Paul Grainge

RECLAIMING HERITAGE: COLOURIZATION, CULTURE WARS AND THE POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA

This article considers the discursive continuities between a specifically liberal defence of cultural patrimony, evident in the debate over film colourization, and the culture war critique associated with neo-conservatism. It examines how a rhetoric of nostalgia, linked to particular ideas of authenticity, canonicity and tradition, has been mobilized by the right and the left in attempts to stabilize the configuration and perceived transmission of American cultural identity. While different in scale, colourization and multiculturalism were seen to create respective (postmodern) barbarisms against which defenders of culture, heritage and good taste could unite. I argue that in its defence of the ‘classic’ work of art, together with principles of aesthetic distinction and the value of cultural inheritance, the anti-colourization lobby helped enrich and legitimize a discourse of tradition that, at the end of the 1980s, was beginning to reverberate powerfully in the conservative challenge to a ‘crisis’ within...

A song and dance: Branded entertainment and mobile promotion

This article considers the rise of branded entertainment within the contemporary marketing and media environment. Specifically, it examines how mobile phone marketing in the UK has sought to engage consumers and perform the social use of mobile technology through multimedia ad campaigns with an inscribed entertainment value. Focusing on brand campaigns for 3G mobile services that borrow explicitly from reality television (T-Mobile) and Hollywood film (Orange), the article explores the concept of branded entertainment in relation to the ‘popular imagination’ of mobile communication in the late 2000s. In doing so, it examines the particular relation of flash mobs to the production of brand community.

Elvis sings for the BBC: broadcast branding and digital media design

This essay uses a striking example of digital remix promotion - BBC Radio 2’s Elvis ad - to examine developments in the contemporary branding and broadcast environment. Developing work by John Caldwell, it examines the Elvis ad as a ‘deep text’, a promotionally reflexive articulation by media industries about the nature of corporate media identity and aesthetics. Suggestive of the BBC’s attempt since the late 1990s to make its brand ‘sing’, and relating specifically to the visualization of radio in the digital age, the essay uses the Elvis ad to investigate the performance of network personality in the multi-channel era, the growing role of brand/design companies such as Red Bee Media, and the operational and ontological transition of the BBC to a digital media world. More generally, the essay considers the relation of found-footage promotion to the ‘spatialization of audiovisual culture’.

TIME'S Past in the Present: Nostalgia and the Black and White Image

In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope sent back to astronomers at the University of Arizona a series of vivid colour images of the Eagle Nebula, a dense formation of interstellar gas and dust the likes of which cradle newborn stars. As evidence that our perceptual universe, in every sense of the word, is defined by the representational powers of colour technology, the Hubbles “cosmic close-ups” are a clear case in point. Colour has become a standard representational form and hence the visual form. If so, what can be said of the recent popularity and proliferation of the black-and-white image? No self-respecting cafe-bar or discriminating home, it seems, can now do without a black and white print on the wall. Commercial photography and certain forms of advertising have found a new niche in black and white, and even sepia is staging a come-back. The popularity of the black-and-white image cannot be divorced from the commercial culture in which it circulates; it is a “look” and a marker of taste. Monochrome is a stylistic trend but a revealing one, especially if one considers the growing preoccupation in America with heritage and memory. Both Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes give black and white a status of authenticity judged in relation to past time “properly” captured. For Sontag, monochrome gives an image a sense of age, historical distance, and aura. She writes, “the cold intimacy of color seems to seal off the photograph from patina.” Likewise, Barthes comments on the artifice of colour, how it is a “coating applied later on to the original truth of black and white.” For both critics, monochrome is an aesthetic of the authentic figured around a basic quality of pastness.

Film histories : an introduction and reader

Arranged chronologically, Film Histories is a wide-ranging anthology that covers the history of film from 1885 to the present. Each chapter contains an introduction by the editors on key developments within the respective period, followed by a classic piece of historical research about that period. Various approaches to film history are taken by the authors of the articles, exposing readers to different forms of historical research. Topics include: the history of audiences, exhibition, marketing, censorship, aesthetic history, political history, and historical reception studies.Film Histories concentrates on the so-called historical turn in film studies, demonstrating that film history is about more than simply key films, directors, and movements. Also included is a preface explaining the structure and organization of the book. The contents are divided into sections on American and non-American research, thus designed to reach a wide student audience at the undergraduate level. Chapter introductions provide an overview of international developments in film.

‘Moments and opportunities’: Interstitials and the promotional imagination of BBC iPlayer

This article examines the promotion of the BBC’s online streaming and download service, iPlayer, as it has been presented to audiences through broadcast television. Analysing transitions in the BBC’s representation of iPlayer, it considers the promotional imagination of the service during the 2010s, a period when the Corporation was striving to communicate its digital identity and broaden iPlayer within mainstream use. Through industrial–textual analysis, the essay considers the paratextual function of iPlayer interstitials, and the relation of on-air promos to the Corporation’s internal strategy for the service in moving ‘beyond PC, beyond catch-up, beyond the early-adopter’.

‘Show us your moves’: trade rituals of television marketing

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the professional culture of television marketing in the UK, the sector of arts marketing responsible for the vast majority of programme trailers and channel promos seen on British television screens. Design/methodology/approach – In research approach, it draws on participant observation at Promax UK, the main trade conference and award ceremony of the television marketing community. Developing John Caldwell’s analysis of the cultural practices of worker groups, it uses Promax as a site of study itself, exploring how a key trade gathering forges, legitimates and ritualizes the identity and practice of those involved in television marketing. Findings – Its findings show how Promax transmits industrial lore, not only about “how to do” the job of television marketing but also “how to be” in the professional field. If trade gatherings enable professional communities to express their own values to themselves, Promax members are constructed as “TV people” rather ...

Ancillary academia: video shorts and the production of university paratexts

ABSTRACT This article considers the production of media paratexts beyond the bounds of the entertainment industry. Specifically, it examines the development of video content strategy by universities, and the paratextual function that video shorts serve in the construction of institutional identity. Taking a production studies approach, the article expands the scope of paratextual analysis by exploring the development of video content by university marketers, and the role of promotional intermediaries in selling video expertise to the education market.