Outside television: Federico Fellini on exposure and attention in the age of abundance

Extract

Federico Fellini’s La voce della luna/The Voice of the Moon (1990) follows the meanderings of Ivo (Roberto Benigni) and other ‘lunatics’ (from luna, the Latin/Italian word for moon) in a media-saturated world. About half-way through the film there is an odd televisual encounter.¹ Ivo is sitting with one of his wandering companions (Paolo Villaggio’s Gonnella) in a deserted field at night. They stare into the camera and their poses suggest that they might, however distractedly, be watching something. Yet the very thing one might expect them to be watching, the giant television set in the distance, is right behind them and does not seem to be displaying anything other than the letters ‘TV’ in black (figure 1).²

What makes this scene odd is not only the size of the television set but also the pervasive sense of things being out of place. This scene is in stark contrast with the classic representation of television as a domestic technology inaugurated in the age of broadcasting. It is an image whose currency and familiarity arguably persists (and not only as a visual memory) even in an era in which ‘television’ may often be experienced as a non-broadcast form via mobile platforms and devices.³ Such a representation opens one of several volumes dedicated to television ‘after TV’ that have appeared in the last two decades. ‘We have probably all seen images like this’, write the editors of Television Sudies after TV: a family gathered in the living room, parents or adults on the sofa, children on the floor, all turned ‘expectantly towards the TV’.⁴ But the still familiar image evoked in this description is reversed in Fellini’s scene: the characters sit outside rather than in, and look away from the TV instead of at it.