ABSTRACT
Cinema and broadcast TV are often taken to be interchangeable media, in direct competition with each other. This book argues their differences from each other: differences in their social roles, their forms of institutional organisation, their general aesthetic procedures. Cinema and broadcast TV are seen as divergent and complementary, having developed distinctive aesthetic and commodity forms (the series and serial in TV; the single ‘feature’ film in cinema), and divergent forms of narration and representation of events and people. These divergent products are marketed differently and ask their spectators to treat them differently. The two media are not in direct competition with each other: broadcast TV cannot wipe out cinema any more than cinema was able to wipe out theatre. But there are vast areas of interdependence. Cinema needs TV’s money invested in film production; TV needs cinema film as a reference point for its own production work, and also as fodder for broadcasting. This mutual dependence has given cinema possibilities that it scarcely possessed before the era of broadcast TV: it can deal with more adventurous topics, and deal with them more adventurously; it can appeal to (and even work with) a wide diversity of allegedly marginal tastes. But cinema has remained within a conception of what constitutes a film (a self-sufficient, universally intelligible unit of about two hours length). It inherited this conception from its past. This conception suits the needs of broadcast TV, but does not exploit the specific characteristics of cinema as a public event to any real extent. An independent cinema in Britain has begun to explore
this aspect of cinema, constructing a form of cinema that is appropriate for the age beyond that of broadcast TV: the age of domestic video. Finally, and hesitantly, then, this book peers into the video future, testing some of its arguments against the almost messianic predictions that are sometimes made.
