June 2013
1970s: What Was Happening in TV Documentaries?
Hitoshi Sakurai
Japan marks the sixtieth anniversary of television broadcasting this year. The early 1970s was the years when TV documentaries dramatically changed, both in technology and expressions. The first change was that documentaries, which were derived from radio and cinema, established a new style of TV documentaries. The second change came with the transboundary of genres—news, drama, variety, etc. were blended into each other. The former meant “independence,” and the latter “coexistence.”
This viewpoint of the author was not drawn from the general history on the sixty years of television but was elicited by the comprehensive review of the author’s perspective acquired through his experience as a producer of TV documentaries and knowledge obtained from the retrospective search of archives. In this view, the characteristics of this period can be defined as the period when “television started looking at itself in a recursive manner.”
This article is an attempt in which the author focuses on the 1970s as the noteworthy “strata” in the history of TV documentaries and as his “excavation site” to explore the “archaeology” of television.