Abstract
This chapter provides an account of the use of eyewitness, and other, testimony as part of the textual operations of British history programming since the 1970s, and relates it to broader issues of, and developments within, historical and personal remembrance, in particular the use of photography. As I have suggested elsewhere, presenter and eyewitness are familiar televisual tropes across many genres, although in history programming in particular, eyewitness testimony may be seen to have a form of auratic power: an eyewitness and his or her account is reproduced through a mass medium, but viewers are encouraged, and many are willing, to see those who testify as authentic, authoritative and unique (Bell, 2009, p. 197; Benjamin, 2008, p. 22). This is problematized, though, as testifiers must often bear witness for others; some of their authority derives from speaking for an entire group (Gray, 1997, p. 100), and as the opening quotation suggests, this transcends the individual witness. Furthermore, as well as acting as ‘vehicles of remembering’ in oral historical research, photographs are often offered to viewers alongside testimony. As historical and personal artefacts reproduced on television, their role will therefore also be considered (Humphries, 1984, pp. 3–6, 99–105; Pickering and Keightley, 2007, p. 273).
The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas [suggests] … that the witness’ speech is one that, by its very definition, transcends the witness who is but its medium, the medium of realization of the testimony … By virtue of the fact that the testimony is addressed to others, the witness … is the vehicle of an occurrence, a reality, a stance or a dimension beyond himself [sic].
(Shoshana Felman, 1995, p. 15)
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Bell, E. (2010). Beyond the Witness. In: Bell, E., Gray, A. (eds) Televising History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277205_6
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