Stephen Boyd Davis, Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University

News from Now Where? – The Digital Spaces of Television

Keywords: television, broadcasting, digital technology, depiction

The subject of this paper is visual space: space which can be seen, both in the sense of the planar space of the representation itself and the deeper space which seems to be depicted. Specifically, the paper presents an inquiry into the visual space of television news. The key questions posed are: what are the spatial practices of news television, where have they come from, and where are they going? In attempting to answer these questions, the contribution made by the fact that television media are now largely digital is highlighted. However, I shall not be suggesting that digital technology causes the emergence of particular spatial practices. Rather, I shall argue that the main influence is the set of objectives of the artefact. These ensure that, even within a single technology such as television, one genre harnesses the capabilities of digital media in quite a different way to another, and this is particularly reflected in its characteristic spatiality. I subscribe to Gombrich’s view that style is an adaptation to functions.¹ The functions of the image, mediated through the technology, determine the form.

The space of painting has been extensively studied, in all sorts of ways, as has the space of film. Though much of the literature which purports to discuss the space of film turns out only to treat the concept metaphorically, nevertheless, there is still significant thinking on the truly visual aspects – the depictive rectangle and its relationship to the spaces depicted. But the visual space of television is a relatively neglected area. Fiske notes some spatial aspects but emphasises the similarity of spatial constructions across genres, not their significant differences.² Caldwell’s extensive discussion of ‘televisuality’ is a multi-faceted analysis, but also tends to emphasise commonalities, and does not trace the historical antecedents³. Like Ellis,⁴ most commentators seem to attribute the current visual character of television deterministically to technology, even where they acknowledge that film and television (and, as shall be demonstrated, different genres within television) use that technology in widely differing ways.

In what follows, television news means primarily UK-based television news programmes, but what I have seen of other news broadcasting does not make me think this is untypical.

I shall treat what appears on the television screen – the whole television display, with its filmic material, graphics, text, overlays, and so forth – as a picture. This term will be implicitly defined as the paper progresses. However, before proceeding I propose some rough distinctions. Crudely, I take it that, where two or more elements are wanted in a planar graphical space, two contrasting strategies are available:

1. The elements can be combined in the two-dimensional space of the composition itself. In modern graphical terms, we would think of this as a ‘diagrammatic’ or ‘configurative’ approach. In everyday digital media it is an approach familiar from the computer interface, where we position windows, folders and all the other paraphernalia of the desktop into more or less meaningful configurations. It is also one of the obvious means by which the various segments of the television display are combined, a ‘hybrid reality composed of different spaces.’ ⁵
2. Alternatively, the elements can be combined in a putative world space, real or imaginary, which is then depicted. This is what we would recognise uncontroversially as picture-making in a traditional sense. A digital example is the creation of three-dimensional computer-graphic imagery which constructs an apparently pre-existent world which then seems to be, as it were, transparently depicted.

Gombrich, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, characterised these as the pictographic versus the photographic. ⁶ The focus here is the relationship of digital media to these two approaches. Most pictures combine the two to a greater or lesser degree: this is often the very thing which makes a picture interesting. Wollheim refers to the picture-maker building up analogies between the medium and the object of representation, seeking an ‘ever more intimate rapport between the two experiences’ ⁷ and Podro refers to the interplay between the space of the pictorial surface and the space of the apparent world which is depicted. ⁸

In tracing the roots of current television practices, it will be necessary to make several references to film. The term classical fiction film here denotes the collection of practices associated with mainstream, commercial cinema of the twentieth and present centuries.

What are the spatial practices of news television?

As early as 1974 Williams was beginning to suspect that the selection of news stories was driven by the availability of film coverage.⁹ Somehow in fifty years of television news, we have moved from a solitary announcer seated against a flat background or a curtain, in which picture value was not a consideration,¹⁰ to a complex graphical mixture with highly distinctive spatiality (Fig. 1), dependent on technologies such as computer-controlled motion-rigs and rostrum cameras, 3D computer animation, computer-assisted drawn animation, digital paint systems, digital video effects, character generators, non-linear video-editing and the electronic stills store. ¹¹

