Visual Culture and Collective Memory: the Reproduction of Cultural Memory Through the Storytelling of a Fictional Television Series1
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Visual culture and collective memory: the reproduction of cultural memory through the storytelling of a fictional television series1 Fernanda Elouise Budag Master in Communication and PhD student University of São Paulo, USP [email protected] Abstract In short, this is a theoretical study about the visual culture focused on the interrelationship between collective memory and visual communication. We see in the television fictional series Once upon a time an empirical object worthy of research by putting in circulation media representations of stories dating back to our oral tradition, the classic fairy tales. In this sense, some questions guide our research: how works the reproduction of cultural memory through the storytelling of a fictional television series? And what news and changes this product of North American visual media brings with this exploration of the past, of yesterday's speeches of fantastic tales? Our objective was to investigate and to understand how the series mobilizes and reframes the collective memory; to perceive how the past and the cultural memory has been remembered, reproduced, modified, told and retold in this series. Among the results, we conclude that the series promotes a conversion of the old narratives to values of our time. It does retain the cultural memory while reflecting the wonderful universe to a nowadays values scale. Keywords: communication; visual culture; memory. Introduction We start from the premise that the visual culture is today one of the great fomenting speeches and narratives in contemporary society; and among the forms of visual communication, television and its fictional series are great players, which we highlight in this reflection. We assume, above all, they would therefore have the potential to preserve, reproduce and rethink memory, or collective memory (Halbwachs, 2003). We undertake therefore a link between media’s narrative and memory. Being memory the theoretical axis that we set for, from it, we see the media’s narrative. In theoretical and methodological terms, after a brief descriptive context of our 1 Paper presented at the IAMCR 2016 conference in Leicester, UK, July 27-31, 2016. Visual Culture Working Group. OCS submission number of the paper: 12447 empirical object, we began our text with the construction of a theoretical framework around the visual culture, more specifically about adaptations and remakes, both concepts of audiovisual studies and television that allow to place the television series that is our empirical object. We continue incorporating to this theoretical foundation concepts that guide studies of cultural and collective memory (Halbwachs, 2003; Nunes, 2016). Further, continuing the methodological process, we developed, from the concept of intertextuality (Fiorin, 2012), an investigation of the TV series object of study here, deconstructing its narrative and identifying the elements of the original stories (fairy tales) and reinterpretations and new meanings it gives them. With all this immersion, our goal is to understand how this TV series mobilizes and reframes the collective memory and to understand how the past and the cultural memory has been remembered, reproduced, modified, told and retold in the series. Introducing our empirical object The empirical object of our study is the North American television fictional series Once upon a time, which had its first presentation on ABC television network in October 2011 and is currently in its fifth season. Created by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, Once upon a time is transmitted in Brazil, at Pay TV, since April 2012 by Sony Channel; already in open television, Record Network broadcasts it from February 2014. Our selection for analysis in this space is only the first season of the series. Then, all we bring here only concerns to the narrative elapsed in the 22 episodes (43 minutes each) of this first season. The narrative Once upon a time is built from the use of numerous references of classic fairy tales, while operating a transposition of this enchanted repertory to the context of the real and present world. In other words, the series goes back to our oral tradition. Its title is the literal phrase “once upon a time”, the classic opening line of fairy tales, precisely because it adopts the fictional universe of the Enchanted Kingdom. Or rather, the narrative starts there in the Magic Kingdom, with the wedding of Snow White and Prince Charming, but a curse of the Evil Queen carries the characters to a place where their lives and memories would be stolen, and where there would be no happy ending: the Real World. So, they are all arrested in a seaside town called Storybrooke – fictional town of Maine, state located in the northeast of USA – and there the story happens between both worlds and the battle against the curse. In almost each one of the episodes, there are two parallel plots that alternate on the screen: one that takes place in Storybrooke (Real World of the series), usually in the present tense, and one that goes in flashback, the Magic Kingdom, commonly with a central focus on a past moment in the life of a specific character before the curse. Detailing a little more, we briefly describe the synopsis of the first season – our focus in this study. It begins just as we have indicated, with the wedding of Snow White and Prince Charming and the break of the ceremony by announcing Evil Queen's curse. With the completion of the spell, all the characters are transported to Storybrooke, losing their memories and identities of characters from fairy tales. Except for Emma, newborn, daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, who was placed in a magical closet that led to the Real World before the curse; protecting her. Emma, then, today, is the only one who can break the spell and restore memories and identities of all, and the only one who can also free them: therefore they don’t realize, but they are stuck in the city; whenever any of them tries to leave, something bad happens to prevent it. Unaware of any of this, however, Emma lives in Boston and, on the day of hers 28th birthday, she is visited by Henry Mills, her biological son she gave up for adoption shortly after birth. The boy, 10 years old, distrusts all this curse – launched by the Evil Queen, who is Regina Mills, adoptive mother of Henry in the Real World. He has a storybook (titled Once upon a time) and he believes that it holds the key to break the curse. So, he appeared that day to ask for help from Emma, because he believes, as written in the book, she is the daughter of Snow White intended to put an end to this spell. Emma goes to Storybrooke to drive Henry home. There, intrigued by the relationship of Henry and Regina, Emma decides to stay in the city. The boy then passes all the season trying to convince Emma about this whole story of curse and she ends up needing to face many enemies and challenges to finally believe in it and break it in the last episode of the season. At first sight, in a superficial observation, Once upon a time can be judged as being an adaptation or a remake; which, in our view, is inconsistent and, in fact, is what we will try to confirm at this time. Thus, we believe that is valid here a contextualization to understand and to localize theoretically the televisual product that we are dealing with. Among the many classifications that underlie the ratings of these productions, two of them seem to deserve our attention more closely: the adaptations and remakes, because both genres2 touch the question of "dialogue" with previous works, as Once upon a time does. In a simplified way, adaptation was always understood in Brazil as “[...] the transposition of an original literary text to the TV language [...]” (Balogh, Mungioli, 2009, p. 315, our translation3). So, we would have as a foreign example of adaptation Game of Thrones series (produced by HBO, still in progress since 2011), adapted from the book A Song of Ice and Fire (1996), of the American author George R. R. Martin. Or, as a Brazilian example, by Globo Network, the miniseries Ligações Perigosas (Dangerous Liaisons) (2016), adapted from the literary work Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) written by the Frenchman Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Traditionally, here in Brazil, it has always taken into account an extreme fidelity of the audiovisual product to the original literary text, maintaining all the elements and only promoting the displacement of a language to another. However, with the advancement of production, this model has undergone changes and now we would have, according to Balogh and Mungioli (2009, p. 315 and 318), “‘hybrid’ models of adaptation”. Starting with the fact that today there is no longer the absolute fidelity to the original text, with a much greater authorial project by the writer adapter, which is free to remove some characters and include others, for example. Or, “[...] the writers are not restricted any more to the original and nuclear work to be adapted, they consider other works or collection of the author's works as modules, as fragments that allow various forms of different combination.” (Balogh, 2006, p. 93, our translation4) As is the case cited by Balogh and Mungioli (2009, p. 331-332) of the miniseries Os Maias (2001, Globo Network), which comes from the homonym novel by Eça de Queiroz, and that has incorporated characters from other works by the same author. Also, another change occurred is the fact that now the texts that are source for adaptations are not necessarily only from literature; they can come from movies, comics or even television itself. In these terms, Balogh (2005) defends the adoption of the concepts of “intersemiotic translation” or “transmutation”, both written by Roman Jakobson 2 We assume in this space the classification of Balogh and Mungioli (2009, p.