IASA's 55th Annual Conference

This session consists of 2 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Sofia Vieira Lopes - Unveiling collective memories to create innovation: the case of the documentary “Festival da Canção 60 anos” (Long presentation)

➺ Liangming Wang, Min Wang, Jiamin Li, Yina Shi - Exploring the Use and Value of Real Historical Images in Film and Television Dramas--Taking the Television Drama "Blossoms Shanghai" as an Example (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Unveiling collective memories to create innovation: the case of the documentary “Festival da Canção 60 anos”
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Sofia Vieira Lopes (Long presentation)
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In 1964, RTP – the national TV Portuguese broadcaster – created the Festival da Canção (FC), a competition to choose the entry in the Eurovision Song Contest. It is the longest-running TV show and music competition in the country. But for a long time, the FC wasn't the subject of in-depth academic work, nor it was the subject of a television work that demonstrated its musical, social, historical, and cultural relevance. As a result of the ethnomusicological research I've carried out over the last years, I was invited to do a documentary. Since RTP holds a unique audiovisual archive, it has been made exclusively from archive content: music performances, interviews, backstage images, shots of the social context, photos, paper documents, press, a.o. The documentary was the result of the collaborative work I did with an RTP director and two unexpected teams: RTP Innovation and RTP Memory channel. We shaped a scientific approach addressed to appeal to a wide-ranging audience of different ages and with diverse social and cultural backgrounds, and it was premiered in prime-time on RTP's generalist channel.
In this presentation, I will outline the challenges of negotiating two visions: the academic and the television one. Nowadays, when the legitimacy of the public media service is being questioned, this presentation is not only about the process of making this documentary, but above all about how the valorisation of the audiovisual archive, its creative use, can help the public understand the importance of archives as testimonies of the recent past.

➺ Exploring the Use and Value of Real Historical Images in Film and Television Dramas--Taking the Television Drama "Blossoms Shanghai" as an Example
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Liangming Wang, Min Wang, Jiamin Li, Yina Shi (Short presentation)
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At the end of 2023,adapted from the Mao Dun Literature Award work "Blossoms", directed by Kar Wai Wong（HK）,the Shanghai local television drama "Blossoms Shanghai" had been launched, with a great reputation.Shanghainese seem to have opened a memory gate, collectively returning to the vibrant 1990s.Many real-life scenes from the past appear in the drama,most of these historical images were provided by Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives.In the three years, the Archives provided senior professional editors and researchers with specialized consulting services for the production team, with dedicated personnel conducting targeted queries and organizing information. They provided over 60 historical video archives for the production team of "Blossoms Shanghai", totaling over 1800 minutes.