[ecrea] Utopian Television - Michael Cramer

*Utopian Television***

*Rossellini, Watkins, and Godard beyond Cinema***

/Michael Cramer///

"Both theoretical treatise and intellectual history, Michael Cramer’s 
intervention matches the utopian vision of its subject as he efficiently 
and astutely navigates us through the thorny politics of art 
cinema."—Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick

"Michael Cramer's fine book explores those paths not taken that define a 
genre, that interplay between film and TV pioneered by Rossellini in 
service of a now utopian social pedagogy. Peter Watkins' understudied 
work, along with Rossellini's experiments—unfamiliar to those who only 
know him through the early masterpieces—throw a wholly new light on 
Godard himself, and Cramer's luminous readings of the works are as 
stimulating as his overall theorization of this new, or perhaps missed, 
form."—Fredric Jameson, Duke University

Television has long been a symbol of social and cultural decay, yet many 
in postwar Europe saw it as the medium with the greatest potential to 
help build a new society and create a new form of audiovisual art. 
/Utopian Television/ examines works of the great filmmakers Roberto 
Rossellini, Peter Watkins, and Jean-Luc Godard, all of whom looked to 
television as a promising new medium even while remaining critical of 
its existing practices.

/Utopian Television/illustrates how each director imagined television’s 
improved or “utopian” version by drawing on elements that had come to 
characterize it by the early 1960s. Taking advantage of the public 
service model of Western European broadcasting, each used television to 
realize works that would never have been viable in the commercial 
cinema. All three directors likewise seized on television’s supposed 
affinity for information and its status as a “useful” medium, but 
attempted to join this utility with aesthetic experimentation, 
suggesting new ways to conceive of the relationship between aesthetics 
and information.

As beautifully written as it is theoretically rigorous, /Utopian 
Television/ turns to the writing of Fredric Jameson and Ernst Bloch in 
treating the three directors’ television experiments as enactments of 
“utopia as method.” In doing so it reveals the extent to which the 
medium inspired and shaped hopes not only of a better future but of 
better moving image art as well.

*Michael Cramer*is assistant professor of film history at Sarah Lawrence 
College.

University of Minnesota Press | March 2017| 304pp | 9781517900397 | PB | 
£24.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL17UTMC**

*Price subject to change.

  **Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia.


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