Week 3: Text: Is Film/TV a Language?

This week’s lecture has looked at how TV and film can use both rhetoric and narrative techniques to see film and TV as a language. While there are the obvious differences between film and TV, it is also important to consider the differences between image and sound. From the key reading of Ellis Part 1 - Broadcast TV as sound and image I have come to the conclusion that image is much more powerful when combined with sound. 'Sound holds attention more consistently than image, and provides a continuity that holds across momentary lapses of attention.' (Ellis 1982, 128) This is because 'sound tends to carry the details.' (Ellis 1982, 129) Therefore sound together with an image creates a more effective image rather than either of them alone.

With the idea of using rhetoric in TV and film, it takes the idea that audience will develop certain meanings and emotions when consuming the text. 'The audience is expected to understand these references.' (Ellis 1982, 134) However from the lecture I have understood that audience do not always accept the dominant ideology due to them being able to tell that meanings are constructed. '...there is in possibility of the film meaning anything without the creative intervention of the spectator in determining what to pay attention to and what sense to give it.' (Nowell-Smith 2000, 10-11)

Considering the idea of broadcast TV as a narrative of having a beginning, middle and an ending an important aspect of narrative to be noted is repetition of segments. 'Segments are bound together into programmes by the repetition device of the series. This constitutes a basic ongoing problematic, which rarely receives a final resolution.' (Ellis 1982, 158) This is what keeps audience members engaged, especially with television series that use repetition, mainly soap operas rather than film which usually finds a resolution in the ending.

Although there are differences between narratives in film and tv it is important to note that 'there is no real difference in narrational form between news and soap opera. The distinction is at another level: that of source of material.' (Ellis 1982, 159) However the difference in narratives between film and TV is of the ending. Film provides an ending 'the film text aims for a final coherent totalising vision, which sets everything back into order.' (Ellis 1982, 156) Whereas with TV 'the incidental problems are solved, but the series format provides no real place for its own resolution.' (Ellis 1982, 156)

Bibliography

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.