Week 3 - Television, Film and Video Media Reading Diary

film-tv

Week 3 - Is Film/TV a Language?

This week we began considering how TV and Film can be portrayed as a language, generating meaning and messages to its viewers. To do this, we must look at the inner workings of a Film or TV show. This will allow us to try and understand the technology, giving us a better understanding of how TV shows and Films are constructed and what message they are trying to get across.

The lecture for this week introduced us to the idea of looking at TV and Film as a language and gave us the basic knowledge for us to complete research of our own. We also considered the history of film and gained an understanding that early cinema was about political meaning and political motivation whereas now it is often based on the producer’s ideology. We then highlighted the three main approaches to studying film which are: Historical Approaches which leads to examining film as an evolving style, watching for pleasure and watching for an appreciation of rhetoric. Watching for an appreciation of rhetoric relates back to the title of this week’s lecture and ensures that we generate an understanding of the message being portrayed.

The reading that I completed this week was exploring the balance between sound and image through TV and Film, looking at the roles in each. The author also looks at the regime of representation that has developed for TV (Ellis, J, 1982, p.128). One of the main points highlighted by the author is the substantial size difference when watching TV in comparison to film, TV image is of lower quality and always substantially smaller than the cinema image (Ellis, J, 1982, p.127). From the author’s perspective, sound plays an extremely important role in TV and is often more important than the image itself, this is because people are often not just watching TV and sound is the only thing that ensures a certain level of attention, to drag viewers back to looking at the set. He highlights the difference in film being that sound follows the images or diverges from it (Ellis, J, 1982, p.130). The relationship of sound an image in TV is very different to that in film and due to to TV’s lower level of sustained concentration the images on broadcast TV are stripped-down, lacking in detail. (Ellis, J, 1982, p.131).

This week allowed me to gain more knowledge of the comparison between sound and image of film and TV. I also learnt how to take more of an in-depth look when researching TV and film. This week has helped me with my own research by highlighting 'rhetoric'. This allowed me to understand that every film and TV show has a meaning and it takes time to undercover this message/meaning.

References

Ellis, John (1982) Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, Routledge: London - pp. 127-159

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (2000) ‘How films mean, or, from aesthetics to semiotics and half-way back again’ in Gledhill, C and Williams, L. (2000), Reinventing Film Studies. London: Bloomsbury Academic.