Using this advertisement or the screening from class as an example, discuss how Ernie Kovacs’ artistic experiments with television sound (or silence), aesthetics, and timing dialogue with growing concerns about television’s noisiness and commercialism?
From the class screening, it was apparent that Kovacs holds in high respect the delicacy of space-time in film, which on many other programs seems to have been maltreated. Programs such as Texaco Star Theatre, in my opinion, squander the capabilities of cinema. The show was, as the name suggests, a theatre performance in front of a camera. As a result, the timing of the acts was often uncomfortably off in one way or another. Kovacs, on the other hand, maintained semblances of Vaudeville theatre while delving into the untapped television entertainment potential of film itself. For example, during the disorienting opening sequence, the final shot is of a mallet hovering over a timpani head after the last note is played. Later on, we return to the shot of the timpani player, but this time the drum is filled with a liquid of some type. The liquid is still, resembling a drumhead. As soon as the drummer strikes the head, we all understand the joke. This humor is based entirely upon the delicate orchestration of shots in film. The first shot of the timpani after it is hit is far too long, comically so. The audience has been bombarded with confusing images. The joke of an unnecessarily long take is the opposite of this, giving the audience too little stimulation. At this point, the timpani is the only thing knows for sure that they understand. There’s nothing like a long take of inactivity to bring you back to the real world. However, when the switch is made later, we understand that the long take was simply a device to trick the audience into a state of false security. All of this is done simply by paying special attention to the consequence of time and space in moving images.
ReplyDeleteThe gag that got the greatest laugh during the screening was the singing woman getting hit in the face with a pie. Why? People have seen slapstick before – why did everyone burst out giggling? I argue that the constant re-shifting of frame of reference, space, in other words, forces the audience to take on a somewhat nihilistic agenda. The feeling of displacement from a diegesis – watching scenes unfold in nebulous contexts and ending abruptly – it’s negation of information. The shots struggle between each other and insert themselves inappropriately, in an almost violent manner. After cinema has played out in such a frustrating and aggressive manner, seeing a woman appear and quickly get pied in the face is exactly what everyone wants. It’s an action. It’s a catharsis that everyone is desperate enough to want.
Juxtaposing with this scene later is a very long, romantic montage of a singing woman in which absolutely nothing happens. Everyone was waiting for something to happen, but it never did. It never succumbed to nihilism, it was just pretty. Kovacs crunches our perception of time by surprising us and making us wait.
Kovacs’ Nairobi Trio sketch explores cultural time through its use of minimalism. The simplicity of the sketch: puppet-like monkeys playing pseudo-exotic music, forces audiences to fill in the gaps using their film logic. When I say film logic, I mean the archetypal awareness of understanding formed by established commonalities in media. Ernie Kovacs did not create a racist sketch, but building pieces that form a synecdoche of archetypal racist caricatures. An ape playing bongos brings to mind an African caricature. Why? Has the perpetuation of cultural appropriation in media affected the mnemonics of my media brain? The ape costumes of the characters follows the racist trajectory of Amos n’ Andy further into the plane of absurdity, and our mind’s tendency to construct meaning of film using past information serves as a reminder of the amount of caricature that we have let slip by.
ReplyDeleteKovacs’ implementation of non-diegetic sound into his sketches, I think, had to be somewhat influenced by the commercialization common to televised programming. The insertion of ads into the diegesis of a television program had to be a steppingstone to the penetration of the television program diegesis from outside dimensions. As with other tactics discussed, Kovacs’ techniques pinpoint trends in television through discomfort felt by hyperbole.
Ernie Kovacs - Dutch Masters analysis
ReplyDeleteTelevision stars early on had the dual responsibility of both entertaining and selling advertisements. The corporations choosing to sponsor these shows knew of the great sway that a television star could have by endorsing their product, and so sponsored programs accordingly. In this commercial, Ernie Kovacs is very aware of his potential influence and strategic corporate placement in this ad and approaches it accordingly.
The commercial, first of all, is clearly still a part of his performance as an entertainer- it never truly takes on a commercial distinction. This tone is set right away with the audience's laughter and the announcer's voiceover. He comments self-reflexively on the "over-imbibing of stimulants" (advertisements), all while just showing Ernie, standing. The word-choice in the beginning, aside from talking self-reflexively about advertising during an ad, is exclusively long-winded and complex, mimicking this over-imbibing of stimulants.
When Ernie is finally introduced by the announcer, suddenly the initial segment of the commercial seems less "commercial" and the viewer is placed in the moment when traditionally the spokesperson-television star makes the pitch- Ernie says nothing. Ernie, taken a little off guard, fumbles around, dropping the cigars. This is another ploy to misdirect the audience; if you assumed that dropping the clumsiness was the only funny trick Kovacs had up his sleeve, you're wrong- another stimulant! Ernie, a quick tilt reveals, is standing in a pool of water, as he scrambles to put the cigars back in the box, a hopelessly futile measure.
However, next, the camera gently pans to a traditionally positioned "Dutch Masters" box on a towel, spotlighted. This convenient camera move, coupled with the gentle background music and announcer's interjection of the "Step Up" slogan, suddenly frames the commercial as a very traditional advertisement. Everything was said that needed to be said (the slogan) and everything shown that needed to be shown (the star and the product), yet of course in this case the star said nothing and yet as the end of the commercial reveals, he did everything right.
