Working toward a Television Canon
2014; Issue: 94 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoTelevision has taken its place as an art form, thanks to an era of acclaimed shows from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones. This ascent has stimulated interest in older TV series. In 2012, for example, Heather Havrilesky published an astute appreciation of Dallas as a distillation of 1980s America, comparing it favorably to its relatively meaningless 21st century remake. As much as anything in the review itself, it's a sign of the times that it was published not on a personal blog or even a film magazine but in The New York Times Magazine (June 3, 2012 issue). In addition to landmark shows, there are technological factors driving TV's rehabilitation. DVD releases erase the biggest mark against the medium--commercials, and the edits made to cram in more of them. Of course, TVs themselves have gotten bigger and better, and now that film (celluloid) seems endangered and our theatres increasingly play host to high-def video and 3-D eyesores, the television dramas of the 1960s and 1970s seem increasingly cinematic. This makes sense, because as TV switched to color broadcasts in the 1960s, the two industries overlapped. According to The Hollywood Story, as theatre box office declined in the 1960s, movie companies expanded into other areas of entertainment such as recording, publishing and, especially, TV production.1 It gets trickier in the late 1970s and 1980s, as TV producers learned they could cut corners. This damaged the legacy of some shows. The 1987-1988 series Max Headroom is a sharp satire of the television society, but it was shot on video, and looks it. It remains to be seen whether today's TV critics will become renowned creators of TV and film, but nevertheless, the current boom in TV criticism bears similarities to the French Nouvelle Vague of the 1950s: * The film critics of Cahiers du Cinema attended marathon screenings at Paris's Cinematheque Francaise; today's TV buffs are known for binge-watching worthy series. * The French critics played offense, boldly asserting cinema as art. Today, it's routine to compare the best serialized television to Dickens and Balzac, writers originally published in serial form. * Before sanctifying world directors such as Fritz Lang and Ingmar Bergman (and joining them), the French New Wave insisted on auteur status for Hollywood veterans such as John Ford and Howard Hawks. Similarly, today's TV aesthetes are expanding their canon to include such series as Hill Street Blues, The Golden Girls, and anything by Joss Whedon. Television was never as far from film as it once seemed, when its primacy in our homes bred contempt. The technology dates from the 1930s, but its adoption was delayed by World War II. As early as the mid-1950s, television produced in New York City was influencing Hollywood, as studios seized such teleplays as Paddy Chayefsky's Marty and Reginald Rose's 12 Angry Men (released as theatrical films in 1955 and 1957, respectively). The two industries cross-pollinated: Alfred Hitchcock produced (and sometimes directed) his long-running TV series (1955-1965), and TV artists such as Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, and Arthur Penn moved to feature films. A number of great theatrical films were produced for television but proved too strong for the networks that commissioned them, including Don Siegel's The Killers (1964), Peter Watkins' The War Game (1965), and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001). While most of the famous made-for-TV movies are based in script and performance (Brian's Song, The Burning Bed, the miniseries Roots), others are undeniably cinema, such as Steven Spielberg's Duel and John Carpenter's Someone's Watching Mel, two seminal 1970s riffs on modern paranoia. Patrick McGoohan's limited-run The Prisoner (196768) remains one of the great dystopias in any medium (like much of that subgenre, it's British). The Prisoner remains timely almost 50 years on: at this point, its paralyzing airborne weapon called Rover can only be termed a proto-drone. …
Referência(s)