LU6: Audiovisual Media

Readings:

TV: Historical Development and Social Impact – by J. Folkerts

Amusing Ourselves to Death – by N. Postman

The Centruy of the Image

No other invention had a comparable cultural impact in the 20th century as the photographic reproduction of images. It entirely changed the communication paradigm in any thinkable context.

When the Lumiere brothers added motion to the photographic pictures, they created a new medium that develop its own language, its own syntax. Television adopted the cinematographic language and very soon adapted the audiovisual syntax to the very nature of the TV medium.

The communicative cocktail had all the ingredients to become a social-psychological phenomenon.

And this is what you need to learn in the learning unit 6:

1 – The technological foundation of cinema,

2 – social functions of film,

3 – the movie industry,

4 – the challenges for the film industry brought about by the digital technologies,

5 – the technological foundation and historical development of television,

6 – the social functions of TV,

7 – the role of advertising in TV contents,

8 – Streaming TV: The Future of Television

and

9 – the rise of entertainment at the expense of the quality of information (Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death)

Audiovisual Media – Film

The Photographic Reproduction of Images

Cinema is the form of art most dependent on science and technology. The technique that made cinema possible was photographic reproduction of images.

The word “photography” is a combination of two Greek words Photon (Light) and Graphos (Writing). Basically this is what you do when you are taking a picture: writing, or drawing, or painting, with light.

Two basic principles combined made photography possible:

  1. First of all, the Camera Obscura (darkroom) principle. If you have a hermetically closed room (or box) and you open a very small hole in the center of one of its sides, you will get on the opposite side the inverted image of what is in front of the hole. (This is basically what a camera is). The “camera obscura” is a relatively old discovery. People in the Renaissance already knew and used the Camera Obscura. Many of the artists at that time used the invention to create the effect of perspective in their paintings. The challenge was to invent something that may catch this image.
  2. Photosensitive materials: In the 19th Century, different people in different parts of the world discovered almost at the same time – therefore, it was anonymous – that there are certain chemical emulsions that are sensitive to the light; that means that the light can change their structure, can modify them. At the beginning, in the so-called Daguerreotypes, the photosensitive material was silver-plate copper. One of the most famous daguerrotypes left us the image of Edgar Allan Poe .

Photography is just the combination of these two discoveries.

You put one of these chemical emulsions in the opposite side of the dark box and expose it to the light. In the first days of photography the photosensitive emulsion used was silver nitrate. Another important invention was a flexible material that could work as an emulsion carrier. George Eastman, founder of the Kodak Company, developed the “celluloid”, the same baking material used in contemporary filmmaking and photography (although It’s being rapidly replaced by digital technologies).

The light will burn the photographic emulsion and you get the negative of the image. Then, in a laboratory, you invert the process. You project the negative picture of the plastic support on a special paper with practically the same chemical emulsion and you have the positive image. Such is the process of developing a film.

Very soon, sophisticated lenses were used to produce sharper and better-defined images.

This simple technique of photographic production and reproduction of images represented a true cultural revolution. The 20th century was the age of the image – and we are still living in this age.

The Dawn of Cinema

In the last decade of the 19th Century, the photographic technique was highly developed, and some people started to think about the possibility of using this medium to catch action and motion – because, of course, photos could only reproduce static scenes.

In Europe, the inventors of the film projector were the Lumiere brothers, August (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948) Lumiere.

The name of the invention was: Cinematograph Lumiere.

The first film show took place in Paris, on 25th December of 1895 in the Salon Indien, which was actually a basement room of the Grand Cafe in Paris.

What they showed was just simple images of a train arriving to the station. The public just panicked. They thought that they were going to be smashed by the train.

In their movies, the brothers Lumiere just took images of everyday life: people walking on the streets or workers getting out of a fabric.

What they actually invented was a system to take and project a series of photographic images. Actually we can see movies because of a defect of the human eye! Our retina retains the light that comes to it during a couple of fractions of a second. And that means if our eyes are exposed to 24 images per second we perceive it as a continuum, as a continuous action. We cannot perceive the limits between the images. This is the perception threshold of our brain: 24 images a second.

And this is actually what cinema is: 24 images per second.

In the first years of the new technology, we can already see the two main tendencies motion pictures will take. The brothers Lumiere used movies to take and reproduce reality. This is the origin of the documentary film.

