Monday, August 22, 2016

 

Jacques Coulardeau & Timothy Olyphant at Academia.edu (45)


TIMOTHY OLYPHANT – JUSTIFED
https://www.academia.edu/19893585/TIMOTHY_OLYPHANT_JUSTIFED

Abstract:

The whole question I am concerned about is whether a TV series, any TV series can be analyzed only at the purely technical, filming, shooting and editing, level or if it can be dealt with as a work of fiction that has to be considered like any work of fiction, as seriously as we would consider Shakespeare or Walt Whitman.

I am not satisfied with all such technical approaches that only speak of ellipses and flash backs and flash forwards and the angle of the take or the camera, the zooming details and movements.

I am not satisfied with those who consider a TV series, since it has to be popular, as having to be banal, hollow, void, meaningless and not being able to be analyzed the way any other work of fiction would and should be analyzed.

I deeply agree with the practice of Great Britain where an actor can – and must or at least is recommended to – have a parallel career on the stage, for TV and for the cinema. I regret the USA do not have that practice. We know the result when we compare British series and American series.

What’s more I don’t see why so many directors – and critics – consider film directors cannot direct a TV series, and they generally concede Twin Peaks as being an exception of a rather marginal man in the world of television. That’s grotesque.

I watched all these seasons in one go, two episodes per night and I summarized some general ideas only at the end. It is thus a living experience of this series and I think that’s how TV has to be taken, as a living experience. It is not because Dexter was killed – was he really killed – in his TV series that the author Jeff Lindsay does not have the right to keep him alive and to go on with his adventures. And we had already been used with such discrepancies between the TV series and the novel series. 

Yet a series has a problem with its end. It has to come to an end in some kind of flourish, fireworks, fanfare, brilliant twist. Prison Breaks is one of the best as for that, and yet two years later they are speaking of bringing it back to the screen. How are they going to revive the main character? The actor is available but the character was buried.


Sir Conan Doyle has already done that with his Sherlock Holmes that he killed at least once and nearly killed several times to just bring him back to life to satisfy public demand. That was literature you are going to say, and then what! Maybe TV series are also fiction.

Let me tell you here that I find it funny when some pretend to deal with history in fictional series and to have a good historian as a guarantee that all they say in the series is pure history, like Un Village Français by Frédéric Krivine and the retired university professor Jean-Pierre Azéma who found a juicy supplement to his retirement instead of teaching a few years more (65 is the sacred age at which all researchers have to retire in France, even in medicine, so that some just move to the USA to go on with their scientific work). Sorry to deceive you Mr Krivine, either you are an author and you respect the rules of fiction, and you work for television and you respect the rules of TV series and that goes against anything having to do with historical truth, especially since there is no truth, there are only points of view and Jean-Pierre Azéma is just one point-of-viewer among many others; or you are a historian and then you should be teaching your point og view about history to some university students. We are not watching your series to have any historical truth, sorry point of view, hammered into our thick skulls.

Luckily, otherwise they would reinvent the Bible.


Research Interests:

Drugs And Addiction, Southern Studies (U.S. South), Drugs and drug culture, Cinema, Series TV, Kentucky History, Moonshine, Marihuana,Company Coal Towns in eastern Kentucky, Heroin, Alcohol Addiction, Whisky, The Deep South, History of Kentucky, Political Affiliation and Gangsterism, and Timothy Olyphant

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