Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

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As in so many creative endeavours it's the limitations which make the art. It's not always about going for perfection, but it always has to be emotional.

Which is a more powerful statement? This: http://virgo.bibl.u-szeged.hu/wm/paint/auth/monet/parliament...

or this: http://isitthattime.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/fog-over-the...

There's no question that the latter is more technically accurate, more lifelike, more realistic, but it lacks the guttural punch of the Monet. Monet was a master, but only by exploiting the limitations of his medium could he attain that mastery.

So it goes with film. A decent cinematographer uses the inherent faults of film to convey emotion. Without the low dynamic range of film, the dark corners of the Nostromo in Alien would have looked like a plywood movie set. Without lens flare and blown highlights then the plight of a dehydrated hero in the desert would be much harder to get across. Those things - 24fps, lens flare, low range, depth of field - have become part of our shared culture now. So much so that even media which aim for perfect realism (eg video games) mimic some of them to aid immersion and, once again, heighten the emotional response.

Disclaimer: I am not an art expert.

You point is well taken, but just as a minor nit, I wanted to add that artists did achieve photorealism first and then move on to abstractness. Arguably, that was driven by the advent of photography which commoditized photorealism.

Fair point. Impressionism was in no small part a reaction to the overly stuffy and formal schools of realistic painting of the time. You've made me think: I wonder how much photography contributed to their frustration with that academic painting style?

But still, painting is painting. Take the Dutch Old Masters: incredibly realistic, lifelike pictures, but also extraordinarily powerful. One doesn't preclude the other, but in every case something about the medium contributes to its power. It might be the fact that a sitter for one of Caravaggio's Christs was actually suffering due to holding his body in place for so long; it could be a need to invent some aspect of light in a scene which ends up illuminating a girl's face in a particularly lovely way.

There's plenty of emotion in photography, too, but it tends to come as a result of skilful use of that medium's own characteristics: spontaneity, completeness, and presence. Press photographs are a great example, exploiting the medium's immediacy to steal a few, shocking milliseconds of reality. That applies even to powerful landscape photographs, in the opposite way: They are very carefully staged, manipulated and contrived, all simply a way to align the limitations of the medium (only 1/500th of a second to make an image) with a particularly beautiful instant of passing space-time.

It's one thing to creatively take advantage of limitations to make art better. It's quite another to insist that an arbitrary limitation must be present on every work, regardless of whether it's good or not.

If 24fps is somehow good for certain types of film, then by all means, keep using it. But it's silly to say that 24fps is universally better, as I've heard some people say.

I can't disagree with that Mike. Absolutes have no place in art.

No absolutes in art, ever, no matter what! :D

Heh! Everything in moderation. Except moderation. But then...

The second one, no question about it. It make me think of storms and fog and winter.

The first one made me think of cartoon depictions of the evil lair and children's drawings. It also looked like those ink blob psychological tests were you can see anything you want in the picture. (Which is presumably why you like it better.)

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