The attributes of television news space include the following: symmetry: pairs of presenters sit together at a desk, or as a diptych where a presenter and a correspondent each occupy their own frame; frontality: the presenter looks straight at us and is viewed full-face; multi-segmentation: the display comprises more than one component, organised both as panels across the surface and in layers; multimodality: a typical display uses text, graphics, film, animation and so forth. In addition, many television news pictures are ambiguous, toying with our inability to work out exactly what we see or precisely where things are, whether something is real or a pictorial fiction, flat or three-dimensional. Above all, it is overtly representational: viewers cannot possibly forget that they are being presented with the material. It is often remarked that the pace of television news has altered in the last, say, thirty years, and it is certainly true that the average 4.8 shots per minute of television news in 1980¹² has become 8.4 shots per minute by 2003,¹³ perhaps justifying Caldwell’s epithet of ‘acute hyperactivity’.¹⁴ But equally significant, as Caldwell extensively documents, is the shift to ‘excessive stylisation and visual exhibitionism.’ ¹⁵

Fig. 1. Some characteristic scenes from News broadcasting (BBC News 24 and Sky News, 2003).

Where have the spatial practices of news television come from?

Though it has been suggested that ‘there is no real difference in narrational form between news and soap opera,’ ¹⁶ the spatial characteristics of these genres could hardly be more different. We could assert that many of the characteristic spatial properties of television have been made easier by digital technology, but why does the genre have its current form, and so little resemblance to that of other genres? Where has this characteristic spatiality come from? Some answers may be gleaned from the history of film. There one can find instances both of techniques which have survived into mainstream cinematic language, and of techniques which have been almost abandoned – only to flourish in news television. In studying them, it is possible to discern what the decisive selective principle has been.

The classical fiction film is remarkable for its opposition to many of the pictorial characteristics just listed. Symmetry is traditionally abhorred: asymmetry in the plane, and a corresponding tendency to organise views of moving subject matter in a three-quarter view, are a characteristic of the classical film. Similarly, frontal presentation is taboo and actors must not seem to address the audience directly. Though very early films presented scenes with a stage-like backcloth parallel to the picture plane and across which the action moved,¹⁷ by 1899 diagonal movement towards the camera had been attempted by the Lumières, and was standard in ‘chase’ films by 1903.¹⁸ Thenceforward, such diagonal staging was the norm. It is also forbidden for the classical film picture to be multi-segmented. Exceptions to this are rare, noticeable, and only done for special purposes. Early cinema experimented with various segmented approaches, including in Williamson’s Are you there? of 1901, perhaps the first example of a telephone conversation in which both parties are visible at once.¹⁹ Other multi-segmented approaches were tried. G A Smith’s Santa Claus of 1898 contrived to show both dreamers and what they are dreaming by inserting a circular vignette into a scene of sleeping children.²⁰ Later, this pragmatic, non-perspectival assemblage of disparate views to form a single picture became unacceptable.

In 1927, when the film Napoléon was made by Abel Gance, cinematic practice was still in a state of flux. There had not at that stage been a strong divergence between the two genres of fictional narrative and factual film-making. Additional factors are that Gance was somewhat outside the mainstream of Hollywood-inspired film-making, and that he was a virtuoso director who wanted his film-making to be noticed as such. This constrasts with the developing ethos in America which valued the narrative, and the audience’s psychological engagement with the narrative, above any display of technique.

A brief list of the techniques used in a single scene (culminating in the pillow fight of Napoleon’s childhood) includes the tracking shot, a graphic frame or circular mask,²¹ close-up, point-of-view shot, reverse-angle shooting, hand-held camera work, continuity editing to carry a single action over two adjoining shots, and use of an unnatural viewpoint (from floor-level). At the conclusion of the scene the image divides first into a four-panel split screen, and then one of nine panels; finally superimposition (the overlaying of one image on another through double exposure) is used as a further device to create maximum visual dynamics and confusion. Incidentally, the split screen sequences were created in the camera using masking and rewinding,²² so would have been prodigiously time-consuming to produce: Gance must have had very good reasons to want to do this.

