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Within and Across the Media Borders
to film and television. The difference lies in the fact that photography is a “piece” of
reality—static—while characteristic of cinema is movement and action and while
television, apart from repetitiveness, gives a sense of the direct experience of distant
reality. The range of audience is another differentiating feature of these media.
Photography had the narrowest one (unlike today, present in other digital media);
film relied on the cinema networks and their wider audience; and television had
the widest audience.
Film, cinema, and television are visual and auditory media, and therefore they
do not require viewers to be literate. Access to television was generally free. One
the most distinctive qualities is that television programming uses storytelling or
engaging narratives to capture people’s attention as the repetitive pattern of mass¬
produced messages and images formed the mainstream of a common symbolic
environment. TV started to be the main source of the most broadly shared images
and messages among visual images. Watching television slowly became a habit ac¬
quired from other primary sources.
Film, Cinema, and TV—Images in Motion
New media are often perceived as second-hand accounting, and they embrace
photography, film, television, and later also digital technologies, the Internet. Lev
Manovich, who described the language of the new media, wrote that “no one treats
the history of cinema as a linear process to create one possible language, or as
a desire to reach probability of the described stories. On the contrary, we treat the
history of film as a consequence of distinct and equally expressive, aesthetically
diverse languages, each of which closes part of the opportunities provided by our
predecessors” (Manovich 2006: 64). New technologies not only filled everyday
public and private space, they also formed a new perception of reality, created new
tools for mediating reality.
Analyzing the way media influenced people in the discussed period, we have
to take into consideration that it was exactly the moment of development of the
cinema in central and eastern Europe. Therefore, access to media increased each
year and this process itself constitutes a cultural context of the epoch. Since 1920,
moving images could be seen on a TV screen. Regular programs started to be cast
from the late 1950s, and they reached a wider audience. The transmission occurred
once a week and since the late 1950s several times a week (Cigognetti, Servetti
& Sorlin 2010). Another point concerning the range of early television program¬
ming, the first broadcasting stations were erected in eastern European cities. The
second channel, a local television station, was launched in the 1970s. Color TV
was introduced for the first time in 1969. As we can see, the process of availability
of television in the average household, at least in the bigger cities, was growing
during the late 1950s to 1970s and from that point on would influence viewers on
an everyday basis.
The cinema has had a public character, thus the development of a cinema net¬
work opened access to movies. As we can see from Karl Kaser’s chapter and his
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