Small Screen Aesthetics

Copyright material – 9781844574094 Contents ACknowledgments iv IntroduCtIon 1 towards a new methodology of media Aesthetics 4 Choices and Chronologies 8 1 EARLY TELEVISION: Creating an Image 11 3 THE CONVERGING SCREEN: The Influence see It now: liveness, Intimacy and Hybridity 15 of Cinema and the Internet on TV 84 CAse study: I Love Lucy (CBs, 1951–7) 26 Home Box office: tV goes to the movies 86 do not Adjust your set: motion, montage and Flow 29 CAse study: The Sopranos (HBo, 1999–2007) 101 CAse study: The Avengers (ABC/ItV, 1961–9) 45 PCtV: tV surfs the web 104 CAse study: Interactive tV 111 2 TV COMES OF AGE: A Medium in Its Own Right 51 liquid television: Promos, Blendos and Pomos 53 4 WEB TV: The New Small Screen 116 CAse study: Cnn International 64 Peepshow: exhibitionism, Authenticity and the real world: Pop docs, Fly-on-the-wall and ‘the graze’ 118 walk and talk 68 CAse study: the webcam 126 CAse study: The Osbournes (mtV, 2002–5) 79 Internet killed television: webisodes, micro-soaps and liquid comics 130 CAse study: Kony 2012 137 ConClusIon: endings and Beginnings 142 notes 145 BIBlIogrAPHy 161 Index 173 Copyright material – 9780230551657 Copyright material – 9781844574094 InTrODuCTIOn Aesthetic judgement is one thing and personal taste is another. The values of art, like all else aesthetic, can only be analysed contextually. Abraham Kaplan, ‘The Aesthetics of the Popular Arts’ (1966: 364) When the ‘cinématographe’ was first revealed to the public in the 1890s, startled spectators were often shown filmed images of charging horses and a speeding train. Francis Doublier presented a Lumière show around Europe in 1896, recalling that sometimes ‘these films even caused panics’, explaining that he ‘had to make a brief speech to convince spectators that neither the horses nor the trains could come out from the screen and endanger the audience’ (cited by Bottomore, 1999: 178). It is arguable whether the ‘train effect’ was actually true or simply part of a clever publicity machine (see ibid.), but such was the undoubted popularity of these short films that the stakes were soon raised and cameras were put onto the front of trains to produce ‘phantom rides’ for a thrilled audience (see Bordwell and Thompson, 1994: 18–19). In stark contrast, when Vladimir K. Zworykin first assembled a complete working electric television system for a demonstration in 1925, it consisted only of an ‘X’ painted on the face of the camera tube.1 A year later, when Édouard Belin and Dr Fernand Holweck gave a demonstration in Paris of their new cathode-ray television system they only showed outlines of faces or figures (see Smith, 1995: 22–3). Even when John Logie Baird successfully produced his first television picture in his laboratory on 2 October 1925, it was the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy (nicknamed ‘Stooky Bill’) that he chose to transmit first.2 These early differences between the cinematic and televisual image can partly be understood through technological considerations, but they also suggest the contrasting expectations that practitioners and audiences have traditionally possessed with regards to the two media. Television’s ability ‘to bring you live pictures’ may partly explain this tendency, the immediacy of television startling enough that the pictures themselves did not need to be grand or sensational. Perhaps the implicitly ‘domestic’ nature of TV also played a role in the type of image that the new medium chose to transmit. While the larger audience for early cinema demanded the rollercoaster ride of the circus or funfair, the small screen aesthetics of television tended to mirror its home-based viewer with a reassuring ‘talking head’ – an image that has arguably remained central to television aesthetics ever since (see Chapter 1). As John Fiske explains, television is normally viewed within the domestic familiarity of the living room, which contrasts significantly with the public, impersonal place of cinema. In going out to cinema we tend to submit to its terms, to become subject to its discourse, but television comes to us, enters our cultural space, and becomes subject to our discourses. (1987: 74) However, as interesting as these aesthetic comparisons are, it is always easy to fall into the problem of essentialism when trying to define the nature of a medium as complex as television. As Milly Buonanno Copyright material – 9780230551657 Copyright material – 9781844574094 2 S M A L L S C r E E n A E S T H E T I C S Television: normally viewed within the domestic familiarity of the home points out, there is always a ‘tendency, founded more on speculation than empiricism, for the nature of the televisual medium to become fixed in a set of distinctive characteristics’ (2008: 30). But aesthetics are never set in stone and the stylistic nature of any medium is always in a state of potential change and development, influenced by technological innovation, economic, institutional and political pressures and so on. Indeed, one of the distinct purposes of this book it to carefully reveal and explain how small screen aesthetics