Television, in all its forms, is a dominant feature of today’s world culture. From Baltimore to Buenos Aires to Beijing, from Malmö to Makhachkala to Mahabalipuram, television is in the home, in the office, in the factory, in the hospital, in the post office, in the hairdresser, in the bar-room. Everywhere where people are, there is television. It comes by transmission from terrestrial antennae, by cable, by satellite, by closed circuit wiring.
TV is the primary communications medium of our age. It is our entertainer, our informer, our educator, our transmitter of culture, our codifier of ideology. It sets the agenda for political debate, manipulates our attitudes to ourselves and others, suggests shared images, stereotypes and paradigms. TV programmes put in front of us role models powerful enough to alter the way we behave. Real police carry out real actions in the style of their representation on the small-screen; politicians take up catch phrases, gestures and mannerisms ascribed to them by television satires. We know how undertakers, soldiers, bricklayers, authors, airline pilots, rock stars, factory workers are supposed to behave because we—and they—have seen it on television.
Television is our favoured way of presenting ourselves to the world. Most youngsters would prefer to tell the wider community about their school in a co-operative video rather than a written essay. Most company marketing managers judge the publicity value of a promotional film well above that of a printed brochure. Most political pressure groups or charitable foundations know that the persuasive power of a single television appearance is worth hundreds of leaflets.
This preference results from a number of television’s particular qualities. One is the illusion of transparent truth that film and video seem to offer. Another is the very familiarity and ubiquity of the medium. TV is such a part of everyday experience that its codes and conventions, its complications and craftsmanship go largely unnoticed. The process of making a television programme seems to the casual observer to need little more than common sense and an eye for a picture.
One important factor which gives television its special status is the fact that until now access to it by ordinary people has been severely restricted. In the capitalist as well as the former communist world, in the developing countries as among the new industrial tiger economies of the Far East, television has been under the exclusive control of a cultural, political, social, commercial or artistic élite—at face value, a wide enough spectrum of people, but an élite nonetheless. The selection criteria for admission to that élite differ from country to country and society to society, but wherever one looks, broadcast television programmes have been made by a privileged few, and those in control of broadcasting their works have been an oligarchy also. This might not be so important in fiction film-making, but in the field of documentary it has meant only the chosen few making films about the unchosen many. It has not been possible for ordinary people to present their own image of themselves; they were only ever to be seen through the others’ eyes.
In consequence, television everywhere has come to fulfil an important validating role. To appear on television is as if to have one’s existence officially acknowledged. Being allowed onto the box is a kind of formal recognition of a person or a group’s presence in society. Back in the 1970s Parosi,1 though not a documentary series but a drama serial set among the South Asian community of the British Midlands, and which included passages of dialogue in Hindi and Urdu, had at the time—according to a UN report—a notable effect on the self-image and self-confidence of British people of Asian origin. Even now if you ever appear on television, people who normally meet you every day of your life feel driven to approach you with an impressed and almost awestruck: ‘Didn’t I see you on TV yesterday?’
It is tempting to compare the status of television production with that of writing in the European Middle Ages before the development of printing. In fact there is a considerable difference. Writing may have been a skill restricted to the few and controlled, in mediӕval Europe at any rate, by the Church, but the products of the literate labour of monks and clerks were, unlike the products of the television producer, only accessible to the tiny minority who could read them. It was that minority who held the power in their society. In our form of democracy, public opinion has power, and television has from quite early on been available to, indeed directed towards, the majority of the population either in their own homes or their places of relaxation and entertainment.
Thus until now television has had all the features of a typical twentieth century mass medium, with costs which are quite unbalanced between producer and consumer. Much like other cultural products of our mass age, pop music for example, television has everywhere been centrally tightly controlled by large corporations or government bureaucracies. It has been expensive to produce and distribute. At the same time it has been relatively easy to acquire and cheap to consume. Power, for good or ill, was largely in the hands of the producers. The consumer’s choice was to answer a multiple choice question, to select between a small number of predetermined responses: to buy this record, that one or neither, to watch this channel, that one or switch off the television altogether.
