This post will not get very far. It is little more than random jottings that have little direciton.
It's initial impetus is a sense that something has happened to film. I reckon it is because it has gone digital.
Now we see computer generated images rather than acting, and these images have changed the relationship of film's representations to social and physical reality. It is possible to have a film that has no referents to the history and the physical world but exist solely in the digital domain of the computer.
That is a big shift. Does it open up screen culture to different kinds of film? Does it mean that the modern history of the cinema is no longer oriented solely according to movements and aesthetic schools? Does the replacement of film's photo-chemical base for an electro-magnetic base have little bearing on film as a cultural practice? Does it threaten the very ontological underpinnings of film culture?
Dunno. I'm not sure that I care.
Hell, I'm still coming to grips with television:---the fleeting images that catch your eye in the corners in airport lounges and shops; the shows that mark Suzanne's daily transition from work to relaxation, the non-stop flow of images when in Canberra. Television is such an integral part of our daily experience that it is now now taken-for-granted. It is cultural/visual form of everyday life.
Remember the bodies of four charred, dead Americans being brutalized and dragged through the streets of Fallujah, Iraq on broadcast television?
The burned corpse chopped and beaten with a pole and pikes and shovels;
a charred side of human flesh dragged through the street by its roasted leg; young teenaged boys laughing and cheering in front of scorched and broken bodies strung from the rafters of a green iron bridge.
That was global television. Television is the primary global medium. What does it mean? Dunno.
Well, we seem to accept that the prolonged feeds from CNN and the BBC mean that television is the only real source of knowledge of waht is happening around the globe. It forms the basis of our common knowledge?
I only know about 9/11 from watching the flow of images and commentary live on a television feed. Like everyone else. but what is the flow? How is it different from programming?
In academia there was a disdain, if not contempt, for the superficial depthlessness of television as a medium, compared to, say, the academic validity of cinema. Film was space aroudn which the serious theorizing took place. Few talked about the forbidden pleasure of watching television. It is hard to miss the television 'chat' as a form of commentary that assumes we are all wealthy, healthy bourgeoisie. It's naturalist tropes across genres, offer us a form of heightened reality.
We do have a televisual culture. That much I can say and do know. Yet I yearn to watch television as distinct from watching a program on television. I yearn to depart from the rhythms of broadcast transmissions of both the public and commercial television systems.
My sense is that the media landscape has been in constant upheaval. Most attention has been focused on the Internet but the old media are being transformed. Digital television now seems inevitable depsite the defence of free-to air-- television systems, and there is lots of talk of the convergence between computer technology, the internet, and television.
I dunno what all that means. I cannot even imagine it.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 22, 2004 11:35 PM | TrackBack