The Changing Role of Television in the Museum
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Leif Kramp The Changing Role of Television in the Museum Museums are a useful source for access to audiovisual heritage—a heritage that is largely unavailable due to restrictions by corporate archives that tend to insulate their assets from the general public and academics. Yet television or broadcasting museums provide access not only to programs from television’s past but also to historical and contemporary artifacts. The potential for such museums to be places of discourse, education, and the shaping of memory is underlined by the connections between television as a mass medium and everyday life, culture, and history. At the same time, television museums have to struggle with the same problems as audiovisual archives: The German Television Museum at the Postdamer Platz in Berlin. the obsolescence of tape formats, cost-intensive The museum is integrated in the Stifung Deutsche Kinemathek equipment, and the inevitability of digitization. that also houses the German Film Museum and the German Film Although there are overlaps with the tasks of and Television Academy. Photo by Leif Kramp. archives and libraries, museums selectively collect and curate for the general public. The primary reason Deutsche Kinemathek, a foundation for film and for the formation of television museums—the television. This development took twenty long extensive loss of programming in the broadcasting years of wrangling over the character and mission archives—has met with the additional mission for of the institution. The museum’s operations are media literacy education to enhance understanding guaranteed until the end of 2012 by a broad of the medium’s mechanisms—in retrospect and coalition of financiers from the public broadcasters advance. ARD, ZDF, Veolia Water, a division of the media In June 2006, the first television museum in conglomerate Vivendi, State Media Broadcasting Germany opened its doors on the Potsdamer Authorities, and finally the German government Platz in Berlin as a division of the Stiftung (which pays the rent).1 The formation process has 48 Media Access: Preservation and Technologies Lucas Hilderbrand, editor, Spectator 27:1 (Spring 2007) 48-57. KRAMP become a symbol for the complicated relations broadcasting museums: the American Museum of between media and politics, as well as for the Television and Radio (MT&R) and the Canadian television industry’s missing awareness of its own Moses Znaimer Television Museum (MZTV history. Museum). First and foremost this new museum in Europe’s geographical center heralds a new conception for Giving Alteration a Name: The “Kinemathek” media museums. During its formation, the project in Berlin and the New Era of Television in the passed through various designs and dismissed many attributes that were once foundational to the Museum original mission of the institution, specifically its function as an archive with the intention of building The German museum was developed under and preserving a collection. This German initiative the name “mediatheque” for about fifteen years, signals a shift that guides the central thesis of until it was integrated into the “Kinemathek.” this article: the concept of television museums as “Mediatheque,” however, refers to an institution primarily archival institutions has failed, which in that collects audiovisual media and also loans it, turn has consequences for accessing our television though this latter service was neither intended nor heritage. Instead, the role of television museums as possible, due to rights issues. This inaccurate name access providers is changing fundamentally, shifting was chosen after years of debates to avoid negative, toward integrating educational programs beyond antiquated connotations that were assumed typical historical texts and highlighting the convergence for the term “museum” as a bildungsbürgerlich of audiovisual media. (educated class) place.3 The International Council Although museums and archives are different of Museums defines the “museum” in a rather types of institutions, decades of television museum traditional if broad way: evolution suggest that they are becoming even more distinct as the predominance of archival A museum is a non-profit making, permanent functions is becoming an obsolescent model for institution in the service of society and of its museums. A perspective that sees museums as development, and open to the public, which archives is caused by the importance of collections acquires, conserves, researches, communicates that focus on object culture. The museum-as- and exhibits, for purposes of study, education repository model comes out of an object culture and enjoyment, material evidence of people that gives importance to collections; this traditional and their environment.4 way that museums define themselves through the uniqueness of their collections does not work any This unquestionably general definition more.2 As independent preservers of television encompasses the diversity of museums from heritage, media museums face challenges in Canada to the Congo and points to the conceptual