"The multiplication of channels has slowly created the reverse feeling of a fundamental 'unity' of all images and sounds on television."

--Serge Daney, "Saint Zelig, Pray for Us" (1987; translated by Laurent Kretzschmar)

[a couple of paragraphs from an unfinished review of World on a Wire, intended to coincide with the film's week-long run at the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier this month]

The only starring role Fassbinder would give occasional company player Klaus Löwitsch, the lead in World on a Wire is Fred Stiller, a computer scientist with the mannerisms (and manners) of a pulp detective. A drinking game could be invented based on the number of times he grabs characters by the lapels (take two shots if he then pushes them against a wall or throws them against a table). Like coolcat sourpuss Jean-Louis Trintignant (to whom he bears a passing resemblance), Löwitsch expresses suspicion, fear, anger and shock though varying degrees of sullenness. He has an Eddie Munster-like widow’s peak that creeps up from under the brim of his fedora and the sort of intensity that, in film history, is the provenance of shorter men.

...

Here’s a rule of thumb a lot of cinephiles learn pretty early on: what looks good on a big screen doesn’t always look good on a small one, but what looks good on a small screen will always look good on a big one.

No surprise then that some of best revivals to come to theaters in the last few years – Out 1, Berlin Alexanderplatz and now World on a Wire – were all originally conceived for television. Though Jacques Rivette had to make an edited-down theatrical version for his film to get shown, Fassbinder shot and edited Berlin Alexanderplatz and World on a Wire exclusively for TV (he even entertained plans of remaking Berlin Alexanderplatz as a theatrically-shown feature with an international cast). On the small screen of a TV or a laptop, it's easier to grasp the geometric design of an image. At the expense of the details of mise-en-scene, the most rudimentary elements of framing and editing make themselves more obvious, a fact very few people seem to harness (Jack Webb was a notable exception). Like Roberto Rossellini, Fassbinder understood this.

Watch His Face

Excerpt from an episode of Press Your Luck aired June 11, 1984

You wanna see drama? Or a "great performance," for that matter? This little clip's got both.

This is the notorious "Michael Larson incident," or the Larson Sweep, or whatever you wanna call it. In the summer of 1984, Michael Larson, an unemployed Ohioan and Philip Seymour Hoffman-lookalike, won a little over $110,000 on Press Your Luck, a chance-based game show where final winnings were usually capped off at $25,000. Watch his face, because Larson isn't lucky: using months of preparation and a VCR, he figured out the seemingly "random" patterns of the game board. This is a performance of intense concentration and hand-eye coordination, a man who has put himself through rigorous training, pretending to be a game show contestant. When they analyzed the show and figured out exactly how he'd done it, the producers tried to keep from paying, but nothing in their rules qualified him as a cheater.

He spent almost all of the money trying to win other contests and lost the rest to Ponzi schemes and burglary. He died of throat cancer in 1998, estranged from his family and on the run from the IRS.

Untitled Video ("Ampex Quadruplex video tape machine on air"), May 1982

Steve Teague's account says he's 48, so basic math tells that he was about 20 when he shot this video. Maybe he was a student, maybe he was a trainee at the station. He's uploaded a few to YouTube, all of them showing the workings of TV stations in Birmingham, England in the early 1980s.

This one's the simplest and the best. I found it while looking for footage of what a Quadruplex machine actually looked like at work, and he shows not only that but how exactly one operates the machine, the general mood of a regional TV control room at the time, how the machine relates to what is being broadcast and how live footage interacts with pre-recorded segments, as well as fleeting details of the life of the machine's operator (who isn't terribly different from a factory worker), all in a single take and a single framing.

The Beauty of TV #1

Roza Rymbaeva peforms "Aliya" on Song of the Year '77

Beautiful Evidence

Most new films shot in black and white make me think of television. Why? Because TV, at its core, is about presenting a sort of evidence, and black and white has been, for a few decades now, a very effective way for directors to "prove" that their film is serious. The fact of the black and white is more important than the image. I don't mean to degrade these films; there's nothing wrong with having your roots in television or the Internet or books or comics or music. Sometimes the TV thinking results in something very beautiful -- it's because of his beginnings in 1950s television that Sidney Lumet's current mise-en-scene is so concerned with evidence.

