It is useful to view all of the media together, ranging from the individual performer appearing in the flesh before his audience to the complex presentations of electronic media. They may be compared in terms of the relationship of the performer to his audience. The media also vary in the kind of performance on which they can draw, either derivatively or creatively.
Media borrow from each other just as Greek drama drew on ancient myths and legends and Renaissance drama on classical and contemporary material. The voracious demands of 20th century media have driven producers and scriptwriters to acquire the rights to existent material in other media, particularly the novel and drama. Radio and television have overlapped increasingly with journalism, with many journalists becoming broadcasters and commentators.
However, much of the borrowing has been mechanical and technical rather than artistic in nature. The invention of magnetic tape for recording both sound and video signals has now linked together all of the mechanized media - phonograph, telephone, radio, sound film, and television - and made available a virtually complete record of the sights, sounds, arts, and culture of modern society.
Dramatic Techniques
Radio began by restoring the ancient art of the storyteller. Writers for radio next learned how to suggest place and time by word of mouth, accompanied by the impressionistic use of sound and music. Thus was born the genre of radio drama. The radio dramatist had to address himself to the imagination of listeners who are unable to see what they were experiencing. This limitation carried with it a certain freedom, so radio was free to create its own plastic continuities of action and time-space reference. Radio has been highly creative in the fields of drama and documentary and also in quite new forms of imaginative light entertainment.
Television, on the other hand, adapted techniques already established by the sound film of the 1930s and 1940s. In the initial rivalry between film and television, economic and technical factors both played a part. The first television plays were like the simplest kind of film dialogues in that they avoided elaborate sets or large casts. This was due to the size of the screen not being large enough and because of cost. Television material was highly expendable, like newspapers and journals that are discarded after a single use. Only gradually did the international distribution of selected television programs, particularly within the large Anglo-American market, permit more money to be spent on "production value" in television.
Television drama came into its own during the 1950s with the emergence of writers and directors who shook themselves free from the old models and began to develop their own techniques. They began to use an extension of the two-dimensional image with sound into fields that the cinema could not or would not enter. The creativity of television in the purely artistic sense lies in the unique opportunities it offers the maker. These opportunities were beyond the reach of the filmmaker, who had no way of impelling his sponsor to finance him in such ventures. Here, art and the nature of sponsorship can be said to overlap, as is so often the case in the history of art.
Film Techniques
The basic principles that the television image shares with the film image are, of course, its freedom to select the compass of each individual shot and its freedom to determine the nature of the movement within it. The form of presentation depends in both cases on a continuity of such shots in order to build up a narrative flow. Film and television narrative are based on the same principles of mobile composition - the selective (or edited) flow of selective shots of the action.
Symbiotic Relationship
Despite the technological differences in their production, they are aesthetically linked and will continue to have a close relationship with each other. This relationship naturally extends into the technical field. Television adopted videotape in order to achieve an immediate high-quality record of the electronic image. This seemed at first to be a threat to the use of film in television, but the threat did not materialize; the film camera is indispensable in many branches of television production. On the other hand, filmmakers have found videotape to be useful in cinema production, since it provides the capability of checking the shot before the film is
processed.
The development of television as an art form has not excluded its use as a channel for works produced in other media. On the contrary, production in other media has been increasingly financed out of revenues from its subsequent transmission on television. Since the earliest years of its existence, television has depended on the regular screening of a vast backlog of movie films. The high rentals paid on old films have induced television interests themselves to undertake the production of new films to be shown in theatres and subsequently on the television channels they operate. The feature films they produce often have relatively small casts and a higher ratio of in-close shooting, making them suitable for the smaller TV screen, just as most films now shot for wide screens keep the essential action in the center so that they can later be shown on television.
Media borrow from each other just as Greek drama drew on ancient myths and legends and Renaissance drama on classical and contemporary material. The voracious demands of 20th century media have driven producers and scriptwriters to acquire the rights to existent material in other media, particularly the novel and drama. Radio and television have overlapped increasingly with journalism, with many journalists becoming broadcasters and commentators.
However, much of the borrowing has been mechanical and technical rather than artistic in nature. The invention of magnetic tape for recording both sound and video signals has now linked together all of the mechanized media - phonograph, telephone, radio, sound film, and television - and made available a virtually complete record of the sights, sounds, arts, and culture of modern society.
Dramatic Techniques
Radio began by restoring the ancient art of the storyteller. Writers for radio next learned how to suggest place and time by word of mouth, accompanied by the impressionistic use of sound and music. Thus was born the genre of radio drama. The radio dramatist had to address himself to the imagination of listeners who are unable to see what they were experiencing. This limitation carried with it a certain freedom, so radio was free to create its own plastic continuities of action and time-space reference. Radio has been highly creative in the fields of drama and documentary and also in quite new forms of imaginative light entertainment.
Television, on the other hand, adapted techniques already established by the sound film of the 1930s and 1940s. In the initial rivalry between film and television, economic and technical factors both played a part. The first television plays were like the simplest kind of film dialogues in that they avoided elaborate sets or large casts. This was due to the size of the screen not being large enough and because of cost. Television material was highly expendable, like newspapers and journals that are discarded after a single use. Only gradually did the international distribution of selected television programs, particularly within the large Anglo-American market, permit more money to be spent on "production value" in television.
Television drama came into its own during the 1950s with the emergence of writers and directors who shook themselves free from the old models and began to develop their own techniques. They began to use an extension of the two-dimensional image with sound into fields that the cinema could not or would not enter. The creativity of television in the purely artistic sense lies in the unique opportunities it offers the maker. These opportunities were beyond the reach of the filmmaker, who had no way of impelling his sponsor to finance him in such ventures. Here, art and the nature of sponsorship can be said to overlap, as is so often the case in the history of art.
Film Techniques
The basic principles that the television image shares with the film image are, of course, its freedom to select the compass of each individual shot and its freedom to determine the nature of the movement within it. The form of presentation depends in both cases on a continuity of such shots in order to build up a narrative flow. Film and television narrative are based on the same principles of mobile composition - the selective (or edited) flow of selective shots of the action.
Symbiotic Relationship
Despite the technological differences in their production, they are aesthetically linked and will continue to have a close relationship with each other. This relationship naturally extends into the technical field. Television adopted videotape in order to achieve an immediate high-quality record of the electronic image. This seemed at first to be a threat to the use of film in television, but the threat did not materialize; the film camera is indispensable in many branches of television production. On the other hand, filmmakers have found videotape to be useful in cinema production, since it provides the capability of checking the shot before the film is
processed.
The development of television as an art form has not excluded its use as a channel for works produced in other media. On the contrary, production in other media has been increasingly financed out of revenues from its subsequent transmission on television. Since the earliest years of its existence, television has depended on the regular screening of a vast backlog of movie films. The high rentals paid on old films have induced television interests themselves to undertake the production of new films to be shown in theatres and subsequently on the television channels they operate. The feature films they produce often have relatively small casts and a higher ratio of in-close shooting, making them suitable for the smaller TV screen, just as most films now shot for wide screens keep the essential action in the center so that they can later be shown on television.
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