RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

pictorial duplication of reality. The initial relationship between TV presentation and its.empirical foundations is in the province of factual transcription, but the objective of a TV production is to order the entire mosaic of sequences by which living reaiity is set out and to do so in accordance with the rules for the symbolic reconstruction of experience. This is the creative act of television. The director has before him through the intermediary of TV cameras living events, an entire mosaic of sequences being emitted by TV cameras. The selection of these sequences for inclusion ог exclusion must be simultaneous with their emission and must be based on their symbolic value in appearing on the screen. It is up to the TV director as he shapes the TV production, under pressure of each subsequent instant and with the symbolic material on hand at each given instant, to intuit on the spot the relationship between the different TV sequences and the code ог language he wants for the TV show. He is not allowed conscious value judgements of existing TV sequences ог the conscious sequential organization of the TV picture; he must depend on instantaneous intuition to achieve a more complexly stated whole clearly expressing the symbolic distance between the television event and the actual happening. What is involved is the ”metaphorization” of the TV picture, the extension of the sensory analogue with the strictlv denotative function into a visual svmbol with connotations. Without this transformation, television cannot meet the requirements of an artistic medium nor the TV presentation, of a show. Having admitted the difficulties of TV as a medium in establishing the svmbolic distance of a presentation from living reality, it must also be admitted that every direct-transmission TV presentation cannot reach the heights of artistic transformation, will not necessarily meet the qualifications of an artistic production. This however does not challenge the fundamental claim that television is inherentlv an artistic medium. Namely, all the products of the film arts are not necessarily artistic creations and the failure to reach attainable standards is a possibility in television creativity also. Nobodv, however, because of the possibility of failure denies films the status

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