noldar12 wrote:Today, we are in a much more visual culture, as opposed to auditory, and a film often is considered "good" if the CGI effects are able to "wow" (obviously, there are exceptions).
To elaborate on that point a bit in way of agreement and amplification of the fact that visual imaging is taking over our culture, our way of bringing information about the culture into our lives and minds and our way of communication with each other; yes we are now in fact a culture of people who may only be able to truely process information intake if it is loaded onto a visual platform. The days of reading printed material as a way of taking in information when we are looking at massive (in terms of millions or hundreds of millions of viewers seeing the same message in a very short period of time) cultural message delivery, are gone. Since films, at the end of the day are information that is processed for pleasure, we can look back at the history of the movie and see this. We can't experience those films from before August 13, 1967 -the release date for Warren Beatty's film version of the Bonnie and Clyde saga-the way the folks in the original theater setting did because the cultural milieu was operating in a completely different environment. One could start with the education that folks received at home the last 11 decades.
1. Pre video\visual dominance-although paintings and photography did compete with each other (from 1837 to 1888 when the first 'moving picture' was made) and visual images presented by artists have always enjoyed great popularity. That pre photography imaging however took place often times because producers in many venues (the church for example) realized most of the audience to whom a particular message was delivered were illiterate. With the invention of photography and then movies, a cultural sea change was started and the swell in the volume of visual images came into such prominence that we are now in a surround sound visually oriented and industrially produced culture milieu.
2. Early viewers of the films to about 1945 were raised and educated in an era where visual images had not yet saturated the world and many people only went to movies very occasionally or never-there was in fact a social stigma attached to cinema all throughout this time frame that remains today with concerns about the nature of content that is offensive to prurient interests. Outside of that concern though, the film industry was in its boom years from 1906 to the early 1950's albeit with a considerable drop in ticket sales during the Great Depression. The industry was only beginning to recover after WW II when the effect of commercial broadcast of live theater (although some of which was very cheaply produced) vis a vis the home TV caused movie ticket sales to plummet. However, outside of the commercial movie houses, film and TV, along with billboard production, newspaper and magazine printing; all of these present to mass audiences a messaging system that is increasingly relying on elaborate graphic images, almost at times to the complete exclusion of any real substantive use of written text which is often reduced to mere stenographic, barebones recordings of factual information that is often merely chronical in nature; the real editorial content is in the photography and its tasteful (sometimes) and artistic presentation. Look and Life and Natural Geographic are the classic icons of the era that demonstrate this fact superbly.
3. The film industry saw a huge influx of new audience members in the mid 1960's to late 1970's , most of whom had grown up in an environment that was increasingly steeped in visual and video cultural forms. Producers like Warren Beatty, whose experience was deeply embedded in the serious film maker's art-being influenced by the likes of Rebel Without A Cause and Psycho -started a new era of film making that took film making to a new height. This era actually has its roots in the films of Fellini, Bergman, Hitchcock and Kurosawa. It was actually Kurosawa's Rashhomon, released in 1950, that ushered in the modern film making era of film as a new art form; producers now had a very high standard to meet as Kurosawa was eventually to become recognized as the towering genius of the century against which all other film maker's efforts were to be judged. This then is the point; visual imaging is of all importance, script and music must serve their parts as handmaidens to the visual and the music in some of Kurosawa' movies is just that; serving as a support for the overall story but never taking over the leading role; that paramount message delivering role was given to the actors and the cinemaphotographer. The camera had to follow the actors in unique and dramatic ways to emphasize, outline, herald, prefigure and cast across the visual field in all kinds of new ways . Of course we need the spoken dialogue as well and it had better be of the best possible quality for these directors but still, the visual medium, as Marshal McLuhan was to say, is the massage.