Mandy Martin, Puritjarra 2, 2005. For further information on MANDY MARTIN, refer here: http://www.mandy-martin.com/
If there are diverse kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing place, then we need to learn to value the different ways each of us sees a single place that is significant, but differently so, for each perspective.
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looking for something firm in a world of chaotic flux
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Soul Deep, television culture, academia
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February 15, 2008
I watched Soul Deep: The Story of Black Popular Music last night on ABC1, even though I had to catch an early flight to Melbourne. I was hoping that I'd learn something about this popular form of black American music and whilst watching it I wondered how music and image and history would come together to inform a television culture. Do we have a television culture? Of sorts
The quote below is from an interview with Jane Roscoe conducted by Henk Huijse in M/C Dialogue. Roscoe says:
in Australia we don't seem to take television very seriously. We're not culturally very interested in it. We don't write a lot about television in the public sphere. You know we have movie shows, but you're lucky if you get a column on television. We don't talk about or write about television in sophisticated ways. We don't feel it's an art form. We don't take it seriously. I mean even the people who make television; often they don't watch it, and they feel they're making television because they can't make a film. And so it's always considered that kind of second rate medium, domestic and confined to the living room, and not to be publicly celebrated and enjoyed, and debated over.
I see television as the culture industry and so unworthy of critical refection or consideration unless it is about the trash or junk. I know that not all the product on the different free-to-air channels and Foxtel is trash, but I 'm not really interested in it apart from the programme here and there (eg., Soul Deep Soul Deep), despite the centrality of this media in our visual culture.
Roscoe goes on to say:
I think academics have a great opportunity to kind of make it more of a public celebration. Now, not everything on television is worth talking about. But I think academics can share their knowledge to enrich the experience of viewing, because that's what television culture is about. Viewing can be enhanced when you know something more about processes or ideas; it doesn't have to be like a lecture, and again, you know, not that idea of: if you knew more about what these representations mean, you would know more. But more: how would your viewing be enhanced if you knew more about the processes, or what the program makers were trying to achieve? How would program making itself be enhanced if producers knew more about how audiences relate to their material? And so, academics can play a really important role in exciting people about television, in making links where perhaps a viewer might not already see those. Enhancement rather than education though, I think is what I'm getting at. I like sharing those ideas with people, and I think it's important. Academics are publicly funded and should give back what they take, that's the bottom line. And I think that's an enjoyable way to do it.
It's an excellent point-----Academics are publicly funded and should give back what they take, that's the bottom line.
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Watched the second part of The Bunker on SBS last night. Its blend of documentary interviews and reenactments was powerful. It's a part of history I'm quite familiar with, yet the quality of this gave it an uexpected dimension. This was television at its best.