this emphasis contradicts the interpretation of history as a process and the conception of the media as an integrated system. It is impossible to overlook the justified suspicions associated with histories that hone in on the inaugural moment. Jean-Louis Comolli has defined the histories of cinema as a catalogue of the “first time that …,” and I have no intention of repeating this scheme with respect to television.⁶ Thus, while this chapter does consider a focus on inaugural events useful, it is nevertheless important to critically reflect on this decision.

Media events as defined by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz became huge celebrations of mass communications in the second half of the twentieth century.⁷ A person landing on the moon, the World Cup, the Olympics, royal weddings, and state funerals are some of these decisive events, which required sufficient television coverage and a mass audience. The inaugural ceremonies of television systems have several features that are characteristic of media events: they were broadcast live and in real time; they interrupted a routine; and they were planned and festive. However, they don’t meet all of the conditions listed by Dayan and Katz, precisely because they were inaugural. For this reason, they were not able to interrupt a programming schedule that did not yet exist, and they were also unable to congregate large audiences because there were only a handful of television sets to receive the broadcasts in each of the cities where the ceremonies took place. Nevertheless, these inaugural events where television introduced and celebrated itself added a defining feature to the mass media. Self-referentiality can be considered decisive in the changes that occurred in television discourse from the 1980s that would correspond to a stage in the history of television that many scholars have characterized as neo-television.⁸ This work will attempt to show that self-referentiality and the creation of events depicted as major celebrations both occurred from the very first moment of television, although the extent of these tendencies varied in each country. In fact, one problem with the notions of paleo - and neo-television is that it leads to theoretical hypotheses on a medium that has had very different histories depending on the society in which it was developed. During the phase known as paleo-television, the world was shown as an “open window,” while the technical artifice that made television broadcasting possible was disguised. This simulated transparency was coherent with the informative role of modern media, which had established a clear distinction between information and entertainment, fiction, and non-fiction. In contrast, neo-television corresponds to a postmodern phase characterized by self-referentiality and the obfuscation of these roles. In this regard, I believe that a comparative historical study of the first period of international television history would allow us to move toward a more precise definition. First, we can observe that the features that allow us to differentiate between systems of public versus private broadcasting also permit the supposed stages of paleo- and neo-television to be distinguished. Second, it is important to point out that accepting the neo-television notion means agreeing with the implicit category of postmodernity, which directly affects the way in which television is involved in different forms of modernization. The entire characterization of Latin American societies entails the contrasts between tradition and modernity, development and underdevelopment, and therefore the discussion on postmodernism (which is supposed to be contemporary of the ascent of neo-television) had specific features in the region.⁹ Therefore, a more detailed historical analysis will help to define television as an institution and outline its relationship to other political, economic, and cultural institutions that have played significant roles in the processes of modernization.

The observation of certain features of these opening ceremonies—like the location chosen for the transmission, the main speaker, the size of the audience, and the relationship between the event, other media, and the television programming after the event—allows us to point out the similarities and differences in the meaning of this new medium in each of the countries where it was incorporated. Thus, by using common elements from events that took place right around the same time, one of the objectives of this work is to highlight the nuances that differentiated the launch of television in each of these places in order to reach certain hypotheses for a comparative investigation of the media in Latin America during this period. The descriptions of the inaugural events in Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina come from print media sources and surviving film reels. Few moving images of these ceremonies remain, and the respective television channels stored no recording of their live broadcasts at that time; however, the existence of film shows the political importance of these events.

Mexico: XHTV Canal 4 at the Congress in Mexico City

Mexico was the first country in Latin America to launch television. Its inaugural broadcast was the fourth government report by President Miguel Alemán Valdés on September 1, 1950. The broadcast began at 10:00 a.m. at the Palacio de Donceles, the Congress building in Mexico City, and the reading of the report, which lasted four hours, began at 11:00 a.m. The event was broadcast by XHTV Canal 4, the channel of Rómulo O’Farrill, who also owned the Novedades chain of newspapers. However, just a year later another channel appeared, XEW Canal 2. This was owned by Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, who had set up Churubusco Studios in the 1940s and who owned Radio XEW, “The voice of Latin America from Mexico.”¹⁰

Reading the government’s report, it is clear that this was a very important event in Mexican politics, and Palacio de Donceles served as a majestic architectural framework for the public broadcast. The film images of the event show President Alemán at the center of the shots, though he is surrounded by a numerous group of government officials. These images (there is no surviving direct sound from the broadcast) reveal two radio microphones from STE and XEW, both of which evidently broadcast the report as well. Television, in contrast, is absent both visually and aurally: there is no sign of television cameras or microphones at the scene. The fact that certain legislators glanced at the cameras from time to time showed that they were aware it was rolling, but it is impossible to see the looks on their faces when they glanced at the other technical apparatuses (the television camera), with which they were not yet familiarized and which probably caught their attention.

The focus of the scene alternates between the president and the legislators in a space that is the public sphere of republican government par excellence. However, the Palacio de Donceles was not a building that just any citizen entered, and thus the broadcast from the congressional floor allowed viewers to get past the visual borders of the congressional walls. Although photographs and films had already “opened” this political space to the public, television gave it a new dimensi...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 The Opening Ceremonies of Television in Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina
• 2 Modernity as “Urbanity” in Early Public Service Broadcasting: The Case of Flanders
• 3 Pro Wrestling and Crying Cowboys: American Influence on Early Japanese Television
• 4 The Tightrope between East and West: East German Television Fiction from the 1960s and the Representation of a Socialist Modernity
• 5 Television Changing Habits: TV Programming in 1960s Soviet Latvia
• 6 Ethiopian Television Service as a Mosaic Modernity Project, 1964–1974
• 7 A Lachrymose Heroine for the Masses: The Origins of the Cinderella Plotline in Mexican Telenovelas, 1968–1973
• 8 Flowers, Steppe Fires, and Communists: Images of Modernity and Identity on TV Shows from Soviet Buryatia in the Brezhnev Era
• 9 “Blue and White” Science and Technology: Nationality and Popular Science on Israeli Television, 1968–1988
• 10 From “The Devil in the Black Box” to a Nation-Building Tool: Early TV in South Africa—A New Medium for a New Nation
• Contributors
• Index