Introduction

I want to propose that the twin mechanisms of automatization and de-automatization offer a useful way of grasping what John Ellis described as television's and cinema's “radically different” aesthetics and viewing practices. “Automatization” proves to be a helpful concept to lay bare how television's standardized aesthetic creates a viewing regime in which the technology of the medium is largely overlooked by viewers. To understand the relevance of this, it should be noted that traditional aesthetics and art theory have mostly been interested in the extraordinary viewing experience, and rarely in what we might call the automatized viewing experience. This disregard of the mundane has had important ramifications for the understanding of the aesthetics and viewing regimes of cinema and television. In an attempt to rectify this ignoring by traditional aesthetics of the complexities of the viewing practice required by mainstream television, I approach the differences between cinema's and television's aesthetics and impact in terms of the presumed effects of the different shot/scale regimes created by large and small screens. I will particularly focus on the ways in which enlargements and closeups on small and large screens affect cinema and television viewers. The closing paragraphs of this present study are devoted to exploring the dialectical exchange of the two “radically different” aesthetic regimes of television and cinema. Contrary to traditional practice, however, I will focus on the aesthetic impact of the younger medium on the older one. As a case study, I take the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, who made the typical television format of the early 1960s – with its dominant use of talking heads, close-ups, sound and music – “work” aesthetically on the widescreen, with many extreme facial close-ups and Ennio Morricone's prominent music scores.

Television's “Radically Different Identity”

From its first critical examination, television's special aesthetic has been dealt with almost exclusively from the perspective of traditional aesthetics. This has resulted in a rather incomplete idea of what sort of phenomenon television really is in terms of its aesthetics and viewing regime. As the television scholar John Ellis put it: “Our critical terms force us to conceive television in the terms that are appropriate for cinema.