METAPHYSICAL TV

or how to make film with the hammer.

At first glance Television seems all full of stuff and nonsense, pervaded by rigid production values and commercial interests totally antithetical to the world of the artist-filmmaker. But it’s not the institution of TV that interests us here; rather it is the breadth of spectacle, the sheer quantity of appearance that it provides.

From this side of the screen, from a viewer’s distance, TV need only be judged as an aesthetic phenomenon.- Consequently-.it makes no difference whether TV accurately reflects the world or actively misrepresents it since there is no battle between a real and apparent world. There is only one world and it contains the real, the apparent and everything else cruel, contradictory, seductive and without meaning. Prepared for such profound world contemplation we can live dangerously, watch TV dangerously. In this state TV can no longer be seen as impoverished but overfill, approaching limitlessness and inducing as it does an inexplicable cheerfulness and intoxication.

Just as in Zeno’s paradox, where a finite line can be divided into an infinite number of points or measures, so too any day or hour of Television, any midday movie or sports telecast can be divided into an infinite number of audio or visual fragments. There is no project of deconstruction here since there is no resentment towards TV, no moral prejudice, rather a goodwill to its appearance and a titanic striving to sift through its constituent parts and cast conceptual nets over the whirl of phenomena.

Looking deeply into the image, yet right on the surface, there appears the grain of video, the 625 individual fines that are the building blocks of the overall image. Curiously these lines are mostly invisible to the naked eye and are only made to appear through the lynx eye of the film camera as it re-scans the video mosaic. The video grain, almost detached from the image it produces, is as pleasing to the eye, as, say, the Benday dots in a Lichtenstein painting. If you look into the void of Television long enough, it eventually winks back, the void looks into you, seeing deep desire, secret hurting, grand personal themes, doom, irony, tragedy and ecstasy

Everything here is grist for the mill.

Mark Titmarsh

2 . . MTV