I watched an interesting video essay by a media analysis and philosophy youtube channel on why more modern movies don't feel as realistic as those in previous eras of cinema. When I first saw the essay, I immediately just assumed it was all about bad special effects. That is an element, as anyone who has seen modern blockbusters can see, but the author also brought so many more elements of film-making into it, such as how their production is organized, how directors are less interested in making shot decisions during shooting a film, how critical camera work is, "haptic" vs "optic" visuals in film, and the loosening of our perception of a film's "indexicality," which is the unconscious confidence we assign to how media storage (like a film role) accurately conveys a reality that feels perceptually "real" and faithful to how we objectively interact with and see the world ourselves.
This topic came up at an interesting time when AI is taking over more and more content creation, and how mass production trends seem to be uncoupling mass content consumption from accurate perception of reality. The essay clearly identified things that I was starting to sense in a lot of movies I've seen over the past ten years, but couldn't clearly put my finger on, other than to just say something "didn't feel realistic."
I didn't see a general thread on film studies and trends in cinema here, so I thought this would be as good an occasion as any to start one.
This topic came up at an interesting time when AI is taking over more and more content creation, and how mass production trends seem to be uncoupling mass content consumption from accurate perception of reality. The essay clearly identified things that I was starting to sense in a lot of movies I've seen over the past ten years, but couldn't clearly put my finger on, other than to just say something "didn't feel realistic."
I didn't see a general thread on film studies and trends in cinema here, so I thought this would be as good an occasion as any to start one.
