Television

This article studies Latin American film during the digital age and determines how much of its recent success in the global market is due to the arrival of new technology. It reveals that the technological advances arrived at time when Latin American industries experienced a critical period near the end of the 1980s. Nevertheless, these technologies soon helped in the marketing of Latin American cinema worldwide and provided new levels of technical finesse. The next sections look at the technological transition of Latin American film to digital, and identify the different trends in style and narrative that were used by Latin American filmmakers.

This chapter examines online small-screen cinema (i.e., movies that are viewed almost exclusively on the web, are made with small recording/viewing devices, and are mostly characterized by amateur production and gifting distribution practices) and the challenges it presents for the institution of cinema in China. The author proposes that online small-screen cinema relies on pleasure-seeking but also thought-provoking brief engagements with the moving image, thus departing from the concentration/absorption model developed by narrative cinema and, instead, connecting with the early cinema of attractions. Both cinematic experiences (early cinema and online small-screen cinema), it is argued, develop in fluid, unregulated environments where attraction, distraction, and intervention all play crucial roles in (re)defining cinema and emancipating its spectators.

This chapter surveys the history of radio and television science fiction, emphasizing the development of industrial and aesthetic approaches to narrative, the integration of cultural concerns into SF narratives, and the creation of ambitious narrative experiences rivalling those offered by film. Radio readily recognized the speculative appeal that is at the heart of SF, helping to establish an “electronic” audience for the genre on which television would capitalize. The chapter chronicles how television SF quickly recognized its potential to visualize new imaginative spaces, from The Twilight Zone to Star Trek, The X Files to Battlestar Galactica. While TV SF was initially limited by minimal budgets, movie-serial-type plotting, and a near absence of special effects, in recent decades it has greatly expanded its scope with large casts, elaborate effects, and epic plot trajectories that recall big-budget films.

This article builds on the assumption that studying television cultures under socialism thoroughly muddles the Cold War framework of two opposing, radically different world systems. The article examines features of socialist television in the Soviet Union and the former Eastern Bloc in order to revisit some of the valuable experiences of socialism that were automatically relegated to the dustbin of history in 1990. It shows how television recorded, reflected, and facilitated the shared experience of socialism’s complicated temporality and helped make socialism manageable, redirecting its high ideals into the ethical principles of everyday habits. The article demonstrates how these principles worked through some exemplary program types and how they got stripped of their collective dimensions after the end of socialism, to be infused with paranoid, anxious nationalism.

This article takes a look at the early history of television, which is usually overshadowed by the assumptions of the primacy of film as a moving-image medium and the efforts to stabilize the medium. The article begins with a discussion of the origins of television and provides a working definition of the term “television.” It then outlines the history of television and identifies who invented television. The concept of interpretive flexibility and the possible sequence of the arrival of television and film are discussed.

This article views the popular television show 24 as a way to illustrate the transitions within the television industry and within the broader society, as the forces of technological change and globalization shape the people's notions of labor, notion, and gender. The discussion is primarily concerned with the way the frequently voiced perceptions of the show's quality and innovativeness can serve to cover its consumption from the soap opera. This article views 24 as a hybrid form, or a kind of convergence parable that combines the elements of reality television, the soap opera, and “quality” drama. It also studies how the series starts a re-masculinization of a serialized melodrama and reviews the question of “quality” television.