TV News vs Cinema Journalism — an insight into meta reality
A brief understanding at how TV news has atrophied and something called Cinema Journalism offers a deeper understanding.
We see what we want to see. Put away the physics for a moment, but your eye allows you to see. Your cognition attempts to make meaning. And that cognition whether seeing, or making for others to see, depends on a myriad factors from within your own black box — background, culture, influences, interactions, conventions, etc.
There’s a constant ping ponging of elements before in that split second you come to a conclusion which scholars refer to as heuristics, or systems 1 thinking or considered or reflexive thinking systems 2. You’ve likely read “Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman”.
Then something remarkable and quite imperceptible happens when another lens is placed between what is there and what we see. That lens from a camera and the framing decide for us what we should see. We make no fuss about what we’re presented with because we’ve come to accept what’s in the frame matters.
The camera lens is unlike the eye lens — its lack of peripheral vision, interpreting light and colour, and it’s ability (through your thinking) to zoom, close out and focus makes it different. The camera lens is a crystal of illusion, able to amplify and diminish visualisation.
In the early 1900s when the camera lens was adopted by film makers, they slowly but assuredly discovered the psychological power of the lens, coupled with framing and structuring stories.
French auteur Abel Gance realised fast cuts film gave the impression of speed. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze noticed different camera framing affected people differently. The close up became the “affective shot”. Russian filmmaker Kuelshov realised he could create different meanings by the shots he put together, famously called the Kuleshov effect. The kings of the camera illusion were Eisenstein, whose exhibition I attended in Moscow, and Vertov.
Reality was upended in a camera. The best you could get was some kind of approximation about what you wanted, but even then the audiences interpreted scenes differently. When TV News was born, they were plagued by the multiplicity of lens’s dynamic behaviour and films internal psychology.
They took cinema’s established clothes, at least some of them e.g. close up, producer, narrator as reporter, and tried to strip cinema’s language of meaning. Truth, it wasn’t deliberate at first, TV news people didn’t want to entertain the psychology of film. A cut away from an interview of a hand (man wringing his wedding band) was convenient to cut a lengthy interview. In cinema, that shot meant something.
Politicians doughutting themselves in a TV news frame meant they could provide the illusion the place was full when there was barely anyone present. TV news preferred well manicured politicians. Politicians who understood the psychology of colour wore red ties, or blue/red dresses.
But meta reality was about to catch up
End of Pt/1