The second name we will learn today, another French name by the way, is the illusionist George Melies. Melies discovered the narrative potential of motion pictures. He discovered that you can use movies to tell stories. And this is the revolutionary potential of the new expressive means. He was producer, director, writer, designer, cameraman, and actorin his movies. Between 1896 and 1906, his Star Film company made around 500 films, of which just 140 survived.

He also tried all possible genres:

  • Fantasies (Cinderella, 1899)
  • Historical reconstructions (Benvenuto Cellini, 1904)
  • Docudramas (The Dreyfus Affair, 1899)
  • Science-fiction adventures (A Trip to the Moon, 1902)

Martin Scorsese released in 2011 a movie about this pioneer in fictional filmmaking: HUGO

Highlights in the early history of film

  • 1891: Edison creates Kinetoscope
  • 1895: Lumieres’ Cinematographe
  • Melies, Griffith: Cinema as imagination
  • 1915: Birth of a Nation
  • 1922: Nosferatu
  • 1922: Nanook of the North

Origins of TV

In this brief video, I discuss the technological development of television. Please, read the corresponding chapter on the historical development of TV and its social impact.

Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death

The Impact of Television on the Typographic Mind

Neil Postman was a critic, author, educator and communication theorist. For several years he hold a position as a professor of communication at the university of New York in the department of culture and communication. He focused his academic research in the field of media and education. His main concern was the unstoppable decline of thee education in his country, the powerful U.S.

This lecture focuses on only one of his books:

Amusing ourselves to death.

In this book, Postman develops the very McLuhian Thesis that the nature of the medium TV explains how the quality of information is deteriorating.

The typographic mind

Postman describes in detail the phenomenon that he calls the “typographic mind”. He explains in his book how it originated and its impact in the development of civilization.

  • The written word has a CONTENT, a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content. 
  • Reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.
  • In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas.
  • The propositional, sequential character of the written word fosters “the analytic management of knowledge”.

The age of show business

  • What is television? What kinds of conversation does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages, what sort of culture does it produce?
  • Distinction between technology and medium:
    • Technology: physical apparatus
    • Medium: a use to which a physical apparatus is put
  • Characteristics of the Medium Television:
    • Combination of audio and image.
    • The average shot length on network television is 3.5 seconds.
    • The eye never rests.
    • It offers a variety of subjects.
    • It requires minimal skills to comprehend.
    • It is largely aimed at emotional gratification.
  • “TV offers viewers a beautiful spectacle, a visual delight, pouring  forth thousands of images on any given day”.
  • “Even commercials, which some regard as an annoyance, are beautifully crafted, always pleasing the eye and accompanied by exciting music”.
  • Television has found in liberal democracy and a relatively free market economy a nurturing climate in which its full potentialities as a technology of images could be exploited.
  • American TV programs are in demand all over the world.
  • The total estimate of U.S. TV exported is over 200,000 hours.

Cosmetics has replaced ideology.

  • Those with camera appeal can command salaries exceeding one million dollar a year …
  • The container overshadows the content …
  • Can you believe that a presidential election can be lost because the candidate was sabotaged by make-up staff?

Is TV entertaining?

TV “has made entertainment itself the natural form for the representation of all experience”.

  • “The problem is not that TV presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining”.
  • “Entertainment is the supraideology of all discourse on TV”.
  • “No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement”.
  • Anything can become news, but when it come through the filter of TV, immediately becomes entertainment:
    • Triple by-pass surgery
    • Rape or murder trials
    • Terrorist Actions
    • Financial crisis
    • Natural catastrophes

Teaching as Entertainment

  • The “Sesame Street” Syndrome
  • The TV show appeared “to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit transfixed in front of a TV screen for unnatural periods of time”.
  • “It was entirely consonant with the prevailing spirit of America. Its use of cute puppets, celebrities, catchy tunes, and rapid-fire editing was certain to give pleasure to the children” (initiation into the fun-loving culture).
  • Everybody (parents, educators, legislators) approved Sesame Street.
  • The problem was:  “Sesame Street encourage children to love school, only if school is like Sesame Street”.

Readings:

TV: Historical Development and Social Impact – by J. Folkerts

Amusing Ourselves to Death – by N. Postman

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