Engineering the ‘Sense of Being There’: Electronovision and the Invention of the Stage Performance Documentary

Abstract

This article investigates the stage performance documentary – the moving image record of a play, concert, comedy routine, or other type of onstage performance – as a mode of media production that has been historically constituted by a multimodal engagement across categories of media and culture. It chronicles the short-lived history of Electronovision, a 1960s moving image capture process that augmented television technologies to record and reproduce live stage events for theatrical exhibition. Electronovision’s history demonstrates how a production company sought legitimacy for the nascent stage performance documentary as more than ‘filmed theater’, but a modern hybridization of stage and screen via cutting-edge technology. Using archival memoranda, industry discourse, and an interview with its director, this article gives particular focus to Electronovision’s production of the rock ’n’ roll revue The T.A.M.I. Show (1964). The work that most convinced the entertainment industry of Electronovision’s ambitions, The T.A.M.I. Show suggests an alternate trajectory that stage performance documentaries might have taken outside of its 16-millmetre formalization by direct cinema.