TV fever
| documentary | |
|---|---|
| Original title | TV fever. Comments on the mass medium and its audience |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1963 |
| length | 58 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Dieter Ertel, Georg Friedel |
| production | Süddeutscher Rundfunk |
| camera | Hartmut Missbach |
The television documentary “ TV fever. ” Broadcast by Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1963 . Comments on the mass medium and its audience ”addresses the contemporary television habits of Germans.
content
The " signs of the times " editors of Südfunk television, Dieter Ertel and Georg Friedel , and their cameraman Hartmut Missbach followed the habits of television viewing in the early 1960s. In the opening scene they show the deserted streets during the Durbridge crime thriller Tim Frazer , which is based on audience ratingscame from nearly 90 percent. “Germany is holding its breath. The big cities are dead. But TV fever raged even more than the flu and runny nose, ”comments the film. The "television fever" keeps people at home in front of the screens. In 1963, experts estimate that an average of 13 to 14 million German citizens spent their evening in front of the screen. "Towers of steel and concrete grew out of the ground everywhere, giants equipped with electrotechnical witchcraft changed the intimate image of home", so the moderation text on the pictures of antennas on the roofs.
But the antennae did not rule everywhere: the film documents the fear of professors and students in Tübingen about the new medium, who nevertheless see themselves as the country's future intellectual elite. The film thus contrasts the "television fever", the natural television consumption of simple workers and employees in the Ruhr area who find everything that comes on the screen somehow interesting.
In the final scene, the film shows how a football broadcast creates the illusion of “being there” and turns the audience into a national community of fate. "This is real television fever," explains the moderator. The medical metaphor shows that the fascination of the new medium seems inexplicable.
The film is an early example of the culture-critical thematization of television by television itself and is considered to be an outstanding contribution of the so-called "Stuttgart School" of television documentation.
An American RTL series from the 1990s also uses the title “Fernsehfieber”.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Helmut Schanze (Ed.): Lexicon Media Theory and Media Studies: Approaches - People - Basic Concepts , 2002, p. 70.
- ↑ Film excerpt with the explanation of the SDR director on Youtube [1]
- ↑ The term '' Fernsehfieber '' appears earlier, for example in the Spiegel column Telemann , cf. Christina Bartz / Jens Ruchatz (eds.): With Telemann through German television history. Commentaries and glosses by television critic Martin Morlock , 2006, ISBN 978-3-89942-327-3 , p. 40