Text: Is Film/TV a Language?

This week we explored the concept of narrative and rhetoric, and what film and television language is. By looking at ways in which we can study film and television, I learned how rhetoric devices could change the purpose of a text, along with the narrative.

(Ellis: 1982) expanded on the concepts mentioned in the lecture, mentioning how channels broadcast programmes such as crossroads and other soaps used climactic revelations and roll the credits immediately afterwards, whereas cinema is unable to do this unless there is a near certain guarantee of a following sequel. Other narrative aspects mentioned within his ninth chapter includes the use of open-ended series (Ellis: 1982, 147), which were first used by news bulletins, but can now be seen in both US and UK television broadcasts. An example of this includes the US show The Big Bang theory in which each series ends, however the episodes continues as one continuous storyline. His eighth chapter, which was also part of this week's set reading, looks less at narrative. It looks at television as a last resort to cinema, in which it can be left on without watching however audiences will automatically be able to catch up. He continues to look at sound, and how necessary it is to television. People can walk in and out of the room with only being able to hear the television and do not need to see it when he states "the broadcast TV image is gestural rather than detailed"(Ellis: 1982, 131). Without sound, TV is useless, and this is Ellis' argument when he says that 'the image has a more illustrative function' (Ellis: 1982, 129) . Nevertheless, both chapters compare the narrative, sound and image of both television and cinema against each other.

The third set reading we were given after the lecture was from Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, and looked solely at cinema and film, rather than television which enables us to get an idea of the language of each. In his writing, he looks at why films mean, and to different people they mean different things. He uses an example of a car accident and why people have a "desire to reconstruct what has happened" and why in order to make sense of the situation (Nowell-Smith: 2000, 10). He also argues that the spectator is always active, and that the active/passive debate is unnecessary, whereas in television (Ellis: 1982) it may be considered that audiences are passive.

From this week's set reading and lecture, a potential research question that I thought may be interesting to investigate may be why the soap series 'The Big Bang Theory' never shows a specific character Mrs Wolowitz, and how this use of rhetoric maintains audiences. I would undertake and study a series of focus groups in order to determine my results.

Bibliography;

ELLIS, JOHN (1982) Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, Routledge: London - pp. 127-159 (Accessed 26th March 2015)

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. (Accessed 26th March 2015)

THE BIG BANG THEORY (2007), CBS http://www.cbs.com/shows/big_bang_theory/ [online] (Accessed 26th March 2015)