RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

and anti-metaphoric TV medium was: ALL THATIS SHOWN ON TV IS ESSENTIALLV DOCUMENTARY, starting from drama programmes, through news items, newspapers, to advertisements. Television itself is a typical document of its time. While the film documentary proves to be present in the future too through its documentary and authentic character, television documentary exhausts itself at the moment it occurs, as it refers exclusively to the present. The responsibihty of a television producer with regard to documentary and everyday life is identical with his responsibihty as regards to the real nature of the medium. Godard has recently shown by means of various editing procedures that the same interview made using the television technique, to meet the requirements of television, can give quite different messages. This is quite natural since an editing procedure, it we look at it from a cinematic point of view, being metaphoric and allowing such manipulation, spontaneously comes into confhct with the essentially non-metaphoric character of the television sequence. The editing of this sequence is also non-metaphoric since it is reduced to describing continuity in time and space. Editing from the film point of view, i.e., »creative editing« when apphed to television, denies the document itself. Therefore, the responsibility of a television producer as regards the documentary aspect is to respect the real nature of the television medium first of all; as soon as this characteristic is neglected, manipulation of the medium begins. As everything shown on TV is a document (from the most complex art forms to the shortest information programme elements), a TV producer is asked the following basic and essential question: What аге his rights to interfere with material taken from everyday life? This question refers to ah programmes, regardless whether it is a sports programme or a more comp!ex and creative programme, such as »Karavan« (Caravan). Television transforms into information both art and non-art programmes, releasing us from the tyrarmy of aesthetic criteria. While art, according to tradition, belongs to the »chosen few«, information belongs to everybody. Therefore, an art film ог a drama shown on TV becomes some kind of information about the works themselves and a form of document about the time, which is avaUable to everybody and becomes identical to information shown in news sports programmes. The avant-garde character of television as a medium lies precisely in the fact that it offers the viewer various contents which have been reduced to information and documentary, thus exposing him to their mutual universal influence. In this way, a viewer who watches TV every day is bombarded with facts, information and documentary material, starting from a direct broadcast of a sports event to avant-garde drama, from a concert of popular music to the televising of a heart operation, from a war fflm

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