Dialogue in Politics

Commemorations as part of ceremonial politics normally are dialogues, speeches and symbolic actions (laying wreaths or lighting candles) between representatives and inside audiences. A TV transmission makes TV viewers another audience participating in an outside dialogue. The BBC transmission of the first UK Holocaust Memorial Day consisted of commemorative and informative discourses (aiming at “Lessons of the Holocaust”) realized in footage, documentaries, testimonies, musical performances, addresses, voice-over texts, etc. Its complexity asks for a multimodal discourse analysis informed by documentary film audience design analysis. When do we find congruence amongst the modes (words, pictures, sounds, music and their respective sub-modes) under investigation, and when do we find incongruence? The focus is on TV viewers who overhear and oversee multimodal commemorative and informative performances. A transcription of the TV transmission is the main source of the analysis.