Loading...
Please wait, while we are loading the content...
Similar Documents
Public History and the People’s History : A View from Atlantic Canada
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Frank, D. |
| Copyright Year | 2003 |
| Abstract | IT IS SEVERAL YEARS NOW SINCE those Sunday evenings at the dawn of the new century when Canadians gathered around their television screens to watch the unveiling of their multi-million dollar millennium gift. It came in the form of a sustained, full-dress presentation of Canadian history, as prepared by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Canada to celebrate the arrival of the new millennium. By the time the second season was completed in 2002, 17 separate episodes had been broadcast, filling a total of 30 hours of primetime television. The cost of the series was about $25 million, an unprecedented expenditure for the popularization of Canadian history on film – though hardly an extraordinary amount in an international industry where the same budget can be assembled for the production of a single feature film. The audience numbers were remarkable too, clocking in at more than two million viewers for the first episode. 1 It was a surprise to the advertising industry, as numerous sponsors had passed over the opportunity to support the series, their marketing departments claiming that there was no consumer appetite for Canadian history on this scale. 2 In a country where the public sector had been under attack for years on end, Canada: A People's History was a triumph for public broadcasting. Executive producer Mark Starowicz later wrote that the evening of the first broadcast on 22 October 2000 was the moment when “the myth that Canadians are not interested in their history died a well-deserved death”. 3 Even if it was true that Canadians did not know much about their history, as various polls had been telling them for years, it seemed clear that Canadians were interested and wanted to know more about it. If public history is primarily about audience, then the People's History was a successful exercise in public history. That experience of a shared viewing of Canadian history delivered on one of the central promises of the new visual technology of the 20th century. As Walter Benjamin had observed in the 1930s, the new technology of communication embedded in the film industry made it possible for large numbers of people to share almost simultaneously in the viewing of a cultural production. Like the great epics of the age of oral tradition, he suggested, the motion picture, with its processes of collective production and shared reception, had the potential to become the appropriate form of public art for modern times. 4 More than one cultural critic has endorsed the idea that film did indeed become one of the international languages of the 20th-century. 5 At the onset of the 21st-century the success of the People's History |
| Starting Page | 120 |
| Ending Page | 120 |
| Page Count | 1 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 32 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/Acadiensis/article/download/10698/11396 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
