I have always had conflicting opinions on this. If I learned anything about cinema, it was purely through the internet. The Internet includes YouTube videos, master classes, articles, books, interviews, essays, and even the movies themselves. So I feel it’s all thanks to the internet and the community that I can say what I see. (a) I am better able to understand myself (2) I am able to give back to cinema as an art form that has enriched my life. And I became more empathetic, able to understand different perspectives, contradictions, hypocrisy, and limitations of the human mind.
Film, by its nature as an art form and medium, is in some ways special because of its ability to be both abstract and intentional at the same time. It is as close to the ‘human experience’ as any art form has ever been. In other words, we can not only understand the film, but also “experience” it. We don’t ask musicians what exactly a particular chord progression in a song means. Words are limited and the human brain with confirmation bias always receives what it wants to receive instead of really understanding what is said. In conversations, people often lose context and get hung up on details.
So filmmakers (those who really know what they’re doing) are trying to use every tool at their disposal (in every permutation and combination) to tell something. is. That’s probably the best version they can do of telling it. Ideas/feelings/feelings/contradictions. If I could say it in words, I’m sure I would have said it in words. But they want more and they want to seep into your subconscious even if you disagree. That’s why movies are so powerful.
So in a way it’s kind of sad that most people lose the mystery and the mystery disappears when the filmmakers explain exactly what’s being said. I think I liked 2001: A Space Odyssey more (and I still love it) until I heard exactly what Stanley Kubrick meant for the climax. If it remained a mystery, I would have had to think more about it. The more time we spend with art, the more meaningful it usually becomes to our lives.
But for me, this is the only movie like that. When I hear other directors’ takes, I often disagree and still try to decipher them myself. The reason I do this is because I understand that sometimes, for example, in Pictionary, you’re going to draw an elephant, but you end up with a mouse. What the director intended isn’t always what’s on screen.
And it would be arrogant to think that any director knows exactly every million tiny details in every inch of the screen and has utter, utter control. It’s a collaborative process, with each artist bringing something to the table. I read somewhere that even Ingmar Bergman was skeptical about Sven Nykvist zooming in instead of Dolly, and the camera moving subtly even though he didn’t ask for it. Sometimes I didn’t realize it. Or sometimes the actor feels something and thinks the director hit the shot, but there’s no guarantee what the actor brought up and what the director’s intentions were. For example, in Burning, Lee Chang-dong says he doesn’t know if Steven Yuan’s character has committed a crime. He left it entirely up to the actor to decide that for himself.
And even though we haven’t even reached the subconscious part of the creation, artists themselves can be amazed at how that part of the brain works in flow. It is one of the most enduring and deepest joys of being an artist.
But I know what Kumara Raja is saying. Film grammar should not be derived from general consensus, every artist creates their own grammar for each particular film. Their job is to make the film as “self-contained” as possible, not just following the grammar, but having the audience “trained” in the grammar of that particular film. For example, blue has often been used for cold melancholy and loneliness, as opposed to yellow for warmth and sunshine. But even with Jordan Peele flipping everything around, it still works great. Now, whenever we see yellow on the screen, we feel scared, but blue makes us feel safer.
The choice, then, is to educate the majority of people who are not even willing to interpret these things by coming to a simplistic general consensus, and mislead the art as a whole. Or, by making it difficult for curious people who accept interpretations and believe in multiple opinions and perspectives that exist in parallel at the same time, they try harder to acquire it and become individuals who are accomplished. progress multiplied by many times?
But I think we can still talk about variables involved in creation. So I can say that there is no need to explain and present a complete polynomial (filmmaking metaphor). We can have our own coefficients and exponents, but since we can give them variables, it turns out to be deeper than we think. Alternatively, we can provide an opinion on how they view other people’s work, so we can have a deeper understanding of what their conscious brain perceives, and we can learn more about it. It can create artists and improve the overall collective social consciousness. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I think, like most things in life, each has its own.
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