Narrative

To explore these issues in-depth, Chapter 2 covers narrative, specifically examining how television commercials operate in terms of Scene, Genre, Cross-Genre, and the Remake. This chapter contends that the narrative framework for producing the television commercial is arguably, shot by shot, second to second, as frequently creative as a full-length feature film. Some commercials utilize cinematic narrative forms of Hollywood; others diverge from the same. The product and its “message” might be realistic or wholly fantastic; nevertheless, the TV commercial is indeed a narrative, a critically substantial formation, whether it unfolds in the form of a slice-of-life story or a presentational style pitch.

Origins

Understanding the television commercial’s evolution from its inception to the late 1950s illustrates how it was influenced by the classical Hollywood style, and that its very adoption of that style into a brief running time meant that it necessarily had to alter the style as well, particularly in terms of editing. The result meant, that even as the commercial borrowed conventions from Hollywood feature filmmaking, the two forms quickly became involved in a dialogue, with the television commercial influencing feature filmmaking, and vice-versa. Chapter 1 initiates the book's exploration of these issues by focusing on early commercials and using the work of Gerald “Jerry” Schnitzer as an important case study. Schnitzer is the essential linking figure between the initial postwar broadcast commercial’s direct appeal to the audience and its later, stylized evolution.

Introduction

“The best TV commercials create a tremendously vivid sense of mood, of a complex presentation of something.” 1 —Stanley Kubrick in 1987 In 1897, while employed at the Edison Studios, William Heise created one of the earliest filmed commercials, Admiral Cigarette (Fig. I.1). Heise, a director and (mostly) cinematographer of such Edison moving pictures as ...

Mise-en-scène

Chapter 3 covers mise-en-scène, specifically examining Sets and Settings, Blocking and Direct Address, Special Effects, and Animation: all that the frame contains within its physical and visible parameters to create signifying, ideologically imbued images. As the commercial’s mise-en-scène invokes the familiar, the shock of the unfamiliar, or even the convergence of the two, it establishes a sense of product differentiation in a highly competitive market for the television audience.

Conclusion

In this book, we have sought to reimagine the historical and aesthetic parameters of the television commercial, to be placed now within the broader context of Film Studies. The intertextual framework we suggest indicates an ongoing, dynamic interrelationship among narrative media, and whether thirty or sixty seconds in length, multiple examples of the historical and contemporary advertising commercial demonstrate that each is, in fact, a short-film narrative, informed by ideologies and technologies of the past and present cultural time. In ...

Sound

Chapter 6 covers sound, offering discussions of how the television commercial has revived, fostered, and revitalized the musical and the silent film genres, integrating sound and image in particularized respects that are markedly different than most Hollywood feature films of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The chapter also addresses the TV the experimental, intertextual commercial that dates to the 1960s, the disruption of aural teleology in the 21st century, and the unique (even if legally obligatory) forms of audio/visual dissonance in which beautiful images unfold while voiceover explains the dire side effects of given pharmaceuticals.

Editing

Chapter 5 covers editing, paying particular attention on Average Shot Lengths (ASLs) and the influential role that the TV commercial has played in how they have decreased in Hollywood feature filmmaking. This chapter also explores the ways in which the TV commercial has approached cutting on camera movement, or, in not using any editing, letting a single image remain onscreen for the entire running time, a practice associated with 19th century cinema and reinvigorated for product sales. The chapter also examines the TV commercial’s ability to eschew standard Hollywood editing practices, opting for decidedly non-classical approaches, as in the exclusive use of close-ups to tell a story.

Cinematography

Chapter 4 covers cinematography, specifically Film Stock, Photofilms, the Freeze-Frame, Moving Camera, and Bullet Time/Time Slice. As Sponsor magazine declared in 1955, the “video portion” of the commercials needed to lead, with copywriters following. Gerald Schnitzer often relied on some of the best camera operators of the classical and, later, post-classical Hollywood eras to shoot his TV commercials, initiating a practice in which cinematographers were able to explore and experiment within limitations dictated by advertising clients and television norms.