A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 1, 1983
Original Title:
How to Make Love to Your Television Set
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 30
Perhaps no artist and fellow media theorist worked so fastidiously in the vein of McLuhan as Douglas Davis, albeit directly contrary to what he described as McLuhan’s “apocalyptic” message when he proclaimed, “The medium is not the message. You and I, in all our obstinate, unpredictable glory and complexity, are the message. The ultimate power lies on this, the other side of the TV screen, in the eye and mind of the viewer who can increasingly become the actor.” This performative broadcast – which also functions somewhat as a mini-retrospective of other classic Davis pieces – features Davis’s self-described “investigation into a kind of denial of the physical reality of the medium…[putting] the control over the medium…back into the hands of the human imagination.” Likewise, it directly contradicts VIDEODROME’s association of television and sexuality with pain and control. Whether it does so effectively is up to the viewer…
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.