Compiling European Immigration History

• Main Author: Meuzelaar, Andrea
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision 2015-12-01
• Series: VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture
• Online Access: https://www.viewjournal.eu/article/10.18146/2213-0969.2015.jethc089/

Today television's reliance on archival footage seems to be intensifying due to the increased accessibility of European broadcast archives and the increased amount of available digitized broadcast material. In this article, the author reflects on television's convention to compile stories from archival material by presenting a case-study of a recently broadcast Dutch television series Land of Promise (2014). This series narrates the history of European post-war immigration, and is constructed from archival material from various European broadcast archives. In this article the author analyses the compilation strategy of Land of Promise, and assesses what kind of European immigration history the series has articulated through the selection and juxtaposition of archival footage.