RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue
of a mediurn for artistic communication, and television is likewise entitled to this status. It is, in fact, an advantage of television over films and the other media of representative communication that the process itself of direct transmission frees television presentations from the danger of ever being entirely sterile. When TV appears in the role of the medium for a production to communicate living political or social experience, then everything presented by the uniquely television feature of direct transmission will meet the requirements at least of factual communication and this is itself important Productions by the other artistic communication media, film, theater, etc., cannot offer this minimum guarantee. But how is the complicated act of transformation achieved in the case of the factual TV presentation so that it can become a higher and more complex form of symbolic communication of an objectively given reality, so that it becomes a TV production? How is the TV picture dr, more broadly, the TV sequences generated by direct transmission organized in well-conceived figurative statements when we know direct-transmission TV imposes a linear descriptive course in the TV picture’s presentation of reality? How can TV editing, the TV director, break this mechanical procession of TV sequences dictate by the iron logic of the simultaneousness of the TV event and the living event, and it must be broken if the production is to be given its indispensable pace. How, finally, can a TV presentation be endowed with all those aesthetic and ideologjcal values and evocations we have discussed when each TV sequence is only a sensory analogue of experience, a pictorial duplication, and no more? The shortest answer wou!d be as foliows: All the very complex problems which арреаг in the process of a TV production by direct transmission must be resolved by the TV picture and its metaphorization and by the ordering of sequences in broader conte.\tual blocs from which can surface not onlv the denoting and connoting values of the TV picture but its symbolic
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