This project investigates art and cultural concepts of the "Swiss Film Newsreel" (Schweizer Filmwochenschau, SFW) as an audiovisual mass medium after the Second World War, focusing on selected items and placing them in the context of Switzerland as a knowledge-based society. At the centre of the project is the question of what role art and culture played in national self-affiliation processes and definitions, and how SFW contributed to the construction of a national identity.
Art, cultural consciousness and Switzerland as a knowledge-based society. Constructions of cultural identity in the Swiss Film Newsreel 1940–1975. Research subject, research to date and questions addressed: Up until the introduction of television in the 1950s, weekly newsreels were the main audiovisual medium for information, education and entertainment all around the world. As well as illustrating and reporting on national cultural and social life, they helped to define it. Accordingly, in his critique of this medium, Hans Magnus Enzensberger acknowledged it as a major cultural influence. This influence was particularly marked in the case of the Swiss Film Newsreel (SFW), in which art and culture topics were given a high priority in both quantitative and qualitative terms. This, together with the cinematic style of the reports – a combination of documentary and fiction modes – gave SFW a special character, defined in part by the institutional origin of this public information vehicle. As a newsreel screened in picture theatres before the main feature, SFW functioned as a state information medium in the service of morale building from 1940 to 1975, and up until the introduction of the daily TV news occupied a monopoly position in the audiovisual sector. SFW continued to reach a large proportion of the population through to the 1960s. It therefore played a major part in forming the collective visual memory and conceptions of Swiss cultural identity and the national self-image. SFW has been the subject of research since the late 1970s, initiated soon after production of the programme was halted in 1975, when it became unable to compete with television. Most research to date has been focused on the media history, historical and sociopolitical perspectives, however. Less attention has been paid to SFW from a purely film studies viewpoint, and the medium's reporting of art and culture has not been investigated at all. In view of this situation, and closely linked with it, two collaborative research projects, based at the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ZHdK) and the Art History Section of the University of Lausanne, carried out a comprehensive examination of the picture of Swiss "culture" portrayed in SFW, its locations, actors, mechanisms and strategies. The two-fold project analyses the concepts of art underlying the newsreel reports and follows the construction of artists' careers via this medium. This includes the examination of gender-specific mechanisms, and the operation of basic narrative patterns in the art and culture reports. Special attention is also given to the specific features, the "discontinuities" and "lacunae" in the conception and style of the reports during the years the newsreel was made. As well as being considered separately, the reports on art, art exhibitions, and artists are scrutinized as part of the total content covered in each edition, and situated in the context of overall social conditions. The projects looke at the way in which reports on art, cultural events and artists are linked formally and thematically to preceding or following reports, to give them more impact and connotative corroboration. Another focus is on how the various art sectors and forms (and which artists) are linked in this way to other areas of activity, such as architecture, technology, engineering or industry, consumption, fashion, leisure pursuits, etc. The projects refer to SFW as a "cultural repository". They start from the premise that art is a complex system of symbolic forms, with multiple interlinkages, deriving some of its power via the "fiction of reality" or the "reality of fiction", i.e. via distinctive features and mechanisms inherent in SFW as a medium. The two-fold project investigates the interdependencies between social, aesthetic and medial change, and locates the intersection points that operate as transitions. It explored the significance of art in the context of national self-affiliation processes and Switzerland's self-definition as a state, which SFW was called on to advance as an essential part of its role as a mass medium. These research projects fill a gap in existing research in two senses: on the one hand, this is an aspect that has not been addressed in previous work on SFW. On the other, meanwhile, the two projects complement or extend the research that has been carried out from an art-historical perspective on Swiss cultural consciousness, which was undergoing momentous changes at that time. The research determines the extent to which SFW reflected this in its reports, and what was deliberately left out of the picture. Attention is given to the ways in which art was situated within the context of the knowledge-based society of the time (including cinematic style and narrative aspects), which concept of art was used to discuss and inform the public of which specific artistic trends and artists, and to what extent the medium also gave space to avant-garde and future-oriented trends. The projects therefore look into the function and use of art as an element in communicating the "grand narrative" of Switzerland at that time, so called because of its role in constituting meaning. The methodological approach is therefore context-based in the widest sense, and interdisciplinary, given the subject matter and its significance. It is based on art studies, semiology of art and discourse analysis-focused theory, combining art and film studies analysis methods. As a result, and through the research subject matter, the two projects draw on the realignment of art and cultural studies currently taking place, which assigns increased importance to "moving pictures" as a significant source of information on the society in general in the visual history context. Research and thematic focal points: The dual project addresses newsreel items over the entire duration of the production of SFW, from 1940 to 1975. The main focus is, however, on the 1950s and 1960s – the "classic" decades of the medium – and the first years of the shake-up of the media mix around 1970 – a time that was also a watershed in the development of so-called Swiss "culture". The projects concentrate on the following interdependent activity and thematic focal points, the first of which is developed in the context of a lecturer's qualification (Habilitation) project, and the second as a thesis project:
A. The concept of art and culture adopted in SFW as a mass medium, and art in the context of Switzerland as a knowledge-based society
B. "Culture", its components, mechanisms, actors and "lacunae".
Over the course of the research projects, a moderated film cycle and an international interdisciplinary conference are held, to situate and discuss the findings regarding Swiss art and culture in SFW in the context of international weekly newsreel coverage of art. The results are published in the form of Habilitation and degree theses, and a joint conference proceedings volume has also appeared.
Publication:
Imesch, Kornelia/Schade, Sigrid/Sieber, Samuel (eds.): Constructions of Cultural Identities in Newsreel Cinema and Television after 1945, transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2016