Hmm, have you read Sculpting in Time by Tarkovsky? He sort of posits a theory that films that follow a simple, let’s say, hero’s journey structure, aren’t actually using the DNA of cinema effectively. In many parts of the book he persuasively argues for a poetic form of cinema, something more in the mode of this year’s Nickel Boys than a film like Mad Max or The Brutalist. Personally I don’t think cinema advances are in the technical space, the look or size of lens or camera, though that stuff is definitely cool. Mad Max was special not because of any of that, but because of the way it played jazz with the form. Godard didn’t need any fancy film cameras to make his advances, in the same way that Joyce hardly needed a gelatin pen. The furthering of cinema, to my eye, is gonna come from directors who fundamentally engrain themselves into the language of cinema, who understand how to use its unique aesthetic parameters to push the art form forward. What makes it a great art form like theater or literature is that its possibilities are limitless. But it’s not the same as those art forms, and Tarkovsky argues this point all over his book, basically saying how the art form is being held back by trying to adapt to the literary form of storytelling. That doesn’t mean ‘simple’ stories are in anyway wrong, I think you’re mining something interesting here, but there does seem to be an over reliance on literary-style storytelling as a means to communicate in cinema because that’s what we, as audiences, have been adapted to accept.
This has, as you hope in the last line, got my brain whirring at top speed!
Something of a digression that your essay started for me:
I've been having some great conversations about the use of AI in The Brutalist and in Emelia Pérez, and it's been somewhat useful to compare it to previous advances in cinematic technology, the most oft-cited in these conversations being the steadicam.
So it was really interesting to read your quotation from Nathalie Morris, saying the steadicam “pushed forward the expressive possibilities of the camera”. I have to wonder whether this AI tech to "improve" the accents of actors will yield any such flourishing of the expressive possibilities of cinema? Will it expand cinema's vocabulary?
"Take the advent of digital photography in the late 1990s, enabling filmmakers to cram way more information into the frame:"
Blurriness of the background has to do with the aperture of the lens relative to the size of the capturing medium regardless of whether it's film or an image sensor. Furthermore a fine grain film has more resolution and dynamic range than 4K digital and even higher resolutions now are only just matching film and with hard edged cold look that is IMO inferior to film.
Hmm, have you read Sculpting in Time by Tarkovsky? He sort of posits a theory that films that follow a simple, let’s say, hero’s journey structure, aren’t actually using the DNA of cinema effectively. In many parts of the book he persuasively argues for a poetic form of cinema, something more in the mode of this year’s Nickel Boys than a film like Mad Max or The Brutalist. Personally I don’t think cinema advances are in the technical space, the look or size of lens or camera, though that stuff is definitely cool. Mad Max was special not because of any of that, but because of the way it played jazz with the form. Godard didn’t need any fancy film cameras to make his advances, in the same way that Joyce hardly needed a gelatin pen. The furthering of cinema, to my eye, is gonna come from directors who fundamentally engrain themselves into the language of cinema, who understand how to use its unique aesthetic parameters to push the art form forward. What makes it a great art form like theater or literature is that its possibilities are limitless. But it’s not the same as those art forms, and Tarkovsky argues this point all over his book, basically saying how the art form is being held back by trying to adapt to the literary form of storytelling. That doesn’t mean ‘simple’ stories are in anyway wrong, I think you’re mining something interesting here, but there does seem to be an over reliance on literary-style storytelling as a means to communicate in cinema because that’s what we, as audiences, have been adapted to accept.
This is fascinating - thank you! Sculpting in Time has been on the to read list for ages now, have just bumped it to the top!
Thanks Ed! So glad you’re going to read it. It’s def one of those that changes your pov on what is possible.
This has, as you hope in the last line, got my brain whirring at top speed!
Something of a digression that your essay started for me:
I've been having some great conversations about the use of AI in The Brutalist and in Emelia Pérez, and it's been somewhat useful to compare it to previous advances in cinematic technology, the most oft-cited in these conversations being the steadicam.
So it was really interesting to read your quotation from Nathalie Morris, saying the steadicam “pushed forward the expressive possibilities of the camera”. I have to wonder whether this AI tech to "improve" the accents of actors will yield any such flourishing of the expressive possibilities of cinema? Will it expand cinema's vocabulary?
"Take the advent of digital photography in the late 1990s, enabling filmmakers to cram way more information into the frame:"
Blurriness of the background has to do with the aperture of the lens relative to the size of the capturing medium regardless of whether it's film or an image sensor. Furthermore a fine grain film has more resolution and dynamic range than 4K digital and even higher resolutions now are only just matching film and with hard edged cold look that is IMO inferior to film.
Interesting! Thanks