Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010

In 2005, the Slovak print and broadcast media discussed reality TV events as avidly as anything from the fields of politics, economics or culture. While the majority of entertainment programming on Slovak television is of foreign origin, the arrival of reality TV programmes that involved the use of local and foreign ordinary contestants in unscripted settings before the gaze of a directly participating national audience appeared to redefine Slovak media culture for that year. Following an examination of the central properties of reality TV that have determined its worldwide success with national audiences, the ways in which reality TV reflected Slovak society will be discussed. In the absence of any ethnographic research, this article refers to a range of contemporary mass media sources collected in Slovakia and accessed electronically to assess the characteristic properties and developments of reality TV programming in Slovakia, its national impact on Slovak media culture and its possible implications for national self-perception through an examination of the discourses that defined Slovak reality TV in its first year of broadcast.

The article is concerned with the deployment of European (especially French) characters and motifs in British screen advertising from the 1970s to the present and the means whereby particular products (cars, cosmetics, drinks) are designated as French. It is especially concerned with the appropriation of French films in ads, through direct pillaging of found footage and through imitation, and the gestural use of French films to designate, more generally, shifting perceptions of the foreignness and difference of Europe. Advertising, it is acknowledged, also has its own trends and cycles, pursued regardless of external factors, within brands and amongst agencies. Screen advertising (Stella and VW) increasingly permeates the production, distribution and exhibition of cinema in Britain.

This article argues that film policy-making in Iceland offers an example of a marginal European culture that has been able to balance cultural and economic imperatives in a way that acknowledges the reality of transnational film production. Following a brief description of Icelandic film culture, the article discusses film laws of 1978, 1984, 1999, 2001 and 2003. The article also provides a sketch of Icelandic archiving policy and exhibition. Overall, we can see that Icelandic film policy has for several decades been simultaneously locally oriented and internationalist, and has allowed for the simultaneous emergence of popular and less mainstream film-making practices, and that it is quite exceptional by the standards of small countries.

Abrams provides a preliminary survey of the representation of Jews in British cinema both in front of and behind the camera from the beginnings of the UK film industry to the present day. In doing so, he outlines the reason for the relative lack of films in Britain that can be considered Jewish. While there are a variety of factors for this, the main reason he argues is the type of identity that British Jews have developed as a response to their context. However, since 1990 there have been signs that this is beginning to change, and more films reflective of the British-Jewish experience are appearing.

David Lynch's film The Elephant Man (1980) tells of the bourgeoisification and rehumanization of the physically deformed Englishman Joseph Merrick, who was put on display as the Elephant Man in European freak shows. The stages of this formative process are illustrated by the monster's progressive acquisition of the ability to engage in the normative use of photographic images. These events are framed by an allegory that constructs two material genealogies, Merrick's own and the genealogy of the filmic medium, and presents the origins of these genealogies, Merrick's mother and the medium of photography, as divided and derivative. At the same time, the interweaving of the two genealogies does not allow film to appear as photography's legitimate descendent, but rather its monstrous offspring. But The Elephant Man suggests that it is precisely this monstrosity that allows film in contrast to photography to represent the monster in a way that lends him a human countenance. This celebration of the filmic culminates in the final sequence, in which the transformation of the photographic medium into the filmic is surpassed by a general transformation from mediated to immediate, in which Lynch's film paradoxically allows its own medium to participate.