New Television and Film (original) (raw)

2021, The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory (edited by Chiel van den Akker)

https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367821814-28

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Abstract

This chapter traces some ways that film and new television portray the past and "think" about history and historiography. Tracing elements of the ontology and phenomenology involved in these media, the chapter also explores some particular instances of how the past has been portrayed in these media recently, especially in, on one hand, the recent work of Quentin Tarantino, and on the other hand, the emergence of what has been termed new television.

Time and the Problems of Television: Three Images

Philosophies, 2019

In this paper I look at three images and use them to discuss television and the conditions for the representation of time in the twenty-first century. The first image is from the UK's Channel 4 news report following the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris. The paper begins by offering a theoretical critique of this televisual image and explores the grounding offered for the representation of fear and the contingent. From here, I explore two images from the experimental beginnings of television, which can be seen to provide the historical and technical conditions for the first image. The paper is media philosophical in method, critically analysing the way television can represent time and events by looking to its technical operation and its history as a technology rooted in solutions to time-based problems. What does it mean to speak about the contemporary? What do we mean when we talk about the contemporaneity of the present? Both of these questions relate to time. Both questions relate to the way the present, as Terry Smith describes it, enacts a type of 'stitching together' of multiple times [1]. Both insist on an answer that addresses the time of the present; a present that is thick with different layers of temporality, different modes of representing time and different experiences of history. In this paper I try to explore these questions by looking at images on television screens. Specifically, I look at three images that allow me to begin an exploration around the way that the temporality of events have been controlled and occasionally expressed by the apparatus of television, as the television attempts to make the multiple into the one. The first image is one that stopped me in my tracks. Following the 2015 terror attacks in Paris, the UK's Channel 4 aired a fairly conventional news report based on the activities of mourners on the 'home soil' of Europe. The arresting image however, the thing that punctuated the coverage, was something that was both expected and unexpected, similar to the punctum of a photograph. There was a moment that broke through the usual techniques of reporting, an image of fear, an image of the contingent, an image of the event, which erupted through the aftermath of the original attacks and its organisation on screens. From here, the second and third images that I explore-images from the experimental beginnings of television-are ones that can be seen to provide the conditions for the first and that offer to us a media historical way to start to understand the conditions for the existence of these types of contemporary images. As such, the paper moves from a phenomenological analysis of the first image, exploring the way it folds together multiple temporalities, to a media archaeological analysis of the second and third images, exploring how basic technical routines have provided the conditions for the possibility of this experience of time. From a description of these images, two theoretical critiques of the television emerge. The first is one in which a media theory of time, contemporaneity and the image is presented based on technical routines of signal processing and the industrial techniques of producing content. The second critical position to emerge is one that pays attention to the potential lines of escape from this type of controlled time of waiting and repetition, a time that has been referred to by Vilém Flusser as 'post-historical', where the television may express

TV & Cinema, What Forms of History Do We Need

This is a post-publication version of the article originally published in Cinema, Television & History: New Approaches. Mee, L. & Walker, J. (eds.). Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, p. 12-24 12 p., 2014

Digital remediation is changing how we can research old moving image material, but it also means that we lose sight of how that material was created. Seeing history as a just as much a form of storytelling as narrative fiction (and fact, for that matter), the article interrogates the assertions that 'all films are documentaries', 'all films are texts' and 'all films are data' in order to propose new approaches to the history of and with moving images.

The Future is Now (On Third Synthesis of Time in Contemporary Media Culture)

In The Future of the Image (2007) Jacques Rancière states that the end of images is behind us. He argues for an aesthetics of the image that acknowledges the continuing power of images as educating documentations of traces of history, as directly affecting interruptions, and as open-to-combining signs of the visible and the sayable ad infinitum. But does Rancière's claim also concern the future of cinema? His cinematic references, in a Deleuzian sense, are mostly to modern time-images. Is the future of film indeed a form of the time-image, or has the 'heart' of cinema moved beyond this image-type? This paper proposes to look at a third category of cinematographic images, based in the third synthesis of time as developed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. This filmic image, that could be called the neuro-image, is connected to the impure regime of images typical for the database logic of the digital age. By comparing Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon to the television seriesFlashForward (2009), I will analyse the temporal operations of the image of the time-image to these images of a new regime of images, the image of and from the future. 1

