• supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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    2 hours ago

    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.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      2 hours ago

      Yeah imagine if I had the media literacy to describe an establishing shot’s form and function, even if it was borrowed or fabricated. But as someone who’s never seen a movie before, I could never suggest costume and set dressing conveying expectations beyond their literal imagery.

      What are you doing?

      Yes, professor, how and why I show an elephant will matter more than ‘hey look, an elephant.’ But in order for my intent to matter, when showing an elephant, I do require the ability to show an elephant. A depiction can’t mean anything unless it happens. If I just tell you to use your imagination, that’s not a movie, that’s a book.

      These tools let you show basically anything at basically no cost. What you want and why is your own problem. The premise, the message, and the edit are still entirely human art. This only replaces the part where real photons bounce off a fake building and look real enough on a sensor. (Or the part where a guy fakes that in Blender.)