As feature films are broadcast nightly to mass audiences, they are extensively interspersed with "reality" material. After reviewing some of the issues involved in this kind of broadcast adaptation, I will closely analyze, with images and transcriptions, eleven specific ways that visual and videographic style is used to transform the feature film on television. It also encroaches upon and stylistically reworks those earlier films into fundamentally new and hybrid forms. Television does not just gather and re-present selected films around contemporary events. In this essay I will examine the formal ways that television appropriates, resuscitates and redefines dated films in response to fast breaking historical and political events. Not only have wars become media texts, they have become contexts that transform other texts in substantive ways. Broadcasters (not just Pentagon briefers) have become spin-doctors for such events and learn to exploit unfolding conflict in the name of viewership and ratings. Wars have become special events that send ripples throughout programming. But looking at the coverage of the Gulf War, we can see there is more to the politics of war on television than objectivity, censorship, and "coverage." Even though many accounts rightly criticized the way television covered the war, and the way the government managed information about it, fewer dealt with the effect the conflict had on programming in general. Especially if by good one means spectacular, visual and all-encompassing. "Salvador" and Noriega by John Caldwell JUMP CUTĬopyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1992, 2006
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