Television and Cinematograph: Dis-articulating and Re-branding the Nation

Double occupancy, as the co-extensiveness of symbolic and ethnic identities, but also the overlap of media representations, racial stereotypes and day-to-day discriminations, connects directly with the re-figuration of the nation and the national discussed in an earlier chapter. For as already argued, the communication revolutions, together with the media-consciousness and media-skills of diaspora communities, have played a major role in the present resurgence of nationalism and the polarisation of public culture and politics. In some instances, such as militant Islamism, technologies like the mobile phone or the internet are said to have exacerbated the feeling of belonging to quite distinct global cultural formations, having to fight for the space of recognition, if necessary with violent means, at the state or local level.

But this analysis foreshortens considerably some of the key developments both in the media and around the notion of the nation and the state from the time that the 1970s and 80s. As pointed out earlier, and argued elsewhere in this volume, the role of representing the nation is commonly assumed to have passed to television. Yet deregulation, privatization and a ratings war between public service and commercial broadcasters has changed the very terms of this representation. For instance, Channel Four in Britain has often been seen as a test case for the shift in paradigm of how the media affect the lived reality of nationhood. In the face of competition from US television imports and needing to profile itself as distinct from both the BBC and its commercial counterpart, ITV, Channel Four had as part of its license remit a new articulation of the nation. In C4's programming Britain appeared as much more diverse and plural than the BBC & ITV had led viewers to believe, with issues of race, of gender, of sexual orientation, as well as region, neighborhood or age (the broadcaster Janet Street-Porter is credited with successfully launching "yoof" culture) coming to the fore. At the same time, these groups were increasingly addressed not as belonging to the same nation, but consisting of interest groups, consumer groups or minorities, rather than being addressed as citizen.

Similar developments could be shown to have taken place in Germany, the Netherlands or France, although in some cases with a ten-year delay. This break up of the nation into segments of consumers, so powerfully pushed by television from the time that the 1990s in every European country including central and eastern Europe, and observed with such despair by those concerned about democracy and the fraying of civic life, must thus be seen to be a thoroughly double-sided phenomenon. It has created spaces for self-representation, even if only in the form of niche-markets, and it has radically de-hierarchized the social pyramids of visual representation, while clearly neither dissolving stereotypes, nor necessarily contributing to a more equitable, multi-cultural society. It is this paradox of simultaneous dis-articulating the nation as citizen, while re-articulating it as a collection of consumers that, I would argue, has radicalized and compartmentalized European societies, but it has also created new spaces, not all of which need to be seen as socially divisive. Yet the manner in which these spaces henceforth communicate with each other, or take on trans-personal and inter-subjective functions, because no longer following the separation of realms into "private" and "public", "interior" and "exterior", has also affected the respective roles played by the cinematograph and television.

One consequence might well be, for instance, that the cinematograph, instead of asserting its national identity by opposing the hegemony of Hollywood, has, in truth, national television as its constantly present but never fully articulated "other". The resulting confusion can be read off any number of European movies. In a movie like La Haine, for instance, television is precisely such a constant ubiquitous presence, the visual catalyst for moving from the bleu-blanc-rouge of the tricolor of "white" France (on television, still very much state-controlled), to the black-blanc-beur of multicultural France (as lived in the streets). Television is despised by the movie's youthful heroes for its lies and distortions, and yet they go to extraordinary lengths in order to be featured on it. In Goodbye Lenin, the "reality" of the disappeared German Democratic Republic is maintained via the simulated television broadcasts, fighting against the billboards increasingly invading the streets, and yet the hero in the end says: "I was beginning to believe in the fiction we had created: finally there was a GDR as we had all dreamt it." Meanwhile, in the British movie About a Boy, television is explicitly cast in the role of the derided "other", against which the Hugh Grant character tries to define a consumerist cool, whose codes, poses and gadgets are - ironically -derived from the very ads shown on the despised box. The confusion is compounded, on the other hand, when one thinks of how the European cinematograph has developed a kind of retroactive national vernacular, discussed in an earlier chapter as a way of "accenting"5 the local or the regional within the global context, or packaging the past as heritage industry. A movie like Jean Pierre Jeunet's Amelie was roundly condemned for its fake image of Montmartre, straight out of Hollywood's picture-publication Paris, and Goodbye Lenin has been seen as a shameless pandering towards Ostalgie, i.e., nostalgia for the GDR, conveniently obliterating the stultifying repression, the permanent surveillance, and the wooden language of official hypocrisy its citizens were subject to.