Not [H.H]. That’s not causing anyone any trouble, except me.
But the VERY IDEA that you shoot a film at 48 frames per second! Peter Jackson shoots a film at double speed, film critics outdo themselves in hysterical stupid.
After a while my eyes adjusted, as to a new pair of glasses, but it was still like watching a very expensively mounted live TV show on the world’s largest home TV screen.
Says it all really. Making a film twice as clear turns it into … television.
The unintended side effect is that the extra visual detail gives the entire film a sickly sheen of fakeness… I was reminded of the BBC’s 1988 production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and not in a good way.
Television!! How lower class!!
For people shots and pans, the smoother motion of 50 fps looks more like … newer TVs to us, although we find it to be less noticeable on action shots.
… but when actors, costumes and sets appeared the clarity made every pore and flaw visible, breaking the spell of the film
OMG Television!!! Even worse it’s like one of those horrible Computer Games that young people seem to like!
It’s not … FILMIC!
One day I hope to take ‘filmic’ and bury it alive under a slab of concrete, along with its addiction to blur as the answer every problem. Blur is the Valium of ‘film’, the scratchy grain, the losses of optical printing, the blur of shallow focus, the juddering pans that 24fps has offered for the last 100 or so years. All of this keeps the image soft, and politely out of our personal space.
Of course when you run out of Valium or Heroin or whatever your fancy, the world is harsh and bright and terribly in focus. Horrible nasty real world, not abstracted by analogue media – the rumble of the turntable, the hiss of tape – ready to provide a meta level where the story can be kept at a distance.
In 2012 there are still people who want to keep it blurry and grainy so that they aren’t confronted by pores and hairs and all that nasty reality. The Dogme movement was one attempt at blowing that out of the water – too rough and ready and Jackson is better equipped to strip off the bunny rug.
Of course this is also political. Never mind that television has been for quite some time the equal and in some cases the better of the cinema. That video cameras have been used for ‘film’ for about a decade. ‘Film’ is pulling rank, which is all it has left really. The smart directors like Jackson are crossing boundaries and forging a hybrid where the size of screen will no longer be compartmentalised.