A weapon against violence
It is one of the advantages of the “Avant Premiere” organized by the Vienna International Music and Media Center, which recently has around six hundred participants from all over the world, that it opens such windows on distant media landscapes. It was thus possible to learn that at the University of Mexico, with 350,000 students, there is a university television station called UNAM, which records the concerts of three university symphony orchestras and in some cases broadcasts them live. It is also available nationwide on the Internet, and Sunday concert broadcasts are also of lively interest in neighboring regions of the United States. As a member of the Asociación de Televisión Educativa Iberoamericana based in Valencia, Spain, UNAM can also feed its programs into an international network and thus reaches up to twenty Latin American countries. In addition to music, the productions cover all cultural sectors as well as the scientific field. “Cultural programs are the best weapon against the violence rampant in the country,” says Iván Trujillo, the station’s director-general, who also makes films on environmental issues, and emphasizes the importance of such programs when it comes to gender justice since the Mexicans are after all famous for their machismo.
As far as Europe is concerned, an upcoming innovation at ZDF is worth mentioning. When the last hurdles in the implementation of the Telemedia Act passed a year ago have been overcome, the broadcaster will expand its media library into a pure streaming broadcaster on the Internet. Addressees are the non-television. “If we want to reach those who are at home on the net or in some other kind of culture, we have to move towards them. They won’t come to us, ”says music director Tobias Feilen. But it is not about reducing the classic in favor of other sectors, but about new forms of representation: “We will not deny the content for which we stand.” His word in God’s ear.
The basis of the classical musical film business is opera and concert recordings, but documentation is still the supreme discipline. Despite the comparatively high costs, excellent portraits of artists and composers are always created. The field can be roughly divided into two categories: On the one hand, there is the current film, which tends to report, such as the portrait of the exceptional Russian dancer Natalia Osipova, and on the other hand, the well-researched documentation, often with a historical background. This includes, for example, a biographical study on Anton Bruckner by Reiner E. Moritz. It shines with rich, rare image material and with comments from well-known scientists and puts the composer, who is considered foreign to the world, in a surprisingly lively light. A third category is documentary drama or feature films such as “The Zurich Liaison” about the love affair between Richard Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck. As has now been shown at the “Avant Premiere”, which is also a trading exchange, there is great interest in such documentation. The music film still has its future ahead of it.