In another sequence, when Napoleon is recognised by an admirer as the potential saviour of France, he appears in a triptych, the background action forming the flanking panels. Later the film’s closing triptych will use three projectors operated side by side, the outer ones with red and blue tinting, the three images together forming a French tricolour.²³ In another scene where Napoleon convinces his military superiors of his strategy to defeat the British, the forthcoming military action is played out using animation, effects and film of battles, superimposed on a map including its textual labels. Arrows as drawn graphics move to represent marching forces, and we see that the flashes of gunfire in the imagined scene actually light up Napoleon’s eyes.

Film takes extraordinary liberties in how it relates one shot to another, or one scene to another, and also of course in terms of what is depicted, but within the cinematographic picture itself, it has for long been bound by a strict rule. Nothing must draw attention to the picture as such. It must seem transparent. Of all the techniques just enumerated, the ones now widely disfavoured in mainstream fiction film-making are graphic framing, split screen, superimposition, colour tinting, and multimodality. Each of these is perceived as a pictorial intervention, and as such is unwelcome. The other techniques are not noticed in the same way: they are just taken to be natural characteristics of the way we see things (even though most of them are not), for example the shot upwards from floor level or the point-of-view shots and reverse-angle cutting where we are always in the best position to see the story events. These are not views that anyone there could have actually seen, but they are still taken to be natural.

Chanan has drawn attention to the continuity between Victorian expectations of picture making and subsequent cinematic practice (that is, as window not as surface) but this continuity can be overstated.²⁴ Clearly in the early history of film, many techniques were tried on a pragmatic basis, some to survive and others to atrophy. Salt emphasises that early film-makers did not, as it were, know what they were doing: experimentation led to many inventions, only some of which survived in the mainstream. As Salt himself points out,²⁵ this is similar to Gombrich’s notion of how progress is made in picture-making, where ad hoc improvisation by each picture-maker lays a foundation for future practice.²⁶

The concept of transparency is fundamental to some kinds of picture-making and to the fiction film and has been commented on by many others. It has been conceived in terms of the Albertian window,²⁷ or as operating without a code.²⁸ It is, unusually, an area where film practice and film theory concur. Film-making manuals almost invariably advocate that cinematography and editing should strive to make themselves invisible, especially when the film-maker requires a high degree of psychological involvement. The subtitle of a recent book on the history of editing is “Looking at the invisible”.²⁹ A handbook for filmmakers introduces editing with the topic ‘invisible cutting’.³⁰ A handbook for editors describes the unnoticed edit as ‘ideal’.³¹ Another handbook by a practitioner, significantly, differentiates between editing styles by genre, and notes how, in the BBC, a ‘light entertainment’ zoom was used regardless of the subject or scene while the ‘drama’ zoom was governed by the tensions within the scene and what is going on in it.³² That the former was noticeable was not a problem, but for drama it would have been considered disastrous. Bazin put the view at perhaps its most extreme, dividing film-makers into ‘those who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality.’³³ Often, as with Bazin, the absence of overt pictorial intervention has been identified with realism and with natural vision.³⁴ Bolter and Grusin, contrasting the transparent with the ‘remediated’, seem to believe that digital media have abandoned the passion for transparency, but it is hoped that this paper will help make clear that there is no evidence for this view: it is genre, not technology which determines the extent to which transparency is the goal. ³⁵

By 1940, there had been such a divergence between the naturalistic style of the fiction film and the overtly presentational style of the newsreel, that Welles famously pastiched the newsreel style at the beginning of Citizen Kane, allegedly farming the work out to actual newsreel editors.³⁶ For Bordwell the newsreel sequence ‘virtually recapitulates the technical development of cinema from 1890 to 1941.’ ³⁷ But the most important, unspoken, aspect of Bordwell’s remark is that many of those techniques had by then been expunged from mainstream fiction film-making: they had become identified with the newsreel genre alone.

In the main body of Kane, all material is photographic – any graphic material such as letters, newspapers, and so forth is situated in the diegetic space – while in the newsreel, drawn and other clearly planar material is used. No textual titles are used in the main film, while in the newsreel they appear extensively. Most edits in the main film are cuts, while in the newsreel numerous essentially decorative transitions such as wipes, iris-open and dissolves occur. The film proper strenuously avoids symmetry, frontal representation and the shallow space of the theatre, but in the newsreel these artificial traits appear often. Conrad documents television’s development from reading news to showing it as though its visual practices had no antecedents³⁸ but everything he comments on had been common in newsreel. It was early television news which was exceptional in being principally auditory.