In the article "Silent TV" Spigel saw Kovacs' performances on TV as subverting the current norm of broadcasts of the time. Noise and commercialism went hand in hand as advertisements bombarded audiences with unwanted sound. Companies were using noise methods and sound design to manipulate audiences, for example utilizing laugh tracks for comedians to trick viewers into laughing at material that was at times underwhelming.
ReplyDeleteKovacs' "Silent Program" seen in class undermined the idea that TV advertised itself as and showed the actual reality of it. Spigel in particular focuses on the Eugene skit. The skit utilizes sound to create humorous situations that subvert expectations by giving normal actions ridiculous volume, and false sounds. Eugene intrudes the club with sound, the way television was beginning to intrude with advertising and noise. Attention is also given to the tilted table which utilized camera manipulation to make an impossible situation possible.
These situations helped show TV wasn't exactly a window into the world. TV presented itself as a recording a reality. TV was live for many programs. However Kovacs through his creativity in his television appearances provided a contrast to TV's shaped reality. TV instead was a medium that could be manipulated just like film or radio. This manipulation could be used by advertisers and companies to serve an agenda.
This advertisement for Dutch Masters featuring Ernie Kovacs completely mocks the issue at this time of overmodulation with commercials. As stated in Spiegel’s article, “The FCC hac uncovered a problem of truly major significance. It’s getting a lot of complaints from TV viewers that the sound level of commercials is irritatingly louder than the sound heard during the rest of the program.” Kovac’s commercial is just as effective as these deafining commercials because it does the complete opposite in a short and comedic way. Kovacs cleverly advirtizes his product without being another average housewife reading from a script like every other commercial we have studied in class.
ReplyDeleteKovac’s creative exploration of silent comedy during this time really jumped the fence from radio to television. All of his silent gags play around with different visual and sound effects that would not be possible through radio. For example, his “Eugene” skit at the Gentlemen’s Club would not be comedic through radio because the comedy comes from the juxtaposition of Eugene’s loud clammering and the silence of the upperclass gentlemen. Ernie Kovacs had a unique sense of humor because his show experimented different ways of making people laugh and keeping them entertained without speaking dialogue.
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ReplyDeleteAt a time when a good portion of television critics and viewers were becoming increasingly put off by the blatant commercialism of television, Ernie Kovacs experimented with the television medium in ways that self-reflexively exhibited its own constructedness. The self-reflexiveness of his television show did have commercial appeal, however, because it added an extra layer of mediation between the commercial message and the viewer. Maybe it seems strange to make this claim when the function of self-reflexivity is often understood as a breaking down of the illusionist mode of representation, as a means of putting artifice out in the open. But I think the self-reflexiveness of the Kovacs' show is something of a prism in which the driving light behind the show, that is to say commercialism, is refracted so that what is seen is not commercial interests but a brilliant rainbow of artistic merit. It can't be ignored, however, that his show was a commercial product sponsored by a body of commerce: Dutch Masters. In the commercial above we are charmed by the eccentricity of the presentation, we stand in closer relation intellectually with the presenter than the product so that the product is held somewhat at a distance. This bestows on the audience a certain sense of superiority and also makes the advertisement funny: humor is often said to be contingent on a degree of emotional distance from the goings on of a narrative.
ReplyDeleteLooking back at the Martha Raye Show, I find there two types of commercials: the ones featuring Martha Raye herself and those presented as detached from the narrative. Kovacs' ad above is of the first kind, allowing the audience to be attached to the charismatic (albeit clumsy) person of the presenter who is presenting something to be looked at sideways. The fact that this mode of representation is used is interesting because it shows that advertisers recognized that the strategy of the second kind of ad, the direct address from the advertiser, was beginning to irritate audience's eye and, of course, ears. This concern for advertisements being too loud which, as Spigel suggests, was not empirically proven to be an actual phenomena has a lot to do with the audiences distrust of advertisers (experienced as advertiser intrusiveness) as well as, I speculate, a certain amount of self-loathing in the viewing public. I think after the quiz show scandals people felt like dupes and needed to distance themselves from any complicity in commercialism. There was a desire to say, "I don't even care about what they're selling." I think an encouraged appreciation of television artistry became a way of elevating the audience, a way of acknowledging their good taste in order to make them feel better about themselves. "We know you don't care about our commodity," advertisers were now trying to say, "Ernie Kovacs' witty manipulations of the television medium are more interesting to your sophisticated tastes. Please consider our product only if you want to." The self-reflexive mode, I believe, is meant to give the viewer the impression that the sender has a privileged outlook on the message he or she is sending and by recognizing the sender’s privileged outlook the viewer is made to feel that he or she is of the same privileged position as the sender. And feeling elevated as such, I think it was possible for a consumer to then go out and buy Dutch Masters with the mindset that he or she was not a depressed, socially isolated, commercially-brainwashed tool of American capitalism but an agent as free as the "rebellious" Ernie Kovacs himself. Ultimately, I think a subversive ethos has been attached to Ernie Kovacs that is not inherent to his self-reflexive mode. Subversion of institutional convention (though self-reflexivity had been a well-established convention in the art world since the turn of the century) is not the same as subversiveness against an institution.