Abstract
The beginnings of the feature genre—a more poetic or impressionistic version of radio documentary—can be traced to the 1920s in England. The exact year when the term feature was used for the first time is subject to discussion. The ambiguity of the definition permeates the entire history of the feature genre. Put simply, a feature may be seen as an artistic piece of opinion journalism or as an artistic documentary programme that uses specific characteristics of a particular fact, that is discussed or described, to present a more general topic. Reková addresses the history of the genre, various international definitions (the interchangeable characteristics of the genre) and the history of it in the Czech Republic. In this book, Reková deals with the feature genre for the most part, as defined by Peter Leonhard Braun, who sets the direction for many other creators. It is vital to point out, however, that in the golden era of the feature genre, there were multiple directions or schools of feature. Braun preferred the one that, in essence, represented “writing with sound”, while others focused more on working with music or a smaller number of characters.
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Notes
- 1.
Udo Zindel is a theoretician and a freelance editor cooperating with the station Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart. Wolfgang Rein works as the sound engineer in the feature and musical production of the station Süddeutscher Rundfunk.
- 2.
Josef Branžovský (1909–1992) was a radio theoretician and a writer who was involved in educating radio staff. He also worked as a deputy Head of Study Department of the Czechoslovak Radio.
- 3.
Cecil Arthur Lewis (1898–1997, UK) was a British soldier, pilot, writer, director and a co-founder of the British Broadcasting Company, the predecessor of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
- 4.
Patrick Conley, a Berlin-based journalist, even places the beginnings of the German-language feature to as late as 1947 when the first German feature called Hier ist London – Anatomie einer Weltstadt, by Peter von Zahn, was broadcasted. (Štěrbová 2009: 13). Listen here: https://archive.org/details/hier-ist-london-anatomie-einer-weltstadt-peter-von-zahn-1948
- 5.
Lancelot De Giberne Sieveking (1896–1972, UK) was a British writer and a pioneer of the radio and television production. He played a significant part in the history of the BBC.
- 6.
Laurence Duval Gilliam (1907–1964, UK) oversaw features at the BBC during his active years. He also worked as a journalist, an actor, and an editor of the British magazine Radio Times.
- 7.
A fun fact—in the Czech Republic people say “I created this fíčura” when they invent something new which can make their lives easier. Fíčura comes from feature and means some life-hack, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity. That is very similar to the meaning of radio feature, which was new and interesting.
- 8.
The text was provided by Peter Leonhard Braun from his personal archive.
- 9.
Frederick Louis MacNeice (1907–1963, UK) was an Irish poet, writer, and radio drama creator.
- 10.
Douglas Geoffrey Bridson (1910–1980, UK) was a poet, writer, and a significant personality of the development of the BBC where he oversaw the art, science, and documentary sections. During his career, he was involved in the production of more than eight hundred radio programmes.
- 11.
E.g., The Secret Correspondence of Hitler and Mussolini (1947)—listen at the website radioechoes.com
- 12.
Ernst Georg Schnabel (1913–1986, Germany) was a German writer and a pioneer of the radio documentary and the radio feature.
- 13.
Alfred Hellmuth Andersch (1914–1980, Germany) was a German writer, radio plays creator, journalist and a narrator, one of the best and well-respected voices of the postwar German literature.
- 14.
Axel Constantin August Eggebrecht (1899–1991, Germany) was a German scriptwriter, journalist, and writer.
- 15.
Peter von Zahn (1913–2001, Germany) was a German writer, filmmaker, journalist, and co-founder of the broadcasting station NWDR.
- 16.
The radio documentaries and the features were also developing in a productive way in the Czechoslovak Radio, they were, however, given a different name (Semotamová 2012: 4).
- 17.
Ewan MacColl, real name James Henry Miller (1915–1989, UK), better known as a songwriter and political activist, but besides that he dealt with radio production and writing stage plays.
- 18.
Peggy Seeger (*1935, USA) is an American singer and banjo player, Ewan MacColl’s ex-wife.
- 19.
Charles Parker (1919–1980, UK) was a British radio maker who worked at the BBC and dealt with the documentary and theatre production. In his honour, the Charles Parker Prize was established which is associated with the Charles Parker Prize for the Best Student Audio Feature.
