Brochure - English translations of course offerings

V4DOF / TD – History of Television Forms: Hollywood and Television: The
Beginnings of American Television (1940s-1960s)
Kira Kitsopanidou
The objective of this course is to revisit the early years of television in the United
States, underscoring the forms of programming that aimed to constitute a specificity
for new media (anthology dramas, teledramas, spectaculars). We will analyze the
rise in power of fictions filmed live, the influences of older media (theater, cinema,
radio), and the economic, socio-­‐cultural, and technological implications of this
domination that spread from the end of the 1940s until the end of the 1950s. We
will address multiple interactions, still present in the history of television in the
United States, between Hollywood and new media, which will allow us to conclude
that it is definitively impossible to conceive of a history of American television
independently of the history of the Hollywood industry (cases studied: police series,
Westerns, sitcoms, science fiction, spy series, etc.).
From Serial to Comedy Forms
Christophe Lenoir
Laughter plays an important role in television. Is it linked to the serial or iterative,
even repetitive, trait of television programs? Between contestation through laughter
or a prescriptive way out, the television shows activate and play with the spectator’s
consciousness of codes and apparatuses, sketching the limits of televised norms.
From Variety on Television to Televised Variety Shows (1954-1980)
Laurence Leveneur
Beyond the strict formal evolution of a genre decried by the critics and voted
overwhelmingly with favor by the general public, this course will address, through
the lens of variety shows, the links between television and other extra-­‐media forms
coming from live spectacle (theater, cabaret, music hall). We will also evoke the
relations between criticism and this form of entertainment open to mélange and
hybridization. The methods employed by television to demarcate itself from live
spectacle will also be questioned through some emblematic examples, from
American shows like The Carpenters’ Television Specials to other innovative filmed
choices: filming the studio as a workplace (Discorama) or manipulating the screen
like a magazine page (Dim Dam Dom), including the visual diversions and the
electronic audacities of Jean Christophe Averty (Les Raisins verts).
Televised Game Shows (1950-1986)
Laurence Leveneur
We will propose a formal history of a genre that does not limit itself to a succession
of formulas and rules yet also allows the television screen to raise questions
regarding the specificities of the television apparatus. By reading cinema or
television critics, we will question the possibility of conceiving televised game
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