Performing television history (original) (raw)

‘Visible’ and ‘invisible’ performance: Framing performance in 1970s television drama

Exploring Television Acting, 2018

1970s television drama, using close analysis of the BBC's I, Claudius (1976) to consider the proxemics of performance both in front of and behind the camera. Cantrell and Hogg (2016) differentiate between 'television acting' (actors portraying characters), and 'television performance', that is, 'adjacent performative components within the construction of text' (285). They warn against the danger that 'the particular contributions of the television actor become obscured within the larger technical mechanics of constructing Deleted: s a television performance' (286). This chapter, however, builds on Cantrell and Hogg's distinction of 'acting' and 'performance' to argue that the 'invisible performance' of camera operators can be as important as the 'television acting' of actors, and therefore demands further investigation. As well as furthering critical understandings of onscreen television performance, the chapter draws attention to the off-screen contribution of camera operators in the framing of performance in 1970s television drama. It therefore suggests that there are two categories of performance at work here in the interaction of actors and camera operators: 'visible' onscreen and 'invisible' off-screen performance. Intimate screens and dramatic rooms Assumptions about the limited aesthetic capability of television have meant a neglect of its production processes in favour of considering the writer as the creative figure in television. Academic orthodoxies consider television in general to be a visually impoverished medium (Geraghty 2003), whose multi-camera, vision mixed aesthetic and notan 1 lighting normatively generate only functional images within a tightly constrained frame. Helen Wheatley has pointed out the way in which theorists have privileged the 1960s studio as an innovative and dynamic space but dismissed the 1970s television studio as 'clumsy, dated and inexpressive' (Wheatley 2005: 145) with dialogue-driven close-ups confined to Williams's (1968) 'dramatic room'. However, as Panos and Lacey (2015) comment, studio multi-camera technique merits a critical reassessment: Television scholars are increasingly returning to the electronic studio era and attempting to understand it on its own terms, tracing practical, material and conceptual factors that influenced studio production and drawing out the dramatic and aesthetic consequences of multi-camera recording and the studio as site. (Panos and Lacey 2015: 2) Likewise, performance in television has been little studied. The teleological 'developmental model' assumes 'a broad movement away from the interior world of studio production, as also moving from a theatrical precedent' (Macmurraugh-Kavanagh and Lacey 1999: 60) Deleted: S Deleted: D Deleted: R comprising 'moments of change' in technology and aesthetics (ibid.). The 'developmental model' has implications for screen performance, assuming a move from studio's 'intimate screen' model (Jacobs 2000) of dialogue-driven close-ups to a more naturalistic mode, as well as a tendency towards more 'cinematic' wide shots. However, theorists have struggled to find a critical vocabulary with which to investigate screen performance. As Bignell, Lacey and MacMurraugh-Kavanagh put it, '[c]ritical discourses on British television drama, arising from studies of "Golden Age" drama like the Wednesday Play and Play for Today series, have been constrained. .. by questions of authorship, realism and communicative effects' (2000: 81-2). John Caughie comments that criticism of TV drama seems 'quite tongue-tied' about acting (2000: 207). Framing performance Screen performance is characterized by the interaction of performers within a frame, and therefore, by the interaction of camera and performers. Lury (1996) suggests that television performance is a combination of technique and technology. Tucker (2003) discusses how actors scale performance to the size of the screen: performance is literally framed by the selection of details of bodily gesture and dialogue delivery within a chosen shot size. This is a collaborative process: Cynthia Baron comments that the selection and combination of movements, gestures, and vocal/facial expressions are themselves mutually interactive elements in the performance montage that actors and directors create. When montage is understood as the process of both selection and combination in film, choices about framing, editing, production, and sound design can actually be seen as implicit choices about performance, and acting choices can be seen as implicit choices about other cinematic strategies. (2007: 33) Performance then must be seen as one element in a matrix of creative and technical choices. However, most accounts of this collaborative process focus on the performer in front of the camera, rather than the activities going on behind it. In television studies, critical assumptions Deleted: ' Deleted: ' Deleted: … Deleted: 8 Deleted: P Deleted: s about television's aesthetic limitations have led to an almost total neglect of the role of camera operators in mediating pro-filmic performance. Foucault (1980; 1991) and Bourdieu (1984) suggest that space and action are dialogically related, and this chapter therefore argues for an understanding of television's production spaces as Bourdieuian fields shaping the subjects and texts produced within them. Within this field, subjects position themselves hierarchically according to various forms of symbolic capital-taste, education, skills and so on (Bourdieu 1993; 1998). Camera operators are not passive functionaries, capturing pro-filmic 'theatrical' performance, but instead actively contribute to the generation of the screen within which performance is both figuratively and literally framed. While this research therefore considers the proxemics of the interaction between camera and actors, it also considers the neglected issue of 'embodied' performance on the part of technical crews as making an essential contribution to the poetics of the performed text; thus drawing a distinction between 'visible' and 'invisible' performance in 1970s studio drama. Hierarchies of distinction Even within the industry, 1970s multi-camera operators were dismissed by their peers. Within the mixed production ecology of 1970s television, it is generally the case that studio interiors were on videotape, and location exteriors were shot on 16mm film. A clear distinction (in various meanings of the word) existed between video camera crews and film cameramen. In the multi-camera studio, with a team of four or so camera operators each assigned to separate cameras, directors can select the output of each camera on monitors. The BBC film cameraman A. A. Englander argues that a key difference between studio production and location filming is that in the latter, the director cannot see the viewfinder picture. Englander suggests that the expertise of film cameramen means that they require

