Contemporary Media Remembrance

Dr Maggie Andrews University of Staffordshire

 

Under no circumstances should this material be quoted from or copied without express permission from the author.

 

Introduction

 

In the period since the First World War conflict and remembrance have been experienced both at a personal level and through a range of media.  As Jay Winter argues remembrance is ‘an activity of agents who congregate on the borderline between private and public, between families, civil society and the state’ (2006 p 150). From the Daily Sketch’s reproduction of images of loved ones picked from Battlefields in 1916 to the contemporary websites such as Youtube media remembrance has served as an interface between the personal, domestic, unofficial sides of remembrance and its national, official and public role. The boundary between the public and private faces of remembrance is however shifting, fluid, porous and open to contestation. Within contemporary media remembrance, a range of new media technologies have facilitated a greater prioritising of the private face of remembrance.

This is congruent with broader cultural shifts in contemporary media saturated society whereby the confessional and therapeutic culture of daytime television, tabloid newspapers, Ok Magazine, facebook, blogs and twitter, celebrate intimate revelations and  the public airing of what would once have been private (domestic even feminized) emotions and experiences.  Such public outpouring of emotions are made possible by significant technological developments – the miniaturization, the transportability and mass production of new media technology has broadened access to be both a producer and a consumer of media texts.

The proliferation of Television hours facilitated by the popularisation of digital and satellite technology since the 1990s has brought about an expansion of cheap programming with a high level of audience / ‘ordinary person’ input – chatshows, reality and lifestyle programming abounds. Whilst the contemporary internet, the second generation of web-based material – known as Web 2.0 – has four key characteristics: interactivity, user participation, dynamic content and freedom. Whereas traditional media, and the early internet, relied upon the consumption of material produced by media organizations Web 2.0 content emphasises private individuals input – as they upload and download images, videos, music, contacts and content, contributing to for example discussion boards or social networking sites.

I will briefly focus on two areas of contemporary media remembrance –  broadcasting around remembrance Sunday and remembrance of the Iraq and Afghan wars on the social network site Youtube. Arguably public remembrance events and spaces are perceived as using a language, imagery and iconography that is: institutionally organised, formal, military, structured and emotionally restrained. I will suggest that alternatively contemporary media remembrance, the television and internet in particular, have the potential to offer more diverse even democratic, informal, domestic, emotionally unrestrained forms of remembrance which are crucially seen as one step removed from: government authority, the military, hierarchal groups and most importantly support for war and conflict.  It is this alongside the familiarity of style and medium which enable some of these texts to speak to constituencies who feel may excluded from more traditional forms of public remembrance.

 

Background – remembrance is not new

We should however remember that media remembrance is not a new phenomenon and has always.

had a democratizing tendency. In the aftermath of the first world war the steady popularization of radio moved it from being an ‘unruly guest’ to a ‘friend in the corner’ in the majority of British homes. Radio consequently enabled ordinary citizens to experience many events once the privilege of only a few. Thus during the 1920s and 1930s the broadcasting of the Remembrance Service, live from the cenotaph on Armistice Day, enabled this ceremony and the two minutes silence to become a truly national event. Individuals within the private space of their homes experienced this public event and were able to forge a sense of belonging and identification with the ‘imagined community’ of the nation (Anderson 1991 reprinted 2006)

Many others in the following weeks watched recordings of Remembrance Day ceremonies in cinemas  where Luke McKernan explains the remembrance day service was ‘the most hallowed day in the newsreel calendar… the story often occupying an entire newsreel’. The importance of the event emphasized in the opening credits of the Tropical Budget newsreel of 1925 ceremony which suggested, “the whole Empire was hushed into … silence.” Whilst in 1924 the Tropical Budget remembrance film had visually and narratively linked private and public remembrance. Watching such ceremonies in cinemas mirrors to some degree the remembrance ceremonies themselves – all be it with a time lag. The audience is still in a public space, in the main surrounded by strangers with little control of, or input into events. Alternatively broadcast media is generally consumed within the private domestic spaces enabling it in time to produce a more personal domestic version of remembrance.

 

Remembrance Television

The economic framework of the contemporary multichannel Television landscape and the scope to re-screen programmes in another year, on another channel and/or in another country has facilitated expediential growth in the broadcast programming that accompanies Remembrance Day. The Radio and Television still provide access to the traditional to the ceremony at the cenotaph and the British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance from the Royal Albert Hall but this is only part of, what the  BBC in 2008 began referring to as its, ‘remembrance season’. In the age of narrowcasting, with much smaller audiences across a range of channels and mediums broadcasters no longer  expect a national  audience although remembrance has become more tele-visual embracing populist and feminized genres such as :, costume drama, lifestyle and reality television, docudramas alongside music, documentaries, current affairs and a range of news coverage, enabling them to create multiple and more varied narratives of the past; for example – Ian Hyslop’s (Channel 4 2005) series Not Forgotten - The Shot at Dawn episode and the docudrama  Walter Tull : Forgotten Hero (BBC 4 2009) which focused on the first Black British Army Officer.