I'm sure it's because of its perceived seriousness that George Clooney chose to print (though not shoot) Good Night and Good Luck in black and white -- a film which is both about television and evidence, the relationship between the two: how TV gave us "fact," and what it was evident of.

It's a real "actor's movie," full of under-appreciated performers: Ray Wise, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey, Jr. (right before everyone started taking him seriously again), Patricia Clarkson, Frank Langella. David Strathairn's fantastic, serious acting evidence, proving to us how committed Edward R. Murrow was. In close-up, he has a real sinner's face, like Leonard Cohen.

Back to the evidence, which is everywhere: the speech patterns, the archival TV footage (with kinescopes of Joe McCarthy playing the part of the senator, so that no one can say the screenwriters twisted his words), the heavy cigarette smoke (all fake, the cast being mostly non-smokers and smoking being forbidden in the studios anyway). The opening shots, "candids" of a ceremony honoring Murrow, all look very serious and "artful," like the photos Joaquin Phoenix takes at the bar mitzvah in Two Lovers.

But somehow Good Night and Good Luck seems less televisual than, say, Manhattan or The Man Who Wasn't There, to cite two examples; maybe it's because Clooney has got more of a sense for cinema than either Allen or the Coens, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that he has no tastes, just interests (Allen and the Coens, on the other hand, are only interested in their tastes, and are only capable of interacting with the world through the prism of their Top 10 list). Good Night and Good Luck isn't an attempt to recreate 1950s cinema; with the exception of a few images (Strathairn finishing his cigarette before he gives his speech, a screening room where the gang watch 16mm documentary footage), this is a 2000s film through-and-through. He's not thinking quite as much as the anachronists are, which gives him more room to feel.

Russian Notebook 2: Television Continued, Kultura

I'm currently in my father's home town, Rostov-on-the-Don, a hilly city built along the banks of a river in the South of Russia.

I watch television here on the Panasonic in the living room. It has a rabbit ear antenna. Usually I sit on the couch, which at night folds out into a bed. The apartment is on the fourth floor and the living room windows look out on one of the busiest intersections in the city. Across the street, there's an office whose windows are level with ours. I've recently noticed that a young woman who works in the office watches me when I play the living room piano. We keep the windows closed, so she can't tell that the piano is badly out of tune and that I can't play it very well.
In all, the television recieves 11 channels, though many of them are repeats. It recieves several I can't get in Moscow, including regional stations and MTV, whose modest local offices are a block up the street from our apartment.
The Panasonic does not get Kultura (Культура), which broadcasts Soviet films in the day time and symphonic concerts and foreign films in the evening (in the my first week, I saw an Oshima, a Moretti and a Jancso). The Soviet films are the real treasure--many of them pre-war, all of them in original aspect ratios, not just well-known pictures (next week brings The Mirror and Cranes Are Flying) but obscure and underrated ones as well. Musicals, lavish period films and war pictures are all shown without repeats and with minimal commercial interruptions. Silent films are not shown.
It's a challenge figuring out what the movies are at times without a steady Internet connection. There're plenty of television listings in the right-wing weeklies, but I'm little too embarassed to buy them or even be seen paging through one at a newstand. I keep a little red notebook into which I jot showtimes as they're advertised. I've turned into a serious television viewer, setting aside evening hours, looking forward to marathons, double-checking my daily Kultura itinerary.

Russian Notebook 1: Crime Television

I'm living the month of August in Russia. One of my intentions was to try and document as much about Russian film culture as I could, but very early on I got sick and ended up bed-ridden for a while. During that time, I found myself watching a lot of Russian television.

