For TV, the first that comes to mind is Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (a fair amount of commentary on this one), which makes me think that having certain categories might be useful, since there are many films that have at least incidental uses of cinema or TV screens. It strikes me that the signification of the image within the image shifts across time, relating to the likely familiarity of the audiences as these technologies have evolved.
For instance, early "tv" images in films reference them as emblems of a future to come or a remarkable but still exotic technology: Metropolis, Modern Times,Things to Come, 2001: A Space Odyssey; the "video" images of Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon serials, even a Three Stooges short where a TV screen showing Niagra Falls suddenly starts gushing water. Much later films sometimes use such "television" references in a deliberately elusive, extra-referential manner, harkening back to the past use of these signifiers: the hologram of Princess Leia in the original Star Wars film, for instance. (On the other hand, Lukas had continued to use video images in a more straightforward SF manner in TXH 1138.) Or the deliberately retro allusiveness of video images in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow contrasts with the "futuristic" TV images of Big Brother in the versions of Orwell's 1984, although even the former film has political implications by the end. On mass culture and the TV image, see Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000 (more savvy than its more recent remake), Rollerball, The Running Man, etc.
The political implications of the TV screen suggested by 1984 seem to be evoked pretty frequently from the 1950s on. The rise of TV as a news medium is given play in such political films and satires as The Best Man and (if memory serves) Advise and Consent and The Last Hurrah, as well as The Manchurian Candidate (more than its remake--the earlier version deliberately plays off the TV imagery of Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate hearings). The manipulation of the TV image for political purposes has continued in many "paranoid thrillers" or for political/social humor from the 1960s on: Putney Swope, Network, Broadcast News, etc., etc., up to (at least) the 2008 film Vantage Point. Also see such things as the TV news footage from Vietnam in Bergman's Persona and The Passion of Anna. Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool has generated quite a bit of commentary. For contrast, see such films as Andrej Wajda's Man of Iron and Jerzy Skolimowsi's Moonlighting. Beyond Putney Swope, see Spike Lee's take on TV and African Americans in Bamboozled.
TV as a pop culture phenomenon figures into a number of films from the 1950s on, where TV came to be identified with a rising youth culture, aligned with the rise of rock-and-roll. Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It is a prime example, but also the several films produced by and starring Alan Freed (Don't Knock the Rock, Mr. Rock and Roll, etc.). On a darker, political/futuristic note, also see Peter Watkins' Privilege., as well as his Punishment Park and other films. On a more comical note, the contrast of 1950s TV with more modern realities is the subject of 1998's Pleasantville. The integration of soap operas and tv into pop culture is a theme of Tootsie.
More recently, the TV image as a marker for the complexities of a globalizing culture and economy figure in such films as the Home Alone films (each featuring the family watching It's a Wonderful Life dubbed into a foreign language on TV) or Lost in Translation.
Etc.
Cinematic images within the cinema screen are probably less common due to the more isolated (though mass) experience of watching the traditional film in a theatrical setting. Movie theaters, for instance, are sometimes used as places of escape or retreat--a film noir like Crossfire is a good example. Hitchock plays in a comically unsettling way with the film image in the chase through Radio City Music Hall toward the end of Saboteur. Film as a means of inducing conformity or triggering dark psychic urges is used in A Clockwork Orange and The Parallax View, among others.
There are probably hundreds of other possibilities for both film and tv, but these are the ones that come most immediately to mind.
Don Larsson
___________________________________________________
"Only connect!" --E.M. Forster
Donald F. Larsson, Professor
English Department, Minnesota State University, Mankato
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From: Film and TV Studies Discussion List [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of W. McCarthy [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, June 04, 2010 9:12 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SCREEN-L] incorporation of TV/cinema screen into cinema narrative
I wonder if someone would be kind enough to direct me toward any studies --
or even mere lists of examples -- which have been made of the incorporation
of images of a TV (and/or cinema) screen into a film's narrative -- screen
within a screen, that is. What I have chiefly in mind are complex examples
such as Arturo Ripstein's Así es la vida, Stone's Any Given Sunday,
Cronenberg's Videodrome, Dassin's Dream of Passion, etc., in which the
screen's images are somehow integral to (or make ironic comment upon) the
on-going narrative. In Any Given Sunday, e.g., Wyler's 1959 Ben-Hur plays on
a screen in order to produce an ironic atmosphere in a key scene. However,
any instance, even incidental, in which a TV or film screen is incorporated
would interest me.
Gratefully,
Bill McCarthy
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