Today, as we look towards the beginning of a new century, this imbalance has already begun to change. The unstoppable development of technology is starting to render the previous dispensation quite out of date.
Smaller, faster, better, cheaper…
Exactly where technology will lead is hard to determine. The notion that the development of technology is the major driving force in history is a shallow one. But so is the idea that the scientific agenda is set purely by social forces. Many people once imagined the future of telephones and radio quite wrongly, believing that radio would be used for point-to-point communications, while the telephone would relay music from the concert hall to the private home. However, of some things we can be reasonably sure, for as the technology of production continues its development—smaller, faster, better, cheaper was always the motto of the microchip—the pattern of the future is already becoming visible.
On the production side, electronics has almost completed its conquest over film. Video cameras are getting cheaper and better every day. Though at the time of writing, there is still an observable difference between the quality of image created by the consumer video camera and that provided by professional video-recording equipment, the gap is narrowing rapidly. The Sony BETA format, at present the standard professional recording format for location shooting, is related to a failed attempt to capture the consumer market.
In stills photography, the professional and the amateur have long had access to identical cameras. The equipment used to take holiday snaps is the very same as is used to produce the pictures which illustrate newspapers and magazines. As the television commercials suggest, anybody can now possess exactly the same still camera with which the most famous and successful professional photographers are equipped. It is how the camera is used, rather than which camera is used that makes the difference. The same will surely soon apply to video shooting.
At the same time, a rapid increase in the speed and memory capacity of computers is stimulating the migration of sound and video editing from very expensive high-precision tape technology to the computer hard disk. This gives video-editing, until recently a rather crude process, the flexibility of old-style film-editing, without the disadvantages of working with an unwieldy and fragile physical material. Much the same is happening in the medium of sound, where mixing and mastering on computer is becoming the new norm. As a result we are approaching a situation in which many people with neither great wealth nor specially privileged access to technology are able to shoot and edit their own video productions, in their own styles, expressing their own thoughts and values.
Taken by itself, this might not mean very much. It is one thing to produce your own film, quite another to ensure that it is seen by an audience. Distribution rather than production is the key to getting your work in front of the public. But distribution is subject to the very same technological trends as production: lower cost, smaller, more powerful and much cleverer equipment. Technology is combining with other social, political and economic forces to change the pattern of television quite radically. As cable now first complements and then maybe replaces broadcasting from ground-based aerials altogether, the number of channels available to select from is increasing all the time. Add to that the channels beamed down directly from satellites and the number becomes very large indeed. These new channels are ravenous for material to broadcast. There is also the ever-growing market in pre-recorded video-cassettes for sale or rent. It is no longer possible for a select and approved few to control the proliferation of pathways through to the public.
And waiting in the wings is a change that may yet make all our conceptions of broadcasting and broadcasters obsolete. Digital electronics is in the process of taking over all media. Every kind of information, all pictures and sounds, can be represented by, or converted to, digital codes which can then be manipulated by computers. In coded form, music, speech and video can be copied and passed from one computer to another with virtually no loss.
The linking up of computers in offices, factories, homes, even eating places into a vast global network, today’s Internet, offers the possibility of an entirely new kind of distribution system for all manner of creative, scholarly and informational works. Music, video, text and many other materials already pass continually to and fro across the globe on what is to become the so-called ‘information super-highway’. The process and the network itself cannot but continue to grow as more and more people link themselves to it. The result is likely to be that control of all electronic media by the few will be consigned to history.
Television is in the throes of being radically democratized—access to the medium is becoming available and accessible to all. Yet the tradition of documentary film-making has a long and distinguished history that is rooted in a very different world: a world of scarcity, of restricted access, of control by a small number of powerful institutions, of a society divided in rather different ways from those of our own. The documentary forms which we mostly take for granted were developed to satisfy needs which may no longer be relevant to a new era.
