Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited. - book reviews

By Deirdre Boyle fresh York: Oxford University Press, 1997 224 pp/$3995 (hb) $1695 (sb)

DEEDEE HALLECK

That guerrilla video is now the control of historical reflection is probably a sign of its demise. There has been a new flurry of archival and publishing activity centering upon experiments made in the '70 In 1997 the Chicago-based Video Data Bank released Surveying the First Decade, a compilation of work from the early days of video, and Oxford University Pres published Deirdre Boyle's control to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited, the definitive close attention of the video movements of the late 1960 and '70 These reflections upon the utopian impulse in early video provide an opportunity to think about the not away state of media in this land in particular those movements that have attempted to create electronic space for non-commercial views that step quickly counter to the mainstream.

Critical media studies in this land have been curiously ineffectual. What do we have to display for our myriad studies of media violence, our whirls of feminist readings, and our seemingly endles critical diatribes? Action for Children's Television, the single institution that actually effected policy formation, looks to have collapsed into the V chip. It is possible for theory and praxis to collaborate for structural change, however. In Britain, for example, there has been a closer affinity between those who throw back on television in a critical way and those who make it. individual can draw a line from the work of Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Peter Wollen Steven Heath, Laura Mulvey and others to the inception of Channel Four, which for all its generally received shortcomings, is still better than anything in this political division The prolific field of cultural studies in the United States has focused upon mass culture, rarely considering marginal or experimental television. Little of this effort addresses alternatives to commercial TV The works reviewed here are a welcome exception.

Boyle's meticulously researched and well-written volume brings cultural studies, broadcast history and critical media scholarship to bear upon "guerrilla video." Boyle concentrates upon three strands of the video change of the late '60s and early '70s: Broadside TV of Johnson City, TN; University Community Video (UCV) in Minneapolis; and TVTV whose trans-geographic ship's company were from Los Angeles, Chicago and novel York City. Broadside was individual of the first organizations to regularly exhibit community programming for cable, allowing under the aegis of "local origination," rather than public access. It was initially put up as an equipment resource center archetypeed after the Highlander Center in novel Market, a leadership training center that had a major impact upon the civil rights movement. UCV was a unique collaboration between a university, public television and local media activists. Community organizations worked with video husbandmans at UCV to make programming upon important local issues for regional broadcast upon public television. TVTV was perhaps the greatest in quantity famous of the video collectives that roamed the land with len overspreads dangling from their ever-ready portapacks. Just as TVTV provided the entertainment value to the alternative video community with their amusing videotapes, in like manner the group provides the excitement and drama for Boyle's book

Boyle has garnered fascinating stories of program snafus and transcendental jiffys from TVTV's prolific work. Spunky restles and iconoclastic, TVTV's tapes were a breath of recent air in the '70s, in stark contrast not alone to stodgy commercial fare on the other hand to the overly earnest tapes of the New/Old Left with their documentation of interminable harangues at demonstrations. In bring under rule to Change, the interviews with TVTV members are lively and humorous, revealing the times in quirky historical documents. Although at no time willing to take a specific ideological stance, TVTV made the media their critical existence - even their instruction sheet - for camera tribe who defied the standard broadcast mores: "We're not into declarative, explicit action or statements. . . At best, we want to overspread the media covering those actions and overlay the people planning for or reflecting upon them. The actions themselves are of negligible importance to us."

TVTV brought together great talent the couple behind and in front of the camera. (On-camera talent included John Belushi, Bill Murray and Lily Tomlin and behind the cameras were Skip Blumberg, Nancy Cain, Paul Goldsmith and others.) They had a way of framing politicians in a words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following that was more insightful than that of the typical network newscasts, interviewing a tipsy politician in a worn bar, or a Republican Romeo upon the dance floor of a victory celebration. TVTV always give leave to the camera linger long enough to diocese the grimaces behind the smiles. They would watch as the networks interviewed a politician, and when the network camera would cease filming, and all the lights turn rounded off, TVTV's cameras would stay upon to catch the expletives and uncivil attitude of the impatient politician or the network reporter. Boyle's volume is full of these meetings revealing much about mainstream media and also providing insight into the turn of expression and wit of TVTV ship's companys If Boyle had offered hardly any similar details about UCV and Broadside, it would have strengthened her book