Further insights are offered by those who have deliberately flouted film-making’s dominant practices. Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) offers two obvious examples of rule-breaking as far as classical film-making is concerned: there is extensive use of split screen (though at this relatively early period the prohibition on such technique was not so strong as it would become later) and the process of film-making is depicted within the film (already extremely peculiar at this date). The important thing is Vertov’s reason for his choices. He wanted to demonstrate that the camera was a superior device to the eye. He wanted to show how making a film was not like seeing things: it was better.³⁹ He had no interest in making the craft of film seem like natural vision. His work was all documentary, emphasising the alignment of this kind of explicit pictorialism with non-fiction work.

In the films of Peter Greenaway too it is possible to find spatial practices which have been rejected by the mainstream, but which place his films close in some respects to the spatiality of news television. When Greenaway breaks the rules, for example in the Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), he does so by showing the outline of the draughtsman’s perspective device, not as an object in the scene, but as a planar frame within a frame. The frontality and rectilinear approach even affect camera movement, something the classical fiction film abhors precisely because it draws attention to the pictorial nature of the form. Greenaway exploited many possibilities of manipulating and combining images using digital media, notably in Prospero’s Books (1991). The results are not designed to be mistaken for straightforward seeing, unlike in a film such as Cameron’s Titanic (1997) where the use of computer graphics, though extensive, is entirely within traditional filmic practices. Also in Greenaway there is a syncretic approach to modes of representation so that photography, drawing, animation and text are brought together, another feature common in newsreel and factual television but deprecated by the classical fiction film. His ways of working are the exact complement of the way the fiction film genre operates. Again the rationale is the key: Greenaway has said that ‘cinema is too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to story tellers’.⁴⁰ For him, the exciting areas of film-making are not primarily narrative. ⁴¹ While Greenaway’s films are engaging, they are also visibly formal exercises. No purpose would be served here by the illusion of transparency created by the classical fiction film. Manovich calls Vertov and Greenaway ‘database film-makers’,⁴² and the idea is a valuable one in drawing attention to the way these directors explicitly present the viewer with visual objects – they are ‘object-oriented’ film-makers.

If news broadcasting practice features many characteristics seen in the neglected history of film, the result is to draw the viewer’s attention very strongly to the image as an image, to make the viewer aware of the objects. It is in a literal sense ‘objectifying’. It would be nice to believe that what news-makers are aiming to do is to make us more aware of the medium in order to sharpen our critical faculties. Unfortunately it seems rather to present the audience with a cornucopia whose main aim is to impress. It is important that we see those objects as objects, which the news broadcast delivers to us. Ellis’s recent book title ‘Seeing Things’ is apt. ⁴³ In the fiction film, the viewer enters the space of the film. In news television, the material is brought to the viewer, who should feel enriched by all these things on offer. An early publicity slogan for the documentary and news films of Charles Urban about 100 years ago was, ‘We put the world before you’.⁴⁴ This characterisation as delivery is as exact now as it was then.

It would be wrong of course to suggest that occult practices from film are the only forebears of the spatiality of news television. The graphic overlay, usually in the periphery of the screen, could well be partly derived from computer games, and I have already acknowledged the debt that the multi-panel television display owes to the computer desktop.

In the Japanese print, most noticeably in the work of Hiroshige, the signature and other non-diegetic information appear in cartouches, often red, which are positioned near to, but not adjoining, the corners of the image and extend parallel to one of the sides. These have a striking resemblance to the current overlays of Sky News and BBC News 24.

Some other historic pictorial devices have been revived, perhaps unwittingly, for the same pragmatic reasons that would have led to the creation of multi-panel pictures hundreds of years earlier: the need to present two things as related even though they are in separate spaces has led to the reinvention of the diptych.

Ambiguity and Transition

So we seem to have a situation neatly characterised in terms of opposites. On the one hand, the fiction film which embodies its messages in a world, and pretends to then film that world in a transparent way. On the other hand, news broadcasting which thrusts objects at the viewer, is designed to be as noticeable as possible, in order to make the audience feel enriched, empowered, perhaps grateful. However, things are not quite so simple.

