Chernobyl Calling. Narrative, Intermediality and Cultural Memory of a Docu-fiction

This research stems from a panel discussion that took place at Thessaloniki during the 15th World Semiotics Conference (IASS/AIS) in August-September 2022 (titled “Chernobyl calling. Fiction, Non-fiction, Lifeworld”) and briefly summarized for the Jenkins 2022 blog, whose interventions and discussions were reopened and reworked by the book’s authors for collective and extended reflection. In designing the book, we also wanted to open it up to other scholars and researchers interested in analyzing contemporary television seriality and its psychological, social, and semiotic implications and constructions. The Chernobyl TV series opens many possible issues, and in this book, we will address some that are part of our research topics. Like many contemporary TV series, Chernobyl is a case of what Mittell (2015) calls “complex TV.” Analyzing a TV series as an isolated and autonomous media product is no longer sufficient. Of course, it will be essential to understand the miniseries’ choice of discursive genre and format (see the chapter by Giorgio Grignaffini) and to examine the narrative structure of the script (see the chapter by Paolo Braga) and the construction of male (see the chapter by Andrea Bernardelli) and female characters (see the chapter by Charo Lacalle). An equally important task will be to analyze the collision or interplay in the series between its fictional capacity and its documentary aspirations (see the chapter by Nicola Dusi), as is also evident in the miniseries’ finale, where fictional images are replaced by those of iconographic and historical sources. While analyzing the TV series, we will talk about the Chernobyl disaster as a social and cultural trauma and the activation mechanisms of media archives (see the chapter by Antonella Mascio) and about the TV series and the elements of modern sacrifice (see the chapter by Alberto García), as well as about the representation of the Cold War and the manipulation of information (see the chapter by Federico Montanari). All this without forgetting ‘traditional’ viewers and their reactions, for example, in a particular local setting such as Greece (in Europe), verifying with qualitative sociological analysis (interviews) the reception and understanding of the TV series’ narrative (see the chapter by Ioanna Vovou). As can be gathered from these first remarks, we decided to approach the Chernobyl miniseries from different theoretical and methodological perspectives to raise issues such as the relationship between fiction and nonfiction, realism constructed through intermedial and transmedia relations, the writing of narrative arcs and the construction of characters in a multi-strand series, with several parallel stories (see the chapter on Héctor Pérez). According to Gambarato and Heuman (2022), exceptionally high-quality audiovisual productions with extensive outreach are most likely to remain in the collective cultural memory as a truthful reference to historical events despite the more accurate historical texts. In our book, we have asked Renira Rampazzo Gambarato and Johannes Heuman to resume their research on the miniseries Chernobyl, focusing on memory and media oblivion. Still, their chapter also discusses the role of ethics and aesthetics based on Peirce’s semiotics.