Piers Plowright, Adorno vs Fiske
Piers Plowright is world famous features producer and he’ll be inspiring us for the next 3 weeks. To him radio is an art, not so much a craft. He also reinforced the concept that all radio features should employ a mix of drama techniques and actuality, which is what we in NP have advocated all along. Except my style is – “Radio is Sound”. We begin it the other way round i.e. with the capsule / feature / commercial, culminating with the third year drama / documentary. I still think this is the right way to approach it.
We listened to some fabulous world features. I found these fascinating because in my entire radio career, I’ve not come across anything close. The only way I can describe them is “poetic”. Certainly not the run-of-the-mill stuff we so often get. Piers had gotten these when he attended several International Features Conferences (sadly not much information on the web) for serious documentary producers to critique one another. Here are some descriptions below.
Sample 1 Cockroach (Finland) 1988
A documentary musical (!). The mechanics of power often seen through the mind of a child and based on a poem by Korney Chukovsky. A flamboyant trip through a large variety of musical styles, starring wolves and rabbits, rhinos and sharks, crocodiles and…the giant cockroach, as well as Fidel Castro and Ronald Reagan.
Sample 2 Everyday Something Disappears (Berlin) 1993
Few questions, but troubling answers in this portrait of a home for Alzheimer patients. There is a great deal of singing in this last haven before death. While patients often don’t recognize their own children, they remember every word of songs from their own childhood. Music seems to be the ultimate defence against a merciless decline. All this is juxtaposed with the diary of a pianist stricken with the disease who nonetheless tried to sight-read a Mozart score. And despite everything, there is the relief of sometimes irreverent humour.
Sample 3 Chan-Wool’s Christmas (Korea) 2000
Although he is blind, Kom Kwang-suk skillfully operates the recorder to capture the precious moments of his son’s growing years. Chan-Wool is in the first grade and beginning to doubt the existence of Santa Claus. He whispers in is father’s ear: “Aren’t you the one who secretly buys me Christmas gifts?” Father: “No, ha-ha”. Son: “You’re lying. That’s why you’re laughing. This is serious, very serious”.
The thread that runs through these features – they touch the heart.
In Media Theory, we looked at analyzing audiences. David Gauntlett was the speaker, and at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford some days later, I discovered he had written some books on this subject. (In fact, quite a few lecturers at BU are authors of media books). Nothing really new, except for a video of focus groups among housewives back in the 60s and 70s. Absolutely hilarious! The women had to role play, so the moderator’s instructions went something like this:
“Now you’re the kitchen sink. What would you say to the housewife (note: not homemaker)?”
“Housewife, have the kitchen sink around you (the kitchen sink sits on top of the housewife). What do you feel when you’re scrubbing?”
And so on…
Adorno is (was?) a Marxist who believes in the power of the media. Basically thinks people are stupid. Believes media creates false needs which capitalism can satisfy.
Fiske, on the other extreme, believes in the power of the people. So he says pop culture is made by the people. The culture industry delivers what the people want.
Gauntlett has developed other creative methods of analyzing audiences, using tools like video, photos, artwork, etc.
Reading Chapter 1 of Andrew Crisell’s new book “More than a Music Box”, I now understand why BBC Radio 4 is so hung up on “intelligent speech”. Historically it recruited highly educated staff from the public schools and Oxbridge. To “be educated meant, above all, to be literate, to be versed in the world of books” and so “radio word could, and often did, assume a para-literary function”.
There’s also an argument about whether internet radio (I would include DAB) is enhanced radio or reduced radio. Do visuals really enhance or do they reduce the effectiveness of radio as a blind medium? My classmates (remember: impassioned radio people) buy the reduction idea. I’d like to mull on it more.
We listened to some fabulous world features. I found these fascinating because in my entire radio career, I’ve not come across anything close. The only way I can describe them is “poetic”. Certainly not the run-of-the-mill stuff we so often get. Piers had gotten these when he attended several International Features Conferences (sadly not much information on the web) for serious documentary producers to critique one another. Here are some descriptions below.
Sample 1 Cockroach (Finland) 1988
A documentary musical (!). The mechanics of power often seen through the mind of a child and based on a poem by Korney Chukovsky. A flamboyant trip through a large variety of musical styles, starring wolves and rabbits, rhinos and sharks, crocodiles and…the giant cockroach, as well as Fidel Castro and Ronald Reagan.
Sample 2 Everyday Something Disappears (Berlin) 1993
Few questions, but troubling answers in this portrait of a home for Alzheimer patients. There is a great deal of singing in this last haven before death. While patients often don’t recognize their own children, they remember every word of songs from their own childhood. Music seems to be the ultimate defence against a merciless decline. All this is juxtaposed with the diary of a pianist stricken with the disease who nonetheless tried to sight-read a Mozart score. And despite everything, there is the relief of sometimes irreverent humour.
Sample 3 Chan-Wool’s Christmas (Korea) 2000
Although he is blind, Kom Kwang-suk skillfully operates the recorder to capture the precious moments of his son’s growing years. Chan-Wool is in the first grade and beginning to doubt the existence of Santa Claus. He whispers in is father’s ear: “Aren’t you the one who secretly buys me Christmas gifts?” Father: “No, ha-ha”. Son: “You’re lying. That’s why you’re laughing. This is serious, very serious”.
The thread that runs through these features – they touch the heart.
In Media Theory, we looked at analyzing audiences. David Gauntlett was the speaker, and at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford some days later, I discovered he had written some books on this subject. (In fact, quite a few lecturers at BU are authors of media books). Nothing really new, except for a video of focus groups among housewives back in the 60s and 70s. Absolutely hilarious! The women had to role play, so the moderator’s instructions went something like this:
“Now you’re the kitchen sink. What would you say to the housewife (note: not homemaker)?”
“Housewife, have the kitchen sink around you (the kitchen sink sits on top of the housewife). What do you feel when you’re scrubbing?”
And so on…
Adorno is (was?) a Marxist who believes in the power of the media. Basically thinks people are stupid. Believes media creates false needs which capitalism can satisfy.
Fiske, on the other extreme, believes in the power of the people. So he says pop culture is made by the people. The culture industry delivers what the people want.
Gauntlett has developed other creative methods of analyzing audiences, using tools like video, photos, artwork, etc.
Reading Chapter 1 of Andrew Crisell’s new book “More than a Music Box”, I now understand why BBC Radio 4 is so hung up on “intelligent speech”. Historically it recruited highly educated staff from the public schools and Oxbridge. To “be educated meant, above all, to be literate, to be versed in the world of books” and so “radio word could, and often did, assume a para-literary function”.
There’s also an argument about whether internet radio (I would include DAB) is enhanced radio or reduced radio. Do visuals really enhance or do they reduce the effectiveness of radio as a blind medium? My classmates (remember: impassioned radio people) buy the reduction idea. I’d like to mull on it more.
posted by BIG! Mama @ 1:08 AM
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