By Christina Kallas
Filmmakers have always flirted with television. One has only to recall, from 1980, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, a series of, notably, thirteen 52-minute episodes plus an epilogue, or David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990/1991), which lasted for two seasons, the first with eight and the second with twenty two 50-minute episodes (the pilots were feature-length) or indeed Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom (1994), a series of eleven 55-minute episodes. Cinema’s flirtation with the new form in fact started much earlier, perhaps with Roberto Rossellini’s infamous 1962 news conference where he declared that cinema, the medium for which he had directed such classics as Rome, Open City and Paisan, was dead and that he would henceforth be making movies for television.
