Rewriting the History of Television: An Interview with Doron Galili (Part Three)

As you note, there were a proliferation of images of television in the cinema prior to the reality of television in the lives of the average consumer -- for example, in Metropolis, Modern Times, International House, Murder by Television and many more. What were the prevailing images that film constructed around television as a medium? Were these early representations caught up in the rivalry between media in the ways that 1950s vintage representation of television, such as in All that Heaven Allows? 

The cinema screen was another important source of information from which the public learned about television before regular broadcasting started. The films you mention, made between the late 1920s and the late 1930s, capitalized on the great interest in the always-just-around-the-corner new medium. Yet films have depicted television technologies starting very early on, in the period when cinema itself was a novelty. While I was doing the research for the book, film historian Richard Koszarski and I compiled a filmography of television in the cinema prior to 1939, which is published, alongside an article by Koszarski, inThe Journal of E Media Studies. 

We discovered over 100 films from all over the world – features, shorts, animation, serials (we excluded newsreels and documentaries in order to keep the volume manageable) – that in one way or another dealt with televisual media. And yet, we were not close to being done: since then we have found quite a few new entries and are now maintaining a webpage that regularly updates the filmography, now consisting of 127 titles (if you know of more films we should add, please get in touch!).The earliest item on the filmography is Georges Méliès trick film Photographie électrique à distance from 1908   which is unsurprising given that in the early cinema era, televisual devices were a fantasy and an attraction in and of themselves, and thereby a most appropriate subject matter for the kinds of films Méliès made at the time. 

When I attempted to synthesize and make sense of this large volume of cinematic depictions of television in my book, I frankly found that they were too anarchic and diverse to do justice to in a conclusive summary or an overarching theory. And here, I’d say, lies the difference between the intermedial relations at play in All that Heaven Allows and other films from its period and the films that dealt with television before 1939. 

In All that Heaven Allows, television signifies values such as domesticity, femininity, consumerism, while a film like A Face in the Crowd, to give an example of another notable 1950s film, critiques broadcast television for its potential for mass political influence and susceptibility to manipulation by economic powers. Both examples, in turn, invite comparison between the cultural and social institution of cinema and its televisual “other.” But as we discussed above, during the silent era and the 1930s, the very nature of television was still up for grabs. Film made in this period, therefore, don’t offer a critique of the new medium as such but rather explore its possibilities. The results are often magnificent: some movies showed television devices in realistic contexts of video-phone conversations or large screen live transmissions, whereas other opted for imaginary depictions, showing televisual devices that transmit images from Mars or from the future. In some movies, television sets are found in houses and movie theaters, while in others they are installed in spaceships, caves, or inside a wrist watch. Television are operated on screen by cowboys, spies, superheroes, tyrannical leaders, and mad professors. Not to mention cartoon puppies

What I found particularly interesting in this large body of varied imaginary depictions was that in many cases the engagement with future forms of moving image media compelled filmmakers to reflect about the nature of their own medium. Thus, several of the films that tell stories about television also raise questions about the ontology of the moving image, its evidential value, and its susceptibility to misinterpretation – all of which, remarkably, echo a very similar reflexive attitude to that we see in films from cinema’s first decades.

What did Dziga Vertov mean by the “Radio-Eye”? What window does his work offer us into utopian and avant garde conceptions of television that emerged in the Soviet Union shortly after the Bolshevik revolution? 

Vertov started using the term Radio Eye in the mid-1920s, when he was commenting on the prospects of television in his manifestoes and essays. Vertov observed the progress in television technology in the United States and Britain, and already at that early moment saw in the experimental medium a promise for new possibilities for revolutionary filmmaking. Radio Eye is a neologism that he coined, an intermedial combination of the Kino Eye (his term for newsreels edited with a montage technique that aims at “deciphering the visible world”)and Radio Ear (the montage of documentary sound recording). Much like he used the term Kino Eye to distance his work from “the movies” in the mainstream Hollywood sense, so does Radio Eye signify a unique political and aesthetic concept of television that departs from the broadcast medium that emerged in the West. 

Vertov’s speculative writings on the Radio-Eye provide us with a very rich case study for how television was imagined in an ideological and industrial context very different from those we typically associate with the emergence of the medium. When Vertov conceived of political deployment of television he did not just think of broadcasting revolutionary propaganda films; in true avant-garde spirit, he rather envisioned a radically different deployment of moving image transmission media altogether. Vertov saw in the coming of television an opportunity to realize something that the cinema in his view had failed to achieve, namely a way to connect the working people to one another.

Hence, the idea of the Radio Eye rejected the centralized one-to-many communication model of broadcasting, both technologically and in terms of the administration of the culture industry. Instead, Vertov envisioned the Radio Eye as a network configuration that anticipates Bertolt Brecht’s idea of “radio as anapparatus of communication” or even contemporary online grassroots media practices. He described a truly collectivist audiovisual apparatus that would enable proletariats to share audiovisual materials, so that they can document their lives and see the political realities of fellow workers. In this media configuration, every spectator is also an agitator, a producer, and a comrade. 

Vertov’s vision of the new medium was absolutely utopian, but he was hardly naïve about the prospects of television. He acknowledged the fact that cinema’s revolutionary potential had by then already been colonized by the capitalist West. His writings on television thus have an urgent tone to them. Vertov knew that within a decade the emergent medium would become a reality and so the Soviet Union had to beat the West in developing transmission technologies and shaping an aesthetic that would be appropriate for television.

And this leads me to believe that Vertov’s late-1920s filmmaking strategies – which we associate with high-modernist interest in medium specificity – were at least partly influenced by his anticipation of television. Like many other ideas about television, this one remained a “road not taken” in media history, but one that remained significant nonetheless. 

Doron Galili is Researcher in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He is the author of Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020) and coeditor of Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (Indiana University Press, 2018). He holds a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago andpreviously taught at the Cinema Studies Program at Oberlin College.