Performing the Identity of the Medium: Adaptation and Television Historiography

Adaptation, 2019

This article focuses on how histories of television construct narratives about what the medium is, how it changes, and how it works in relation to other media. The key examples discussed are dramatic adaptations made and screened in Britain. They include early forms of live transmission of performance shot with multiple cameras, usually in a TV studio, with the aim of bringing an intimate and immediate experience to the viewer. This form shares aspects of medial identity with broadcast radio and live television programmes, and with theatre. The article also analyses adaptations of a later period, mainly filmed dramas for television that were broadcast in weekly serialized episodes, and shot on location to offer viewers a rich engagement with a realized fictional world. Here, film production techniques and technologies are adapted for television, alongside the routines of daily and weekly scheduling that characterize television broadcasting. The article identifies and analyses the questions about what is proper to television that arise from the different forms that adaptations took. The analyses show that television has been a mixed form across its history, while often aiming to reject such intermediality and claim its own specificity as a medium. Television adaptation has, paradoxically, operated as the ground to assert and debate what television could and should be, through a process of transforming pre-existing material. The performance of television's role has taken place through the relay, repetition, and remediation that adaptation implies, and also through the repudiation of adaptation.

Television and the popular: viewing from the British perspective

The academic discipline of television studies has been constituted by the claim that television is worth studying because it is popular. Yet this claim has also entailed a need to defend the subject against the triviality that is associated with the television medium because of its very popularity. This article analyses the many attempts in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries to constitute critical discourses about television as a popular medium. It focuses on how the theoretical currents of Television Studies emerged and changed in the UK, where a disciplinary identity for the subject was founded by borrowing from related disciplines, yet argued for the specificity of the medium as an object of criticism. Eschewing technological determinism, moral pathologization and sterile debates about television's supposed effects, UK writers such as Raymond Williams addressed television as an aspect of culture. Television theory in Britain has been part of, and also separate from, the disciplinary fields of media theory, literary theory and film theory. It has focused its attention on institutions, audio-visual texts, genres, authors and viewers according to the ways that research problems and theoretical inadequacies have emerged over time. But a consistent feature has been the problem of moving from a descriptive discourse to an analytical and evaluative one, and from studies of specific texts, moments and locations of television to larger theories. By discussing some historically significant critical work about television, the article considers how academic work has constructed relationships between the different kinds of objects of study. In the article, the aim is not to arrive at a definitive meaning for "the popular" inasmuch as it designates programmes or indeed the medium of television itself. Instead the aim is to show how, in historically and geographically contingent ways, these terms and ideas have been dynamically adopted and contested in order to address a multiple and changing object of analysis.

Television Studies: The Basics

2009

Acknowledgments vi Introduction: the televisual sublime 1 Television theory: TV studies 1.0 and 2.0 22 Television institutions 50 Content 80 Audiences 110 How to do TV Studies 3.0 145 Conclusion 175

Live and kicking: a meta-critical discourse on television and television studies

Science Fiction Film & Television, 2010

Television studies has been engaged in a reflexive self-discourse since its beginnings, and the last few years have seen a noticeable number of publications that consider the state of television as an object of study and/or television studies as the discipline that studies this object. Here, Cinema Journal 's special 'In Focus: The Place of Television Studies' section-edited by William Boddy, with contributions from other senior US scholars including John T. Caldwell, Michele Hilmes and Lynn Spigel 1-and the British response to this by members of the Midlands Television Research Group-'In Focus: The Place of Television Studies: A View from the British Midlands', edited by Charlotte Brunsdon and Ann Gray, with contributions from Rachel Moseley and Helen Wheatley 2-have been especially illuminating as a Bakhtinian self-dialogue. With this essay, we wish to reflect both on these prior reflections and on the relationship between the object and the discipline towards the end of the first decade of the twentyfirst century. Considering the nature of the transition of television and a possible reformation of television studies, we will focus on the uncertainties of the discipline, with regard to both research and teaching, and highlight a number of issues and concerns that have perhaps not so far been brought to the forefront as much as they deserve. We will also indicate how our arguments resonate with sf and sf studies. Post-object, post-discipline? It is a truth universally acknowledged, that any work on the current state of television and/or television studies, must contain a discussion of the fact that