developing efficient ways to provide broad access to freedom inherent in museums.5 The Berliner either programming or technical artifacts, whether initiative took advantage of this flexibility and due to copyright issues, lost original programs, or learned what to strive for and what to avoid from the fragmentation of the overwhelming amount of its predecessors abroad in North America. assets sleeping in other archives. Consequentially, In all the proposals for the German museum, the the missions of television museums are changing institution was conceived to serve the urgent and these days from archival repositories to institutions essential purpose of preserving cultural identity as that focus more clearly on education, infotainment, communicated in the mass media.6 Thus, it took and context for current issues of media society a while until the main focus shifted from archival using their collections. This article analyzes the tasks to a more educational understanding of the German Television Museum and how its new institution’s responsibility. In a mission statement, conceptual strategy fits into a broader process of the main tasks were formulated very early in the transformation and reorganization, one which planning process: “The museum for broadcasting can be recognized in two of the world’s biggest history ought to make accessible radio- and MEDIA ACCESS 49 TELEVISION IN THE MUSEUM Smoking Politicians: The German Television Museum focuses on a visually attractive setting. Photo courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin. television-productions for the general public are not available in the program gallery because independently from the programming structure even short excerpts are not affordable for the small of the broadcasters.”7 The major reason for the budget. The same problem appeared with popular German plans to build a museum in the first place series like the animated Bee Maja or Pan Tau, both was a response to the unavailability of Germany’s Czech productions. In these cases, the museum audiovisual heritage8 —both to make up for the curators had to decline paying 1,500 Euros per broadcast archives’ limited resources and to counter thirty-minute episode.12 a general “cultural shame” that these materials had The general trend toward a hypostatization become inaccessible.9 of “public understanding” in the museum has The need to change the attitude of perceiving also found its way into the German museum.13 itself as an all-embracing—or at least leading— Considerable effort was invested to create a collector of television programming is now visually attractive exhibition area, including a so- enabled by complementary resources such as video, called “time tunnel” which reminds attendees of the Internet, and other collecting institutions.10 major news events: the first man on the moon, the Currently, the collection of the new museum is catastrophe in the mine of Germany’s Lengede, or quite lean: whereas, in the original plan, a minimum 9/11. Another attraction is a “mirror hall” where of 10,000 hours of television programming was a fifteen-minute clip-reel shows the televisual considered indispensable, visitors to the museum history of entertainment from smoking politicians can only access 500 hours—at nine consoles instead on talk shows to excerpts of popular Saturday of the envisioned forty stations.11 The collection will night shows. With constructs of monitors and a surely grow, but slowly and very selectively as the thirty-six channel screen wall, the former head major complex of problems has not disappeared. The of the Deutsche Kinemathek, Hans Helmut museum struggles with right issues and the related Prinzler, wanted to “prise open the dryness and hassle of financial strength. It is often not able to appearance of prudity”14 and to de-stigmatize the pay the required licensing fees to rights holders of museum of any traditional clichés in the hopes of productions that are not completely owned by the attracting potential visitors who otherwise would major German broadcasters, which have contracts be unlikely to be interested in a museum. With this with the museum and supply programming at orientation, the museum complies with the model no cost. For instance, to obtain a copy of Queen of a so-called “post-museum” that Eilean Hooper- Elizabeth II’s coronation for the collection, the Greenhill has envisioned to integrate the museum museum had to pay 1,000 Euros for each minute of into its various communities.15 the running time. Sport programs, such as popular Due to its financial, institutional, and soccer games of the European Champions League cooperative struggles, its public space shrank 50 SPRNG 2007 KRAMP from an initially planned 50,000 to 12,000 square Film and Television Academy and the German feet.16 The museum is small, but such limitations Filmmuseum. Its decisive advantage over other can be beneficial. In scholarship on museums, the museums is its integration into the infrastructure complexity of some institutions is viewed as a of the Kinemathek, which also owns Europe’s problem for the accessibility and perception of the biggest photo archive of film and celebrity stills.