have changed so radically since their early origins in the 1930s and how it is never easy to tie TV down to any enduring and eternal characteristics. So, while I will sometimes employ the ‘clear brush strokes’ (ibid.) that Buonanno warns about, it is not with the intention to universalise one televisual aesthetic, but to reveal just how complex the televisual text really is and how the boundaries between all media are often in a subtle state of flux. Indeed, early television was, above all, the history of a media continually in a process of transformation, quickly learning to adapt to an ever-changing set of complex conditions and picking and choosing styles and techniques from other media. As David Thorburn explains (2004: 7): American television during the broadcast era is not a history of unremitting refinement and improvement … but it is a history impossible to understand without an awareness of the aesthetics of media transition, a Copyright material – 9780230551657 Copyright material – 9781844574094 I n T r O D u C T I O n 3 recognition of the complex, ongoing ways in which the medium learned to use and then to exploit more subtly such defining constraints as the commercial interruptions, the reduced visual scale of the screen, the formulas, genres, performing styles and actors it inherited from radio, theater and the movies, the 30- or (somewhat later) the 60-minute time slot, the domestic environment in which TV is experienced. As this suggests, television was a hybrid medium from its earliest origins, blatantly borrowing aspects of theatre, radio, cinema and journalism in the gradual and sometimes difficult formation of its own aesthetic identity (see Chapter 1). This hybridity has perhaps become no less apparent in recent years with the arrival of a culture of ‘media convergence’, one that has arguably seen television rapidly assimilate and reformulate aesthetic styles and artistic techniques more commonly associated with media such as the cinema and the computer (see Chapter 3). Furthermore, with the arrival of the moving image on the internet in the mid-1990s, we have now arguably witnessed the emergence of a new small screen, one that, while clearly having its own unique set of aesthetic characteristics, is also strangely reminiscent of the early days of television and cinema, perhaps even seeing the return of TV’s incarnation as ‘the inti- mate screen’ now manifest itself in the shape of ‘Web TV’ (see Chapter 4). As this suggests, where ‘television’ starts and ends is increasingly difficult to determine in a world where we now watch TV on a number of different media platforms, meaning that any aesthetic characteristics of ‘TV’ (if we can now even call it that) seem to be as transitory and as ephemeral as the ever-changing technology on which it is broadcast. In fact, the term ‘broadcasting’ itself appears an outdated synonym for a linear, time-based medium that arguably no longer exists in a world of VOD, DVr, YouTube, iTunes, iPlayer, web stream- ing, mobile video, online TV and so on (see Chapter 3). It is with some caution, then, that I approach this new account of small screen aesthetics. So, rather than imply that I understand what the essential aesthetics of television are (particularly when com- pared, for example, with radio, cinema, journalism and the internet), I hope this book reveals just how varied, multifarious and historically situated any medium-specific aesthetic style really is. The study of aesthetics is, of course, never an exact science (see below); no doubt other accounts of small screen style will differ in places, offering various readings and interpretation that will clash with, complement and contradict my own. Yet, I hope that this book will offer a strong contribution to this relatively neglected area of discussion. For, while seminal works like raymond Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), Horace newcomb’s TV: The Most Popular Art (1974), John Ellis’s Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (1982), John Thornton Caldwell’s Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (1995) and Jeremy G. Butler’s Television Style (2010) have offered enormous contributions to the aesthetic examination of the medium over the last four decades (ones that will be extensively and exhaustively acknowledged throughout this account), there has arguably never been enough discussion of the very fabric and design of the television text and the issues and debates related to its critical and academic examination. This book, then, is partly an attempt to add to the growing (but still relatively slender) work on small screen aesthetics, almost uniquely incorporating both television and the internet into one single volume.3 In doing so, it hopes to isolate the aesthetic characteristics of each medium, but only within a clear chronological time frame that shows how each period is unique to itself and also how each historical ‘phase’ is part of a wider dialogic discussion between all media, as well as other social, cultural, economic and political forces.

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