1. "Crime" shows dominate Russian television; they've been on top for quite a while, a decade maybe--enough for people to be long tired of them. But they're cheap to make and easy to advertise, so it's unlikely they'll leave airwaves anytime soon. In fact, their prevalence and interchangeability make them the defining genre of Russian television; it's often difficult to figure out which show you're watching--switching between channels seems more like intercutting than. The remote control becomes a method for home editing: from car chase to assassination to a busy street corner to car chase again without ever breaking continuity.
   
2. "Crime" shows are both documentary and fiction-based (in Russian, fiction films are refered to as artistic films), though there's very little difference in content and presentation between the two. "True crime" shows often center around sensationalistic "investigative journalism" peppered with shots of real-life deaths, dramatic re-enactments and flashy graphics that resemble the credits and intertitles of the "fictional" crime shows (or is it the other way around?). The host of one show, which focues almost exclusively on bloody traffic accidents in Moscow, carries a small Handycam as a prop, pointing it at the proceedings; we never see what he's recording and can assume that the prop camera is never turned on.
   
3. Despite being shot exlusively on video (shooting on film is very rare in Russia, where theatrical features are almost exclusively shot on HD), almost all fictional crime shows use post-synced dialogue. There is something fascinating about handheld, often rough images combined with calm, crisp sounds. On television, Moscow is the quietest city in the world, and the wind is never blowing in the country side. Foreign films and programs, which make up a sizeable portion of Russian television, are always shown dubbed, so this forms an odd aesthetic continuity.
   

Godard on ABC

A clip from Breathless--just a few seconds of Jean Seberg selling The New York Herald Tribune in her yellow (gray) sweater--was shown on ABC's Nightline last night; it was a piece on how the French feel that they're losing the Champs-Élysées to American stores. What would Jean-Luc think? The archival film clip is a time-worn device of televised news narrative, a way of subtly tapping the (fictional) collective conscience; there are things we remember mostly through cinema.
Sometimes they are not even things cinema was present for. For example, cinema only came to the concentration camps after they were closed, but it's been atoning for that oversight with a half-century's worth of Holocaust movies whose television-like reliance on pre-established forms imbues the subject with a sort of boring seriousness, the distance of a news item. It's hard for us to feel about it because we've been told how to feel about for so many years, just as its difficult to feel empathy for the people on television. Rather, we process the information and then feel empathy--television language is indirect.

Another interesting juxtaposition (same channel): evening Oprah episode on wunderkinds (an Indian preteen studying to become a doctor, an Austrian girl with a photographic memory, etc.) followed by an advertisement for Harrington Learning Centers, a chain of "educational programs" to help your "underachieving child" get ahead.

Scarface, Carlito's Way and the Internet

Al Pacino in a promotional still for Carlito's Way

Scarface and Carlito's Way are so intertwined for me that I often get them confused. In which one does he own the nightclub? Am I sure he didn't have a beard in both? Carlito's Way does not as much redeem the sins of Scarface as fill that film out--it's the missing chapters in between rather than an apologetic epilogue. The characters are not Carlito Brigante and Tony Montana, but Al Pacino and Brian De Palma. The existence of Carlito's Way makes Scarface a better film just as Scarface tarnishes Carlito's Way--and the other way 'round as well, for Scarface also makes Carlito's Way a better film and Carlito's Way mars Scarface.
It's an odd situation, considering the fact that we tend to view films as individual works, or as wholly independent parts of a community (the cinematic narrative). The advantage cinema has over literature is that a writer can only write what he or she notices, but in a movie there a million other outside factors that make their way into the production. And so Scarface had Carlito's Way waiting for it in the future, in our future collective memory, in a form of dependency alien to books.
This kind of relationship--the cinematic narrative, the cinematic history--is almost proto-Internet. We think about the Internt in ways we could never think about cinema or literature--a website, after all, is not a "work," since the "work" is the Internet itself. The Internet does not consist of many parts, but is rather a single whole--the presence of information on the Internet colors other information on the Internet. The relationship to other websites is an integral part of a website. It seems as though every medium we invent is treated more collectively--first television, then pop music, and now the Internet.