A complicating factor has already been noted: the love of spatial ambiguity. Often the viewer cannot tell whether things are two- or three-dimensional, whether they are in a real space or a virtual one, and so forth. This again makes sense in terms of the unformulated agenda of news broadcasting. Once the programme makers have decided that they want the audience to notice the mediation – that the presentational qualities should be seen – this gives them licence to play, and one of the obvious things to play with is pictorial space.

This ambiguous spatial interplay itself has a pre-digital history in television news. Illustrations in Merritt’s book on television graphics in 1987 show an election broadcast of some years earlier where spatial ambiguity is clearly deliberate, even though the set is constructed of physical materials.⁴⁵

Fig. 2. The extra-diegetic screen interface becomes a diegetic object in the studio (Sky News, 2003).

However, there are signs of change, signs that programme-makers want to move toward the depiction of an apparently pre-pictorial 3D world where the entire content of news would appear in a unified space. In some Sky News broadcasts, the viewer looks at a medium-long shot of a presenter (Fig. 2). The presenter moves in front of what seems to be a large projection screen, the ‘News Wall’, which is sometimes divided into eight panels, each displaying a different sub-story which the digital interactive viewer may select. What is extraordinary is that this display is the same one that normally appears flat on the television screen, but which now is situated in a studio space with a man standing in front of it, talking about the options. What was a purely screen-based interactive menu is now presented as a large physical object. One of Caldwell’s four televisual modes is plasticity: transforming the video image into a three-dimensional object,⁴⁶ and in an opening sequence for Sky’s daily coverage of the Iraq war, not only did a stream of images, some static, some moving, all framed as photographic ‘objects’, pour towards the viewer across the screen, but these were interspersed with animated models of helicopters and other war machines flying into the screen and weaving between the photographs.

Within a single genre such as news television, the major national and international broadcasters tend to imitate each other. But there are some differences between Sky News, intentionally populist, and BBC News 24, more sober and traditional. While Sky News eagerly embraces the 3D pictorial world, the BBC as yet offers a more tentative playing with these ideas. For example, a BBC News 24 presenter stands on a gallery and seems to discuss the content of a projection screen behind him. But parts of this apparently physical display apparatus turn out to be synthesised, while some of the displayed contents turns out to be 3D (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Three-dimensional worlds of news objects (Sky News and BBC News 24, 2003).

Even for the BBC, things may be about to change. BBC Research is working on mixed realities which will allow live control by a presenter of synthetic components which are composited on the fly into a real scene.⁴⁷ Already in a recent documentary we have seen Peter Snow walking around a historic battlefield carrying a portfolio. He opens the portfolio and on it there is a clearly digital map of the terrain. Then, not only does the map animate but little helicopters and planes start to fly over it, actually flying over the surface of the portfolio, apparently in the world that Snow himself occupies.

It is noticeable that even within the diagrammatic or configurative mode, there are consistent attempts to force a spatial coherence. For example in BBC News 24 financial reports, though the correspondent appears inside a filmic window within a graphical surface on which the stock market figures appear, she looks repeatedly at the figures when referring to them. She looks at the figures as if they were situated in the same world (Fig. 4), even though if this were so, she would be looking at the back of them!

Fig. 4. Forcing spatial coherence using the gaze (BBC News 24, 2003).

In a sense, perhaps we have been here before. The Van Eyck polyptych at Ghent of c.1432 is similarly on the cusp between configurative approaches to depiction and those based on the apparent construction of a coherent 3D world and its ‘subsequent’ depiction. From the diagrammatic approach it inherits the way that the four groups of figures are arranged around the central holy motif: the further group is above the nearer, so that we see their full height, and many of the visually distancing cues (of which Van Eyck was a master) are suppressed, so that in some ways the further group does not seem any further away than the near one: there is no difference in colour or level of detail. But at the same time it is a world, a landscape, and the near figures are bigger to make them seem to be in the foreground, not to denote that they are more important than the distant group. It is a borderline case – perhaps deliberately so, perhaps just as a function of when Van Eyck was working. It is a transitional image, in some ways similar to the transitional state that news graphics currently occupy.

