Visual cultures: Tele-visions

Contemporary approaches in media history are used here to analyze the role of cinema and television in twentieth-century culture, economy, and politics in particular. Tracking the transformation of visual cultures, Anikó Imre applies a post-colonial critique both to great works of high art and to popular cultures in Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. She argues that the gradual globalization of the dominant visual languages characterizing the region have actually been tied to highly specific power relations and institutional arrangements in socialist and post-socialist times. This chapter argues that the gradual globalization of the dominant visual languages characterizing the region have actually been tied to highly specific power relations and institutional arrangements in socialist and post-socialist times. Writing a history of socialist television histories is therefore a large and necessarily collective project only recently begun by scholars in research centres in Europe and scattered across the globe. Television was first introduced in most countries of the region during the pre-war period, in step with the United States and Western Europe. Television under Soviet-style socialism followed Western European broadcasters’ commitment to realism and an ethos of public service. The most direct result of imagining TV as a massive school house was School TV. The category of education most favoured by party authorities, but least successful with audiences, was overtly ideological, agitational-propaganda programming about Marxism, socialism and the workings of a socialist society. All socialist countries engaged in some form of television advertising.