On Video

by Roy Armes

Though video systems are now growing ever more accessible, and practical video work is undertaken at every level of education, this is the first book-length historical and theoretical study of the medium. On Video explores video on two levels: first, it examines the relationship between technology and society; and second, it probes the connection between production methods and the communication of meaning.

Paperback

First published May 5, 1988

Reviews

[Evan Pincus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of good history and some decent analysis, but largely fails to dig into video as its own medium - despite the stated aims to define video as a field separate from film and television, it resorts to analyzing classical Hollywood image/sound relations (Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity) when discussing the aesthetics of video sound or focusing in on a teleplay for broadcast being shot on film rather than video tape when talking about the aesthetics of the video image. Were the book called On Media, this would make much more sense, but it's not! All the same, valuable as a pretty dopey, deeply idiosyncratic time capsule of a time and place (80's Britain, this book couldn't come from anywhere else) in criticism. I mean, come on...

“Of course any television programme can be recorded on video tape, and the transmitted output and the video recording are superficially identical. But as Jorge Luis Borges’s masterly story, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, makes dazzlingly clear, two literary texts may be verbally identical and yet it is possible to construct an argument proving that the second is ‘almost infinitely richer'. The same can be argued of the live programme and its video recording.”

Is that not the coolest opinion anyone has ever had?