Perhaps there is a parallel too in terms of virtuosity. Elkins suggests that, for most Renaissance artists, perspective was in paintings – rather than paintings being in perspective. Up to and beyond the time of Vasari, perspective treatises enumerated the perspectival parts of pictures such that a good painting could be ‘full of perspectives’ (Vasari quoted by Elkins).⁴⁸ A recent re-evaluation of Jan van Eyck has characterised his work as a form of virtuoso playing with the available forms of representation.⁴⁹ Merrit remarked ten years ago on the cult of innovation in television graphics⁵⁰ while Edgerton claims that Renaissance painters ‘felt the need to create ever more ingenious perspective invenzioni’ and that ‘As far as painted perspective was concerned, Western Renaissance painters were ever required to be novel.’⁵¹ In some ways the new technology of perspective was a form of showing off like Caldwell’s ‘visual exhibitionism’ in television.

Fig. 5. Old pictorial devices recycled (BBC News 24, 2003).

When the objectives are the same, the pictorial solutions tend to be the same also. When a presenter must be positioned pictorially to act as mediator – and Ballantyne notes how rarely the news viewer has unframed, unmediated access to the subject of the news⁵² – it is likely that solutions emerge which in their own way cast light on the pictorial issues facing the painter of the past. In analysing the Ghent Altarpiece, Dhanens suggested that the difference between the flanking Adam and Eve figures, which seem to belong in a space immediately adjacent to that of the spectator, and the other figures, who are separated by some distance, is probably due to differences in approach between Hubert and Jan van Eyck.⁵³ But surely more plausible is that Adam and Eve, being human like ourselves rather than divine, are transitional between our world and the saintly world depicted in the other panels – taking on a role similar to the presenter, or the signer for the deaf, in the TV image (Fig. 5).

Another Van Eyck image fascinatingly poised between two worlds is the Madonna with Chancellor Rolin of 1435. At first we seem to see a physical space where each thing is a given size for purely optical reasons, until we notice the angel, at top right, which, if considered optically, must either be very small or far away. If he conforms to the laws of optical perspective, he is further away than the Madonna figure – but is apparently holding the crown over the Madonna’s head. The angel does not seem to know, as it were, whether he belongs in the optical world of 3D sizes and shapes, or in another, symbolic and diagrammatic world, where importance and significance determine the size of objects. Does this hybrid status, part optical, part diagrammatic, tell us that the angel is not bound by the rules of earthly space?

Panofsky was surely right in characterising the new coherent perspective schemata as a problem for the painter. Whereas meaning could previously be constructed largely by juxtaposing symbolic images, now the painter had to find an ‘excuse’ for objects to occupy a single unified space.⁵⁴ Gombrich too described it as problematic, a problem ‘of harmonizing the requirements of traditional didactic symbolism with the means of realism.’⁵⁵ In the same way, the urge to make optically coherent worlds populated with news objects is competing with the benefits of the configurational approaches to which we have been accustomed in recent years of news television.

Are we again witnessing an unstoppable slide from the diagrammatic, through the transitional as represented by Van Eyck and others in the fifteenth century (or by television news space now), into the dominance of a wholly unified perspectival space? Gombrich suggested that hybrid modes have a short life, that a balance between the conflicting systems of configurative and unified perspectival systems could not be maintained.⁵⁶ Perhaps the technology of digital imaging is due to follow the same trajectory as the technology called perspective?

What then is the television news space of the future? Will it continue to be dominated by overt interventions in the pictorial surface, or will it increasingly become a perspectival space populated by presenters and news objects? Once again digital games offer some interesting parallels. There too there is an increasing interest in presenting everything as though in a world. Sometimes this may be little more than a jokey fad. For example in the game War of the Monsters (Incog. Inc. for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, 2003), menus which would at one time have been simple flat graphics are now presented as giant animated billboards for a horror movie, positioned in a 3D world.

In Gran Turismo 3 (Polyphony Digital for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, 2001), while many menus and other interface devices are quite clearly pictorial interventions, the cars that each player has chosen are inserted into an apparent pre-pictorial world which is then depicted. They are no longer part of diagram space but of world space, even though this is not the same space in which the race itself will be run.