Two recent examples of – this are My Boy Jack shown by ITV on Remembrance Sunday 2007 and  My Family at War part of the BBC’s 2008 remembrance season; both of these provide a domestic and personal approach to remembrance centred upon the effects of war on families whilst still utilising to familiar iconography of the Western Front and the historical era.

My Boy Jack is a costume drama about the death, on the Western Front, of the only son of the Rudyard Kipling a popular novelist and WW 1 propagandist. It was shown by ITV at 9:00pm on Remembrance Sunday in 2007. The losses of the Western Front become personalised in the loss of one soldier – Jack  – the  pain caused by his death rupturing  a home and  family with a melodramatic excess of emotion.

Jack’s death floundering, unable to see, in mud on the Western Front –an iconic image of WW1 – (Todman), operates as a metaphor for young soldiers in the First World War and latter conflicts, the text suggesting that Jack and others are blind to the reality of war and death which they stumble into.  Jack is the victim of his father and propaganda.  Indeed Kipling, and by implication the establishment and the government propaganda machine which he is actively involved with, are portrayed as culpable for Jack’s death. As Jack personalizes youthful victims of the conflict, his father personalizes, the government and the elite,  those who sent young men to their death. He is represented as living in a childlike fantasy world, with disastrous consequences for those around him.

Alternatively the BBC series My Family at War shown in 2009 reworked the popular series Who do you think you are ?  In each of four episodes two celebrities undertook  a journey to ‘reveal’ a  family member’s participation in war. The BBC publicity for episode 4 explained :

Rolf Harris has been singing Two Little Boys for 40 years. Until now, he had no idea just how much the song mirrors the story of his dad and uncle in the Great War. In this programme, Rolf fulfils a lifetime’s ambition by travelling to the Western Front to find out the truth behind his hit song.  Kirsty Wark, meanwhile, uncovers the brutal reality of her great uncle’s life in the machine gun corps.

The journey of discovery is both internal and external, both Wark and Harris actually go to France. Many of the features of lifestyle and reality TV are utilised such as: public displays of emotion, ‘confessions’ and the search for the Truth’ (White p 371), for example when Wark encounters, with shock, the killing machine that her young uncle became in WW1, or that he stole boots from dead German soldiers or when she breaks down in tears reading her Uncle’s farewell letters written to his parents on the eve of a battle he was uncertain he would survive.

Significantly My Family at War engages the audience in ethical debates, voiced by celebrities and resonating with My Boy Jack’s  critique of government.  In the complex interplay between past and present, that popular History involves, the discussion of the Great war, that ‘icon of the futility, carnage and organized violence in the twentieth century’  Winter 2006 ) means that for many viewers these text facilitate an ethical debate about contemporary conflict. It is in this ability of popular media remembrance to open up a critical engagement with governmental policy and acknowledge and commemorate the private grief and sacrifice of war which is key to its ability to speak to wider audiences than traditional remembrance. It is for example worth suggesting that the popular appeal of Harry Patch as an iconic veteran of WW1 rested both upon his age and his condemnation of war and his respect for those who fought on both sides in the conflict – it is for example his laying of a wreath at  the German cemetery at  Langemarch which has been uploaded and viewed onto Youtube .

Both My Boy Jack and My Family at War’s critique of war rests upon the vulnerability of the young men sent to fight. Kirtsy Wark early in her My Family at War programme looks, with her own seventeen year old son, at images of her uncle in uniform and saying to her him ‘can you imagine you away to war’. Thus emphasising it is mother’s sons, it is youth who brutalised, injured and killed in war.   This articulates increasingly familiar discourses of remembrance of soldiers as victims and even more families as victims of war that can be seen as the focus of contemporary news coverage of armed conflict.  An emphasis on families as victims can also be indentified in the recent introduction of the Elizabeth Cross. it is significant that one of the most popular current youtube videos, with 4 and half million hits, is young Heather Martin’s  song to her GI brother in Iraq; seeped in pathos  and sentimentality and emphasising family suffering with lines such as :  ‘You wanted to help with the war so you joined the army when I was only four’

 

Iraq and Afghanistan and new media remembrance

The Iraq and Afghan are new media wars experienced via: digital television such as News 24 and Al Jazeera , mobile phone’s video and images, blogs and sites such as liveleak.com.  Through such mediums participants and ordinary people have reported and commented on the conflict producing user-generated – content to an unparalleled scale and it should therefore be no surprise that this also the case in terms of remembrance especially as it comes at a point in time when web memorials  and chatrooms for the bereaved are expanding.