- 20.
Rundfunk der DDR or Deutscher Demokratischer Rundfunk, is a former name for one of the most prominent broadcasting stations in the East Germany in the years 1952–1991. After the unification of Germany, the station was renamed to Funkhaus Berlin (Broadcasting Center Berlin).
- 21.
In the history of Czech radio production, the following makers were among the most prominent creators of pásmo programmes: Dalibor Chalupa (1900–1983), František Gel (1901–1972), Josef Kolář (1905–1983), Ludvík Vaculík (1926–2015), Jiří Hraše (nar. 1930).
- 22.
Pásmo – news, pásmo – commentary, pásmo – rcolumn, pásmo – lecture, pásmo – story, pásmo – reportage, pásmo – drama, pásmo – documentary, pásmo – discussion, pásmo – feature.
- 23.
Zdeněk Bouček (1941 Czechoslovakia – 2005, Czech Republic) was a reporter, a documentary maker, a director, a theoretician, a journalist, a lecturer, a representative of the Czech Republic in the EBU, a co-founder of the Sdružení pro rozhlasovou tvorbu (Association for the Radio Production). Bouček’s detailed biography is to be found in the Appendix.
- 24.
The documentary almost did not see the light of day—Braun admits that his managers were against its recording: “Still living in London and being very much involved in London in the first experiments on stereo technique, I wrote to my station in Berlin: ‘I want to do the chicken in stereo.’ And I got a reply, I quote it to you: ‘Chicken in stereo means ga ga ga ga from right to left, it doesn’t make sense.’ I did it anyway” (OH Braun 2017).
- 25.
A similar device existed in the UK at the time; it was called the Midget. It looked the same but had a green colour.
- 26.
Braun compares the hall with the chicken to a Thermos bottle due to the high temperature inside of it.
- 27.
Hip Replacement (8 Uhr 15, Opertationssaal III, Hüftplastik) is Braun’s feature from 1970. In the script, Braun says that the programme is an experiment the aim of which is to work as an acoustic film. There is no narrator or actor in the entire programme. The sounds are supposed to “speak” for themselves—Braun and his technician spent an entire week in an operating theatre and recorded authentic sounds of surgeries. These were accompanied by numerous noises. The medical report is added, too, as well as the patients’ narration reflecting her suffering, but with a typical Berlin-like humour.
- 28.
Dziga Vertov (1896–1954, Russia) was s a pioneer of Soviet filmmaking, newsreel director, cinema theorist. His practices and style of documentary filmmaking and editing led to a subsequent revolution in cinema. He devised Kino-eye—a film technique of capturing what Vertov believed to be hidden to the human eye. In his movies, he organised life facts into new cinematic structures reflecting his ideology.
- 29.
“In a radio context, the term “actuality” can refer to mediated simultaneity—“liveness”– but also to mass culture, current affairs and fashion, as well as, more vaguely, to abstract ideas of contemporaneity… [or] the phenomena of presence [through sound] which were among radio’s main innovations in media-aesthetic and experiential terms.” (Edgar Hanrahan in Madsen 2018: 85)
- 30.
The German radio creator Ingo Kottkamp dealt with the history of various German “schools” and methods of making features in great detail for several years. He and his team listened to thousands of historical recordings. Subsequently, he used them in overview programmes in which he strives to shed light on the entire scope of the documentary programmes and features and the process of their creation. (Deutschlandfunk Kultur, © 2020). Ingo Kottkamp (*1972, Germany) studied literature, but has worked for radio for many years. He creates his own programmes and works as a director at the station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Since 2007 he has worked as an editor for the section Hörspiel und Feature (Radio Drama and Feature).
- 31.
Soundscape is a term used often in specialised discussions. It is the “acoustic environment” of the programme, the individual layers of sound and the way they are mixed together and so on. Even our lives have their own soundscape, i.e., all the sounds we perceive around us. It is similar with radio.
- 32.
Similarly, to filming, the process of recording for radio also distinguishes various shot sizes. If the microphone is located close to the interviewees’ mouth, it is a close-up where we can hear their voice very clearly. If the interviewees stand further from the microphone, it is a semi close-up, medium shot, or long shot (based on the distance).
