Producing Public Television, Producing Public Culture

by Barry Dornfeld

Overview

From 1989 to 1991, Barry Dornfeld had an unusual double role on the crew of the major PBS documentary series Childhood. As a researcher for the series, he investigated the relationship between children and media. As an anthropologist, however, his subject was the television production process itself—examining, for example, how producers developed the series, negotiated with their academic advisors, and shaped footage shot around the world into seven programs. He presents the results of his fieldwork in this groundbreaking study—one of the first to take an ethnographic approach to the production of a television show, as opposed to its reception.


Dornfeld begins with a broad discussion of public television's role in American culture and goes on to examine documentaries as a form of popular anthropology. Drawing on his observations of Childhood, he considers the documentary form as a kind of "imagining," in which both producers and viewers construct understandings of themselves and others, revealing their conceptions of culture and history and their ideologies of cultural difference and universality. He argues that producers of culture should also be understood as consumers who conduct their work through an active envisioning of the audience. Dornfeld explores as well how intellectual media professionals struggle with the institutional and cultural forces surrounding television that promote entertainment at the expense of education. The book provides a rare glimpse behind the scenes of a major documentary and demonstrates the value of an ethnographic approach to the study of media production.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691044675
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/21/1998
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Barry Dornfeld is an Associate at the Center for Applied Research in Philadelphia and is a producer of documentary ethnographic films. His films include Powerhouse for God (1988) and Gandy Dancers (1992).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	Studying Public Television as American Public Culture	3
Ch. 2	Childhood on the Contested Territory of Public Television in the United States	35
Ch. 3	Negotiating Documentary Production: Authorship and Imagined Audiences	61
Ch. 4	Public Television Documentary Poetics	89
Ch. 5	Cutting across Cultures: Public Television Documentary and Representations of Otherness	140
Ch. 6	Public Television Documentary and the Mediation of American Public Culture	168
App. A	Organizational chart of the Childhood Staff	189
App. B	List of Academic Observers and Advisors	191
App. C	Synopsis of the Childhood Series	193
Notes	197
References	221
Filmography	234
Index	237