TV is the New Cinema: Exploring the Erosion of
Boundaries between two Media
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Thursday 22 May 2014
12.30-7.30 pm
David Woods
will be presenting a paper on the one-day symposium “TV is the New Cinema”
organised by the Department of Communication and Media, University of
Liverpool and the Department of Film Studies, Liverpool John Moores
University.
The
increasing erosion of boundaries between film and television is a phenomenon
increasingly discussed among scholars, critics and other stakeholders.
Publications such as the New Yorker (January 2012) and Sight
and Sound (September 2013) have explored the matter in special
dossiers. Filmmakers have increasingly been working across the two media (eg.
David Fincher and Netflix’s House of Cards; Greg Motolla and
HBO’s The Newsroom), while others seem to have found a more or
less permanent home on television than cinema (Frank Darabont and AMC’s The
Walking Dead) or even to pronounce an early retirement from cinema in
order to work exclusively for television (Steven Soderbergh). Furthermore,
year’s end Top Ten lists have started including television series, with
episodes of Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire making some of
the 2013 lists next to Academy Award nominated films such as Nebraska and The
Wolf of Wall Street. Even major film festivals premiere episodes from
television series (two episodes from House of Cards were
offered a special screening at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival).
Successful television shows are now habitually adapted for the cinema and
become entry points to huge franchises (Sex and the City), while
television producers are invited to direct and produce major film properties
such as Star Trek (J.J Abrams) and Avengers Assemble (Josh
Whedon).
What do all these developments mean for the
current state of the two media? Is the future of film and television
intertwined? Is medium specificity not important anymore as a defining
characteristic of each medium? To what extent can we still talk about film
and television as different media industries? What is the impact of recent
developments on the aesthetics associated with each medium? In what ways has
the history of each medium influenced their current state? What is the role
of the global entertainment conglomerates that control both film and
television in this convergence between the two media?
TV is the New Cinema will explore these and a
host of other questions, with a view to bring together film and television
scholars to discuss the ways in which research and knowledge from both fields
can help us understand the present and the future of these media.
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Woods’ paper examines an aspect of the
historical and industrial grounding of the technologies of cinema and
television. It argues that a key aspect of their strikingly different looks can
be attributed to the different temporal resolution of the two formats, and that
the reasons for this difference can be accounted for in terms of the
technological strategies the two industries developed historically to minimise
the use of expensive resources specific to their medium. The cultural
complexities of the aesthetics associated with cinema and film were well
demonstrated by the release of The Hobbit in high framerate in 2012, and the
paper briefly outlines some implications of the often highly charged popular
responses which this provoked.
For the event details: http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/LSS/127881.htm
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