Bryce Carlyle, Kings College London
While this conference is concerned with asking if multi-camera production can replicate or capture the experience of live performance, my research analyses a historical moment in which the television apparatus works not to translate the live, but transmute it. This research interrogates the location of live performance, challenging the notion that media technology attempts to capture a performance that exists somewhere on the stage, and instead argues that media technology can create an aesthetically, temporally, and culturally distinct performance event, intrinsically severed from the “real” at the moment of broadcast.
I am focused on psychedelic performances shown on United States television during the late 1960s. This era’s broadcast tendencies present a unique confrontation between the medium’s ideology and its ontology. Variety shows such as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour succumbed structurally and aesthetically to television’s origins of unmediated transmission; however, the reality of this temporal relationship between broadcast and spectator was muddled by the implementation of videotape in the late 1950s. Thus, the spectator was often held at a distance from the reality of transmission, forced to interpret ‘live’ performance based on its real or simulated immediacy.
Psychedelic performances uniquely complicate the temporality of their exhibition, engaging with multimedia and artistic total environments – popularised by Bill Graham at the Fillmore, and theorised by Fred Turner in The Democratic Surround. Due to this intertextual emphasis, television performances of psychedelia often showcase televisual masks layered upon a ‘live’ referent. For example, the Blues Magoos 1967 performance of ‘Tobacco Road’ on NBC’s The Kraft Music Hall is coated, distorted, and displaced temporally through elements only perceptible to the screen spectator (masking, chroma-key, colorizer, and others), all while retaining its coded liveness.
As articulated by The Doors on December 27, 1967 when they wheeled out a television set mid-concert to witness themselves perform ‘live’ on CBS’s The Jonathan Winters Show, this research probes at live performance’s relationship to its mediatization, and ultimately asks whether the ‘real’ or the televisual possesses the primacy of the true performance event.
Biography: Bryce McLin Carlyle is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London. He is currently writing on 1960s musical performance on American broadcast television. His research focuses on the cultural and political implications of “live” televisual events, questioning how performance functions through media apparatuses and how these systems create novel forms of audience reception.