like that

When I’m trying to decide whether I want to watch a movie, my first step is to ask this question: Do I want to watch a movie that looks like that? I know from long experience that I have strong responses to the visual Gestalt of a film, so strong that if that Gestalt alienates me I will not enjoy the movie, no matter how strong the story and the acting. For example: I watched the trailer for del Toro’s Frankenstein and said: Nope. Not for me. Frankenstein is one of the essential myths and del Toro is at least a semi-genius, but I simply do not want to watch a movie that looks like that. 

It’s true that I generally prefer film to digital, but some of the most beautiful movies I know (e.g. Malick’s A Hidden Life) were filmed digitally. So it’s not digital photography as such that alienates me, though perhaps certain practices of filmmaking strongly associated with digital technologies do. That’s pretty vague, I know — maybe this brief video by Patrick Tomasso alongside this one will flesh things out. 

(A number of people seem to like this much longer video on the same subject, but I dunno, anyone who holds up the Avatar movies as paragons of cinematic excellence is not on my wavelength. I couldn’t even get through the trailers of those things.) 

What goes into the making a beautiful visual Gestalt? So many things: directors and DPs have to be sensitive to — and this is an incomplete list —   

color exposure light and shadow grain depth of fieldcamera placementcamera movementpace of cutting 

And there are no fixed rules to any of these things. Terrence Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki developed The Dogma, but the final item on the list is “Accept the exception to the dogma” — in much the same way that Orwell, having made a list of rules of good writing, makes this the last one: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” 

So I might in general prefer a still camera, à la Ozu, but the way that Max Ophüls moves his camera is one of the great joys of movie-watching: take a look at this scene, for example. Or this justly famous scene from Taxi Driver: still, moving, still. Or any Malick movie — but let’s remember the astonishing crane shots from The Thin Red Line. 

I don’t really have a Dogma; I just know that some movies’ visual worlds draw me in and and those of others drive me away, alienate my sensibility. And though I can’t tell everything about a film’s visual world from a trailer — for instance, trailers tell you little about how a movie is cut — I can tell enough. So hooray for trailers: they save me a lot of money.