With America definitely leading the way, a number of commercial organizations and charities have enabled people to produce online global memorials to friends, family, celebrities and pets and who have died.  The freedom to create memorials to articulate loss is often within tight aesthetic constraints. Access to these memorials may be open or password protected, although on gonetoosoon.org visitors are invited to add comments, leave gifts and light candles, join discussion threads or create their own garden of remembrance from a range of memorials. Such sites utilize a range of stock images and established iconography: Teddy bears, flowers, poppies, candles, angels alongside domestic photographs. Their attempt to preserve notions of ‘good taste’ is often compromised by commercial imperatives.

Anonymity and problems in regulating or censoring the internet provide scope for those whose loss is otherwise hidden, or for emotions and relationships deemed ‘unacceptable’ or marginalized to have a voice.  The many discussion strands, blogs and dedicated sites for the grieving give a space for public outpouring of emotions. For example one contributor describes the value of grief.net.org and similar sites after her married lower had died :

What they gave me was a validation of my relationship with (lover’s name’s) and also a place to share all the emotions that couldn’t be expressed due the secrecy that I maintained to try to save (her husband’s name) face. For me it was the one safe place I had and also the same went for many of the other people on the site.

 

The USA based site grief.net.org has developed an area entitled ‘Fallen Heroes’ but it is the private discourses of Facebook  and the bricolage of public and private imagery and the pop-video style of Youtube which is often produced by and engages contemporary youth. Arguably the style and imagery of traditional remembrance is often utilsed or reworked – for example the ‘roll of honor’ is a frequent theme, albeit visually illustrated and set to music, whilst this Australian remembrance video  is not a long way from the 1924 Tropical Budget video we looked at.

More frequently user –generated content based around a well known musical tracks is edited with a post-modern borrowing of familiar iconography to blend together clips from national news, images from newspapers, informal snapshots of war, classic iconography of previous wars, domestic family photographs and written commentary to convey meaning often honoring the dead but not necessarily supporting the government or the military involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan.

 

The dynamic content and informality of Youtube and similar social networking sites enable them to transgress national boundaries (between the UK and USA) and to merge the public and the private.  Whilst the informal and interactive and networked nature of the site with recommendations of related videos, written and video responses to the items encourage dialogue and ethical debate with generally speaking support for those serving in the armed forces.  

 

For example Dialogue under – British Army Our Fallen Heroes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1E4nsOINmQ&feature=related

Bungle12345678 (2 months ago)

Your comments so true mate, our goverment, and 70% of people are a fucking disgrace.? Thing is, they’d probably support them more if they weren’t fucking worried the foreigners would cry racism, I FUCKING HATE BRITISH GOVERMENT.
Our troops on other hand… i respect them just as my as i respect my own mother.

flarpman2233 (2 months ago)

Massive respect to all our armed forces.? Keep it going!

mc2redhead (5 months ago)

it is true it is the old who rage wars but it? is our youth who must suffer the most good vid mate

miky261 (5 months ago)

i fukin hate the pacifist who say “the army is a mistake”. if there was no army then dicks like hitler would get their way and do things like the holocaust, if there was no army? then wed get invaded

rossfulla (6 months ago)

some little dip shit called the british troops child rapists and baby killers fuck him are boys are the best of the best theyd neve do that?

those brave men/women who fight for their country they will be missed.
remember them with? honer think of them with coruge never forget them.

spellings have been retained from the original

 

Mediums such as the TV and the internet are not independent from one another but integrated borrowing style and reusing content. Hence I would like to finish with an example of this from The Fallen originally shown as a 3 hour documentary on Saturday 15 November during last year’s BBC Remembrance season and then uploaded onto Youtube in 9 separate parts.  The Fallen commemorates all who have died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars intercutting a chronological roll of their names with voxpops from relatives, partners and friends. Ordinary people, in mundane domestic situations utilise the discourses of confessional cultures and individual feelings bringing private, domestic, personal grief into the public sphere – legitimating it and emphasizing the shift towards the private face of remembrance in contemporary media.     

 

References

Andreson, B.( 2006 revised edition)  Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Spread of Nationalism Verso

 

Winter, J. ( 2006) Remembering War Yale University Press

 

 

Websites of Interest

 

Bed of Roses

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gJnrXXumfw&feature=related

 

Politically motivated remembrance

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GR6Lq2gVDU

 

Roll call of fallen with dialogue and debate below http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1E4nsOINmQ&feature=related

 

American memorial video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvtQzZmdX-E&feature=related

 

An American  music video tribute to the families of those killed in Iraq

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeyvdpBC81o

 

Tribute to the fallen of the Iraq war

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJSpjpWC8c8&feature=fvsr