The Getaway (by Team Soho for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, 2002) is a videogame which always aims to avoid presenting extra-diegetic material on screen. Everything the player needs to know is conveyed in the diegetic world (as of course it usually is in film). For example, the flashing of the indicators on the vehicle are the hint to the player which way to turn. Earlier games would have had a clearly non-diegetic arrow in the sky pointing the direction the player should go. None of the information about status – about how many bullets the player has in his gun, how many people he has killed – none of these things are presented extra-diegetically. They are all part of the story world. These games seem to offer evidence of the desire within another digital genre to move from the configurative to the apparent depiction of a pre-existent world.

In conclusion, it is suggested that, though to a large extent at present one could characterise the spatiality of news broadcasting as the opposite of that in classical film-making, the tendency will increase to ape the latter’s single coherent perspectival space. Then news objects will really seem to be objects in the same diegetic space as the newscaster, whose role will, even more obviously than now, be to act as presenter, manipulator and explicator of these objects.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Vali Lalioti of BBC Research for advance access to conference papers and to my colleagues at the Lansdown Centre for feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. Also to British Sky Broadcasting for permission to reproduce images from broadcasts.

November 2003

Notes

1. Gombrich, E. H., The Uses of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication, London: Phaidon, 1999, p. 48.

2. Fiske, J., Television Culture, London: Methuen, reprinted Routledge, 1987.

3. Caldwell, J., Televisuality – Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

4. Ellis, J., Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty, London: I B Tauris, 2002.

5. Manovich, L., The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001, p.150.

6. Gombrich, E. H., The Uses of Images: Studies in the Social function of Art and Visual communication, Phaidon, London, 1999, p.49.

7. Wollheim, R., Art and its Objects, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, (1968) 1980, p. 224.

8. Podro, M., Depiction, New Haven:Yale University Press, 1998, p. 9.

9. Williams, R., Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Fontana, 1974, p. 48.

10. Goodwin, A., ‘TV News: Striking the Right Balance?’, Understanding Television, Goodwin, A. and Whannel, G. (eds.), London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 42-59.

11. Merritt, D., Graphic Design in Television, Oxford: Focal Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 1993.

12. Glasgow University Media Group, More Bad News: Volume 2 of Bad News, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980, pp. 194-203.

13. Figures for 2003 are approximate only, based on single sample hours in daytime news broadcasts in April. A shot change is defined broadly consistently with the Glasgow Media Group definition and therefore does not include changes of minor screen elements such as caption overlays.

14. Caldwell, J., Televisuality – Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995, p. 13.

15. Caldwell, J., Televisuality – Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995, p. 352.

16. Ellis, J., Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, London: Routledge, (1982) 1992, p. 159.

17. Thompson, K., ‘Classical Narrative Space and the Spectator’s Attention’, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Bordwell, D., Staiger, J. and Thompson, K., London: Routledge, 1985, pp. 214-230.

18. Salt, B., Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, London: Starword, (1983) 1992, p. 34.

19. Salt, B., Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, London: Starword, (1983) 1992, p. 57.

20. Salt, B., Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, London: Starword, (1983) 1992, p. 35.

21. The meaning of this masking, which occurs repeatedly in the film, is never quite clear. It seems to be used to render a scene iconic.

22. Brownlow, K., Napoleon – Abel Gance’s Classic Film, London: Jonathan Cape, 1983, p. 70.

23. Brownlow K., Napoleon – Abel Gance’s Classic Film, London: Jonathan Cape, 1983, p. 153.

24. Chanan, M., The Dream that Kicks: the Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain, London: Routledge, (1980) 1996, p.161.

25. Salt, B., Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, London: Starword, (1983) 1992, p. 40.

26. Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London: Phaidon, (1960) 1977, p. 304.

27. Elkins, J., The Poetics of Perspective, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994, pp. 45-62.

28. Barthes, R., Image—Music—Text trans. Heath, S., London: Fontana, 1977, p. 17.

29. Fairservice, D., Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice: Looking at the Invisible, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.

30. Pincus, E. and Ascher, S., The Filmmaker's Handbook, New York: Plume/New American Library, 1984, p. 279.

31. Thompson, R., reprinted 2002, Grammar of the Edit, Oxford: Focal Press, 1993, p. 72.

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