“TV IS AN ILLUSION OF PARTICIPATION”

TELEVISION

Television is able to influence the situation in the country, but only if there is a zombie, repeated repetition, processing by different methods. Where there is a dispute between business entities, where different points of view are expressed, television ...

Television is able to influence the situation in the country, but only if there is a zombie, repeated repetition, processing by different methods. Where there is a dispute between business entities, where different points of view are expressed, television cannot change anything. Everything that is shown interactively and with an invitation to the public turns into a show and does not cause a desire to intervene and convince someone of something, because everything has already been decided for you.

For example, stories about the Museum of Cinema are often filmed on television. When there was a scandal connected with our eviction from the Cinema Center, there was no channel that would not respond to this event. In this sense, we are very grateful to the news programs. Even the First Channel reacted to this situation, which was somewhat unexpected for me. The second one invited me to a live news program for the Far East, in the central part of the country this program was already being recorded. The “old” NTV and even the “new” NTV were constantly talking about us, there were many stories on TVC and Ren TV. Almost all central channels spoke about the eviction of the Museum of Cinema and more than once. The whole country found out about this, but, unfortunately, it did not affect those who made the decision to evict us, and those who traded this building, in our opinion, illegally.

People watch TV, I think, for two reasons: on the one hand, it is inertia, a habit that has developed and strengthened, especially in the early years of perestroika, when television really played the role of an informer, a discussion club, and even a guide, because people did not understand what was happening in the country at all. On the other hand, this is a compensation for the inertia to which we are doomed, due to the fact that the public is not in demand in real life. This is a kind of pseudo activity. The illusion of complicity with a fairly comfortable unwillingness to participate.

In order to know what is going on in the world, I listen to the radio. As for cinema, the films that we show and select at the Cinema Museum are enough for me. Sometimes it happens that the pictures that we showed then end up on television, because they were not rented. This applies to new films. For a while we influenced the selection of films by television. After our retrospectives, films by Fassbinder and Godard appeared on TV. In general, the channels somehow looked back at what was successful with our public.

It began with the program "The Museum of Cinema", which aired for several years on the Second Channel, and we, in accordance with our repertoire, showed the classics throughout the country: films by Eisenstein, Barnet, Protazanov, Room. Then this program was called "Masterpieces of Old Cinema" so that the word "museum" would not turn away the audience. But we had the only condition - that these films should not be interrupted by advertising. Naturally, it came into conflict with the commercial interests of the channel, and the program was removed as unprofitable.

We know, for example, that Wenders' film Alice in the Cities was shown on Channel One when we had a retrospective of this director's films. The right to show this film on television was bought by the Goethe Institute to acquaint the country with such a name as Wim Wenders.

Television has always depended on the people who pay for it. The question is what do these people want.