Denouncing the pursuit of verisimilitude is a novel response to hand-wave CGI. Are you this philosophical when a movie does spend a million dollars, to make two unrelated actors look exactly the same? Should audiences be happier if a no-budget sci-fi film has cardboard displays? It’s cute, certainly. But when a central complaint is that people will notice generated elements and object to low quality, I think they’re gonna notice literal cardboard.
Films are photographs. That’s why The Social Network didn’t just say the Winklevii were twins and expect people to pretend. Movies are a visual medium, whereas theater is mostly heard. Like how television has viewers but theater has an audience. You can Dogville it, and people will roll with that, but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.
but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
Your lack of media literacy is wild, film is entirely a honest fabrication of obvious fakes, that is the basis of cinema, the fundamental concept of the movie screen being itself simply a fake window that is honest to you about the speculative nature of the world revealed beyond.
Movies don’t convey impossible things by actually creating them, they present destabilized artifice from perspectives that invite us to see the mundane everywhere as a facade disguising something quivering underneath.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.
You almost make a coherent point here but then you topple your entire logic.
The first lesson you learn as a writer is to show not tell and the first lesson you learn as an artist working with video is that to tell is actually something that is desperately hard to avoid doing with a video camera because at the heart of it that is all moving images can do moment to moment, unlike words untethered from direct sensation.
Thus the true skill of an artist working with photographs or video is how they continously subvert the tendency of images to exhaustingly tell instead of show.
This is kind of a basic aspect to an exploration of movies as art…?
Whether it be documentaries having to grapple with the inherent paradox of the production of the documentary affecting and telling upon what it is attempting only to honestly show a picture of, or movies about fictional things having to constantly avoid the catastrophe of the audience only attending to the literal quality of the thing presented to them scene to scene, it is all the same existential question.
Denouncing the pursuit of verisimilitude is a novel response to hand-wave CGI. Are you this philosophical when a movie does spend a million dollars, to make two unrelated actors look exactly the same? Should audiences be happier if a no-budget sci-fi film has cardboard displays? It’s cute, certainly. But when a central complaint is that people will notice generated elements and object to low quality, I think they’re gonna notice literal cardboard.
Films are photographs. That’s why The Social Network didn’t just say the Winklevii were twins and expect people to pretend. Movies are a visual medium, whereas theater is mostly heard. Like how television has viewers but theater has an audience. You can Dogville it, and people will roll with that, but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.
Your lack of media literacy is wild, film is entirely a honest fabrication of obvious fakes, that is the basis of cinema, the fundamental concept of the movie screen being itself simply a fake window that is honest to you about the speculative nature of the world revealed beyond.
Movies don’t convey impossible things by actually creating them, they present destabilized artifice from perspectives that invite us to see the mundane everywhere as a facade disguising something quivering underneath.
You almost make a coherent point here but then you topple your entire logic.
The first lesson you learn as a writer is to show not tell and the first lesson you learn as an artist working with video is that to tell is actually something that is desperately hard to avoid doing with a video camera because at the heart of it that is all moving images can do moment to moment, unlike words untethered from direct sensation.
Thus the true skill of an artist working with photographs or video is how they continously subvert the tendency of images to exhaustingly tell instead of show.
This is kind of a basic aspect to an exploration of movies as art…?
Whether it be documentaries having to grapple with the inherent paradox of the production of the documentary affecting and telling upon what it is attempting only to honestly show a picture of, or movies about fictional things having to constantly avoid the catastrophe of the audience only attending to the literal quality of the thing presented to them scene to scene, it is all the same existential question.