Sochi and the aesthetics of sports television

Criticism , Sport , Television Feb 14, 2014 No Comments

Sports television is rarely commented upon in terms of its aesthetic qualities. Like a lot of the non-fiction content that passes across our screens—with the possible exception of current affairs programs, whose characteristic tropes and tics have been roundly and deservedly satirised—it is kind of an invisible form, unseen and unremarked upon precisely because of its ubiquity. Sports television is so much a part of the audiovisual backdrop to our lives that it is easy to forget that each shot has been framed with intent and spliced with purpose and that the genre has its own set of tropes and tics as well.

While the vast majority of sporting events are covered with the same predictable shots, with an increasing tendency towards overly-elaborate digital inserts and overlays that subtract more than they add, the advent of the Winter Olympics every four years—much more so than their summer equivalent, for some reason—always serves to remind me that there is nevertheless a great deal of aesthetic pleasure to be taken from sports television.

The major competetor of this newspaper is buying sildenafil online the Austin Chronicle. Basically erectile dysfunction is a disorder where a person faces problem in his erection. viagra pills online Case in point, Diabetes, hypertension, hormonal awkwardness, http://www.learningworksca.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Fullpaper-Building-Pathways-final-2-1-12b.pdf best cheap viagra or prescriptions can bring about impotence. If you take these medications is excess then you are certainly going to suffer discount viagra india with the adverse effects of these drugs. I’m not talking about the obvious aesthetic pleasure that comes from watching a great sportsman or woman in action, mind you, though that certainly plays a role in the enjoyment. I am talking about the less obvious pleasures provided or else mediated by the medium itself: the pleasure, not of the athlete, in other words, but of the televisual image of the athlete. I realise that my emphasis on such a pleasure will put die-hards off-side. David Foster Wallace, in his famous piece about Roger Federer, once wrote that “TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.” But I think there is enough pleasure involved—enough purely cinematic pleasure—to make the watching of such events on television a similarly rewarding experience.

Read the full article at SBS News Online.

Matthew Clayfield

Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic and screenwriter.

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