- Causality also motivates temporal principles of organization: the
syuzhet represents the order, frequency, and duration of fabula events in ways which bring out the salient causal relations - Process is especially evident in a device highly characteristic of classical narration—the deadline - A deadline can be measured by calendars , by clocks , by stipulation, or by cues that time is running out - Climax of a classical film is often a deadline shows the structural power of defining dramatic duration as the time it takes to achieve or fail to achieve a goal - Usually the classical syuzhet [plot] presents a double causal structure, two plot lines: one involving heterosexual romance (boy/girl, husband/wife), the other line involving another sphere—work, war, a mission or quest, other personal relationships - Each line will possess a goal, obstacles, and a climax - Wild and Wooly (1917) example - The syuzhet [plot] is always broken up into segments - In the silent era, the typical Hollywood film would contain between 9 and 18 sequences; in the sound era, between 14 and 35 (with postwar films tending to have more sequences) - Only two types of Hollywood segments: "summaries" and "scenes" - Hollywood narration clearly defines its scenes by neoclassical criteria—unity of time (continuous or consistently intermittent duration), space (a definable locale), and action (a distinct cause- effect phase) - Bounds of the sequence will be marked by some standardized punctuations (dissolve, fade, wipe, sound bridge)
American Public Television
- Commercial TV became standard and owners of private broadcast TV stations and networks lobbied hard against ay state intervention in media industries - American state didn’t promote educational TV in early period of TV and also discouraged it o E.g. Defeat of Wagner-Hatfield bill by Congress in 1934 which would’ve allocated 25% of US broadcasting frequencies for educational use o Most schools and colleges operated the early TV stations but disappeared by 1940s - 1950s – FCC set aside a few unallocated frequencies (mostly in the hard-to-tune UHF bands) so a number of small educational stations re-emerged in late 50s - Until 1962 – they were funded by various charities at which time the fed govt started giving them grants - Newton Minnow (chairman of FCC in 1960) called TV a vast wasteland – his expression of a growing public sentiment of the time - Once initial novelty of TV had begun to wear off, some audience members began to adopt more critical attitudes towards the medium, and some began to tune out - Part of the 1960s rebellion against the status quo included an oppositional attitude towards both TV and consumerism - From 1962-1967, the Ford Foundation and later the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (1967-70) funded the production and distribution of educational programming—especially children’s programming and public affairs show - 1963 – a network called National Educational Television (NET) was created and funded by the Ford Foundation - 1967 – Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act – gave non- commercial broadcasting a national mandate for the first time - The structure they created was a weak one though—power was decentralized so that it couldn’t become a fourth network in direct competition with the Big Three commercial networks