Another lecture, another buzzword. ‘Cine-speak’ describes a brief terminology bank of shot framing and techniques used in photography, film, and television. Admittedly, I had never considered these media to be forms of communication technology. In fact, they belong to a long-standing and constantly developing culture of artistic storytelling that is also a powerful vehicle for communicating messages concerned with politics; popular culture and celebrity clout; consumerism, current affairs, power relations, and values systems.
Perhaps the most significant element of this lecture was the argument that screen media represent a convergence of art and communication. In many cases, this convergence has given rise to a form of audiovisual storytelling that invites the viewer to leave behind his or her body – his or her world – and enter another. Marshall describes this phenomenon as using the screen (or, rather, the camera) as a transformative extension of oneself: in his study Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he further claims that “…the photograph and its development in the movie restored gesture to the human technology of recording experience” (1964). Interestingly, Marshall used the terms ‘new technology’ and [screen] ‘media’ interchangeably throughout this work.
The lecture provided a glimpse of the various framing techniques and ‘rules’ applied by television and film-makers to communicate a conscious message with an audience. While Marshall famously claimed that the medium itself is the message (1984), Jane Stadler’s more recent analysis of screen media stresses the equal importance and interdependence of form and content in audience interpretation of the message (2009). While neither expressly acknowledges the influence of intersubjectivity on audience interpretation in these works, Stadler does go some way towards answering Josh’s original TuteSpark question about the relationship between framing or shot size and medium type. In a nutshell, Stadler explains that the average running time, vast landscape dimensions, and budget devoted to film projects mean that long shots, two-shots and more densely detailed framing are more often used than in television.
Before signing off I thought I’d add this food for thought: just as convergence has had a major impact on the way we use new communication technology devices and operate socially, the digitalisation of both film and television (think HDTV and recent Oscar wins for films like Slumdog Millionaire, shot using digital cameras) has begun a trend of convergence between these two media. Big-budget television series such as CSI:NY (Donahue, Mendelsohn, Zuiker, et al.,2004) and Lost (Abrams, Bender, et al., 2004) are representative of this stylistic shift. between the two You may have noticed that both computer screens and plasma televisions are becoming wider as well as flatter… Could this perhaps be a reaction to the growing culture of amateur movie-making and illegal/legal downloading?
Reference List
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw Hill.
Stadler, J. (2009). Screen media: Analysing film and television. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.
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