Thus, according to Grossklauss, we face the phenomenon in which the “older” medium (film) anticipates and announces the mode of perception of the oncoming medium (television). Whether we take Baudrillard’s example of the American Loud family, O. J. Simpson’s trial, the Olympic Games in Atlanta, the above–mentioned electoral campaigns, or other spectacular or less spectacular television events, we will notice that they convey in the stated manner the source situations which characterise the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, and Triumph des Willens film. These events undergo a similar development:
- With the television illusion, the distant (the foreign) becomes the near (the known): we get the feeling that we are present at an event which takes place far away, and on which we actually have no influence;
- Public figures and other television personalities become only seemingly private, known, or intimate, for we cannot communicate with them;
- Television dictates events: reality becomes the television reality, and television becomes real;
-Television acquires its autonomy through the television system of signs which becomes the substitute of reality (Baudrillard); therefore we can speak of the television reality (protagonists on television, for example, lose their identity and acquire a new, television identity).
To return to the beginning: the agony of the real, or the phenomenon of hyper–reality, is not a contemporary, postmodern phenomena which, according to Baudrillard, would only appear with developed television; instead, its origins and beginnings can be sought in the case in which the media simulation and manipulation require the finest reflection: the case of pre–war Germany.
part two