TV REVIEWS : PBS’ 30-Minutes of ‘New Television’ Is Modest Display of TV Art--But It’s Better Than Nothing

The space for experimental television is always criminally cramped--or nonexistent--on any network, even cable or late-night PBS. So while the new PBS series “New Television” (at 11:30 tonight on KCET Channel 28) is really a 30-minute portion of crumbs compared to the wealth of vital video work that has emerged in recent years, it is better than nothing at all.

Alas, last week’s premiere segment, Juan Downey’s reflective and multilayered “J.S. Bach,” displayed a richer example of cutting-edge videomaking than most of the three works on tonight’s program. Ngozi Onwurah’s “Coffee Colored Children” and Claude Palardy’s and Louise-Marie Beauchamp’s “The Elder” are actually films, and both uneasily blend the murky with the obvious.

Onwurah, with nods to fellow British experimentalist Derek Jarman, constructs an autobiographical examination of what it meant to be a black child of a single white mother in a white English neighborhood. While her montage of home movies and staged scenes reflects the troubled state of her narrating voice, it finally undercuts the anger feeding the work.

Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” aria, “When I Am Laid in Earth,” is meant to be a sonic thread through “The Elder,” but Beauchamp’s voice proves just as weak as Palardy’s filmmaking. There’s an authoritative style here--watch the graceful cutting between scenes of an old woman being deposited in a retirement home and her fantasies--but no ideas.

Like a flashing nightmare that rushes by before the mind can absorb it, the final piece, Andrew Moore’s “Nosferatu” spills out a cascade of processed images of European trains and Transylvanian icons--and like a high-speed rail trip, it’s too short by half.

Future “New Television” highlights: L.A. video artist Bill Viola’s “The Reflecting Pool” (Aug. 1) and a rare Robert Wilson video, “La Femme a la Cafetiere” (Aug. 29).