Faculty of Arts
quotations used in lecture 5 – televisual form
“Cinema and broadcast TV are often taken to be interchangeable media, in direct competition with each other. This book argues their differences from each other: differences in their social roles, their forms of institutional organisation, their general aesthetic procedures.”
John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge, 1992) p. 1.
“The gaze implies a concentration of the spectator's activity into that of looking, the glance implies that no extraordinary effort is being invested in the activity of looking. The very terms we habitually use to designate the person who watches TV or the cinema screen tend to indicate this difference. The cinema-looker is a spectator caught by the projection yet separate from its illusion. The TV-looker is a viewer, casting a lazy eye over proceedings, keeping an eye on events, or, as the slightly archaic designation had it, 'looking in'.”
• John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, p. 137.
“[The dominant] constitution of television as the bad cultural object creates a critical abyss when we try to look at television [in aesthetic terms]...[T]here is almost no elaborated discourse of quality, judgment, and value which is specific to television.”
• Charlotte Brunsdon, “Television: Aesthetics and Audiences” in Logics of Television, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
“Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”
• Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? tr. Almyer Maude (1899; rpt.
“It's pointless to spend much time wrestling with the question of whether TV can be art (of course it can be and often isn't). But there have been many days when, after a particularly potent "Buffy" episode, I've found myself feeling vaguely off my game, my mind clouded with a gauzy, muted sense of dread. When a show jostles your equilibrium to the point of haunting your days or robbing you of sleep, when it finds a place in your imagination that also rubs, hard, at the core of who you think you really are, it starts to look like something more than what we simply call TV.”
• Stephanie Zakarek, “
“Television is to some extent subversive of the very values most prized by litera[te culture]…The written word works through and so promotes consistency, narrative development from cause to effect, universality and abstraction, clarity and a single tone of voice. Television, on the other hand, is ephemeral, episodic, specific and dramatic in mode. Its meanings are arrived at by contrasts and by the juxtaposition of contradictory signs, and its ‘logic’ is oral and visual.”
• John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (New York: Methuen, 1978) 15.
“Analysis of a distribution of interest or categories in a broadcasting programme, while in its own terms significant, is necessarily abstract and static. In all developed broadcasting systems the characteristic organization, and therefore the characteristic experience, is one of sequence and flow.”
• Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974), p. 86.
“What is being offered is not…a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcasting’.”
• Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, p. 90.
“If one takes on the idea of flow, television is a continuous narrative from the moment one cuts into it with the remote control and with one’s consciousness. It also has a kind of narrative structure imposed by the schedulers.”
• Graeme Burton, Talking Television: An Introduction to the Study of Television (
“The language of television would be the whole body of conventions and rules for conveying meaning in the medium….The language of television consists of visual and aural signs. Television’s visual signs include all the images and graphics which are seen on the screen, Aural signs consist of the speech, sound and music which television produces.”
• Jonathan Bignell, An Introduction to Television Studies, p. 87.
“For all those who thought that television was defined by the flow, think again.”
• John Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (Rutgers UP, 1995), p. 264.
“Increasingly, television has come to be associated more with something you can hold, push into an appliance, and physically move around with a controller' - instead of a medium in which one bobs along in the flow of network broadcasting, mindlessly accepting whatever comes next.”
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“Advertising teaches television in more ways than one: it is a hungry proving ground for new production technologies; it is a leaky cache of creative personnel that denarrativizes television; it is an omnipresent aesthetic farm-system for primetime.”
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