Guerrilla Television

A postmodern media movement linked to new journalism and other counterculture activities of the 1960s and 1970s, guerrilla television began with Sony's production of home video cameras, called Porta-Paks, in 1965. It gained further prominence through Michael Shamberg and the Raindance Corporation's 1971 book Guerrilla Television, as well as federal legislation in 1972 directing cable companies to include public access channels. Everyday people with little to no artistic or technical experience started producing video representations of events and ideas.

At an historical time when citizens were dissatisfied with the choices that many authorities, government and otherwise, were making, guerrilla television took the power of broadcasted images away from the professionals that had claimed dominion over them. It empowered the masses by giving them the ability to decide how to portray everyday reality themselves, and therefore provide an insider's point of view. People suddenly had the power to create a visual representation of life and reality that was uniquely subjective and personal.

Along with new journalism, guerrilla television asked society to question authority—not only the how and what of traditional newspapers, magazines, and broadcast television, but the why and who—why ideas were shaped the way they were and who was making those decisions. In this way, guerrilla television can be seen as an artistic movement that asked people to look at television and video critically in the same way they did other artistic mediums. But it was also a social movement that ran parallel with much of the counterculture of the time.

Shamberg and other proponents of guerrilla television, including Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, and Ira Schneider, the other founders of the Raindance Corporation, encouraged people not just to use the newly available technology to record live events, but also to thoughtfully shoot and edit these events, and to edit pieces of broadcast television with their own tape to create collages that communicated new ideas. Shamberg's book also encouraged guerrilla television artists to use familiar sounds and visuals from traditional broadcast television to express original thoughts, feelings, and ideas.

Shamberg would go on to helm TVTV, a collaborative of guerrilla television artists who would bring the movement to great fame, but also ruin, over the course of the 1970s. TVTV received critical praise for its coverage of the 1972 Republican National Convention, a documentary-style piece titled Four More Years, and another documentary about a 15-year-old spiritual guru, called Lord of the Universe. TVTV's increasingly close dealings with cable television, though, were criticized, and over time, the movement behind the collaborative lost steam. Scholar Deidre Boyle sees their pilot for NBC, [Page 653]The TVTV Show, as the end of an era when guerrilla television gave up its radical edge in favor of mass audiences.