“Overwatchness” as a Problem of Modern Practical Aesthetics of Cinema

Abstract

This study proves that the conceptual proximity of culture and quality, aesthetics and taste, has the same long ‘track record’ in the history of philosophy as the inextricable link between sensuality and axiology. Some expressions — to reconsider, to reconsider how to see enough, to ‘disentangle’, to look, to ‘run through’ with your eyes, to scroll through and especially to ‘overwatch’ a movie — are more than single-root words. In the experience of everyone who is not indifferent to cinema to varying degrees, there is a turning point when it is completely unclear whether the threshold of watching with interest has long been crossed, whether cinema itself has changed, or, conversely, watchfullness (even ‘overwatchness’) of films of the same type does not allow you to leave the “comfort zone”. In the second part of the study, it is assumed that inattention to certain films, genres, and other types of audiovisual content in English-language aesthetics is not coincidentally expressed by the evaluative terms like ‘underseeen’ and ‘underatched’. After all, they reveal the potential of value judgment in watching: for example, to present a similar viewer or someone who has long switched from cinema to ‘you’ in a favorable light. As a result, it is concluded that watching, impressionability, watchability, spectator and festival cinema, such supposedly universal concepts, are applicable to different areas of not only ‘bottom-up’ aesthetics, but also applied areas (spectatorship studies, empirical and content-oriented aesthetics).