Television and On-Line Media

The American Cinema Foundation is committed to recognizing achievement with a conscience. The E Pluribus Unum conference series recognizes feature film and television productions which address fundamental social values in a manner that recognizes their importance to the fabric of society. We include concerned public intellectuals and other people outside the film business who can bring valuable ideas into a town that is in love with its own reflection.

The American Cinema Foundation continues to hold panels of young film and TV artists with traditionalist, centrist, and other unorthodox tastes, discussing how the internet and other new technologies can help bring some real diversity to a town that recognizes only skin-deep forms of diversity.

In 2005, the American Cinema Foundation worked with daring, thoughtful rebels in public broadcasting, and the American Film Institute, to present a first-ever Hollywood forum about balance in PBS and public TV that was focused on the industry but open to everyone. The success of that weekend is leading to new ways of interrogating the issues and television’s culturally powerful decision-makers.
Public television and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have been much in the news lately. There have been outspoken critics of the way PBS, in particular, has handled its news and public affairs programming. ACF was given a grant by the CPB to explore some of these issues in an open public forum, designed for the media community but open to everyone. The program is called “Finding the Future of Public Television”. That future needs a dialog. We’ve just expanded the dialog, and we’re going to expand it a lot more.

This series of seminars was inspired by the popular perception that there’s a new sensibility, brought by a new wave of idealistic social skeptics who are coming to non-fiction film today and tomorrow. We inspired what we hope and trust is a group of artists whose diverse attitudes have often run against the grain of the cultural establishment of their own adult lifetimes, the eighties and nineties. They may and will be coming to public broadcasting through different personal networks, even different parts of the country, than those established by now popular PBS contributors. Using novel production techniques and often self-distributed, this younger generation of skeptics is already reaching a level of sophistication that warrants the attention of Hollywood’s talent development process.

Public broadcasting has been, for the past 40 years, one of the most visible expressions of our sense of the common good in arts and education. We are concerned that this sense of a shared culture may be lost. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) chose to work with us in conducting this important discussion, open to the public and live blogged in progress.

Our panel series is dedicated to expanding the ongoing dialog between the public television community, media creators who have not yet worked in that community, and informed members of the interested general public. James Day, one of the founders of San Francisco’s KQED, once overheard a line that stuck with him: “Public television expresses the interests of a present minority in the name of a future majority”. Which present minority has the right to declare that it knows what a future majority will want? A reasonable person should be able to see both sides of that argument.

For newcomers to the field, this Los Angeles weekend served as professional development, an invitation to get involved with a unique American institution.

PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are usually thought of only as broadcasters, but they have often led the commercial TV industry in new technical areas–from satellite distribution in the '70s, to added content in the '90s. And right from the start, the dream has always been that bright new technology will lead us to a more democratic tomorrow. The new digital media is a change agent that breaks down agendas and offers choices to viewers. These more open forms of non-fiction may become a bridge between tomorrow’s engaged filmmakers and tomorrow’s more skeptical audiences, who may be less willing to accept what they see as filtering, or bias, and what others in public TV see as storytelling.

Today’s video bloggers are documentarians without opinion filters, without license from any authority, and eminently as independent as Joris Ivens or Robert Flaherty ever dreamed of being. But their social vocabulary is nothing like that of the classic wave of non-fiction filmmakers. PBS producing stations, and other independent entities, may find in some of these artists both regional and emerging talents deserving of the first stages of creative contact, and points of view that may assist public broadcasting’s treatment of issues of social and political sensitivity.

The American Film Institute was a key partner in this dialogue. Besides being an institution for filmmaker training, it also explores issues related to interactive and other forms of enhanced television presentation. KCET Los Angeles has a rich history of producing for the public broadcasting system, and public television has had a long, complex relationship with the commercial media headquartered here.