RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

The gap between the television image and the television language (echo) which entwines around the image like a creeper has been narrowed down over the past 20 years in Belgrade Television by a whole агту of thousands of television programme-makers. The quickest solution to the insuperable »problem of TV narcissism« has always been obtained when the working man has stood in front of the cameras, grinning broadly, in full view of the public and spoken the truth. But as soon as the time-worn avoiders of the truth set foot in front of the same cameras and tried to wriggle round the problem with long speeches, then the programme had to be cut, stuck together, and generally mutilated. Those who have managed to achieve a greater organic unity between word and image аге the following: among the announcers, Kalanj, Katić and Zdravković, among the presenters, Orlović, among the poets, Radović, among the live broadcasters Nikitović and Stojaković, and those representing the spirit of childhood, Antić and Ršumović. It is not really ту intention here to make an inventory of merit, for who can be a fair judge of mevjt, but I do wish to remind the reader of living people whose experience should not be allowed to fall into oblivion. Instead, we should learn from their 20-уеаг long struggle against the mechanical welding together of language and a totally contradictory television image, In this way we could enrich our own offorts. v\ hen we refer to the organic joining together of television language with the television image, we do not do so out of some gourmet’s desire for »l’art pour l’art«. Nor аге we motivated by the linguist’s desire for a eulogy to the power which living language has when it is cl°sely accompanied by pleasing pictures and yet still remains a complete abstraction. The reasons for this need to join up word and image аге connected with the further development of culture in general. After a short Period in which the necessity to make literate a mass of milhons hitherto deprived of their cultural rights was felt, today the human гасе has already entered the phase in which it is known that the »literate« man is not in fact literate until he obtains access to the literary treasures of mankind. And to speed up and simplify this democratic approach to the riches of world culture (Rene Mahe pointed to this as far back as 1969), the mass media create a new literature, a lapidary and intelligible literature, but no less deep and philosophical than the old academic one. As far as we know this »new literature« is created, at least on television, when the gap between the television image and television

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