- 33.
Sarah Geis is an independent producer who is currently teaching audio creation at the University of Chicago and the Centre for Documentary Studies. Simultaneously, she works for Gimlet Creative.
- 34.
The associate professor Alena Štěrbová (*1939, Czechoslovakia) is a lecturer of Czech studies, a literary historian focusing on the history of the Czech literature, theatre and drama, and a radio theoretician.
- 35.
Don Mowatt is a highly regarded Canadian feature maker and a librettist who studied documentary production at Peter Leonhard Braun, the pioneer of the documentary production. Mowatt made use of Braun’s style as well as his knowledge about stereophony, acoustic composition, structure of sounds and so on in 1970–1990 at the Canadian station CBC (OH Braun 2017).
- 36.
Moreover, France was represented by two programmes of a similar length, namely, Cowboys—or the Return to North America Trough the Bering Strait and Pologne – Polska – Polcha.
- 37.
For instance, in 1982 in France, there was an allotted time for a documentary every Sunday from 8.40 pm to 11.00 pm (a series from Atelier de Création Radiophonique based in Paris), at the BBC London, shorter programmes were being created which would be broadcasted at night and rerun in the morning two days later. There were much more listeners in the morning broadcast times (Mowatt 1982).
- 38.
Kaye Mortley (*1943, Australia) is an Australian documentary maker living in Paris since 1981. She has received many awards and organised numerous radio workshops. Her production is significantly poetic and is close to French atélier creation radiophonique.
- 39.
The well-respected creator Alan Hall deals with the history of the radio feature—a hybrid between the drama and the documentary as it is sometimes said—in his feature called The Ballad of the Radio Feature which he created in 2008 for the BBC. Hall put together statements of renowned documentary makers from all over the world into an impressive and playful, while simultaneously, informative composition.
- 40.
Ladislav Kerata, known as Laco in the artistic circles, is a Slovak writer, actor, director, poet, and dramatist.
- 41.
In the Czech literature on the topic, the term “fíčr” (the Czech phonetic spelling of the feature) is also sometimes used even today.
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———. 2000. Úvodní vystoupení PhDr. Zdeňka Boučka při slavnostním předání cen vítězům soutěže REPORT, 12. prosince 2000. In Sborník z tvůrčích akcí SRT za rok 2000. Prague: Sdružení pro rozhlasovou tvorbu.
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———. 1990a. Hledání rozhlasovosti. Prague: Sdružení pro rozhlasovou tvorbu. ISBN 9788027081301.
———. 1990b. Rozhlasové pásmo či feature? Pokus o průzkum nezmapované pevniny. Prague: Československý rozhlas.
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Interviews Conducted via the Method of Oral History
OH Braun. 2017. An interview with Peter Leonhard Braun, April 11 and 12, Prix Europa office, Berlin.
OH Brys. 2017a. An interview with Edwin Brys, May 9, International Feature Conference, Stockholm.
———. 2017b. An interview with Edwin Brys, June 1–3, at his house, Brussels.
OH Geis. 2018. An interview with Sarah Geis, a Skype interview, November 3.
OH Kerata. 2019. An interview with Ladislav Laco Kerata, October 8, Prix Europa, Berlin.
Internet Sources
Braun, Peter Leonhard. 1999. The Genesis [online]. [cit. 2017-11-08]. https://ifc2.wordpress.com/the-genesis-of-ifc/
Other Material
Kowalska-Elkader, Natalia. 2021. Feature: A genological draft. Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT 9 (1): 7–20. https://doi.org/10.46687/SILC.2021.v09i01.001.
Mchugh, Siobhán A. 2012. Oral history and the radio documentary/feature: Introducing the ‘COHRD’ form. The Radio Journal – International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 10 (1): 35–50.
Personal Archive of Edwin Brys
Mortley, Kaye. 1982. Report. Montreal.
Mowatt, Don. 1982. A personal report on the sessions in Montreal of the eighth International Feature Conference. Montreal.
Theocharis, John. 2001. S.O.S. feature – Diagnosis – Prognosis – Therapy. London.
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Reková, T. (2024). Radio Feature. In: European Radio Documentary. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57185-5_4
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