Writing the History of the "Cinema" Problem: Media Archaeology With Historical Epistemology

At the Borders of (Film) History: Temporality, Archaeology, Theories, edited by Alberto Beltrame, Giuseppe Fidotta, Andrea Mariani, 2015

In the last thirty years, our discipline has known many shifts and changes, moving from film history to new film history, to media archeology, and possibly to cinema history. The variety of these names reflects transformations in methods and approaches as well as in objects, from classical film masterpieces to early film or "pre-cinema" (and/or "post-cinema") apparatus, and from the dark screening room to the vast array of screens populating today's world. Film or cinema historians have moved away from linear narratives to favor accounts of complex cultural circulations. Media archaeologists have turned to forgotten, obsolete machineries, to understand the dynamic balance of media evolution, and to replace the diversity of contemporary viewing devices within long or very long histories where they could be confronted and tested against intricate genealogies of real or imaginary objects. These methods, set against traditional film history, vastly enriched and complexified our view of the history of cinema. But still, certain aspects of that evolution of media or "dispositives" remain difficult to account for. Other disciplines know similar difficulties, like the history of science or of technology: how can we explain the newness of a certain discovery or invention, without reducing this newness either to the genius of the great men on the one hand, or to the simple and unproblematic continuity of history? Media archeology has tended to isolate apparatuses and objects from one another, but some historical moments have remained reluctant to that dispersion into fragments. Some tension seems to be at work at certain points in history, a tension which is concretely productive for the people involved. What I would propose here, using the conceptual tools proposed by the French tradition of historical epistemology, is to decenter the analysis from objects to problems. Problems are in fact what inventors, technicians, engineers, and users deal with; they are intrinsically historical and operative. They point toward an imagined solution -in a sense, they carry an intrinsic teleology. That solution may be utopian, impossible, or only a small transformation of a difficult or painful technique. It may be consciously and precisely formulated by the operator, or remain only a vague project. In any case, it embodies the orientation of historical evolution at that precise moment. Let us take an example. At some point in the nineteenth century, a young man, 26 years old, has an idea. He imagines a machine capable of wonderful things:

Repurposing Television’s Past: Re-Screening, History and Memory in the Multi-Platform Era

Rundfunk und Geschichte, 2011

Medienhistorische Forschungen kritisch und fördernd zu begleiten, steht im Zentrum der Aufgaben des »Studienkreises Rundfunk und Geschichte«. Die Unterstützung des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses spielt dabei eine ganz besondere Rolle. So veranstaltete der »Studienkreis« seit Mitte der 1970er Jahre Examenskolloquien und führt seit 2007 in der Lutherstadt Wittenberg -basierend auf einer Callfor-Proposals-Ausschreibung -das »Medienhistorische Forum« für Absolventen und Forschungsnachwuchs durch. Vor diesem Hintergrund startete die Zeitschrift »Rundfunk und Geschichte« in der Ausgabe 1-2/2009 eine neue Rubrik innerhalb ihres »Forums«. Promovierende erhalten die Möglichkeit, ihre Dissertationsprojekte zu medienhistorischen Themen vorzustellen, über Quellenrecherchen zu berichten und ihren wissenschaftlichen Ansatz zur Diskussion zu stellen.

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  110. Burgoyne, Robert. The Hollywood Historical Film. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
  111. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.
  112. Rosenstone, Robert A. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
  113. Shuster, Martin. New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2017.
  114. Treacey, Mia E.M. Reframing the Past: History, Film and Television. London: Routledge Publishers, 2016.

