Poor prospects for TV artists

Press, 14 September 1988, Page 19

Poor prospects for TV artists

Ruth Ranker

on television

Last Sunday night a foreigner who had just arrived in our country presented us with the most visually stunning piece of local television I have seen all year. “Kaleidoscope” sponsored the Japanese videoartist Ko Nakajima to collect and construct his impressions of Rangitoto. The results were magnificent television, but there was a disturbing hidden message.

It is depressing that Ko Nakajima was given a freedom to explore our landscape in video when local artists don’t have the resources to do the same. It would be interesting to hear what the helicopter trip alone cost, even if Ko Nakajima’s fee was free access to facilities at Vidcom. But it was his access to television time that must have had local artists spitting tacks. TVNZ hasn’t been a generous buyer of innovative independent television. Mainstream television rarely realises anything like the potentials offered by its new technologies. It’s so often a ragbag of ideas borrowed from film, stage, tabloid newspapers, magazine and radio. This format has been constructed to be an unapologetic crowd-pleaser. It has to be. After all, television’s main purpose is producing audiences to

sell to advertisers. Mainstream television is a collaborative effort. Like anything made by a team, it aims for consistency of product rather than idiosyncratic flair. Products which are the vision of one artist are rare. Personal television is something that creative film and television workers in New Zealand can only dream of. The possibilities in the marketdriven future seem even bleaker. ’Mr Prebble’s Broadcasting Commission budget is unlikely to stretch past the socially relevant into experimen-

tai self-expression. And yet it can be argued that such unrestricted visions are important to the selfknowledge of the nation. Now that no warrants or TVNZ public-service brief exist to encourage local New Zealand artistry, even the future of show-case programmes like "Kaleidoscope” must be in doubt. Television artists in this country work on bread-and-butter commissions already. Many end up doing their most creative work in advertisements. The alternative is to emigrate, or dream of personal statements while they collect ' the dole. Video has no equivalent of an artist’s garret. It’s useful to have access to the latest generation industrial set-up to help stretch the borders of visual expression. But most important of all it must be shown to an audience. Does it have to be the preserve of older, wealthier societies to foster artists like Ko Nakajima? It appears that the tradition of artistic sponsorship extends in Japan even to the new media of video and computers. And this sponsorship exists side by side with the commercial, suc-cess-stories of marketdriven telly. Watching Nakajima’s extraordinary mystical re-

flections on the landscape of Rangitoto moved me tremendously. I would love our artists to have the same access to us via the television set. So three cheers for Hibiscus Film for trying to perform the difficult balancing act of making popular yet innovative New Zealand films for cinema and television, as it did with Alison Maclean’s amusing short film, “Talkback,” screened last Sunday. Channel Four began the pattern of producing films for theatrical release followed by television scheduling. “My Beautiful Laundrette” continues to have international film release and video distribution. A film can be designed to have many lives. When I first saw “Talkback” in the cinema I wondered how well it would look on television. The cinema experience made the most of the space-capsule intimacy of a radio station at night. In the more cluttered environment of television viewing at home I found that the interaction of the different characters came out even more clearly than on the silver screen. This sort of local product deserves all the support it can get. It probably won’t be looking to Mr Prebble’s brave new world for a cent.