No one is saying that filmmakers couldn’t use lower frame rates as a deliberate stylistic device, similar to how 12 FPS can be used in films now (or black and white, or out of focus images, etc.), or even that all films previously shot in 24 FPS would be better if the frame rate was doubled with no other stylistic changes.
The race to shove more crap at the screen to the appreciation of a younger and younger demographic to chase other tertiaries like toys, collectables, games etc.. means that the films are almost unwatchable by older people. I guess they're making their money so whatever, but it means that films feel more dead than ever before for myself. Admittedly, this may be more biased by aging out of existing target demos anyways, so shrugs.
I think the problem today is that the art of cinematography and technology evolved together up until ultra high-def digital came about, and now the art isn't keeping up with the advances in tech.
Yep, and it goes much further back than the PS2. The original example I saw was of Zelda II on the NES, but here's a whole bunch of examples in a whole bunch of games/systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao-1uCCXBwc
Or is impressionism the only valid art form?
Also -
> happens to be at that perfect balance between ...
Yeah na, it's just what you're used to.
That's not what GP said. GP was arguing that 24fps is a genuine artistic choice, and that an argument that 48fps is intrinsically superior is absurd. GP was arguing that frame rate is a choice artists can use to tell their stories, that 24fps is Impressionism and 48fps is realism.
Also, cross examining (e.g. "so, you're saying...") is against HN policies. Misrepresenting what someone said is also not great.
Okay, where is 77 FPS movie for surrealism, 12 FPS movie for abstractionism, 174 FPS for cubism?
The whole argument is fictitious
Yes, and I'm saying that's spurious argument because if it were an artistic choice we'd have a lot more variation of said choice.
> cross examining (e.g. "so, you're saying...")
Where did I do that?
Habituation is powerful, and even if this effect you're talking about does exist, well firstly it's not going to be appropriate for every subject matter. Secondly the technological limitations which led the industry to arrive at that standardised framerate, the chance of that landing on some sort of optimum spot... it's just not believable.
But for the kind of movie that's supposed to take place in a world very much like ours? The kind where it's just a camera filming actors in a street or whatever, and there's no intentional impressionistic art style? An "impressionist" frame rate is totally inappropriate in such a context.
EDIT: I'd actually be very interested to know why people are downvoting this comment. I'm accepting that there can be artistic merit to low frame rates, but I'm rejecting the idea that impressionism should be forced on art which isn't trying to be impressionist. What's objectionable?
Its a cult.
Start with the shakey cam effect, often added post production, which does what no human head/eyes do during fast movement.
(And often used to cover up poor quality fight scenes)
Second using an incapable camera person, the camera jumping around like my grandma doing video on her phone. Steady cams, and gear, and booms, are a century old!
While I am open to looking at all modern issues, I'd prefer getting rid of purposeful garbage first.
Hopefully this image search [1] answers your question. The photographs in each of these was "simply taking a photo of a street, a common real-life thing". Yet, when you look at them, almost every single one of them is highly stylized. Whether it's simply by being B&W (yes that's not reality), having pronounced bokeh, strong silhouetting, or even vignetting, etc. They're all absolutely not what I'd call realism.
Realism is just boring. And artists don't find much appeal in producing it.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=street+photography&t=osx&iar=image...
Type 'art' into google, how many pictures are impressionism, 1 in 10?
Pick a movie at random, what are the chances it's made in 24 fps? 99.9%?
Why do you thin TVs have motion smoothing? Because, we, normal people, are sick of you impressionist-obsessed people controlling everything.
On a recent episode of The Filmcast, David Chen speculates that there's something of a generational divide to the preference [0]. He thinks that younger people, brought up on big screen TVs, 120 fps oled smartphones, and 240 fps gaming action, may just come to prefer high frame rate for everything, whereas older folk might be more nostalgically drawn to the traditional slow frame rate for movies.
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-700-avatar-the-way-...
This might be true farther in the future. But the vast majority of kids now were certainly not brought up on 240fps games and 120hz smartphones.
The iPhone 14 is still 60hz and the Galaxy s21 is the first Samsung phone to have 120hz and it was released in 2021.
And 240fps gaming monitors are a thing, but not really mainstream yet.
Compared to two Van Gogh paintings, a Hugo Simberg painting, an anime mural, a digitally rendered skeleton covered in flowers, and abstract stock photos of an colorful eye, and two impressionist paintings.
So to answer your question it’s 3/10 are impressionist. 4 if you have a liberal definition of Impressionism and include the skeleton.
The movie Brainstorm also experimented with using the HFR as part of the story telling. But being in the film days, it was difficult to project/distribute.
Avatar 2 is the first modern equivalent to Brainstorm, where the filmmaker opted to "turn a knob" to digitally change the frame rate in a variable fashion throughout the film, depending on what the content needed. (Not the final content appeared to be 48fps, but the apparent frame-rate within that container varies from 24 smoothly to 48fps.
There are people painting what would be considered impressionist painting now (literally now, I have a friend who frequently paints on sundays and texted to ask before writing this).
I also like my wine expensive and with nice labels.
No one would say, "well you're just conditioned to like the impressionistic form better". I think it's just objectively more interesting. An iPhone snapshot of the same scene is just boring. If anything, my point is proven by what people attempt in their photographs. They add vignetting, color treatment, bokey, etc. All these things are forms of impressionism. No one wants a perfectly realistic photo.
[1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YiHuMtP-658/Usi_fBZsLSI/AAAAAAAADA...
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"Impressionism is objectively worse than realism. Look at a Van Gogh painting, there's hardly any detail. It looks coarse, and grainy and the brush strokes are so wide I can hard tell what's what. Starry Starry Night would be objectively such a better painting if he had just reach for a finer brush and included more detail. Adding more detail would have made it far more realistic, and thus objectively better"
You see your premised is founded on the false pretense that realism is the goal. The Cinema frame rate of 24fps (while not chosen to achieve this, but by a happy accident) happens to be at that perfect balance between too choppy and realism. It's just off from reality enough to trigger that "impressionistic response" in our brain. The same thing that happens when we look at a Monet painting. Out brains find impressionism appealing because it's specifically not what our eyes see in the real world. It's an interpretation. It's someone else's view of the world. More detail is simply not the goal.
24fps Cinema is impressionism.