davidhadwen's website

What is cinema? If when considering cinema you only account for “image” then there’s an obvious history, but “cinema’s sound identity has undergone constant redefintion.” In cinema’s early -pre-1930’s- period, it combined with various audio media to the extent that they cannot be seen separately.

Media is constantly changing, be wary of projecting the current conception onto the past. Because it combines “image and sound technologies” film can integrate or “blend in” any relevant new technique that “serves a particular aesthetic or economic purpose.”

“Nickelodeons” were largely a silent format -a matter of “moving photographs” on literal film. The “familiar audio/visual phenomenon we now call cinema” is not present at this early moment. Soon after however, films began to be shot “in view of a specific accompaniment.” As the cliché has it “the silents were never silent.”

The “phonograph” or “graphophone” was then combined with “the picture machine” to create “the singing and talking moving picture.” This process is primarily identified with the company Cameraphone who initiated the “star system” via their “decision to record vaudeville on film.” However, “it would take nearly two decades to install a durable sound film system.”

“We make more sense of the film industry by understanding it as a complex of related production strategies.” Thanks to this dynamism, early film “could pass rapidly from opera to cartoons and back.”

“Televison was referred to as radio throughout the twenties.” With regards to film and radio “the borders of the media remained an open question” and they had not “definitively separated” by 1922. Film audio was simulcast over radio to multiple theaters in the “Rothacker process.”

The “Victrola” was a “revolution in the phonograph field.” Early sound films “were an outgrowth of the record industry” and emphasized audio, “a telephone, plus a phonograph plus a radio” as one critic put it. “What is a talking picture but a phonograph record with plenty of amplification behind it?” wrote another.

“Representational technologies” like the above audio/visual innovations “take on multiple identities,” are “constantly redefined” and “are subject to the vagaries of reception.” This is opposed to simple notions of “substitution” or “succession”. “Equivalence and improvement in one area are accompanied by a zone of non-equivalence in another.”

Cinema’s history of “conflation with other media” precludes any notion of a succession of “true equivalents.” “Representational technologies” tend “toward multiple definition,” in the case of early cinema “as a circus,” an “exhibition,” or “theater.” In the history of cinema definition is a multifaceted “ongoing struggle” of “jurisdiction.”

Stereotypes “are an indispensable element of the organization and anticipation of experience, preventing us from falling into mental disorganization and chaos, no art can entirely dispense with them.”

But “reified and rigid” stereotypes are a threat in the present “setup of cultural industry.” “The more opaque and complicated modern life becomes, the more people are tempted to cling desperately to clichés which bring some order…”

“We should never forget that there are two sides to every psychodynamic phenomenon, the unconscious or id element and the rationalization.” The latter can be legitimate, but even where legitimate, as in moral messages that are cheesy but positive and true, “mechanical oversimplifications” risk “distorting.”

“The standard device employed is that of the spurious personalization of objective issues.” Personalization of issues is necessary but not to the extent of presenting “individuals as mere specimens of an abstraction.” TVs “phony psychology of the big shots” leads to identification with power.

Two examples of stereotypes in mass culture: “a pretty girl can do no wrong” and is “exploitative, demanding” etc. and the artist as a “maladjusted, introverted” weakling in contrast to the “man of action.”

“As happens frequently in mass culture, the roles of the sexes are reversed -the girl is utterly aggressive, and the boy, utterly afraid of her, describes himself as ‘woman-handled’ when she manages to kiss him.”

These “illustrations and examples” are not new but they are newly relevant in light of “the cultural and pedagogical problem presented by television.” The aim is to knowingly “face psychological mechanisms operating on various levels in order not to become blind and passive victims.”

The following is a summary of The Roles of Radio by Harold Mendelsohn.

Radio functions as a “diverting companion” and fills the void during routine and boring tasks as well as consoling feelings of social isolation and loneliness. It can also add an “adult” voice for those starved of such, like mothers of young children.

“Radio serves as a reliable, nonthreatening, pleasant human surrogate” that keeps listeners “in touch” with social “realities.” The wide variety of stations make radio adaptable to the listening “mood or psychological frame of mind.” This mood function serves to both sustain and create.

Radio listeners do not tire of listening to the same news over and over again, whether new details are added or not. News radio provides a sense of vicarious participation in “the great events of the day.” “In a world of overwhelming complexity where the role of the individual in shaping events is becoming ever more remote, ‘keeping up’ with the news easily becomes a substitute” for involvement.

“Radio allows the listener to “participate” psychologically in the news events of the day” and “share with others a wide variety of events of common interest.” The “talk” content of radio is “social lubricant” as it provides listeners with subjects of conversation. In this way, casual communication between people is made easier.

Click here for a summary of Understanding Radio by Marshall McLuhan. It’s a much more intense analysis of radio that asserts the medium’s “tribal” effects.

The following is a summary of Understanding Radio by Marshall McLuhan. 

England and America were immunized against radio by their long histories of literacy and industrialism. Their “intense visual organization” contrasted with the “more earthy and less visual European cultures.” There, the “tribal drum” of radio is “magic” and “began to resonate with the note of fascism.” Highly literate people were bewildered.

Radio listeners are deeply involved, people “carry transistor sets in order to provide a private world for themselves amidst crowds.” “Radio affects people most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between speaker and listener.”

Hitlers rise to power was “directly owing to radio.” “Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic implosion: that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilization.” Highly literate societies “have managed to absorb and to neutralize the radio implosion,” elsewhere the exposure is “utterly explosive.”

Typographic technology and literacy represent one grand logic that impacts societies key components. “Continuity, uniformity, repeatability” had permeated England and America. In contrast, the middle-European world had “ready access” to the rich non-visual resources of auditory and tactile form and felt “the hot impact of radio.” “The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.”

Literacy “fostered an extreme of individualism” while radio revived “the ancient exposure of kinship webs of deep tribal involvement.” Radio “is really a subliminal echo chamber of magical power to touch remote extensions of ourselves and forgotten chords.” Radio is “an extension of the central nervous system that is matched only by human speech itself.”

“The phonetic alphabet and the printed word exploded the closed tribal world into the open society of fragmented functions and specialist knowledge.” Radio has the power to “retribalize mankind.” This has gone virtually unremarked upon and that itself is what needs explaining.

Click here for a summary of The Roles of Radio by Harold Mendelsohn. It’s a much less intense analysis of radio focused on everyday consumption.

A “hot medium” extends one single sense in high definition. “High definition is the state of being well filled with data.” Speech is a cool medium because “so much has to be filled in by the listener.” “Hot media” “do not leave so much to be filled in.” “Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation.”

The printed word broke up the old medieval social structure with its “individualistic patterns.” The “hotting-up of the medium of writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century.” Stone bound time, print unified spaces and the ages.

Intensity and high definition engender specialism and fragmentation. We can’t accept every shock to our sensibility fully and directly so a “cooling system” is necessary, particularly in periods of technological change.

Old hierarchies collapse in the face of hot mediums. On the other hand, media like radio send societies back in time as “nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.” “The instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial social action today.”