There is no inevitability to the pattern of broadcasting that has grown up through the twentieth century. The mass media belong to the century of the masses, but it is not commanded by any law that television should exclusively be divided between a small number of makers and a mass of viewers. As technology spreads the use of the television medium from the few to the many, the pattern of the next hundred years begins to look very different.
Of course, there will always be a market for escapism, for entertainment and for production values greater the individual can afford. There will surely always be a place for the hundred-million dollar movie or for the five episodes a week soap opera, just as there is for the best-selling thriller novel. But in the same way as the vast majority of books published—some 80,000 in Britain in 1994—are non-fiction titles, so most of the films and videos produced now and in the future are and will always be factual. Of those, a large proportion will be documentaries, though precisely what kind of production the word documentary implies may be different in the future from what it has meant in the past.
The style of factual television with which we are familiar today has a long history. So much so that many people take it for granted that the current way of making films is the only way possible, inherent perhaps in the medium itself. Or, it is said, productions are as they are, simply in response to the audience’s demands, no more no less. In reality the styles and formats of today are the result of a very large number of factors: yes, there is the logic of the medium itself, yes, there are the preferences of viewers, but there are also the needs of the producing organizations, the economics of film production and broadcasting, the ideology of the society in which they work, the aesthetic assumptions of those who make the programmes.
Regular evolution of these parameters over time makes the style of non-fiction television seem to change much faster than that of TV and film drama. Fiction from the early days of television shows its age far less than do documentary productions of the same period. One reason may be that the world of the drama, for all its apparent naturalism, is actually highly stylized, and may have been as far from the reality of its own times as it is from ours. Another is that fiction generally explores the film-maker’s interior world, which changes far less over the years than the wider social world addressed by the documentarist.
Some aspects of film-making are forever fixed. Film and video will always depend on showing a sequence of still pictures at a speed which makes the eye perceive them as moving. Human psychology will always search for meaning when presented with sequences of events. But some of the other limitations on documentary style are anything but unalterable. And the rapid technological revolution taking place in our time, with its radical consequences for television broadcasting ownership and access, is already having an impact on the way television documentaries are made.
The television aesthetic is changing noticeably fast in the 1990s. Techniques and devices which were once considered impossible or unacceptable are commonplace today. The great debate over how to make the documentary live up to its claim of truth looks set to be abandoned, as a new generation of documentary makers, who recognize that there is never only a single truth, enjoy overtly manipulating the camera’s images as if to emphasize their nature as interpretative icons rather than as mappings of reality. Today, the opportunities for original, ground-breaking and challenging work are once again as great as they were in the early days of film, at the time of the introduction of synchronous sound, or during the development of television as a medium. Indeed we are witnessing something of a golden age of television documentary at present, as broadcasters again attract sizeable audiences to new non-fiction productions. In Britain many documentary strands feature in peak-time hours, underlining the interest and entertainment value of ordinary people’s extraordinary experiences. Even in the United States, with its very different television culture, major networks now commission documentary ‘network specials’ for mid-evening viewing hours. A heady time indeed.
A time to question the accepted way of doing things. The late writer and chemist Primo Levi described hearing after many years about a paint factory of which he was once the manager. To his astonishment, he discovered that the workers were still incorporating into the mix an ingredient he himself had once prescribed simply to neutralize a defect in a particular batch of raw material. The need for this ingredient had long gone and its purpose had been long forgotten, yet the workers were still faithfully putting it in. One wonders how many tired conventions and over-used clichés of the television documentary are also responses to needs long since passed away?
Though it is important to apply a critical, perhaps even cynical, eye to the ways and means, styles and formats used by film-makers up to now, the maker of documentaries need not abandon everything from the past and start again with an empty slate—and an empty mind. Today’s documentarist needs to distinguish between those processes and procedures dependent on the psychology of vision, those intrinsic to the medium of moving pictures, those demanded specifically by the small screen, and those brought to bear by outdated social, political, structural or economic constraints. The successful documentary film-maker will remember the way things have been done in the past, but will also seek out new and original ways of applying the underlying logic of film and television to the communication process—and will write his or her own artistic signature over all.
Note
1 BBC 1976