The Postmodern Challenge of Television as History

(2001). Quantum Leap: The postmodern challenge of television as history. In G. Edgerton & P. Rollins (eds.), Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (pp. 59-78). Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky

TV as time machine: television’s changing heterochronic regimes and the production of history

Routledge, 2012

Most of the existing scholarly literature on television texts focuses on particular programs. This essay, however, will consider television's dynamics as a larger textual composite. Particularly at a moment when, to invoke Raymond Williams, television's technology and cultural form are very much in transition, the medium's fast changing textual mix and our access to it merit closer consideration. In considering this mix, I will focus on a particular aspect of television's temporality that in effect makes it a time machine, allowing viewers to experience a distinctive kind of time and possibly even notion of history. Television's temporal regime has been in flux since the start of the broadcast era, and I am interested above all in how changing configurations of time and the (re-) sequencing of programming units themselves constitute key elements of the medium's relationship to historical representation. I am interested in using medium-specific attributes to explore television's changing role as a site for the personal construction of historical meaning and as a vehicle for public history. Although the broad contours of this short narrative-the shift over the past 60 years from relatively stable and widespread textual sequences to highly variable and personalized constellations-will not be surprising, by limiting my focus to the interplay of

Sources of youth. Memories of a past future of television fiction

2015

This article explores different specific projects for television by filmmakers who work in connection with previous founding forms of TV as a hybrid medium: theater in Jean Renoir, realist novel in Maurice Pialat, televisuality in David Lynch, and verbal discourse in Orson Welles. Thus the specificities of duration, repetition and seriality, plus other televisual traits such as simultaneity, intimacy and popular appeal, turn TV into a realm of infinite possibilities based on a certain " poorness " of its images, which can be hinted in the television projects of such filmmakers.

'The Forerunners of a New Era': Television History and Ruins of the Future

This article explores the relationship between historicality and historiography, with particular focus on the tension between claims of the historicality of broadcast events and later absences in broadcast historiography. It analyses two types of claims of historicality: first as a provider of images of history in the making; and second, as a kind of prototype, a forerunner of a new era in which television has a central position in a global society. Looking at the production and organization of the broadcast of Yuri Gagarin’s return to Moscow in April 1961, the article argues that historiography is often too bound up in the present and remains blind to perspectives falling outside the dominant narratives of the current. The claims of being forerunners, on behalf of the agents involved in producing the broadcast, fit poorly with later historical events and are perhaps nothing more than the ruins of an anticipated future. But as such it may teach us just as much about the forgotten aspects of television history as it does about our practices of writing it.

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.

FilmForum 2017 XV MAGIS Film Studies Spring School 29 March – 2 April, Gorizia

Nostalgic trends in contemporary TV series. One of the most effective insights of postmodern theory of narrative was that “nostalgia for the present” defined by Jameson in Postmodernism. The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In the narrative arts there was a trend of works based on “list of stereotypes, of ideas of facts and historical realities”; in the field of cinematographic productions, Jameson called this kind of movie “nostalgia film”, citing American Graffiti and Chinatown as exemplary cases of movies set in another era, as historical films, but that cannot be confused with them because the “nostalgia film” focuses on “imaginary style of real past”. In this trend there were also movies which connect past and present (Body Heat, Blue Velvet, Something Wild), showing “a collective unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own present at the same time that they illuminate the failure of this attempt, which seems to reduce itself to the recombination of various stereotypes of the past”. Three decades away from these insights we start again to talk about nostalgia as the hallmark of many contemporary narrative works, especially in the field of television series in which some scholars actually find a strong trend towards the nostalgic. Katherina Niemeyer and Daniela Wentz assert this kind of nostalgia consists of: “reconstructing and reimagining the past visually, discursively and historically by portraying and referring to the key political, social, economic and aesthetic elements of former times”. We can find examples of that sort both in American and European series such as Stranger Things, Mad Men, Narcos, Boardwalk Empire, Downton Abbey, Deutschland 83, Aquarius, 1992, The Get-Down, Manhattan and many others. This trend also includes television series set in the present or in the future, because these narratives display a vast amount of time, and try to establish the narrative world’s present on a complex backstory: Daredevil has a vast amount the time to go back and develop the relationship of the hero as a child with his father; Luke Cage can use an entire episode to narrate the origin of the superpowers of Luke. So rethink the postmodernism can mean exploring some intuitions and tools, pondering the topical relation between media and nostalgia.